Why African poverty? - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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Political issues and parties in the nations of Africa.

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By park
#14479895
I understand different levels of development but why do Africans starve? How is it possible that they can't even produce low quality food from farms? It's a techonology of centuries ago.
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By JohnRawls
#14479896
Absense of water, civil war and social disorder.
#14479902
Resource/economic exploitation under colonialism (going back generations) and neo-colonialism that continues to this day.
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By JohnRawls
#14479905
Yes, blame 'the west' for everything. Its been 50 years now, things are not looking more positive. Colonialism is a minor issue by now. Untill Africa stop fighting with itself and accepts that borders need to be redrawn, nothing will change.
#14479912
JohnRawls wrote:Yes, blame 'the west' for everything. Its been 50 years now, things are not looking more positive. Colonialism is a minor issue by now. Untill Africa stop fighting with itself and accepts that borders need to be redrawn, nothing will change.


50 years since what? Africa is still getting raped of it's resources, and the people sitting on top of it are still getting fucked and manipulated every which way. I'm not just blaming the west for everything. It's any large power that can get their hands on Africa's resources, and the African politicians who are willing to sell out. It's just that China (for example) cares a little bit more (but not by much) about developing the places they plunder. You can stick your head in the sand all you want about Africa today, and say it's all the Africans fault. That doesn't change the reality of the bigger picture and how that effects everything else.

[youtube]_KM06hTeRSY[/youtube]
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By Kapanda
#14480001
Mismanagement, actually. Yes, repercussions from colonisation are still felt, but today, Africans mismanage their economies.

Neocolonialism is an offensive and bullshit line.
#14480003
park wrote:I understand different levels of development but why do Africans starve? How is it possible that they can't even produce low quality food from farms? It's a techonology of centuries ago.


This is Africa - they still believe in witchcraft and the ritual mutilation of children. They have a radically different mind-set to westerners and ne'er the twain shall meet.
By Wexoch
#14482665
Kapanda wrote:Mismanagement, actually. Yes, repercussions from colonisation are still felt, but today, Africans mismanage their economies.

Neocolonialism is an offensive and bullshit line.


If neocolonialism is bullshit then why does the West kill African leaders that fight neocolonialism? Thomas Sankara and Ghadaffi for example.
#14482667
Kapanda wrote:Mismanagement, actually. Yes, repercussions from colonisation are still felt, but today, Africans mismanage their economies.


Yes, African leaders mismanage their economies in favor of outside capital, over the poor people living there. Thank you for describing part of neocolonialism, which you somehow believe is bullshit. Despite it's very real existence.

Kapanda wrote:Neocolonialism is an offensive and bullshit line.


The only people that the citation of neocolonialism offends, are international capitalists and their African leader pawns who sell out their people.

Neocolonialism isn't bullshit. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neocolonialism

Your denial of it is both naive and ridiculous.
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By Kapanda
#14482678
Have you ever been to Africa?
#14482686
Kapanda wrote:Have you ever been to Africa?


Why does it matter whether or not someone has been to Africa? As if a trip to Africa will show them what's truly going on. This isn't something that you see from your hotel window or through a little touring. This is something you need to study (no matter where you are in the world), and not gloss over, and just lazily throw all the blame on Africans (as you do Kapanda). Maybe when you're in Africa, Kapanda, you only see Africans at fault, but that doesn't mean there isn't international capital behind it. Only placing the blame on African mismanagement (as you do Kapanda) is what is offensive here. Not citing neocolonialism (which you claim is offensive, showing your sympathies towards international capital), which is most certainly happening in Africa. Whether you want to admit it or not.
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By Ombrageux
#14482700
Inevitably there are a lot of factors, but one does have to wonder: Why is Sub-Saharan Africa so underdeveloped, even by the standards of exploited Third World countries?

A big problem it seems to me is Africa's sheer size and low population density. People are so spread out that you have countless ethnic groups with their own language and culture, all semi-intermingled. Virtually no African country has a solid ethnic majority, like in your classical European, Middle Eastern or Northeast Asian Nation-State. History has not allowed Africa to develop consolidated, relatively homogeneous peoples over a given territory. So you've got constant tribal recriminations and, occasionally, very vicious ethnic civil wars and outright genocide. Like Central Europe before WW2, but everywhere, and worse.

In addition, from The Global Bell Curve:
Image
These IQ scores can no doubt be significantly improved through improved nutrition (childhood malnutrition can seriously stunt lifetime IQ) and, where it occurs, suppression of consanguinous coupling (but AFAIK this isn't a huge problem in Sub-Saharan Africa?). But, just as there's no sign that European IQs will converge with East Asian IQ, it is highly uncertain whether full convergence will occur. It may be that evolutionary pressures in Sub-Saharan Africa were simply not conducive to producing Western/Northeast Asian norms of development in general.

Currently Sub-Saharan fertility rates are also so high that things are simply not going to get much better for a long, long time. There is also a tendency - seen in Liberia, D.R. Congo and in the Americas in Haiti - for a horrible Malthusian trap to be reached where order breaks down and it's just absolutely horrible chaos, violence, corruption, poverty, etc, seemingly indefinitely. A lot of effort is likely required to get out of that negative equilibrium.
#14482714
I found this post on reddit today and figured I'd repost it here:

I'm just going to go on a general rant about Africa; this is not necessarily directed at you but at "the general" because there are a lot of bad perceptions about africa pre-colonization.
While they weren't directly in 'participation' with Europe they still had a sophisticated system of centralized states. The Swahili City-States in the Early Medieval Era could map the entire Indian Ocean wind patterns down to the day and sail from Swahili to freaking China and trade over there. They traded in China, Indochina, Polynesia, the Indian sub-continent, the Middle East, and with other African kingdoms and tribes.
For further example; Egyptians, Nubians, and Aksumites developed new cross-fertilization processes. The Sahelian empires advanced metallurgy during the "middle ages." Benin was known for sophisticated bronze work in the 16th c. Areas of West Africa had early advanced agronomy (Rice-growing in the American south was also almost entirely an import from the Guinea Coast of Africa. The methods and knowledge were carried with skilled growers into slavery). The King of Mali in the early 14th century went on his pilgrimage to Mecca. On his journey with his 60,000 man party he gave away so much gold that it crashed the Mediterranean economy because of the massive inflation. Timbuktu, Gao, and Ife were huge trade hubs that became wealthier than many European cities could even dream of. Great Zimbabwe, in South Africa, domesticated large amounts of animal and traded iron, ivory, and gold acquired from their own territories with its own workers and traded again with other African kingdoms and traded as far as India, China, and Persia. We have archeological evidence that the Africans were trading with East Indian Ocean peoples as early as 300AD!
African kingdoms mostly elected to not traverse that massive desert for expansion when they had a ripe continent right at their fingertips loaded to the brim with gold, iron, diamonds, ivory and etc. When they had huge local, continental, and trans-oceanic trade routes that brought them immense wealth they had no reason to go North. But in that respect they also had no capacity to develop militarily along with the Europeans who, while being "so advanced", were really the best at just killing each other a lot and refined that idea more than really anyone else.
Progress isn't a tech tree like Civ V; it follows the needs of the people. Yes, the African's didn't have guns and didn't wear fancy top hats and white powdered wigs and didn't write down laws on yellow paper with fancy calligraphy. Yes they didn't wear extravagant blue suits with white puffy ties and green feathered hats with strikingly red boots. They had their fair share of silly costumes with fancy hats but my point is just because they didn't look like and didn't progress along like Europeans doesn't mean they didn't progress or experience golden ages. I also know this might shock everyone too but African kingdoms and tribes were not hunters and gatherers! They independently developed iron tools and agriculture themselves. It just took a little longer because they didn't have copper or bronze ages because those resources barely existed in Sub-Saharan Africa; if anything to me that makes it more impressive.
It's the same kind of shit that Native Americans have to deal with. Oh you didn't have WHEELS? How can you be a civilized nation without WHEELS?!?! Well the Native American's had wheels -- they were used regularly on things like toys but on a practical level they had no need for them. Many Central and South American kingdoms, notably the Aztecs and Inca's, lived in heavily mountainous areas and things like donkeys and manpower were far more consistent and efficient than wheels which would have to traverse rocky cliffs and hills. Yeah they didn't have compass' but no one else on Earth could use work a mountain cliff for agriculture like Native American's could with terrace farming.
So I'd say this: Africa saw its share of developed and powerful civilizations just like most of the rest of the world, and they rose and fell like anywhere else. Africa is not unique except maybe for the fact that it is the only continent of the Old World with substantial (roughly half) of its land area locked up in rainforest or desert. Europe, rather, is the odd one out, and it was the Renaissance and age of Empire and exploration in Europe that allowed it to conquer and exploit Africa, enslaving its people and extracting its resources and labor to keep it down until the 20th century. Nowhere else in the world had to suffer an entire separate continent spending nearly 400 years persistently waging war against it (either by political interference or direct military action) to intentionally destabilize it and subdue it. Africa just fell under pressure. Combine that with 400 years of racism and destroying of local culture and history to fragment the people more and then, when they finally get freedom, arbitrarily releasing them according to European administrative borders and not cultural, historical, or religious borders and you just get a shitstorm waiting to happen.
What did Africa do? It made the mistake of being home to an inordinate amount of easily extractable resources and not expecting the combined forces of Portugal, Spain, France, the British Empire, Italy, and later the Ottoman Empire, who couldn't spend more than 5 seconds not being at each others throats, to unite in subduing them for nearly 400 years bit by bit by bit. Start with the coasts, isolate them, disrupt inner African politics; once they're at war with each other and weaker by being 'starved out' move in and crush them. Just think about that -- until the European Union the obliteration of Africa for material gain was the only thing Europe could really work together on. Europe united in the subduing of Africa and the African states really had no idea what was going on or any concept of uniting against this common threat until it was far too late. Even then though in the 1500's and early 1600's the African coastal states still put up a damn good fight against the Portuguese in particular; alas it didn't matter though as they were gradually squeezed out one at a time. It's a tragic story.
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By Ombrageux
#14482719
All the feels in the world don't make up for that bottom-of-the-barrel GDP/capita (which Africans themselves hate and hence are trying to improve, either in their own country, or by moving to European countries).
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By Kapanda
#14482749
Solastalgia wrote:Why does it matter whether or not someone has been to Africa? As if a trip to Africa will show them what's truly going on. This isn't something that you see from your hotel window or through a little touring. This is something you need to study (no matter where you are in the world), and not gloss over, and just lazily throw all the blame on Africans (as you do Kapanda). Maybe when you're in Africa, Kapanda, you only see Africans at fault, but that doesn't mean there isn't international capital behind it. Only placing the blame on African mismanagement (as you do Kapanda) is what is offensive here. Not citing neocolonialism (which you claim is offensive, showing your sympathies towards international capital), which is most certainly happening in Africa. Whether you want to admit it or not.

Another privileged white boy with a saviour complex. Just what Africa needs.
#14482753
Kapanda wrote:Another privileged white boy with a saviour complex. Just what Africa needs.


Actually, it would be you (who pretends neocolonialism doesn't exist) that's pushing the privileged white savior complex agenda. Which is an integral part of neocolonialism, all of which I've been critiquing, while you (on the other hand) pretend it doesn't exist, and when it's brought up, you call that offensive (it only offends the privileged white savior international capitalists and their defenders, who don't want their bubble popped, to realize the reality of the neocolonial ass fucking they're pushing).

It's hilariously ironic how you acted like neocolonialism is non-existent, while I was critiquing all of it, and now you're trying to paint me as the neocolonialist.

Please explain how I'm pushing white savior complex by being against neocolonialism (of which white savior complex plays an important role). The people that pretend neocolonialism isn't an issue (like yourself), or even defend it, are the ones that're perfectly okay with white savior complex (if they don't already have it themselves).
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By Kapanda
#14482764
it's thoroughly irrelevant. I'm sure you will feel some gratification fighting neocolonialism, whilst Africa actually tries to solve its own problems
#14482769
Kapanda wrote:it's thoroughly irrelevant.


By continuing to disregard neocolonialism as an issue, you're practically defending it. Of course, the international capitalists with their white savior complex put forward the same argument, that neocolonialism really isn't a problem, yada, yada.

Kapanda wrote:I'm sure you will feel some gratification fighting neocolonialism, whilst Africa actually tries to solve its own problems


Do you even know what neocolonialism means? When an outsider brings up neocolonialism as an issue in Africa, that doesn't make them a neocolonialist themself. If someone (like myself) is against neocolonialism, then they're for domestic solutions to the problems. If you watched the documentary I linked to earlier, it's all about Africans coming together to fight the outside influences that are hurting them.
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By Drlee
#14482772
White people showed up. Had a good time. Didn't leave a large enough tip.
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By Kapanda
#14482774
Of all the ills in Angola, one thing it is continuously praised for is that it sets its own agenda, although poverty is still way too high. It negotiates in the international arenas as an equal partner - especially because China made the first step in treating that poor African nation as such.

Your stance of a complex of superiority, that we are in bad shape because of the meanies from the outside, is given more attention than it deserves, and is condescending to say the least. I'm giving it attention here because, if not you, somebody else would spew this shit and talk about how trees still need hugging.
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