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:
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.
A stubborn porcupine: heredity & nationhood. Meditate, brother!
« Artists are the antennae of the race. »