Ta-Nehisi Coates takes to task those who enjoy spectacles like Zimbabwe as evidence that Africa can't govern itself and was better off under colonial rule. I quite agree. This argument seems to be generally advanced by people who think that the entire continent is composed of Zimbabwe, Congo, Angola, Rwanda, and Sudan--i.e., the places they've seen in the news. Africa has dozens of countries. Most of them are poor. They were also poor under colonial rule.
Nor is the fact that the places where whites stayed were unusually prosperous evidence that Africa sucks weasels. The whites stayed there because they were unusually prosperous--they went to those places with the highly arable land, the natural resources, and the navigable rivers.
I also take a moment to brush aside the notion that Africa is poor because they have naturally low IQs. Theoretically, such a thing is possible--there's no reason to believe that cognitive ability couldn't cluster more tightly in some populations. But you can't prove it by Africa, because African poverty is in the range that indisputably causes low cognitive ability: malnutrition and disease in early childhood permanently retard cognitive development. People who rely on small surveys of a few hundred people in each African nation to draw sweeping conclusions about the continent's future are engaging in the exact opposite of science.
I'm not trying to pretend that Africa's decolonialization has not involved some colossal screw-ups, or that most of Africa's political and economic institutions couldn't be a whole lot better. But African poverty and political culture is complicated; there is no simple theory that Explains It All, neither colonialism nor eugenics.
So why am I defending colonialism? As I said earlier, I'm not; the fact that most Zimbabweans might have been better off under Smith doesn't mean that they didn't deserve to be even better off under a government that didn't think blacks were not quite human. However, on any metric I can think of--ethnic violence, political rights, economic prosperity, social cohesion--ordinary Zimbabweans were probably better off in Old Rhodesia. It doesn't seem to be widely known that Mugabe went on his own reign of terror against other tribes he thought were political enemies; the current opposition battle is in part a tribal conflict, as I understand it. Mugabe hasn't been about empowering Africans; he's been empowering his tribesmen and especially his cronies.
But this just makes the point: Mugabe is not Africa. He is Robert Mugabe. He is not automatically better than the loathesome Ian Smith merely by virtue of being black, any more than his blackness is the problem with his government. He's a vicious thug who has destroyed a once prosperous country in order to hold onto power for a few more years. Surely, a quick reading of history should tell anyone that this is not some specially African problem.
I think that the assumption that any black leader was definitionally better than the Smith government is part of what enabled Mugabe. I don't mean on the part of Zimbabweans--you can hardly blame the subjects of a colonial regime for wanting one of their own in charge. But Western governments enabled him in part. And they did so because practically their only criteria was blackness--they didn't look, say, at the different ethnic groups within the country, because aren't all Africans the same? Nor did they look very hard at how he might rule, so long as he managed to be black. This is a way of infantilizing Africa--acting as if Mugabe is really the best they're capable of. Nearly every government in Africa is better than Mugabe's. We should have expected better.
While they were also poor under colonial rule, they were poor because of colonial rule. There was simply no way any of the colonies would ever evolve into a free and prosperous place to live under colonial rule. That being said, the new boss is the same as the old boss.
Your argument seems to validate De Maistre's observation: "Every country gets the government it deserves"
Mmmm . . . I take William Easterly's line. Western/Japanese levels of prosperity are the exceptional state, not poverty. Most places under colonialism were no poorer than they were before, and most places that weren't really colonized, like inner China, stayed just as poor as Africa for a long time. Certainly, colonial rule didn't improve things, and it indisputably left behind it political dysfunction that has hindered development. But I don't think it's the cause of the poverty. Developing a liberal market economy is a long and arduous institution-building task.
"Every country gets the government it deserves"
..."but I don’t recall ever knife-raping any retarded nuns."
(ripped off from The Onion "What do you think" after some elections--2002 I believe)
It's not so much that every country is a horror story like Sudan or Zimbabwe, it's that there are no real success stories.
I recommend Ryszard Kapuscinski's The Shadow of the Sun. It doesn't answer the questions of why Africa is how it is, but it offers quite a lot of thought-provoking perspective. For example, one can't get away from the deleterious effects of tribalism on post-colonial developments.
Plus it's a heck of a read. (How that guy lived to a respectable age is beyond me.)
Cheers,
You dare mention IQ! Watch out for the IQ trolls that will be coming your way from GNXP and Sailer's site.
What makes the situation even more lamentable is that Rhodesia/Zimbabwe had not one but two elections in which blacks were full participants: the first, held in 1979, in which Bishop Abel Muzorewa won and formed a government, has now been all but erased from the collective memory.
It was held to lack legitimacy by basically two people: President Carter and the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington, who persuaded his boss, Prime Minister Thatcher, to come around to his way of thinking.
There was then a substantial revision to the constitution that had been previously agreed, and the subsequent (1980) elections were won by Mugabe and his ZANU-PF party. Even then, things didn't get crazy until a decade later, when the white representation in the legislature was dropped off. At that point, Mugabe could have gone in one of two directions: the one he actually chose, or what I'll call for want of a better description the South African Way.
The rest, alas, is history.
The old Southern Rhodesia was not remotely as nasty as Apartheid South Africa (nor even as unpleasant as some of the segregated Deep South, for all I know). Nor was it "colonial", except in the special sense that it was run by the Rhodesian whites rather than by London. Mugabe's regime is infinitely worse for almost all Zimbabweans, I'd have thought. Not that that matters, of course; things are as they are.
I wonder how much overlap there is between people who will accept:
a. A statement that much of Iraq was better off under Saddam than now.
b. A statement that much of Africa was better off under colonialism than now.
It seems to me that most people who agree to one will object to the other. And almost everyone is capable of missing the fact that "better than an endless nightmare" is not the same as "good."
The IQ comment is spot on, IMO. If you think low IQ is a major problem for African development, the best answers are probably things you'd want to do anyway: improve nutrition, vaccinate for widespread diseases, try to keep malaria under control in places where it's a big problem, etc. (I gather there are specific minerals you might supplement to avoid known causes of low IQ in children--frex, we supplement salt with iodine for that reason.)
You know in the end we're all Kenyans (or certainly East Africans).
"It's not so much that every country is a horror story like Sudan or Zimbabwe, it's that there are no real success stories."
Mauritius and Botswana. It requires special "all Africans aren't the same glasses" to see them, but most civilized people would be comfortable in either place.
By what I'm sure is a random coincidence, those happen to be the two highest ranking African countries on the Index of Economic Freedom.
http://www.heritage.org/index/countries.cfm
I am a white guy with Scottish roots. Did you know that Caucasians have more genes in common with East Africans, than East Africans have in common with West Africans! So intelligence is not "race" based. In fact there is really no scientific basis for there being "races", and the only reason they are perceived as such is that skin color is so easily identifiable.
I am a white guy with Scottish roots. Did you know that Caucasians have more genes in common with East Africans, than East Africans have in common with West Africans! So intelligence is not "race" based. In fact there is really no scientific basis for there being "races", and the only reason they are perceived as such is that skin color is so easily identifiable.
I don't think anyone would disagree with Megan that individual Zimbabweans were living in superior circumstances during the Smith regime than the present population.
For most of the world, though, that is not the metric that counts. What stirs hearts and motivates movements is the freedom of the racial/ethnic/linguistic group from aliens who claimed their land and it's people as a possession.
It is a great great tragedy that creeps like Mugabe have created nations of victims. And not all of them, of course, were post-colonial BTW. Those who spread the news of the horrors and crimes as you are doing are on the side of the angels.
But the prosperity of individuals was not the reason that anti-colonialism was a victorious movement in the post-WWW2 world. Woodrow Wilson's phrase 'the self determination of Peoples' is more like it.
It's not so much that every country is a horror story like Sudan or Zimbabwe, it's that there are no real success stories.
Mauritius and Botswana. It requires special "all Africans aren't the same glasses" to see them, but most civilized people would be comfortable in either place.
Botswana has a strong economy based especially on diamond production. On the other hand, as noted above it also has very low life expectancy due to AIDS. Some estimates say that one-sixth of the country's population is HIV+. Prosperity or not, I'd have a hard time calling Botswana a success story given those numbers.
Mauritius is considered part of Africa geographically but in other respect is mainly an Asian country.
From the CIA World Factbook on Botswana:
Diamond mining has fueled much of the expansion and currently accounts for more than one-third of GDP and for 70-80% of export earnings. Tourism, financial services, subsistence farming, and cattle raising are other key sectors. On the downside, the government must deal with high rates of unemployment and poverty. Unemployment officially was 23.8% in 2004, but unofficial estimates place it closer to 40%. HIV/AIDS infection rates are the second highest in the world and threaten Botswana's impressive economic gains. An expected leveling off in diamond mining production overshadows long-term prospects.
The estimate of the HIV infection rate is 37.3%. And the life expectancy has almost been cut in half from the 1990 value (from 64 to 34), according to Wikipedia.
If a small (less than 2 million people), AIDS ravaged, diamond boosted economy is the best example of African self-government then the evidence is pretty clear. That's not to say that re-colonization is the way to go, only that our expectations need to be calibrated accordingly.
Actually, if you understand evolution there's every reason to believe that there are at least tiny mental differences in every human subpopulation. Minds are based on brains, and brains are physical constructs built by genes. Genes mutate and are reshuffled in every generation.
Race realists do not only look at African-descended people in Africa. They also look at them in other places, most particularly in America. African-Americans partake of the wonderful modern nutritional cornucopia, practically the same as other Americans. But their IQs are still roughly one standard deviation lower.
It's true, though, that African IQs are probably being suppressed quite a bit by malnutrition. This is what those measurements you deride show: African IQs average in the 70 range, versus African-American IQs which average 85. This suggests quite a bit of damage from malnutrition.
The measurements of those few hundred people here and there, as weak as they are, still are the best and hardest data we have. And contra your assertion, any real scientist will use them, to draw sweeping, although tentative, conclusions.
Look, we'd love to be wrong. It's just that the IQ data all point one way, including huge corpuses of data collected in the USA that are bulletproof. The historical data, on the performance of African societies post independence, point the same way.
For my money Kim Du Toit's essay "Let Africa Sink" contains the most precise response to Africa's problem. It's harsh, but I don't know that anyone else can come up with a better solution, including the esteemed Jeff Sachs. Only Africans can improve Africa. Similar to how only Iraqis can improve Iraq, only Afghans can improve Afghanistan, and only Americans can improve America. It's hard work, but it's really the only way.
I think it can be argued that Zimbabwe under Mugabe in 1990 was better off than under Smith in 1975.
http://hdrstats.undp.org/indicators/10.html
http://www.freedomhouse.org/uploads/fiw/FIWAllScores.xls
This is not to say that Mugabe was a good guy in 1990. He was already responsible for mass-murder of Ndebele and other abuses. However going by development Zimbabwe was better in 1990 than in 1975 and in freedom it was about the same.
I meant to add something. Although not a good guy even then if Mugabe had retired in 1992 I think he would probably be viewed with some favor. At that point life expectancy under him had risen while infant mortality had dropped. There had been minimal increases in freedom, but at that point there had not been the erosions that'd be seen later. His murderous treatment of ethnic minorities, and alliance with North Koreans in doing so, would be a dark cloud but one the Left could plausibly minimize.
The period from 1995 to present is when Zimbabwe truly began to collapse and his regime lost what defensibility it had. Some collapse was inevitable due to AIDS, see Botswana, but his actions of the last 15 years has worsened things. Going by the UNDP Botswana actually rebounded a bit from 2000 to 2005. Zimbabwe continued to decline in that period. (Although nowhere near as much as Swaziland did in that period, Mswati III is arguably even crazier than Mugabe.)
"If a small (less than 2 million people), AIDS ravaged, diamond boosted economy is the best example of African self-government then the evidence is pretty clear."
Funny. I view just the opposite. I see Botswana as a sterling, if not inspirational example of what social and political stability can achieve. I would hate to see what kind of dictatorship or dystopia would arise in any Western nation facing a similar health crisis. What moralizing political entrepreneur could resist the perfect excuse for a power grab in the name of "dire national crisis?"
I grew up in Botswana, and I still have family there. My last visit was in 10 months ago, and it's still a very nice place. Two huge shifts that have taken place since I lived there are AIDS and the immigration problem sparked by Mugabe. The total population of the country is under 1.5 million, so you don't need a huge influx of refugees to make a major impact. Zimbabwean refugees are driving down wages and driving up crime. Still, despite AIDS and the refugee problem the country manages to maintain a decent standard of living for most people, along with economic opportunity, the rule of law, respect for human rights, and all the other stuff Africa supposedly lacks.
Re: Did you know that Caucasians have more genes in common with East Africans, than East Africans have in common with West Africans!
Depends what you mean by "East Africans". If you're talking Ethiopia and Somalia, then yes, of course, because there's been lot of gene flows across the Red Sea. In fact Semitic languages are even spoken in Ethiopia, and the Cushitic languages like Somali belong to the same overall family. But if you go further south-- say, down to Tanzania, then you are in Bantu country, and the Bantu started out in Nigeria about 3000 years ago.
While they were also poor under colonial rule, they were poor because of colonial rule. There was simply no way any of the colonies would ever evolve into a free and prosperous place to live under colonial rule. That being said, the new boss is the same as the old boss.
Posted by rickm
The idea that Africans would be fine but for the fact it is all the fault of the evil colonial oppressor - ignores all the former colonial areas outside Africa in the ME, Asia, Oceana, the Americas, that (anywhere blacks do not rule), are doing pretty well, some spectacularly..with only a few Burmas, Moldavas, Albanias as exceptions.
There are no black nations that are success stories. Nor any black dominated regions or cities where they are a national minority.
Where blacks have had personal success, with significant parts moved into the middle and upper classes, it has been only as minorities in places where the dominant ethicity helps them rise and gives them money and breaks and affirmative action no real African would think of giving if they were in a swapped postion with those non-black elites.
I am a white guy with Scottish roots. Did you know that Caucasians have more genes in common with East Africans, than East Africans have in common with West Africans! So intelligence is not "race" based. In fact there is really no scientific basis for there being "races", and the only reason they are perceived as such is that skin color is so easily identifiable.
Posted by Tax Lawyer
More Lefty claptrap they honestly think can be foisted on some people so dumb they didn't get a sociology degree and become a welfare worker or teacher that doesn't understand the 6th grade subject they teach.
Race exists. It is profound.
The scientific basis of race, outside the PC ranks in academia, is well established.
1. A forensic anthropologist can tell the difference between a chimpanzee, black, and white skull with 99% confidence. Bewteen whites and Asians with 85% confidence. Checking shinbone to height ratio will lead the same anthropologist to identify black skeletons with 100% certainty
2. A checklist to 20 childhood behavior and physical maturation indices conducted with chimpanzees, blacks, whites, and Asians shows without looking, childhood development researchers can distinguish 100% of the time between blacks and chimpanzees without ever actually seeing the subject - but also distinguish 100% of the time whose checklist was done for a black child, which was done for a white/Asian kid. The white and Asian kids, the descendents of the few humans that left Africa, can only be predicted with 85% certainty - most areas are same, a few profound differences like spatial ability and child violence, aggressiveness levels..
3. As another poster noted, a 1 sigma difference in IQ exists between blacks and others. A check of muscle tissue of congoloids shows unique physiology. DNA samples readily reveal races. The top 400 sprinters in dashes and hurdles for men are 98% congoloid. The Africans lack, or 89% of them lack, two major brain mutations that arose outside Africa, the most recent one 6,000 years ago - that all whites and Asians have (except aboriginal Asians) because it conferred advantages.
4. None of the differences are surprising. West African blacks had a 80,000 year isolation from the East Africans who were the ancestors of white and Asian protostock. Researchers believe the separatation and evolving of East Africans almost turned Congoloids into a distinct species, but then drought and desert barriers eased up and the two populations mixed genes and blocked the rise of a separate homo congolensis.
5. Japanese and Americans now make medicines that work better with one race. Certain drugs are metabolized slower or differently, by race. A few cardiac medicines whites and Asians can use will kill blacks or cause serious complications. Mongoloids are less able to metabolize alcohol, but better able to digest and use starches than other races. The races also suffer from differemt diseases and pathologies as much as the races differ in areas of physical and mental attainment. And those pathologies, like IQ, are quite distinct from locale, being in a different culture, and "nuture" differences.
******************
"There are no black nations that are success stories" cf
TR: I know you're a bit of a racist, but this is a bit silly.
Barbados is a fairly well-developed nation with high literacy. They live longer than the Czechs. Granted it does have a high murder rate and prison capacity is filled. There are several black populations in the Caribbean that are successful.
"I know you're a bit of a racist,"
On rereading scratch that. There's nothing "a bit" about it.
It's true there aren't many successful nations in Africa. In development terms the top nation in "Black Africa" is Gabon. Gabon is a longstanding dictatorship ran by Omar Bongo that's about as developed as Guatemala. In democracy terms Ghana would be tops.
In general terms the most successful country in Africa, to have substantial black ancestry, might be Cape Verde. It's roughly equivalent to Jamaica in development and is a democracy. The population is partly Portuguese descended so it maybe doesn't squelch the "blacks are stupid people who need whites to elevate them" notion.
It should surprise Megan that a conservative blog is filled with white supremicists, should it?
Some of the arguments are quite silly. Take this for example: "If a small (less than 2 million people), AIDS ravaged, diamond boosted economy is the best example of African self-government then the evidence is pretty clear."
So Botswana is a failure because it is small, has abundant natural resources, and is suffering from a plague? If Botswana had no natural resources, would it then be a success? Or if it shut down all the diamond mines? But I thought conservatives wanted America to drill its way to economic prosperity in Alaska. Isn't that a contradiction? Or is America a failure because it derives much of its prosperity to drilling wealth from the ground?
In case you needed more proof about conservatives...
In general terms the most successful country in Africa, to have substantial black ancestry, might be Cape Verde. It's roughly equivalent to Jamaica in development and is a democracy. The population is partly Portuguese descended so it maybe doesn't squelch the "blacks are stupid people who need whites to elevate them" notion.
Cape Verde's also an unusual case because the diaspora population is larger than the population of the country itself. It's not hard to see how that could have significant effects on development, for instance through remittances.
Incidentally, growing up in Connecticut I knew many people of Cape Verdean ancestry, and while most of them were relatively dark-skinned by and large they did not think of themselves as black.
The thing about Botswana is that they've actually managed their diamonds pretty well. Angola and the Congo haven't. Those in the know almost unanimously acclaim Botswana as an economic and political success story; AIDS is their one largest failing, but South Africa hasn't been doing too well on that front either - and South Africa is still on the whole not that bad a place.
"It should surprise Megan that a conservative blog is filled with white supremicists, should it?"
TR: I thought she was libertarian. Does her blog become conservative even if she's not?
Besides which this isn't 1948. This whole "race realist, let's measure the size of black skulls" idiocy is fringe among conservatives. You see it a fair amount online because elements of it are appealing to dorky white men who like bragging about their IQ and "dorky white men who brag about their IQ" are disproportionately represented online. Also white supremacists encourage web-surfing to some degree. "King of the Hill" made a joke about white supremacists online presence ten years ago.
"Western/Japanese levels of prosperity are the exceptional state, not poverty"
Modern medicine is also exceptional by historic standards, but that doesn't mean that it can't be adopted by countries and people around the planet - each country doesn't have to reinvent the wheel, it just has to start using it. When it comes to political, legal, economic and financial systems, some countries are making full use of modern technology, while others have chosen not to.
Granted, their cultures, plus vested interests, make it harder for some countries to modernize. But the least that the 'developed' world can do is to stop making excuses for them. Mugabe deliberately implemented bad, antiquated policies, with predictable results.
The point of comparing Zimbabwe today to how it was under colonialsim is that it's outrageous that a leader like Mugabe couldn't even match the performance of a clearly sub-standard system. The point is not how good colonialism is but how very bad Mugabe must be to underperform such a low benchmark. To defend him is an example of 'the quiet bigotry of low expectations'.
freddiemac - So Botswana is a failure because it is small, has abundant natural resources, and is suffering from a plague? If Botswana had no natural resources, would it then be a success? Or if it shut down all the diamond mines? But I thought conservatives wanted America to drill its way to economic prosperity in Alaska. Isn't that a contradiction? Or is America a failure because it derives much of its prosperity to drilling wealth from the ground?
It appears that you are being intentionally thick here (or you failed reading comprehension), but I'll respond anyway. Botswana is not a full-fledged failure. It's impressive that they have managed not to squander their diamond resources. The elements of economic success for Botswana cannot be translated elsewhere. The country has a small population (probably because, even if it is the size of Texas, it's also 70% desert), and not every country in Africa has access to diamonds or an equivalent natural resource. Even including the diamonds the country has unemployment of 25-40%; so it's not exactly an untarnished success story.
As far as the completely off-topic rant about Alaskan oil, no one thinks that drilling in ANWR is going to make us prosperous. Natural resources make up a tiny part of the US economy. Even if we discovered an oil reserve in Alaska bigger than Saudi Arabia it would have only a marginal impact on the enormous US economy.
This sort of discussion always reminds me of this joke:
A woman comes home from work early and finds her husband in bed with another woman.
"John, are you having an affair?!!" she shrieks.
"No," he says. "Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes!"
Now, what do you see with your own eyes? Why should you deny the evidence of your own eyes?
I am one of the few Africans posting here. I have a few things to say:
Infant mortality is high in Africa today, but it was significantly higher in most African countries under colonial rule.
Colonial administrations were neither visionary nor competent. A terribly corrupt Nigeria managed to build more roads, power stations and schools than the British managed to build in 150 years of colonisation.
Mugabe (for all his errors) still managed to train more Zimbabweans than Ian Smith. (The British NHS has a healthy dose of Zimbabwean health care professionals).
I am not saying that Mugabe is good or that Western Governments are totally malacious but we need to strike a balance between the "White man good black man bad" world view of Western Conservatives (e.g. Reagan) and the "excessive post-colonial guilt" of the Western Liberals.
A great deal of Africa's problems originate from the "scramble for Africa" and the Berlin conference of 1884. The map of most modern Africa was drawn out without reference to local sensibilities. (E.g. The Yoruba are split between Benin and Nigeria, The Hausa are split between Niger and Nigeria and the nation state 'Nigeria' has no meaning).
We have 50 potential 'Yugoslavias' in Africa.
The Brits and the French (whom Americans get all the biased second-hand knowledge about Africa from) don't usually talk about this, and the Americans (who never really bothered about geography, don't usually ask).
Africa is presently at the 'storming stage' of development. The political map of Africa has to change before realistic progress is made. Every ethnic group in Africa should have the right for self-determination.
I don't think America really has much of a role in Africa's future. The future of Africa will depend more on Africans themselves, the Chinese and Indians.
N.B: Please stop telling us we are stupid. You've being telling us we are stupid for the past 400 years.
We accept.
If you could please lift the trade tariffs, start doing hard nosed business (like the Chinese), stop telling us how much aid you give us every thirty minutes and for God's sake try to understand that there are 50 odd nations in Africa - we will be very grateful.
(If you cannot control Iraq and the Brits could not control Basra - there is precious little you could do in Africa).
I am one of the few Africans posting here. I have a few things to say:
Infant mortality is high in Africa today, but it was significantly higher in most African countries under colonial rule.
Colonial administrations were neither visionary nor competent. A terribly corrupt Nigeria managed to build more roads, power stations and schools than the British managed to build in 150 years of colonisation.
Mugabe (for all his errors) still managed to train more Zimbabweans than Ian Smith. (The British NHS has a healthy dose of Zimbabwean health care professionals).
I am not saying that Mugabe is good or that Western Governments are totally malacious but we need to strike a balance between the "White man good black man bad" world view of Western Conservatives (e.g. Reagan) and the "excessive post-colonial guilt" of the Western Liberals.
A great deal of Africa's problems originate from the "scramble for Africa" and the Berlin conference of 1884. The map of most modern Africa was drawn out without reference to local sensibilities. (E.g. The Yoruba are split between Benin and Nigeria, The Hausa are split between Niger and Nigeria and the nation state 'Nigeria' has no meaning).
We have 50 potential 'Yugoslavias' in Africa.
The Brits and the French (whom Americans get all the biased second-hand knowledge about Africa from) don't usually talk about this, and the Americans (who never really bothered about geography, don't usually ask).
Africa is presently at the 'storming stage' of development. The political map of Africa has to change before realistic progress is made. Every ethnic group in Africa should have the right for self-determination.
I don't think America really has much of a role in Africa's future. The future of Africa will depend more on Africans themselves, the Chinese and Indians.
N.B: Please stop telling us we are stupid. You've being telling us we are stupid for the past 400 years.
We accept.
If you could please lift the trade tariffs, start doing hard nosed business (like the Chinese), stop telling us how much aid you give us every thirty minutes and for God's sake try to understand that there are 50 odd nations in Africa - we will be very grateful.
(If you cannot control Iraq and the Brits could not control Basra - there is precious little you could do in Africa).
Re: Cape Verde's also an unusual case because the diaspora population is larger than the population of the country itself.
So what? The same applies to Ireland.: there are far more Irish descended people dwelling abroad than in the Auld Sod.
Re: AIDS is their one largest failing
An infectious disease is not a cultural or mental failing. One might claim it is an immunological failure, but in this particular case it is one that most of the rest of humanity shares.
Re: Infant mortality is high in Africa today, but it was significantly higher in most African countries under colonial rule.
It was also higher in the colonial powers back in those day too.
re: The future of Africa will depend more on Africans themselves, the Chinese and Indians.
??? Indians and Chinese? Why? Maybe the Indian population that was settled in Africa, OK. But China? They're every bit as much an alien Power mucking around Africa for self-interest as the US or the USSR were.
JonF,
I live in Nigeria. I am posting this from Nigeria.
You ask why the Chinese? You obviously don't live in Africa.
Not all africans require aid, but virtually all africans require kerosene lanterns or candles. Most kerosene lanterns and candles are made in China. We cannot afford Harley-Davidson motorcycles, we can afford Jincheng and QJiang motorcycles. We cannot afford Honda generators, we can afford Tigershark generators.
As Malloch-Brown put it: "When was the last time anyone from England left to open a store in rural Africa?". This, is exactly what the Chinese are doing. The last time I checked the US was more interested in establishing AFRICOM than in establishing Special Economic Zones in Africa (Which the Chinese are doing).
China wants to do real business with Africa. Africa has a rising middle class and that middle class needs products that only China can supply.
P.S. I have an interview with a Chinese telecommunications company Huawei on tuesday. Please wish me well.
"An infectious disease is not a cultural or mental failing."
Yes it is a cultural failing. There are a whole range of cultural solutions to HIV: education campaigns, changing sexual mores, retroviral drug programs etc. Some of these are beyond the reach of a poor country but there are enough that aren't to reduce the impact of the disease.
If you argue that white Americans and Black Africans are the same physically than there has to be a cultural difference that is responsible for the different HIV rates of the populations.
Good luck Maduka. I would go in with your eyes open though because the intentions of the Chinese are not benign. The few examples I know of; working with the genocidal government of Sudan and sending a load of arms to Zimbabwe to prop up Mugabe, don't look positive to me.
The Chinese and the Africans are going to be worse off at the end of all this.
Strange that Megan would bring up the sensible idea that IQs in Africa are artificially depressed by poor environments and not take it to its logical conclusion. Why not intervene to ensure that African children receive the nutrition and stimulation they need to maximize their IQs? Surely Africa will be a better place to live if more Africans realize their cognitive potentials.
Having said that, it's disingenuous of Megan to "brush aside" the idea that Africans may have naturally lower IQs based on a handful of studies done on a few hundred individuals, while completely ignoring the hundreds of studies on thousands of individuals of African ancestry and thousands of individuals of European ancestry in the United States over the course of a century showing a fairly stable gap of about 15 points favoring whites--a gap which persists even when socioeconomic variables are controlled for. The latter studies are the basis of the theory that whites (and Asians) have naturally higher IQs than sub-Saharan Africans, not what's trickled out of Africa.
Finally, if no one minds me saying so, I think some people here need to wrap their heads around the idea that making an idea taboo and disproving it are two very different things. Dismissing the idea of racial difference in intelligence as "backwards" without looking at the actual data is the progressive equivalent of a fundamentalist Christian dismissing out-of-hand the idea that homosexuality has a biological basis because it contradicts his or her religious ideology.
Marc you bring up good points. What's more is that we will soon have hundreds and then thousands of sequenced genomes to help us understand the biological basis of these IQ differences. When I say soon, I mean in the next 12 months. In fact, just to bring the discussion back to Africa, Applied Biosystems sequenced the genome of a black, African male to show off the next generation sequencing capabilities of their SOLiD instrument. The information is in the publicly accessible Genbank, start analyzing it....
I have a few points to make.
1. I find it amazing that westerners that have zero knowledge about the complexities of Africa speak with authority about African issues.
2. Western media has sold the view that Chinese involvement in Africa is evil while Western involvment is benign. That is patent nonsense.
The evil dictator of Equitorial Guinea is in power today because ChevronTexaco and ExxonMobil want him there. The Chinese in 100 years will not be able to match the amount of environmental degradation Shell, ExxonMobil and ChevronTexaco have wrought the Niger Delta region. France and Belgium (not China) supported the massacre of half a million Tutsis.
3. Mugabe might be chummy with the Chinese but his doesn't bank his loot in Shanghai. He banks in London and Switzerland.
4. The West has spent 500 billion on aid in Africa - we agree. But most of the money is back in the West (In Western bank accounts). The day dictators feel their loot is threatened is the day that corruption levels will fall drastically in Africa.
5. Make up your minds as to whether Africans are smart or stupid. Frankly speaking, we no longer care. During the colonial era you used it as an excuse to deny us education.
Malcolm,
Good for Applied Biosystems. Seriously, people (including myself) have been plugging genes associated with intelligence into the Hapmap and finding differences in the frequency of their beneficial and deleterious alleles among the different populations (Nigerians, Utah whites, Chinese and Japanese) represented in the Hapmap for some time now. In some instances the differences are stark, and in most but not all, if I remember correctly, whites and Asians have more of the high-IQ alleles than Nigerians.
There was a discussion of this on www.halfsigma.com a while back right after the whole Watson controversy broke. You should google it if this sort of thing interests you. There was also a more recent one sparked by the discovery of IL1RAPL1.
Still, they haven't found all the genes associated with IQ by a long, long, long shot, and not all the genes currently associated with IQ will probably pass the replication test. So we certainly aren't going to know the answer to this in 12 months. In ten years, on the other hand...
Chike,
1. So which is it, we have zero knowledge of complex Africa, or we are knee-deep in Africa's problems like you state in point #2?
2. Yeah that sucks and Chinese involvement is just going to add another layer of suck.
4. $500 billion. Jeeze. I live in a city in the US that doesn't even have buses.
5. Most of us are Americans on this blog. The only colony we had was Liberia so we could get you back to Africa.
It's interesting that for all the scientific and other knowledge about Africa portrayed in this blog, nobody has mentioned WHY HIV has spread like wildfire in Africa, compared to the rest of the world. Simple- culture... the African age old culture of poligamy. Most other countries are monogamic societies and HIV is spread there mostly through sources considered more liberal (gay communities, swingers), infedility, etc, those who usually perform outside the standard norm of monogamy. In a nutshell, 1 african gentleman gets it, his 8, 12 or 30 wives are guaranteed to get it, any one of them is unfaithfull and many are, they pass it on to someone else who infects his 8,15 or 20 wives, etc. Simple culture mixed with the mathematics of multiplication... how about that? I was born in Angola and I lived 23 years spread over, Angola, Mozambique, Rhodesia, Botswana and South Africa. The trend is the same everywhere. As for comparing the prosperity of Africa under colonial rule with present day Africa and even Rhodesia with Zimbabwe, that is a joke. Comparison with latter day africa and latter day world, and present day Africa and present day world are the only valid points, you compare contemporary periods , and those comparisons only show degradation in Africa. They have not known how to handle their natural resourses and blame everyone else for their problems and do nothing to improve their lot. What's so special about Mugabe? Dictator, murderer and thief??? Yes. Bulletproof? I think not. It's easier to blame the world for their problems than to have the courage to take matters into their hands than getting on with their lives after colonization like Asia did. Unless a cure is found for HIV, Africans are doomed. The Chinese know it and want their people on the ground to take over without having to do it militarily the way things are gooing. They have the numbers and the patience to perform a silent takeover. Keen businessmen they are, leave nothing to chance, absolutely nothing... crazy notion??? Maybe, let's sit back and watch the next 15 years...