Why is Africa less developed than Europe & Asia?

TubbaBlubba said:
Wheels are only really useful with large draft animals to early civilizations.
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Which brings in the tsetse fly subject. This one single insect is responsible for the current existence of the much of Africa's wildlife. It kills domestic animals, and some humans too. Wherever there is no tsetse there are farm animals, so the fact that it's range was historically a huge percentage of sub-tropical Africa is an often-overlooked element in the lack of human activity in large parts of the continent. They (tsetses) exist in open woodland areas, but not grassy plains. Africans always had bullocks for draft animals, but the areas in which they were able to survive were limited by the tsetse.
 
rjh01 said:
I think this is part of the answer. Plus (some mentioned earlier)
- more choice of plants and animals.
- several rivers that could be used to help grow crops.
- people living on one river could communicate with people living on other rivers.
- total size and population.
- diseases had a great impact in Africa. Though epidemics had a major impact in Europe, such as the Black death.
- knowledge and use of metals (bronze was rare in Africa, not in other places), wheels and other technology.
- Chinese and Europeans were the only people who went on long two way sea voyages to unknown places.
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Could you elaborate on these points, please. You don't make it clear where you are talking about, for instance, when you say "more choice of plants and animals", or "several rivers could.......grow crops".

In principal, though, whatever you mean by that list you seem to be implicitly accepting the flawed premise of the OP, which is that Africa doesn't have architecture, culture and so on and is less developed than Europe. As has been pointed out, this simply isn't even close to being true, except for the post-industrial revolution era.
 
MikeG said:
In principal, though, whatever you mean by that list you seem to be implicitly accepting the flawed premise of the OP, which is that Africa doesn't have architecture, culture and so on and is less developed than Europe. As has been pointed out, this simply isn't even close to being true, except for the post-industrial revolution era.
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Further to your point:
https://nypost.com/2018/03/23/laser-technology-reveals-lost-city-in-south-africa/

And this is only because we have some money to do research. Imagine what treasures still lie buried all over this continent.

Original article here:
http://theconversation.com/how-we-recreated-a-lost-african-city-with-laser-technology-92852
 
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MikeG said:
Could you elaborate on these points, please. You don't make it clear where you are talking about, for instance, when you say "more choice of plants and animals", or "several rivers could.......grow crops".

In principal, though, whatever you mean by that list you seem to be implicitly accepting the flawed premise of the OP, which is that Africa doesn't have architecture, culture and so on and is less developed than Europe. As has been pointed out, this simply isn't even close to being true, except for the post-industrial revolution era.
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I am not going to write a book on the subject so not willing to expand on every point. You do not need advanced technology to make large stone buildings. The Egyptians built the pyramids using copper tools. Plus a lot of labor. Ditto to everything else. So your point that such things existed in Africa is not important.

As for choice of animals, Europeans and Asians had access to cats, dogs, sheep, goats, cows, horses. All useful farm animals. African and Americans had fewer animals. Someone else mentioned that large animals were killed by disease in Africa. With no large animals you lose a major source of power. So you would need far more people to produce food. So fewer people to produce other things, like new technology.

As for rivers, just looked up rivers in England. There are heaps of them. Partly due to the vast amount of rainfall it gets! With the water (either from the river or the rain) you can grow crops. Plus get fish from the river. And if you want to go visit someone who lives on a nearby river it would not be a huge land journey as the distances between rivers is not huge.

Now your turn. Do the same for Africa. You will find that the distance between rivers is far greater and a lot of them go through deserts. Egypt was invaded via the Nile and from people from outside of Africa, but never from other parts of Africa.

Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rivers_of_England
 
rjh01 said:
I am not going to write a book on the subject......

As for choice of animals, Europeans and Asians had access to cats, dogs, sheep, goats, cows, horses. All useful farm animals. ........
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Right, thanks. I wasn't arguing with you, but seeking clarification. You just said something like "more rivers", and didn't make it clear who had more rivers, Africa or Europe.

And of course, as is the way with such generalisations, they are meaningless. There are parts of Africa (bigger than all of Western Europe) where for every inch of rain in Europe* there is a foot of rain. Where major rivers occur every mile or two. Africans have had access to pigs, goats and cows for at least as long as we have in Europe (but refer back to what I said previously, the tsetse fly meant the area for their use was restricted).

*I live in a part of England which gets less rainfall than parts of the Kgalagadi, less than Johannesberg, less than Jerusalem. East Anglia seems quite well developed to me.
 
MikeG said:
Right, thanks. I wasn't arguing with you, but seeking clarification. You just said something like "more rivers", and didn't make it clear who had more rivers, Africa or Europe.

And of course, as is the way with such generalisations, they are meaningless. There are parts of Africa (bigger than all of Western Europe) where for every inch of rain in Europe* there is a foot of rain. Where major rivers occur every mile or two. Africans have had access to pigs, goats and cows for at least as long as we have in Europe (but refer back to what I said previously, the tsetse fly meant the area for their use was restricted).

*I live in a part of England which gets less rainfall than parts of the Kgalagadi, less than Johannesberg, less than Jerusalem. East Anglia seems quite well developed to me.
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In those areas of Africa that get heaps of rain it comes in a short period of the year. But in England you can count on it raining nearly every month of the year.

For example you mention Johannesburg. Below is a graph of rainfall. For three months it hardly rains at all (measured in # of days of rain). And the two months on the edge are not much better.

https://www.yr.no/place/South_Africa/Gauteng/Johannesburg/statistics.html

Edit.
For comparison look at Cambridge UK. A lot of food is grown near there. It rains in July on average on 7 days. Other months it rains more often, like 12 days in January.
Ref: https://www.yr.no/place/United_Kingdom/England/Cambridge/statistics.html
 
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rjh01 said:
In those areas of Africa that get heaps of rain it comes in a short period of the year. But in England you can count on it raining nearly every month of the year.
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I don't know why you are using that as a basis for your argument.
The British Isles were a backwater. They were the arse end of Europe until the middle ages.

So using the rainfall there seems odd.

Especially when, for example, Egypt gets bugger all away from the coast and it seemed to do quite well.
 
rjh01 said:
In those areas of Africa that get heaps of rain it comes in a short period of the year......
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Simply not so. Zaire......sorry DRC... gets tropical rainfall (ie feet of the stuff) for 11 months of the year.
 
MikeG said:
Africans have had access to pigs, goats and cows for at least as long as we have in Europe (but refer back to what I said previously, the tsetse fly meant the area for their use was restricted).
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Indeed, and I believe that is consistent with Jared Diamond's thesis. The opportunities for African civilizations were not as great as those of Eurasian civilizations.

Some civilizations in Eurasia had perfect storms of opportunity, most African civilizations would lack one thing or another and the geography played a part in holding them back.

According to one quote that I have had to take from Wikipedia (I don't have his book to hand):

Similarly, Africa was fragmented by its extreme variations in climate from north to south: crops and animals that flourished in one area never reached other areas where they could have flourished, because they could not survive the intervening environment.
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There is a bit about this matter in a book called Africa on a Tightrope by Henry Gibbs 1954:

Belonging to a more recent period, certainly after the arrival of the Bushmen, are the mysterious Zimbabwe ruins, two hundred miles from Bulawayo. Zimbabwe is a Bantu name, a compound of zimba (houses) and mabgi (stones). The ruins, the largest found in Southern Africa, are dissimilar in structure and ornamentation from any located elsewhere; they are unlike those at Gedi, in Kenya; they evince a more advanced architecture than that shown by settled African tribes. No Bushman or Hottentot structures equal them. Various explanations of the origin of Zimbabwe have been given, including a possible Arab or Moorish presence ( the possible origin of Gedi) or of Portuguese development ( but no records remains).

Elsewhere between the Limpopo and Zambesi rivers are remains of a quantity of stone-fenced kraals. These may be of Bantu origin, but no evidence shows which tribe erected them. All were ruined and deserted long ago and the likeliest explanation is that between seven and five centuries ago settled communities superior to Bushmen and Hottentots were driven from their homes by Bantu warriors advancing south.

This demonstrates the weakness of Padmore's work. He noticed the 'displacement' caused by Bantu migration, but reserved condemnation for when it resulted from the presence of Europeans. The attitude implied a racial approach. It denied a true interpretation of history.
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Why pick a book from the period that some people were trying to imply that those ruins were not African? Specifically, were not built by the ancestors of the Shona?

You really need to read more up to date material, Henri.
 
Searching for natural causes of the supremacy of European civilisation in the world is pure speculation. Rather than talking about real things we are going to let out all the demons inside us, from the laziness of the savages to the form of their chin. It would probably be easier to analyse the real causes of the current supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon model of capitalism and the roles that it assigns to "the Others". Perhaps then we could see what happens to African raw materials, who keeps them, what leaves Africans out of them and how African reformers have been treated when they have wanted to get out of the grip of big business and colonial, colonialist and neo-colonialist leaders. Let us speak of diamonds, Patrice Lumumba, coltan, crowds on small boats, McDonald's deforestation, oil, Samora Machel and other things that we are not used to see in newspapers and TV news.
 
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Paper with a good deal of quantitative argument supporting the tsetse/trypanosomes
http://cegadev.org/assets/miscellaneous_files/tsetse_website_0.pdf

Tho' wikipedia claims "Tsetse were absent from much of southern and eastern Africa until colonial times".

Without domesticated cattle, camels or horses, it's very difficult to have the sort of excess productivity needed to support cities & 'culture'.

It appears that the Mali empire was primarily a vendor of natural resources (gold, copper, salt) not as dependent on agriculture nor draft animals, but also not as sustainable.
 
human laziness is the answer. and to some extent greed. If I had apples and something like potatoes available all year round, I wouldn't bother :)
 
Jodie said:
Another factor is the higher incidence of disease burden in African countries. This article discusses the link between lower IQ and disease burden in countries like those in central Africa. That's certainly not the only factor, famine also plays a part in that too.

http://www.newsweek.com/why-do-some-nations-have-lower-iq-scores-74797
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Which is the typical newsweek watery shallow spin on
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing....3801?sid=0c2cc10c-fc46-4d7c-bc79-14f84bf5bbde
(paywall) ...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289611000572
or even
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-is-average-iq-higher-in-some-places/

But infectious disease burden seems partly related to the effectiveness of government (see Haiti vs Dominican Republic or Cuba), which again requires some excess productive capacity to support.
 
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David Mo said:
Searching for natural causes of the supremacy of European civilisation in the world is pure speculation. Rather than talking about real things we are going to let out all the demons inside us, from the laziness of the savages to the form of their chin.
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First of all, natural causes are real things.

Second, there's nothing racist about studying whether climate or other local factors have an effect on how civilisations can and do progress.

You seem to have quite a beef with the idea, on top of your own speculation that these ideas are borne out of bigotry. The fact of the matter is that subsaharan Africa IS less developed, and has been for quite a while, and that Western intervention isn't the only explanation. That may not fit with anti-western sentiment, but facts rarely serve ideology.
 
stevea said:
Without domesticated cattle, camels or horses, it's very difficult to have the sort of excess productivity needed to support cities & 'culture'.
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Not disputing the value of domesticated animals, but there were no suitable draft animals in Mesoamerica, yet Tenochtitlan rivalled the size of Europe's biggest cities (200,000-250,000 inhabitants). There are a lot of variables at play.
 
MikeG said:
Simply not so. Zaire......sorry DRC... gets tropical rainfall (ie feet of the stuff) for 11 months of the year.
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Nope. Four months of the year very little rainfall. You want drinking water? You need to keep it for months. This is the rainfall for Kinshasa, which is a large city in DRC. I am sure the rest of the country it would be even worse for them. Too much rainfall means that the soil will be washed away so no crops.

http://www.kinshasa.climatemps.com/precipitation.php

England. Backwater? Is that the reason the USA's primary language is English? England had empire, after empire. It just could not keep them like the Romans did. Everything I have said previously would also be true for other European countries.

Actually the reason Europe got the technology to explore the world was two inventions. One was paper. Invented in China. Europeans got hold of it and could not work out how to make it. Eventually they got told how to make it. Then moveable type printing. These inventions (with a few other inventions) allowed for the mass production of books. So people could get educated not just by what the teacher knew but what the best minds knew.

We are lucky something went wrong in China. They could have gone and dominated the world.
 
rjh01 said:
We are lucky something went wrong in China. They could have gone and dominated the world.
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The pre-Mongol Song dynasty is indeed noted as one potential society that was on the way to industrialization.
 
Based on my own observations, the fact that most African institutions are not stronger than the people who run them is a huge drag on development. The systems of patronage designed around keeping "big men of Africa" (Musevani, Kabila, Kenyatta, Kagame etc..)in power stifle both innovation and development. If African nations could become nations of laws vice of men, you'd see a real takeoff in development.
 
rjh01 said:
Nope. Four months of the year very little rainfall...........
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Oh Jesus H ...... The ISF, the place to come for utterly pointless nitpicking and pointscoring.

Not "nope"......*********** yep. Instead of picking Kinshasa, try Ituri. About 2 metres of annual rainfall with 10 months of over 10 inches. Picked at random. There are wetter places.

Don't forget, this is in response to this stupid claim:

rjh01 said:
In those areas of Africa that get heaps of rain it comes in a short period of the year..........
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Well your continent would be less developed if Europe spent half a millennium plundering it for all its wealth than once they couldn't plunder anymore they went "haha **** you and starve!"
 
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