setting a watchman

[Crossless2.0]

lol, someone hasn't heard about colonialism.

Also, saying African countries don't have many resources is uninformed. Many do -- oil, bauxite, gold, iron and so on -- but those leases are owned and operated by the foreign companies left in place after the liberation of colonies.

This entire thread is a monument to the post hoc fallacy. Africa isn't screwed because it's run by blacks. Africa is screwed because colonialization prevented the formation of stable governments in many cases, up until the 1960s. It's also screwed because organized religion still plays a huge role in their societies, leading to high rates of HIV, large populations (meaning lower per-capita incomes), and violence perpetrated or inspired by the faithful.

lol... Someone doesn't know the socioeconomic placement the sum total of African ran countries had before colonialism. Again at best most countries were akin to what a bronze age city state would look like. the vast majority were still well placed in the stone age.

You are right to say the african countries did not ever develop, but again they never left the stone age for the 10's of thousands of years that preceded colonialism either. (there was a reason colonialists were shoot tribes men with muskets, that were armed with cows hide shields and stone tipped spears.)

it is not a fault or failing of a content of people. The development of the "africa"/nations is only less developed when you compare it to modern society. They were simply on a different path, one that lent itself to the status quo rather than change.

A different path . . . lol . . . and someone else hasn't read Guns, Germs, and Steel. Eurasian ascendancy was the outcome of a cumulative process that didn't happen in a vacuum. If a people has a decisive head start in terms of certain useful resources (e.g., flora and fauna that easily lend themselves to domestication) or benefit from surroundings that favor the spread of ideas and goods, and then have to innovate to overcome other challenges their environments impose on them, then it shouldn't come as a great surprise that they tend to dominate other peoples when their paths cross. (Of course, a population -- long inured -- carrying virulent diseases that other people lack resistance to doesn't hurt either.)

So yeah, sub-Saharan Africa didn't develop along the same lines as Europe. The question is, to what do you attribute the difference? Differences in racial/ethnic intelligence levels? A predilection for the status quo rather than change? If this last, how do you determine that, and how do you account for the fact that almost every "backward" people, upon coming into contact with materially superior outsiders, almost immediately seek to acquire this better technology for their own use? Apparently, they had no trouble recognizing a good thing when they saw it and didn't mind such change.

And don't underestimate the effects of colonialism in shaping the destinies of many of these nations. Set arbitrary national borders, plunder a land long enough, pit tribes against each other, infantilize the "natives" and then what? Pretend to be surprised when things are fucked up when you leave or finally are chased out?