Africa's Poverty

There are many involved in solving this problem. Religious and secular organizations alike. Not only do they provide the basic needs of life such as food and clothing, but also medical care as well. Also, these organizations are providing the knowledge such as progressive farming for example, so those folks can one day be somewhat independent.Good people are on this problem. I don't think the world has turned a blind eye on it.

The best thing we could do is stop selling them arms, and convince others to stop selling them arms, and cut off all aid, and leave them be. Most of our 'help' does nothing but prop up dictators and prolong the agony. That said, its not 'our' responsibility.

I would have to say that you cannot pick a single reason for Africa's poverty due to the complex nature of Africa's history and empires over the last 6 or 7 centuries. Nowadays, one of the biggest causes for the continuation of severe poverty in Africa is the World Bank. They give money to countries for practices (i.e. agriculture and resource extraction) that are not sustainable for the continent, which only make the problem more severe.

I see a lot of the blame with colonialism more than anything else. I know we are limited in the scope of what we can talk about because you want to discuss sub-saharan Africa, but all over Africa you have instances of colonialism seriously screwing over the African continent. The French did a number on Algeria, the British did a number on the south Africans (both the African natives and the Boer settlers), the Germans carried out a massive extermination campaign in the early 1900's against the Herero in western Africa, etc.

To be honest, your question implies a lot of the problems with the western conception of Africa. If we ask who is to blame for the African continent being the way it is, that implies in mnay ways that we must blame the failure on conservators (i.e. the colonizers).

Can the African be blamed for the result of their own continent? I would say yes and no because the Africans were themselves on a different path than the western world. The Europeans took it upon themselves to bring civilization to the heathens http://web.jjay.cuny.edu/~jobrien/reference/ob22.html

One of the problem with giving direct aid to Africa is that African warlords smuggle the aid, and then use it against the people. Much of what is given never reaches the intended people. This is especially a problem in sub-Sahara Africa.

This is a highly multifactorial problem, and it's not solely the blame of one group or another.

I'd highlight a few major impediments to development in Africa

1) Geographic isolation. Africa has the smallest ratio of shoreline to landmass of any continent. This means that a MUCH higher proportion of its people live far away from the coast than, say, Europe, which is much smaller physically but has far more coastline. To make matters worse, even to this day the Sahara is an immense barrier (trust me, the first time I flew over it from north to south it took around 6 hours to get from the Mediterranean to the southern fringes of the Sahel).

This means that African societies have been relatively unlikely to be able to share in many of the societies like Egypt, Greece, Rome, Persia, Babylon, etc that developed in the near / middle east. There WERE some great societies in ancient Africa, most famously Axum (Ethiopia), the empires of Ghana / Mali / Songhai (Mali), Kano (Nigeria), and Great Zimbabwe. But these were, in the end, unsustained.

When the Suez Canal was built in the late 19th century, European seafarers began to completely bypass Africa, so colonial cities (like Calcutta, Bangkok, Singapore) never really developed in Africa. The colonial cities I've personally been to, like Saint-Louis (Senegal) and Banjul (Gambia) are cute relics.


2) Difficulties with agriculture. To have population growth, urbanization, and food surpluses, you need sedentary populations and agriculture. The problem is that sedentary populations get ravaged by malaria and sleeping sickness. Irrigation has been a huge contributor to mosquito growth. And believe it or not elephants were a major impediment to developing agriculture because they were nearly impossible to keep out of farms until recent history.

3) Disease. Africa has an inordinate burden of disease. Malaria alone consumes 30% of the health budget in Africa and kills a million African children under 5 every year. The combination of recurrent malaria, recurrent gastroenteritis, chronic parasitic disease (esp hookworm), and the consequent malnutrition caused by these infections, greatly impedes the physical and cognitive development of children and therefore their productivity as adults.

4) Slavery. The European slave trade exported around 20 million Africans from the continent (half of whom died en route to the New World). But there was also in situ forced labor, i.e. colonizing powers who enslaved and brutalized the indigenous population. Think about the Boer War, the genocide of the Hereros, and the catastrophic reign of King Leopold II (Belgium) who is blamed for reducing the population of the Congo by 10 million people. The Arabic, trans-Saharan, and indigenous slave trades were a trifle compared with this massive depopulation. In addition to robbing Africa (esp West Africa) of millions, it also turned Africa into a slave economy (often slaves were exchanged for arms), and offered no chance of stable societies ever developing.

5) Diplomatic manipulation: Many wars, atrocities, and puppet regimes have existed in Africa since the end of colonialism in the 1950s. A lot of this had to do with communist vs non-communist alignment. Some of the most catastrophic examples were Angola, Congo, Mozambique, and Ethiopia. The Congo's current horrendous problems are directly traceable to the assassination of Patrice Lumumba more than 40 years ago, which the CIA (but especially Belgium) had complicity in.

6) Debt. Africa has been saddled with tremendous debt because of development loans. Payment on the interest of these loans exceeds the gross domestic product in many cases.

7) Economic manipulation. African raw materials are bought on the cheap, then resold to Africa in more expensive processed form. A good example is cocoa from Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire. Nestle has virtual monopolies in much of Africa on the sale of processed cocoa products. Cocoa and coffee plantations in this region have a big problem with child labor and even child slavery -- it's lucrative to the plantation owners to sell their products, but the reimbursement never spreads out to the population. Worse yet are the protectionist policies of America (and probably Europe, I'm just less familiar) with some exports. American subsidies of cotton and rice, combined with the efficiency of industrial farming, means that American cotton and rice can be sold in Africa for far less than the local product. This has put cotton farmers in Mali (one of the world's poorest countries) out of work, and has nearly destroyed the Ghanaian rice industry.

8) Horrible governments. Corruption is rife. But what can you do, the populace isn't empowered at all -- they're barely literate in most places.

9) Neglect. Africa just isn't a strategic priority for the rest of the world. It's becoming so as the Chad-Cameroon pipeline starts cranking out oil, and with oil reserves in Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria, and probably elsewhere in central Africa. But no one is really making great pains to create a Somali government, to reconstruct Angola / Sierra Leone / Liberia after their wars, to broker stability in Zimbabwe, to bring peace to Burundi and Sudan, etc. Just not on the world's priority list.

The trans-Saharan/Arabic slave trade rivaled the trans-Atlantic trade, Aedes. I'll have to rummage around for the old text book to get numbers, but we're talking about over ten million souls.

Not according to the slavery museums I went to at Cape Coast and Elmina (Ghana) and Ile de Goree (Senegal), but I don't remember the stats. I'll see what I can find, though. I did visit an encampment for the former trans-Saharan route in a little town called Paga in northern Ghana. The trans-Atlantic trade was at an industrial scale and over a relatively short time period. The trans-Saharan and Arabic were lower volume but over a much much longer period, so even if the numbers are comparable in the end, they were diluted over time. That said, Africa is a very low population-density continent (fewer people in Africa than in India alone), and the effect could have been great. But whatever the numbers, all had the twofold effect of destabilizing and depopulating societies, and creating an economy based on slavery.

Turns out I was wrong. The trans-Saharan/Arabic slave trade took around 2.5 million souls according to the text book I have.

Looking at wikipedia, they have the numbers hyperinflated along the same lines as my bad memory.

I haven't gotten around to scanning a lot of the negatives I shot in Ghana (I was there in 2002). But Elmina Castle and Cape Coast Castle were two of the largest slave trading sites in West Africa, and two of the three major ones in Ghana. (The third is Osu Castle, which you can't visit or even photograph -- ironically it's now their capital building). One site I've never visited, but would love to, is Ouidah in Benin. The word "voodoo" comes from Ouidah, and as many as 25% of all trans-Atlantic slaves (including all ancestors of modern Haiti) came from this site. I also went to Ile de Goree in Senegal, which was a very minor site but they really play it up in their museum.

The thing is, I ran across a lot of African Americans at these museums in Ghana and Senegal who were making a sort of pilgrimage to these sites. It was probably inspired by Roots, by Alex Haley, who traced his family heritage (perhaps dubiously) to a town in Gambia (another country I've worked in, but did not visit any slave sites there). The African people I spoke with seemed to have an interesting take on it -- that their distant ancestral cousins who are now African Americans had it lucky -- because look at what was left behind. The town of Elmina is an impoverished pit of a fishing village, for instance, with hordes of kids hawking all kinds of crap to the tourists.

But for me, it was a deeply moving experience to be in all these places. My own family's suffering in Europe makes me very much identify with this other catastrophe of modern human history, and which indeed has left a legacy in Africa every bit as strong as the one it's left in the New World.

This is Ile de Goree in Senegal, with the capital (Dakar) in the background.

And the World Bank, or those using the World Bank, does this intentionally, and not just in Africa. Anyone ever read the book, "Confessions of an Economic Hitman?" Just like in the U.S. the idea is to loan as much cheap money as possible, preferably so much that the borrower has to default or, you guessed it, borrow more, and so on until the creditor has complete control and/or takes most of the borrowers real assets. Alot of poor countries have gotten 'assistance' so that they could build completely unnecesary infrastructure, which cost more than they could afford and failed to provide the revenues that the World Bank officials estimated.

I don't think the World Bank intentionally marginalizes Africa. The problem is that they've had an unrealistic model of the timeline of economic development there. Their model has been that given the huge potential for economic growth, an investment in African health / infrastructure / governments / industry would yield economic returns.

And while that may be true, it will happen on a timescale beyond what investors care to stomach. The World Bank has funded temporary interventions, collected their loans from countries with no way to pay them back, and funded shortsighted projects with low efficacy.

I was quite impressed by Jeffrey Sachs (economist and head of the Earth Institute at Columbia) when I went to a seminar he gave at MIT a couple years ago. One of his messages was that we should not be talking about the self-sustainability of health care interventions in Africa. They simply need to be sustained for a long time, perhaps generations, with external support.

I think the exploitation will take a new turn with china buying all the arable land in Africa and supporting Sudan's crimes against it own people.The RC church refusing to accept its contraceptive laws are killing thousands.Slaves are still being bought and sold from Africa and the world ignores it. I think i read a report, there are more slaves now than any other time in Africa's history and we treat as a historical event, amazing in 2009.

Xris, while there's some truth to what you've written, a lot of it is in reality a huge exaggeration. China has a very mixed record in Africa, but it's not all bad. There is a lot of infrastructure in West Africa built by Chinese investment that would not be there otherwise, including hospitals. True for the RC church as well, a mixed record. They have a painfully unproductive approach to HIV, teen pregnancy, and STDs. On the other hand mission hospitals have vaccinated and treated millions. Finally, slavery in Africa doesn't happen at nearly as wide a scale as it did under colonial rule. Slavery was banned in Mauritania in the 1990s, which is one of the most backwater countries on the continent. Child labor and in areas of conflict (mainly Sudan, Somalia, Congo, and Burundi these days) child soldiers are a major problem. But there's nothing like the population-scale forced labor that existed under colonial rule.

well i hope you dont mind if i disagree with you. China has only its own interests at heart in Africa to feed it growing population and obtain oil by supporting a oppressive regime.We built schools hospitals and infrastructure, most empires are good at that.Slavery is wide spread throughout Africa through child labour and human trafficking and it is on the increase, i think you will find amnesty international will confirm this.The RC are very good at targeted charity with sting in its tail, just like a lot of of christian aide. If it did not have such a strict teaching on contraception many child orphans that the RC church so kindly look after would have their parents. We interfere with our typical european moral values on a continent that survived a lot better without us.

I don't mind if you disagree with me. Our disagreement is only about scale, not substance. There are roughly 50 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, and the three issues you've discussed are not remotely the same in different countries. You bring up China's influence in one of these 50 countries, in which I wholeheartedly agree. In Gambia and Senegal, countries whose major natural resources are peanuts and fish (and there is no oil at all), China has done some outstanding infrastructure work. Contraception is an important part of public health in Africa, but not the only one. when 800,000 kids die of measles and 1 million die of malaria, but a mission hospital will provide vaccines and antimalarials and clean water and irrigation, I'll take the bad with the good. I've met people from the Mercy Ship, people from various small church groups, and I've given a talk on HIV at a RC mission school in Gambia. They could do better, but they're better than nothing. Finally, slavery and child labor differ greatly from region to region even within countries and it's very difficult to quantify. Lawless, despotic countries like Sudan and Somalia and Congo have a lot. Stable, developing countries like Tanzania, Senegal, and Ghana have very little.

I agree that we should be cautious about imposing our values on them. On the other hand, their problems are in part our own creation and many of us regard it as our responsibility to help.

The introuduction of western technology and money to Africa during Europes expansionairy era fed into and engorged Africas existing social, economic and political problems. Africa was rent by bloody cycles of tribal conflicts, with a highly paternalistic leadership, with strong male individuals holding tribes and kingdoms together by force. There was a system of kidnapping and slavery, that had already been externalised by the Islamic slave trade. The arrival of greedy, ambitous and advanced explorers, merchants and mercanaries from Europe had a deadly effect. The African slave market was suddenly dumped with a massive demand, and whatever person answered it could be equipped with guns and gain all the wealth and power he desired. It is exactly the same problem we have in Africa today- the systems of global trade don't benefit any African country- but every ruler who maintains the system is rewarded- so the political system activly encourages the adverse economic system. The weapons go to whatever tribe decides to help the slavers in earliar times, and buissnessmen of today, and they use them to subjegate other tribes and even their own people to answer demand. Obviously there is no longer forced mass deportation, but econmic migrants create yet another parralel.
What is really interesting about all this is what intereputs this economic relationship. Colonialism and Imperialism. The British empire owns much of Africa, and specifically most of the concerned regions. Obviously there is exploitation, killing, oppression. But it brings peace and stability, it brings education, it brings healthcare, it creates infrastructure and it helps bring people to the church- one of the few ways to permanantly end the divisions and conflicts of Africa. Thanks to the lack of corrupt African leaders, and because the countries are in the British empire, they are no longer helpless ajuncts to a free market. They progress- Kenya, Sudan, Zimbabwe for instance all become succesful and prosperous, at least by all previous standards. All these countries experianced devestating problems post their independance, for the same reason Africa had problems to begin with. Tribes fighting with guns, economic mismanagement and inneficent autocrats running everything. Obviously Africa has a right to independance, but it hasn't gotten it. Its only got a form of slavery worse than imperial rule- economic rule. The British empire should have givven them independance within the commonwealth- as an equal partner in a global union that might have protected it from becoming an economic slave to the west. But the false western ideal of nationalism destroyed this dream, both in the violent civil wars and rebellions that helped bring about unconditional independance, and in the extreme nationalism that brought about the two world wars that destabilised the emprie and destroyed the hope and promise of the commonwealth.

Good points, avatar, thank you!

Not anymore, thankfully! Colonial rule in Africa ended in the 1960s. The relationships that certain countries have with their former colonial owner are quite heterogeneous.

The problems in Africa don't seem to have much regard for colonial heritage. There are former British colonies that are disasters (Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Zimbabwe) and there are former British colonies that are models (Ghana). There are former French colonies that are disasters (Chad, Central African Republic, Republic of Congo, Guinea-Conakry), and others that are models (Senegal, Mali). There are former Portugese colonies that are disasters (Angola, Mozambique), former Belgian colonies that are disasters (Democratic Republic of the Congo), and former non-colonies that are disasters (Ethiopia).

What people commonly say, and I've observed this myself, is that the French tended to leave more institutions in place than the British. Senegal indeed has a very French feel to it, at least in the big cities, with patisseries and French restaurants all around.

Firstly don't pointlessly misquote me. Secondly, for all that theres a mixture, the majority of African countries are worse off- back in the 19th century they looked like they were going somewhere- now they barely keep their head above the water, even the succesful ones. Just because they are better off in some sense than they were then (an arguable assertion) they are not better off in the most important scale- in relation to other countries.