Why Did Civilization Lag in Africa?

[cosmicalstorm]

In Freakonomics in 2012, superstar economist Daron Acemoglu and his sidekick James A. Robinson used a Q & A with readers to promote their book Why Nations Fail and its all-purpose theory that “extractive institutions” rather than “inclusive institutions” were to blame for anything bad that ever happened anywhere in the history of the world.

Q. I am from Haiti, a country that you guys speak of quite often. I moved here to the States about ten years ago for school. Anyway, I’ve always wondered why countries dominated by blacks have done so terribly (and I am not trying to make us look stupid)? My questions stems from the fact that even within Haiti, the wealthier people are the sons and daughters of ex-pats from Europe or Syria, but in the larger picture, countries heavily dominated by blacks tend to fail. I don’t know many countries in the world where blacks are at the top of the social pyramid; it is concerning. Does it have to do with slavery; more than slavery, education? And how would it be solved in a 30-year plan for example? -Jean-Marc Davis

A. The fact that nearly all countries which are headed by black people are poor is a coincidence.

There is nothing intrinsic about black people that makes such countries poor. Just look at Botswana — it is run by and for black people, but it is one of the great economic success stories of the past 50 years. The same is true of several Caribbean countries, such as the Bahamas. The reasons for this are several-fold. Let’s focus just on Africa. Historically (before European influence), Africa developed extractive institutions for reasons that are not well understood.

For instance, the fact that the construction of centralized states in Africa lagged behind Eurasia is not really understood. This history of extractive institutions then created a terrible vicious circle in the early modern period. First, the slave trade destroyed states and made economic institutions more extractive, and the poverty of Africa then allowed it to be colonized by Europeans. This left a legacy of extractive institutions with which African countries have been struggling since independence. But there is nothing inevitable in this process. Fifty years ago, you would have asked “How come every country run by Asians is poor”?

We don’t ask that because we know that many Asian countries have changed their development paths. They, of course, had advantages Africa did not have, such as a history of centralized states. More broadly, there is nothing inevitable about the fact that the Industrial Revolution happened in Britain and soon after spread to Western Europe and these countries’ superior technologies allowed them to colonize large parts of the world. This was the outcome of a long contingent process of institutional change. This process did not happen in Africa, but that has nothing to do with black people but rather different histories of institutions and different shocks. In the book, we illustrate this by talking about Ethiopia. In 400AD, Ethiopia looked very similar to states in the Mediterranean basin, but then it experienced very different shocks and while these other societies changed, Ethiopia got stuck.

Obviously, this explanation wouldn’t strike anybody better informed and more objective than Daron Acemoglu, the Malcolm Gladwell of MIT, as terribly persuasive. (Of course, I often wonder if implausibility isn’t considered a virtue these days. If the point is to demonstrate your True Faith, then Acemoglu and Robinson’s opening tactical salvo of “The fact that nearly all countries which are headed by black people are poor is a coincidence” isn’t as funny as it would sound to the Man from Mars. If the point is not science but witch-sniffing, then making assertions so lunkheaded they are bound to raise a smile in anybody with an active brain is brilliant, even if it’s simultaneously stupid).

So, rather than critique Acemoglu’s thrashings, let me try to work out a fundamental explanation for why Africa, the home of anatomically modern humans, was long so far behind even other tropical lowlands such as the Yucatan.

I’ve put up a picture above of an immense ruin I visited five years ago, the theater in Miletus in what’s now southwestern Turkey, because there are a lot of ruins in this world. Turkey is full of ancient ruins (as are Mexico, Guatemala, and Peru).

This theater in Turkey is particularly jaw-dropping because it’s not just the usual hillside converted into seating, like in Ephesus or Bodrum/Halicarnassus. You drive through empty, flat farmland and them you come upon this old theater that struck me at the time as, “Not as big as Wrigley Field.” It’s definitely less massive than most current major league baseball stadiums, but I couldn’t say offhand how it compares in size to NBA/NHL arenas like the Staples Center. But it’s built on the same pattern as modern outdoor sports facilities, with big tunnels under the stands to help you get to and from seats without having to walk in front of most spectators who arrived earlier.

There’s an explanation for why this ruin is in the middle of an empty field today: back in Ancient Greek times, Miletus used to be a big port city. But the meandering Meander River silted up the harbor, so it’s now five miles inland from the Mediterranean. Miletus was a big league city in world cultural history: it was the home to Thales, whom the two most famous logicians in history, Aristotle and Bertrand Russell, considered the father of philosophy and/or science.

Is this sports and entertainment facility the creation of extractive or inclusive institutions? Well, I suppose you could argue it either way. But the clear lesson is that, in any case, to pay for and erect this grandiose edifice there clearly had to be a lot of institutions and a lot of surplus to extract. Otherwise, you couldn’t pay for this theater, as well as all the philosophers and scientists associated with Miletus (such as, besides Thales, Anaximander and Leucippus).

Why this meandering reminiscence of mine about a random ruin in Turkey? Because sub-Saharan Africa has remarkably few ruins for its immense size.

This fact is not well known. It is so hazy in the contemporary mind that Henry Louis Gates managed to sell PBS on a six episode miniseries about African ruins called The Wonders of Africa without, apparently, anybody in PBS management calling his bluff about the lack of wonders that his camera crew would wind up documenting in one of the most boring documentary series of the 21st Century.

The only book I’ve read that has wrestled seriously with the implications of sub-Saharan Africa’s relative lack of ruins is John Reader’s extraordinary Africa: Biography of a Continent.

Reader’s argument is that the reason there are few ruins is because there was little wealth in sub-Saharan Africa before outside interventions. The Economist’s 1998 review of Reader’s book noted:

Much of Africa’s history is explained by its fragile soils and erratic weather. They make for conservative social and political systems. “The communities which endured were those that directed available energies primarily towards minimising the risk of failure, not maximising returns,” says Mr Reader. This created societies designed for survival, not development; the qualities needed for survival are the opposite of those needed for developing, ie, making experiments and taking risks. Some societies were wealthy, but accumulating wealth was next to impossible; most people bartered and there were few traders.

In fact, there were few people. Whereas the rest of the world tended to butt up against Malthusian limits on the amount of food that the burgeoning population could wrest from the ground, tropical Africa had plenty of land but strikingly few people.

The problem, according to Reader, was that African humans had a hard time outcompeting other living things in Africa, such as diseases (falciparum malaria and sleeping sickness, most notably) and giant beasts (such as elephants).

To put this in Darwinian terms, humanity not only evolved in Africa, but, unfortunately for the humans, co-evolved along with animals and germs, which gave humanity’s rivals a more than fighting chance. When humans arrived in the New World, in contrast, we killed and ate the local elephants (wooly mammoths) in short order because they didn’t understand how dangerous these two-legged creatures with pointy sticks were to them. In Africa, the elephants had seen us coming for millions of years and had time to evolve behavioral defenses against us.

A herd of elephants seems cute to us in America today, but one can eat an entire African village’s crop of food in a day, leaving it starving. So, as Reader notes, humans and elephants in Africa tended to form patchworks of habitation, with humans only living in areas where they could muster enough density of population to drive off the elephants and giraffes and predators.

But too high a density of population, such as in cities, made people sitting ducks for diseases borne by mosquitoes and tsetse flies. The germs in tropical Africa were even worse than the megafauna. Thomas Pakenham’s 1998 review of Reader’s book in the New York Times explains:

Why did Africa south of the Sahara fare so badly in the last three millenniums? Reader explains Africa’s handicaps in terms of disease and climate. He contrasts the happy colonists who ”by leaving the tropical environments of the cradle-land in which humanity had evolved . . . also left behind the many parasites and disease organisms that had evolved in parallel with the human species.” Up to a point, this must be right. In the African Garden of Eden lurked enemies all the more potent because they were invisible: the malaria bug and other lethal organisms. The liberation of Africa from these enemies began with the period of European exploitation and has continued, somewhat haphazardly, as European drugs are exported to Africa.

For example, from Wikipedia:

Plasmodium falciparum is a protozoan parasite, one of the species of Plasmodium that cause malaria in humans. It is transmitted by the female Anopheles mosquito. Malaria caused by this species (also called malignant[1] or falciparum[2] malaria) is the most dangerous form of malaria,[3] with the highest rates of complications and mortality. As of 2006, there were an estimated 247 million human malarial infections (98% in Africa, 70% being 5 years or younger).[4] It is much more prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa than in many other regions of the world; in most African countries, over 75% of cases were due to P. falciparum, whereas in most other countries with malaria transmission, other, less virulent plasmodial species predominate. Almost every malarial death is caused by P. falciparum.[4]

Humans in Africa evolved a brutal defense against this version of malaria, the sickle cell genetic mutation, which provides some protection if you get one copy of the allele, but (without modern medicine) kills you if you inherit two. We wouldn’t have such an inelegant genetic protection if humans in Africa didn’t need it against such a massive killer. (The less vicious vivax malaria has a safer mutation to protect Africans, the Duffy gene.)

So, tropical Africans couldn’t learn to live in dense urban populations, with all the advanced trades made possible by the concentrations of city life. They largely remained small villagers scratching a living from the ground.

Also, in contrast to the rest of the world, where sexual restraint had its Darwinian advantages in avoiding the Malthusian Trap, tropical Africans found it advantageous to procreate as thoughtlessly as an NFL star like Adrian Peterson, Antonio Cromartie, or Travis Henry. Children weren’t likely to starve because their working mothers could grow enough food for them in the thin tropical soil (without fathers needing to do the heavy lifting of plowing, as on continents with better soil).

And the children were probably going to die of random diseases anyway, for which no amount of paternal investment could protect them before modern medicine. (For example, the hypothesis that yellow fever, which originated in Africa, was spread by mosquitoes was first proposed by Cuban doctor Carlos Finlay only as recently as 1881 and proven by American doctors such as Walter Reed and William Gorgas around the turn of the 20th Century.) So, it made more Darwinian sense in tropical Africa for men to procreate with abandon than to parent carefully.

Is Reader’s late 1990s theory of the difference between Africa (and thus Africans) and the rest of world true? It’s similar to Jared Diamond’s theory in the contemporary bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel, but is far more detailed, plausible, and interesting. Unlike Diamond’s rather airy theory, it has the advantage / disadvantage of explaining much that we see in modern America as well. Reader didn’t really want to draw out the modern implications in the manner of J.P. Rushton, but it’s pretty obvious reading his book that there are connections between prehistoric Africa and inner city black America.

In the decade and a half since Reader published his highly readable Africa: Biography of a Continent, has any economist, evolutionary theorist, or geneticist directly grappled with testing his model?

Not that I’m aware of. Instead, we have goofs like Acemoglu dominating our intellectual life, such as it is. Isn’t it about time to give serious attention to John Reader’s theory?

http://www.unz.com/isteve/why-did-civil ... in-africa/

[mr friendly guy]

Also, in contrast to the rest of the world, where sexual restraint had its Darwinian advantages in avoiding the Malthusian Trap, tropical Africans found it advantageous to procreate as thoughtlessly as an NFL star like Adrian Peterson, Antonio Cromartie, or Travis Henry. Children weren’t likely to starve because their working mothers could grow enough food for them in the thin tropical soil (without fathers needing to do the heavy lifting of plowing, as on continents with better soil).

And the children were probably going to die of random diseases anyway, for which no amount of paternal investment could protect them before modern medicine. (For example, the hypothesis that yellow fever, which originated in Africa, was spread by mosquitoes was first proposed by Cuban doctor Carlos Finlay only as recently as 1881 and proven by American doctors such as Walter Reed and William Gorgas around the turn of the 20th Century.) So, it made more Darwinian sense in tropical Africa for men to procreate with abandon than to parent carefully.

This reads like the racist literature of Rushton - that is Whites and Asians produce fewer children but care for them better, compared to Africans who produce a lot but don't care as well. All part of a survival strategy, just like how some insects do it. Then as I read the rest of the article they dropped Rushton's name in as well. What a shock.

[Eleas]

Yeah, this passage in particular made me go "this is a real convenient argument if you're a racist fuck":

Reader didn’t really want to draw out the modern implications in the manner of J.P. Rushton, but it’s pretty obvious reading his book that there are connections between prehistoric Africa and inner city black America. Unlike Diamond’s rather airy theory, it has the advantage / disadvantage of explaining much that we see in modern America as well.

Because as we all clearly know, the conditions of suburban NY bears a clear similarity to that of "Africa" (itself a bewilderingly diverse continent).

[cosmicalstorm]

Well I'm increasingly becoming a racist I guess. Not the hardcore white power stuff, exterminating other people and so on. But I am starting to wonder if natural selection really just stops at the neck of humans. It seems pretty possible that IQ points and impulse control should differ some between different groups. That variation along with everything else in the world eventually gives us our societies we live in.

[ray245]

Well I'm increasingly becoming a racist I guess. Not the hardcore white power stuff, exterminating other people and so on. But I am starting to wonder if natural selection really just stops at the neck of humans. It seems pretty possible that IQ points and impulse control should differ some between different groups. That variation along with everything else in the world eventually gives us our societies we live in.

How society organise themselves can always change. That has nothing to do with genetics, given that race is a social construct as opposed to a purely biological fact.

[mr friendly guy]

Well I'm increasingly becoming a racist I guess. Not the hardcore white power stuff, exterminating other people and so on. But I am starting to wonder if natural selection really just stops at the neck of humans. It seems pretty possible that IQ points and impulse control should differ some between different groups. That variation along with everything else in the world eventually gives us our societies we live in.

The problem with talking about IQ is that you will have to explain why natural selection selected for "less smart" people.

You would also need to explain why IQ scores are increasing in only a few decades using an evolutionary mechanism (ie explain how evolution occurs so fast in contrast to how we actually understand it).

Now the racists race realists will respond with variations of the following

a. Europeans and Asians evolved in colder weather. Colder temp => bigger brains => smarter people => evolutionary advantage.

Only problem is Neanderthals had bigger brains than us, and also likely had a body shape (short and stocky) to better adapt to the cold climate. Yet their bigger brains didn't let them outlast modern humans.

b. But Asians and whites have wider hips, so their babies can come out with bigger brains.

No I kid you not. Rushton actually made that argument and racists lap it up like money in Scrooge McDuck's hands.

Lets just accept that claim about the wider hips for the moment. They however ignore the fact that real scientists have already concluded that human evolution accomodated our larger brains by giving birth to less mature young. I mean, ever wondered why apes can walk and become independent much faster than human babies? Well that's because our young are less mature at birth, and this is the price we pay for our intelligence compared to other primates.

[Vendetta]

Q: Why Did Civilization Lag in Africa?

A: Europe particularly has large amounts of relatively easily cultivated land for arable and herd rearing purposes, and a relatively high population density, meaning it was easier for civilisations to grow and competition between them was fiercer, meaning faster development.

[Broomstick]

Q: Why Did Civilization Lag in Africa?

A: It didn't.

Some of the earliest civilizations, by which I mean organized urban centers, writing, mathematics, centralized government, and collective works, were in Africa or nearby. Ancient Egypt is the best known but it's not the only one.

Better to ask why Africans, who had a head start and did pretty well for a few thousand years, first lagged behind then finally lost much of what civilization they had.

[Imperial Overlord]

Eurasia and the Mediterranean (including the African parts) have an enormous agricultural advantage over the rest of Africa. Stupidly easy to cultivate grains originated in the Fertile Crescent and spread rapidly throughout Eurasia. Rice spread rapidly throughout Asia, but was only cultivated in a limited part of Africa. Wheat can be grown from Egypt to Scandinavia, inclusively. The food surplus produced by agriculture is essential to create and support large scale civilization. Why should anyone be surprised that Eurasia, which won the edible plant and climate zone lottery, came out far ahead?

[Thanas]

Even more importantly, due to accessible waterways it was much more easier to transport the surplus over long distances. Without the large rivers and the Mediterranean sea Europe might have lost that lottery.

And then the kicker - iron deposits, easy to access. South America was just as organized as European states (as were some african kingdoms) but they did not have iron deposits that were essential to survival or easily accessible.

So you got a production, logistics and resource advantage.

[Imperial Overlord]

You're right about logistics. Central and South America did have maize and potatoes, but they lacked the wheel, lots of useful water ways, and domesticable animals larger than the dog. Their ability to spread much beyond the city-state level was severely limited.

[Simon_Jester]

Well I'm increasingly becoming a racist I guess. Not the hardcore white power stuff, exterminating other people and so on. But I am starting to wonder if natural selection really just stops at the neck of humans.

It doesn't- but natural selection shaped the brains we have, which are quite good general purpose instruments for the task they perform.

It seems pretty possible that IQ points and impulse control should differ some between different groups. That variation along with everything else in the world eventually gives us our societies we live in.

Why? Natural selection would only give people in one region more advanced brains (smarter and less impulsive) if there was a strong force that kills people for being stupid and impulsive in that area.

No part of the world is uniquely deadly for stupid people.

[Broomstick]

You're right about logistics. Central and South America did have maize and potatoes, but they lacked the wheel, lots of useful water ways, and domesticable animals larger than the dog. Their ability to spread much beyond the city-state level was severely limited.

It wasn't for lack of trying, either - the Incas built extensive roadways, some of which are still in use. What they didn't have was the horse or an equivalent and wheeled vehicles. They weren't ignorant of the wheel - children's toys used them, for example - but without a decent sized draft animal there wasn't sufficient practical use for them to be scaled up. The Incan Empire relied on humans and the llama to carry goods, the latter of which while capable of carrying some weight was nowhere near the strength or utility of horses, oxen, and other Eurasian draft animals.

The Aztec and Mayan didn't even have llamas.

[Thanas]

You're right about logistics. Central and South America did have maize and potatoes, but they lacked the wheel, lots of useful water ways, and domesticable animals larger than the dog. Their ability to spread much beyond the city-state level was severely limited.

Another thing is that due to the geographical conditions and the fauna, keeping different kinds of animals meant better immunization against disease, while the Med bassin was - due to the mixtures of all kinds of people from all kinds of climates and diseases - the perfect reinforcement for that. This gave European (and I am using European losely here, more like the Roman definition instead of the modern one as to include the middle east and Northern Africa, for it would be silly to split those cultures apart for those times) a massive competitive advantage. The greatest epidemics brought back from contact with Asia, Africa and the Americas were syphilis and the plague, but neither of those managed to destroy western societies. But isolated cultures? Wiped out.

[Imperial Overlord]

Not just Western culture benefited from disease resistance. Trade along the Silk Road connecting Asia to Europe and contact, ranging from trade to warfare, with the nomad steppe empires that dominated the middle ground was the norm for most of history.

[Elheru Aran]

A couple of points--

Agriculturally:

The major crops *today* have been introduced from outside. Maize, cotton, peanuts, sugar cane and so forth, are not native to Africa, but they are among the biggest agricultural exports of the continent now. Very little of Africa's commercial agriculture is actually native to the continent. There are quite a few domestic agricultural products, but they are largely small-scale and consumed internally as part of traditional cuisine, such as yams.

To run with the example of yams (genus Dioscorea that is, not the sweet potato): This is a vegetable which requires a lot of labour to cultivate as well as decent irrigation, which can be an issue in areas with a two-season climate (dry and rainy seasons). The tubers are fairly delicate-- they rot quickly if bruised or damaged-- so you have to take a lot of care when shipping them. And when you consider exporting them, the fact is that the common potato has the 'starchy root vegetable' niche pretty well dominated. That means that apart from areas where it happens to be fairly indigenous or where the population has a taste for it and cultivated it historically, there is not much demand for it.

So, as far as commercially profitable crops go, the focus has been upon produce already consumed and cultivated by the rest of the world-- crops not native to Africa for the most part. This means that when they were introduced, there was a quite stiff transitional period. Some crops happen to work out fine-- maize, for example, is quite common-- but others take a good bit of work to make viable in the various climates and environments that they try to grow them in.

And of course you can't let your own people starve (not that many governments in the period roughly 1950-now cared), so a good chunk, if not the majority, of the African countries' agricultural production has to go towards sustaining their own population rather than being exported. So, all together, agriculture has not been a terribly profitable part of the African continent's economy-- something that's notable when you look at the top exports of the various countries. Minerals, especially oil, tend to predominate.

Second point: Language.

There are something like over 1,000 (minimum; potentially over 3,000) languages in Africa. Nigeria has over 500 to start with. Without getting into the details of why this happened, it is still highly notable. Compare this to the history of Europe and the Mediterranean, and you'll see that they have far fewer tongues to contend with. Even in, say, France in the Roman period, they would have had a degree of mutual compatibility of their various languages. And starting in the Middle Ages through the Renaissance, earlier in many parts of the world, there were efforts to bring a common tongue to the people; the Florentine dialect of Italian, Parisian French, and so forth. The Muslim domains shared Arabic in common.

In Africa, there was nothing like this. One village fifty miles down the river might have an entirely different and unintelligible language from the other village upstream. Various individuals might have a decent command of the trade dialects such as Ibo, Yoruba, Fulfulde, or Hausa, but there was little cross-cultural connection between communities and settlement. This meant that ideas were not communicated and people did not unify unless there was some form of tremendous external pressure, in which case their nominal overlords were typically of the tribal group that the trade dialect was established by such as the Fulani sultanate of Sokoto and emirate of Kano.

The colonizing nations tried to cut through this mess by imposing their own languages upon the various provinces' new-created governments, and they tried to continue this after independence, but you can't do in 50-80-some years what took 300-400 years for the European countries. Hopefully, modern technology will accelerate the pace of commonalizing their languages, but that's at the risk of losing unique cultural identities that have been built up over centuries...

[Thanas]

A point on language - this only applies to the renaissance area. Before that, there were a lot of local dialects. So only the very highest level of upper class people (like say, top 2% or so) could actually understand each other and learned the greater languages like Greek (east) and Latin (west). It wasn't like some peasant from Syria could go to Egypt and understand each other.

[Elheru Aran]

A point on language - this only applies to the renaissance area. Before that, there were a lot of local dialects. So only the very highest level of upper class people (like say, top 2% or so) could actually understand each other and learned the greater languages like Greek (east) and Latin (west). It wasn't like some peasant from Syria could go to Egypt and understand each other.

That's true, but there was still a (more or less) concerted effort to bring the various countries together under a common language.

I suspect that this more than anything has to do with the development of the printing press, though, a technology largely absent from Africa until very recent history...

[Thanas]

Yeah, but Africa didn't lose their edge in the Renaissance. It was gone long before that. So language maybe guaranteed a second, maybe bigger push, but Africa was already behind at that point and had been since the age of the Greeks.

[Guardsman Bass]

The slave trade probably damaged economic and political consolidation in Africa, although it was happening before 19th century Europeans took it over (see Ethiopia). Aside from the people lost, it incentivized war and conflict between African state-lets to get more slaves.

They had issues with livestock as well in subsaharan Africa, particularly with diseases spread by the Tsetse fly.

[Elheru Aran]

Honestly as with any wide-ranging historical question, the answer is a mix of a whole bunch of factors that come together in a stew, and without the benefit of time-travel or past-viewing, there's really nothing that can be pinned down as the ultimate cause of civ-lag.

Off the top of my head you have:

--a widely dispersed population consisting of mostly small tribal units under the nominal feudal authority of monarchs controlling kingdoms of varying size;

--internal conflicts between the same, where the losing side was often either wiped out, sold into slavery, or forcibly integrated into the winning side, all of which would in time often rebound;

--primitive levels of medical care that resulted in a lower level of health and a certain degree of attrition. This one is perhaps less of a cause than others, as the native inhabitants of Africa were well acclimated to their environment, but nonetheless it is a factor worth considering as there were and still are far too many ailments that could with ease or over time debilitate populations (and let's not forget domesticated livestock);

--a largely subsistence-level economy for the most part, where the cheapest commodity available was people (hence the slave trade). All other goods were hard to come by, the product of long man-hours of work and thus rare and valuable. Trade is small-scale, typically bartering one good for another. This leads to:

--outside economic pressures, the most notable being the slave trade but also ivory and gold;

--also external social pressures such as Christian proselyting (which tried to eliminate tribal boundaries under the commonality of faith and a foreign language, also setting "believer" against "unbeliever) and Muslim conquest (ditto), especially in West Africa but present throughout much of the continent;

--long-lasting language barriers thanks to various factors such as the environment (it's a big continent, not very conductive to long-distance travel except for the dedicated traders), tribal differences, low technology, etc;

--a general lack of incentive to develop past a basic level of technology because what they had largely worked for them and what they didn't have, they didn't care about until it was used against them;

--and ultimately, the most commonly blamed culprit but more likely simply the most recent: colonialism by more powerful and technologically advanced European nations and the various events perpetrated thereof.

Colonialism and the evils/sins thereof are really after the fact, though, as all they did was move into a position of authority over nations that were already largely beneath them in military and economic power. It is simply far more visible than the rest because it's far more recent and memorable.

I suspect my second-to-last point is a strong factor. Humans are to a certain degree prone to complacency-- as long as their needs are met and social conditions are static, there is little inclination to change. The African peoples found their niche somewhere in the late Iron Age, got comfortable, and apart from occasional upheaval, generally continued "business as usual" for the next millennia or two until the... ehhh... past five or six hundred years? That, I would think, is perhaps when the civilization lag becomes truly marked in contrast to the other civilizations in the world around them.

That's not to say they were all well-nigh cavemen; by no means. You had pockets of serious civilization such as the Ashanti kingdom, Benin with its fine bronze castings, the kingdom of Mali (or was that Songhai? I can never remember), the Zulu kingdom, and so forth. In these, however, generally the civilization itself was centered around specific cities where the intelligentsia (for lack of a better word) and leadership gathered. The large majority of the population still generally existed without things that became taken for granted in the Western and Eastern worlds such as roads, literacy, wide-spread trade channels, money, a level of metal-working above a basic Iron Age level.

I hope this hasn't been too TL;DR...

[Simon_Jester]

A point on language - this only applies to the renaissance area. Before that, there were a lot of local dialects. So only the very highest level of upper class people (like say, top 2% or so) could actually understand each other and learned the greater languages like Greek (east) and Latin (west). It wasn't like some peasant from Syria could go to Egypt and understand each other.

Even making it possible for the upper class, the scholars, and the merchants to understand each other over a broad region can do a lot to keep society from becoming trapped in conditions of primitivism.

[Thanas]

And I wasn't disputing that.

[Elheru Aran]

One thing against the same thing happening in Africa is that the 'upper class' was very much smaller, proportionally speaking, than in Europe. To make an example, a small town in Niger of two thousand might have one chief and five or six sub-chiefs below him. The chief and a few imams in the local mosque might be the *only* people in the town who understand Arabic, and can thus communicate with traders passing through the Sahara. The imams would very likely be the only literate persons there. Even in a city the size of Timbuktu in Mali, perhaps (dubiously) as large as a hundred thousand people at its height, would only have had a few dozen literate citizens.

Compare this to medieval Europe where due to the greater population density, you had many more people in the average town/city capable of reading and knowing languages besides the local dialect. It wasn't much better than Africa-- but it was better-- and in the Renaissance those numbers straight-up exploded. In Africa, they never really improved until very, very recently.

[PainRack]

A point on the economy. 'Extractive institutions', or what shifting ambigous terms Daaron develops so that Europe and America doesn't have it were placed on Africa by their colonial masters.

From increased townships and agriculture for taxation purposes, increased monetary markets and as the final kicker, cash crops that was firmly entrenched by 1950 ensured that their economies were tied to selling resources to the world markets while servicing colonial debt. Newly independent countries inherited social stresses that when combined with the failure of a cashcrop economy, either via prices or nature meant that many of these countries found it hard to develop further.

It's intriguing to note that nations that did relatively better like Nigeria and South africia had better trading nexuses than say Ethiopia.Luck of geopolitics I guess ..