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Comment by mmsimanga | Hacker News Reader

As an African I have always wondered how Sub Saharan Africa got left so far behind in terms of technology. One of my lay mans theories based on listening to older folk and the new maps showing just how big Africa is compared to other continents[1]. You can fit the US, Asia and most of Europe into Africa. Listening to older folk there were lots of migrations. If you had dispute with someone you just took your people and went off to find another spot to live. I theorize that we largely avoided wars therefore there was no need to innovate. Off course there are other things at play but I agree with you when you have to fight to survive in wars you put aside your differences as a country and you get to see true innovation. Its my theory.

[1]https://www.visualcapitalist.com/map-true-size-of-africa/

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Jared Diamond's theory in the book Guns, Germs and Steel is that trade, ideas, and technology develop and disperse along routes where agriculture flourished. The basic agricultural package which works from China to England does not work in sub-Saharan Africa. The Bantu people developed one that did work, but it developed a lot later, and there was a sufficient gap between the two to prevent significant commerce, flow of ideas, etc. The result is that Africa was technologically thousands of years behind.

The accelerating technological dynamic that put Europe ahead of everyone else along the Silk Road had a different dynamic. One of whose key ingredients was the lack of any central authority who could suppress discoveries and lines of research for whatever political or religious reasons. And once that turned into a runaway train of progress, well, everyone was backwards compared to them!

Interesting book. Thanks for sharing I will be sure to read it. My dad chaired the local history society for our tribe for a long time. I have been to some of these historical sites dating back about 100 years. I have always had an interest in the topic.

He has another one, Collapse, that is also interesting. But be sure to read the criticisms of both. A lot of his theories are somewhat controversial and not at all widely accepted.

African history is full of wars and empires though, for millennia. Africa wasn't always behind technologically; these letters I write English in are developed from Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Fibonacci learned decimal numbers in Africa. But most of Africa spent the first 250 years of the Industrial Revolution being colonized, which really impeded its development. Even before that, most of the great African empires had collapsed under the onslaught of the slave trade: not just for America but also Arabia, Turkey, Europe, and China.

I specifically restricted my theory to sub Saharan Africa. Egypt and North Africa do indeed have history of technology and innovation. In sub Saharan African I don't even think the wheel was a thing before the colonisers arrived. I could be wrong but from all the history I have read and from speaking to old people we did have some iron works to make spears and arrows. No wheels, no bridges and no roads.

No wheels, except on the East Coast, but West Africa had, for example, drum telegraphs and (probably independently invented) iron smelting for 4500 years. Heliocentrism was mainstream in Mali centuries before Galileo. The Americans probably learned inoculation from Ghana. Coffee, irrigation systems, dams, aqueducts, terraced farming, megalithic astronomy, etc.

Except in telecommunications, surgery, and metallurgy, subsaharan Africa wasn't ahead of Europe, China, and India even before the early modern ramp-up in the slave trade, but it wasn't nearly as far off as you'd extrapolate from looking at the ruins after 500 years of enslavement and colonialism.

> most of the great African empires had collapsed under the onslaught of the slave trade

Powerful African states like the Ashanti empire, Dahomey and Kanem Bornu empire grew and based much of their economy on the wealth of the slave trade, benefiting at the expense of their weaker neighbors whom they "exported", and collapsed only after the slave trade was over, in part because of the loss of that trade revenue. In general, the conquest and colonization (beyond trade posts) of sub-Saharan Africa does not overlap at all with the years of trans-Atlantic slave trade, the collapse of pretty much all the African empires and kingdoms came starting from 1880 after the slave trade had ended.

And of course there are earlier great African empires like Mali and Songhai and Kush, but again their collapse had nothing to do with "the onslaught of the slave trade". Arguably the causality is the other way around - the peoples whose empires collapsed due to attacks by neighbours or internal fighting became the victims of the slave trade afterwards, benefiting the economy of their victorious neighboring African empires/kingdoms who then kept raiding the less unified areas for slaves.

I was talking about Mali, Axum, and the empires whose names are forgotten, not the Early Modern states you're talking about. I don't know of any technical advances made by Dahomey or Asante. They already belong to the subSaharan Dark Age.

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