Now, before anyone brings out the pitchforks, I'm a black African residing in Nigeria...I'm just saying that we really have to do better than this.
Building cultural capital is hard.
That's probably the biggest factor.
There's also the possibility (I don't know of much evidence either way) of differences in mental traits, not necessarily in a less intelligent sense, but in an adapted to a particular way of life sense. Individual humans aren't fully general intelligences and some of us have more skills in some areas than others, this may also apply across people's groups that diverged in lifestyle a hundred generations ago, leading to slightly different specializations that nonethless make it slightly harder to function in an environment made for another group.
If opportunities within a country are exceptionally poor, and opportunities outside are both more remunerative and reasonably accessible, talent will flee.
You see this within countries as well (generally migration from poorer / inland parts of the US toward the coasts, though housing unaffordability has somewhat put a damper on this in the past decade), but it's especially pronounced between poorer and wealthier nations of the world.
This tends also to continue to depress opportunities within poorer countries: talent migrates elsewhere, institutions tend to be less capable / more corrupt, etc. It's a vicious cycle.
Ghana too was doing well in the last decade, but now has taken a turn for the worse since the current government took over. I live in Ghana, and the level of corruption now, and the neglect of a proper development agenda, is unbelievable.
So, I don’t think there is necessarily anything that makes black-majority countries incapable of curbing corruption.
I should know, because I have experienced it myself. In Ghana set up stalls for trade on the sides of major roads, at considerable risk to their safety. Successive governments have tried to force them away for a while, only for people to denounce those actions as heartless. Invariably, they slowly creep back. Imagine those who promote this situation are fined or jailed. Is that a case of being authoritarian, or a case of robust enforcement of safety rules?
Here you have an African country enforcing the rule of law and a strong national identity, and with actual results to back it up. Of course mistakes can be made, and I'm not holding up the Rwandan regime as blameless in terms of human rights. But if you you focus on quality of life of the average citizen, they have improved a great deal.
... which is not special to Africa particularly. But Western Europe went through this centuries ago. It is said that the past is another country. The reverse is true.
There are other factors like fewer geographical separations. Lesotho and Namibia are more stable now because they are enclosed by mountains and separated from others by desert respectively.
Imagine if there was no water separating England and the European continent. There probably would not be an England. Or rather, no UK.
You might count a few Caribbean countries for your initial question, eg the Bahamas is 90% black and has similar per-capita gdp to Poland (a lower hdi though). But maybe it’s easier to be this developed if you’re a small country (population 400k).
It’s not that hard for me to get to Dakar or Windhoek as it is, and I could certainly see myself enjoying those destinations if there were more to do
https://www.iadb.org/en/news/covid-19-effects-and-impacts-ba....
There was both direct engagement through defence spending and presence, as well as policy designed to specifically encourage trade relations with the US and Europe. That hit critical mass in the 1960s (Japan) and 1970s/80s (Korea).
All three regions were otherwise strongly unified culturally had had relatively little history of colonisation (arguably less so for Korea, which had in fact been occupied by Japan, than Japan or Taiwan).
If you look back at early Western large-scale democracies (as opposed to the historic smaller scale Greek ones), most of them weren't all roses for the first couple of generations.
Given the last 30 years, the trend is going in opposite directions — where Russia reverts to their authoritarian baseline, Ukraine actually devolves central authority and especially presidential powers. Ukrainian constitution of 1996 literally has a transition plan to disperse the power of central executive authority into several distinct bodies.
Both trends are backed by centuries of history. To put that in a perspective: Ukraine had more democratic transitions of power in the last 10 years than Russian had in the last 300.
How many once in a generation leaders were assassinated or deposed in favor of brutal yet capital friendly regimes?
America, with all its cultural heritage of Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson and Lincoln barely survived the 1960’s due to political assassinations. It’s hard to expect younger nations to fair better.
Africa especially, the current country borders were designed based on the division of property between all the European countries invading the natives' lands. That meant several tribes and groups were divided/grouped together, leading to wars that hold to this day. If I'm not mistaken the Rwanda Massacre is the major example of that coming to fruit
Germany didn't exist 200 years ago.
Welsh nearly went extinct.
Poland moved hundreds of miles.
The thing that differentiates those European countries from the African ones is mostly age. And even then its not always one-sided.
There's also countries like Vietnam or empires like India which got pillaged just as hard as South Africa or Rwanda.
Also, are you trying to make the point that multi-ethnic societies result in civil war? That goes pretty strongly against current public sentiment.
In time, these nations will find a single point of unity but it will take generations and strong leaders.
It also has the issue that its going to hit 600 million people this century with no way to feed them.
The reason all major nations are the way they are is the cult of the state: it combines the selfish ambition of the people and brings it to the altar of the war machine demon, quite literally. This manifests in earnest worship of the law and order for its own sake, the greatness of empire, the national security and the faceless economy as the highest idol. The war machine lives only to fight other war machines, it wants to keep everyone in its iron fist, including its own people, and make them worship its greatness. It's a dumb and selfish ruler, so all empires whither and die in its "caring" hands, and with it dies the demon. Then anarchy fills the void to multiply sufferings, until another war machine rises and gets the people under its thumb. Balancing between the two evils is the doom of every advanced nation. Prosperity is a transient and almost incidental property here.
He started a bar. Yet later discovered that his business partner was reselling booze via the back door, pocketing this money for himself. Next, the business man started a transport business. Every driver he hired mysteriously got "robbed", which means they resold the fuel. They are just anecdotes, but if widespread, it must be near impossible to get any development going. It's constantly sabotaged by your peers.
On a TV program, I saw a Nigerian woman complaining how the city fails to maintain drinking water infrastructure, specifically pointing to a broken pipe. It was in this broken state for 13 years and as a result she had to walk an additional 30 mins for her water, every day. It's bad that government is this careless but looking at the broken pipe, I'd say its 1 hour of work to repair for a pro. So maybe crowd fund that pro with some locals and get it done?
One of my friends has a construction company that infrequently does some jobs in Africa. He really wants to do things right so exclusively hires local people and offers them double the usual pay. Guess what happens? They don't show up the next day. Literally living life by the day.
I personally visited Madagascar a few times. All over the country you see structures crumbling. You can tell somebody had the right idea and built something of value, but not even minor cheap repairs are carried out. So it's all falling apart from pure indifference.
Our guide, a local, explained how there was a tree planting project where people are literally paid per tree. Most planted a handful and went home.
I tried to help out in ecotourism by explaining how they're drastically undercharging. Make little booklets and sell them. Charge 5 times more for your drinks, they'd still be cheap by western standards.
Nobody cared. It's just baffling, this widespread apathy. Simple and effortless opportunities presented on a silver platter, and it's just met with complete indifference.
There's different ways to frame the issue. You could say they underperform by the standards of global capitalism. Another way to look at it is that some/many reject performance culture altogether.
For sure there are also other factors at play, historical, geopolitical, but a culture that "doesn't even try" is quite self-defeating.
Take the pipe example. Maybe the police don't let people just "crowd fund" repairs to public infrastructure and perform them themselves. Maybe what you saw on the video isn't representative of the whole problem, or your assessment of the repair difficulty isn't accurate.
Perhaps your brilliant idea about pricing and selling ecotourism booklets isn't such a great idea after all. Maybe they already tried it and tried different price points and were too polite to tell you. That's common in "development" projects where there's a power/wealth imbalance between the person giving well meaning advice and the folks receiving it.
Speaking of which, maybe home repairs that look cheap when you're driving by aren't actually cheap by local standards. Perhaps the materials aren't affordable or people have absentee landlords that don't take care of the place because it's not in their interest to do so. There are plenty of buildings like this in SF but the reason is economic incentives, not a culture of apathy.
Who knows what's going on with your friend's construction business. As an absentee foreigner they may rely on a foreman who pockets a bunch of the workers' pay, making it a shitty deal for the workers.
Because I said it. And obviously my only possible agenda can be rationalize a sense of superiority, it can't possibly because I care.
I watch the video of a thai native going back to Thailand to make a restaurant and his experience is the same : paid the workers more to get them "committed" but they have this culture of "good enough/it's not important".
You cannot expect civilizations with millenia of divergent cultures and climate to have evolved with the same cultural/traditional habits.
It sounds like you're reaching for explanations and grasping at straws. At some point you either get to "maybe aliens did it" or you stop reaching and look for other explanations.
> There are plenty of buildings like this in SF but the reason is economic incentives, not a culture of apathy.
Yes, some things can look similar but be very much not the same. Look at the incentives, I'm sure they're not the same between a slumlord in SF and someone living in their own house.
Not only is any plain and simple observation I make incorrect, it is also not so subtly assumed to be driven by an agenda of biological or cultural racial hierarchy.
Which is to suggest that I'm a supremacist looking to confirm my supremacy. That is what is implied.
I can handle that bad faith toxic notion just fine, no issue there. The real issue is that this style of discourse strongly discourages people to call out very serious issues that are grounded in reality. Just pretend they don't exist.
To remind what got this started:
"I've always wondered why there's no black-majority country that's prosperous...it's always the same story of corruption, incompetence, and/or infighting. Now, before anyone brings out the pitchforks, I'm a black African residing in Nigeria...I'm just saying that we really have to do better than this."
And where we're at now: Nah, it's all fine. Stop talking about it.
In a country where they can benefit from pushing you around and enforcing arbitrary rules? Is it really hard to imagine corrupt police stopping a citizen from doing something that's technically illegal and benefits the citizen? That's the entire basis of their power.
> Yes, some things can look similar but be very much not the same. Look at the incentives, I'm sure they're not the same between a slumlord in SF and someone living in their own house.
You don't know someone owns the house they're living in when you drive by. That was exactly my point.
Workers seem misguided in both cases, but it is clear that they had a totally different view and relationship to money.
- We’ve had an ugly history of military rule, post-colonization. - During the colonial period a specific region of the country[1] produced quite a number of leaders, both colonial and post-colonial era; it’s almost 63 years of independence and that region now has the highest population, higher unemployment, child illiteracy, and poverty rates in the country[2].
Thanks to this massive population and frequent election racketeering, immense political power seemingly resides with people from that region and nepotism has become the order of the day. So we now have a case of leaders who care less about establishing functional institutions or a sustainable culture and are much more concerned with maintaining power. It’s depressing.
- [1] https://www.icirnigeria.org/2023-north-has-the-numbers-to-co... - [2] https://www.thenigerianvoice.com/news/53569/northern-nigeria..., https://www.cgdev.org/blog/poverty-nigeria-understanding-and...
From my perspective it looks like you're speed-running a continental democracy.
Also, they have other common aspects - apart from being in Africa and having black population.
Decades of colonialism, constant disruption and malicious interference from multiple powerful governments ought to count for something.
Remember, Russia single handedly influenced culture, politics, and elections in the US, just with the means of social media.
I ought to ask this on /r/AskHistorians
Does it last though? The UK doesn't seem to be bursting at the seams with prosperity these days. Switzerland does much better yet never had any colonies. Portugal had lots, just as Spain, and look at them. Germany had few because they started late and they're doing much better. The Ottoman empire was huge but Turkey isn't doing too good, despite its strategic geopolitical location that pays lots of dividend.
Correlation doesn't imply causation, but does lack of correlation?
And yes, of course there were African empires, but they didn't nicely map to countries (but then again, did European empires? The Habsburgers would say otherwise) and didn't leave a lasting imprint of prosperity.
I dunno - Northern Ireland seems to be doing alright, current woes affecting the rest of the Kingdom (Britain) appear to be self-inflicted.
More seriously: I never claimed imperialism led to eternal prosperity. Pax Britania led to a very prosperous Britain - it is undeniable that imperialism is beneficial while it's happening: captive markets abroad support broader industrialization than just a single home market[1], and externalization of costs makes it cheaper/more "efficient".
1. Which Britain is relearning - as you noted, they are not exactly bursting at the seams with prosperity, post-Brexit
btw: i'm also a black southern african
There is also the issue of many African countries being a mix of more than one nation. It causes a lot of tribalism and favouritism and corruption. Uganda is a good example of how they got over it but still, diversity is a problem when there is more than one major group which sets the tone. Some western countries are going down this path thinking it will benefit them but it just makes things worst.