there is something keeping africans from actually making a continent the way other races did, and i literally cannot tell you what it is, just notice that it's missing.
Oh, I can tell you right now. I brought up geography earlier. Sub-Saharan Africa has basically no way to get out of the continent and travelling it in any significant degree without a lot of technology is exceedingly difficult. You can't navigate the rivers, there's very little natural harbors, there's no native pack animals, and the disease barrier kept everyone else out of the area on top of it all. So when Ancient Rome invents and perfects things like "concrete," "plowing," or "basic infrastructure," Africa stays pretty much ignorant of it all through isolation, and this impediment just stacks on top of itself over and over and over again until Shaka Zulu's getting his troops perforated by the Maxim gun fielded by soldiers with effectively centuries of tactical and equipment development and quinine to not die from malaria.
In short, let's plop down prehistoric man. He's got nothing and knows nothing. Let's see what he can do in... *throws dart at dartboard* ... France.
He can farm.
He can yoke cattle.
Trade is relatively plentiful and he can go a lot of places between walking or sailing.
If Germany invents something, he'll find out about it relatively quickly whether because Germans trade with him or elect to come over and conquer him.
Meanwhile in Sub-Saharan Africa...
You can't farm between steppes that need tools and jungles that aren't farmable without removal with tools you don't have.
You can't get cattle to carry your shit around.
You can't leave.
You can't get any news about anything anyone's developing.
You can't really do anything about the geography limiting you.
You pretty much have the options of hunt and gather or die.
No one's developing any intellectual capital here except at an extremely low rate simply because any piece of tech Africa could want, THEY need to invent. Meanwhile a British colonial soldier has clothes made with the intellectual contributions of innumerable people, anti-malarials with a litany of medical science behind them with contributions from a lot of people, gunpowder invented in China and perfected by Americans and Europeans of all stripes, tactics honed by history written on by all sorts of cultures and generals, so on and so forth. Northern Africa and the coastal areas of the Middle East largely benefit from a few trade routes and being attached to the Mediterranean, a source of both an excellent diet and many trade opportunities and general exposure to other nations from whence lessons can be learned. So when you say this...
you don't even need to be that modern. when africans were discovered by european colonial powers, they had no empires, they had no sprawling territories, they had no real weapons beyond the basic spears and bow and arrow implements they used (slings and other similar tech too of course) and they had no idea how to fight any kind of mid or large-scale war, or even any idea of long-term betterment of their natural surroundings for the easement of their day to day activities.
... my first thought is, "Well no shit. If no one's going to be able to get to Sub-Saharan Africa to let them know something like a plow exists, where are they gonna learn it from?" Shaka Zulu doesn't even have a
concept of what a firearm is, to such a degree dum-dum bullets needed to be invented just to make it clear that getting shot is a very bad thing, and you should stop charging when you get shot.
this came up in a conversation with a friend of mine recently. africans have no word to describe the concept of maintenance. the very basic idea doesn't exist in african societies.
My simple answer is that African culture has progressed at such a snail's pace due to being locked away from the rest of the world for so long, being utterly unaware of basically anything going on beyond their immediate surroundings, there genuinely has not been enough cultural progress to have anything that warrants such a concept. Normally, when you have such a sheer gap of development, the better developed culture conquers the other. Think like Ancient Rome going after the ancient Britons. For a time, Britain was doing this in Africa, and it was working. Colonial troops quashed tribal rivalries and instituted British legal norms overriding any native culture there. But then WWII happened, the empire had to start setting just because there weren't enough bodies anymore, and no one should be surprised that if you give a bunch of highly tribal people who didn't have much more than a bow AK-47's... they go on a bit of a tear to say the least... lest we forget the genocides in Rwanda were done with machetes.
the average african literally does not have the level of intellect required to understand that plastic is not a source of nutrition for animals. there is no drive in the african people to advance humanity or even their own race, even when you take them out of africa (with small outliers not withstanding of course.)
Here's a pop quiz question. Do they even know what plastic
is? I don't mean if you hand them a bottle, could they tell you it's plastic, I mean if you asked them to describe what a plastic item fundamentally is, do you think they could even begin to answer the question? Given Rhodesia and South Africa have fallen decades ago, while we live in a 21st century understand, I'd be generous in saying Africa's in a 17th century understanding at best.
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