Will The Continent Of Africa EVER Produce A Country That Can Be A "Superpower"?

[panopticon]

I gotta say you and @mbewane wrote some excellent posts.

Props for doing so in a clear and calm manner too.

I'm learning alot as an African American

I won't lie, I love the fukkery (no man is without his vices), but the quality of discussion we can have on this site on serious issues with real-world impact is nothing short of amazing.

Knowledge is Power and all that...

 

[panopticon]

These cultures, social arrangements, traditions, social mores, and practices all fall under the umbrella of Tribalism. It seems like we're in agreement on this point.

The "modernity" they're ultimately clashing with is the expansion of their idea of tribes and tribal empowerment.

I disagree. The clash is far deeper than a simple refusal of groups to join one another in a common enterprise. Several African nations have done so already, with differing levels of success (the Ethiopians, a country with 70+ languages, all 3 Abrahamic religions and probably hundreds of other ancient, orally-transmitted religious customs defeated the Italians in open battle, the Egyptians have managed a 2-religion society more or less at peace with one another since independence, the Kenyans have more or less successfully reconciled the often strained relations among ethnic and religious groups even in the face of devastating terror attacks, etc.)

Just to give an example from Europe - the "Germans" as we know them now aren't nearly the monolithic ethnic and religious group we assume them to be. There are very deep and real religious differences (Bavarian Catholics vs. a Protestant majority), language/dialect differences, and differences in basic outlooks and ways of life stretching back centuries. Germany as we know it today was cobbled together through truly vicious warfare between these different groups, powerful national leaders asserting centralized control, and of course the outward expression of territorial aggression (what's the best way to keep 2 or 3 groups from fighting one another? give them another, outside group to attack and exploit!). The Germans are where they are now not because they've somehow discovered some special formula to suppress "tribalism" and ethnic particularism, but because they were able to co-evolve with modernity in such a way that allowed them to maintain whatever differences were most important to their constituent groups while also submitting to a sophisticated, centralized administrative state. That takes centuries, lots of warfare, and lots of diplomacy - and most African countries were born only 50 or 60 years ago - not nearly enough time for such a process to take root.

Additionally, the Germans had the advantage of a slow, creeping modernity - not an immediate shock like African countries endured. As technology became more advanced over time, their administrative methods were able to increase in sophistication to help distribute the benefits and manage the pitfalls of modernity. They were able to successfully move millions of people off of ox-plowed farms and into cities to work in factories *without* total social collapse in part because of the limitations of trade and technology at the time - there was no "China factor" for investors to consider when planning a new factory - no fear that they would be suddenly undercut on price and the market flooded with an overwhelming volume of products from abroad. This allowed them precious time to train up their workforce, discover new technologies, and master their supply chain and sales networks. For any African country now - how could they possibly improve domestic manufacturing and human capital development when all it takes to destroy their efforts at self-sufficiency is 2 or 3 container ships from Hong Kong? How could they possibly expect to stay in front of the always-looming threat of famine and humanitarian disaster when their population grows out of control due to the impact of Western medicine? How could an African government even begin to convince the "tribalists" that you despise that coming together and working on behalf of the nation will do anything positive, when all they've seen in the postcolonial era is incompetence, corruption and disaster at every level?

I guess the basic, bottom line argument I have to make is that Africa isn't in the position it is in because of some human failure unique only to Africans - every other people, since the beginning of time, have been just as (or even more) tribal and vicious with one another. At least for the Europeans, their one saving grace was that they were blessed with time - time that allowed them to simultaneously adapt to the modern world as they built it. Africa has been given no such respite - the continent has to expend enormous quantities of political energy just attempting to *cope* with modernity, leaving little left to master it and reap some of its rewards. Sometimes the disconnect is totally unbelievable - in a place like Ethiopia almost everyone has a smartphone (a crowning achievement of modernity) - and yet some huge percentage of the population is genuinely concerned with whether or not they'll eat tomorrow.

 

[panopticon]

Exactly. Rather regional as religious lines are mostly imported and imply more risk of outside meddling.

As for the bolded totally agree.



Glad you do. I'll be honest as I can't say the same as you have a condescending way of speaking about Africans, which I usually only hear from racist White people. No disrespect, but you've been repeating platitudes and generalizations the whole thread.

Anyone can play that game :

- AAs are p*ssy for killing fellow AAs instead of rebelling against their oppressors. Burning a couple cars every now and then won't achieve much.
- AAs don't even have leaders to be corrupt. Took the son of a Kenyan to FINALLY have a Black president. Next best thing was Ben Carson lol.
- While Africans have tribalism, AAs push the absurdity even further by beefing between projects of the same damn city.

See how easy it is to make stupid generalizations that don't mean shyt?

1. They're "p*ssy" because you keep repeating it. Where in Africa have you been to see the everyday struggle these people go through? Putting food on their plate, educating the kids, fighting diseases and whatnot, all of this after being gutted by slavery, colonization etc, and they're STILL there managing to create, build, innovate. And here you are calling a whole continent p*ssy. I guess you've been following the Arab spring (yes, Northern Africa is Africa), the protests in Senegal, Burkina, DRC, CAR, Madagscar, SA? All those people are p*ssy?

2. Leaders are corrupt all over the world (US presidency is actually based on who gets the most money to campaign, yet they have the balls to call other people "corrupt"). What exactly do you think happens to a lot of people who aren't corrupt?

3. "Petty tribalism" is what is called nationalism/regionalism in the West, you keep dodging this point. US is built on "America first" and you say it's Africans pushing tribalism. Don't you understand that one is just a form of the other? AND it's not ALL Africans that engage in tribalism, but it's obvious you will have more tribalism when you put together people who don't share common cultures or whatnot. What happened in Yougoslavia? I repeat myself, but how do you think tribalism developped in the first place in Rwanda?

And the white men did not "expanded the tribe under the banner of whiteness and feasted on the world", they feasted on the world PRECISELY to have more ressources for the inner battles and positioning in Europe. You think Portugal and Spain invaded Latin Ameirca "for the white man"? Lol. They did so to accumulate riches in the intra-euro competition. No one cared about "whiteness" then, that shyt was intellectuallized AFTER the fact in order to "justify" it. That's the problem with Black Americans, y'all think the whole world has always and still only revolves around race. And that's what I've been saying since the beginnning, that Black in the diasporas must be cautious not to themselves see Africa throughout their own bias, which is a Western bias. African intellectuals are already speaking on this, as well as people in the diasporas. Basically, be humble is what they're saying. shyt the whole point of the Berlin conference was to cut up Africa BEFORE the respective Euro armies ended up fighting in Africa too. They did not sit together because they were allies, they sat together precisely because they were competitors. How you explain Fachoda if they were "united under the banner of whiteness"?

My apologies for not dapping this post earlier. Tour de force for real. You know your shyt.



"the whole point of the Berlin conference was to cut up Africa BEFORE the respective Euro armies ended up fighting in Africa too. They did not sit together because they were allies, they sat together precisely because they were competitors."

 

[Jatigi]

For sure, It is going to be Chinese though.

 

[mbewane]

My apologies for not dapping this post earlier. Tour de force for real. You know your shyt.



"the whole point of the Berlin conference was to cut up Africa BEFORE the respective Euro armies ended up fighting in Africa too. They did not sit together because they were allies, they sat together precisely because they were competitors."

 

[shadowking]

@Diasporan Royalty @Sagat @JudgeJoeGorilla @MansaMusa7 @Dip

Now you see the truth trickling out

Buhari asked us to focus on northern Nigeria — World Bank

The President of the World Bank Group, Jim Yong Kim, said on Thursday that the bank had concentrated on the northern region of Nigeria in line with President Muhammadu Buhari’s request.
Kim and the Managing Director, International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde, who spoke at separate press conferences in Washington DC, United States, also advised Buhari to invest in things that would enhance economic growth.
Kim said, “You know, in my very first meeting with President Buhari he said specifically that he would like us to shift our focus to the northern region of Nigeria and we’ve done that. Now, it has been very difficult. The work there has been very difficult.

“I think Nigeria, of course, has suffered from the dropping oil prices. I think things are just now getting better. But the conversation we need to have with Nigeria, I think, is in many ways related to the theme that I brought to the table just this past week, which is investment in human capital. The percentage of the Gross Domestic Product that Nigeria spends on healthcare is less than one percent.”

 

[panopticon]

@Diasporan Royalty @Sagat @JudgeJoeGorilla @MansaMusa7 @Dip

Now you see the truth trickling out

Buhari asked us to focus on northern Nigeria — World Bank

The President of the World Bank Group, Jim Yong Kim, said on Thursday that the bank had concentrated on the northern region of Nigeria in line with President Muhammadu Buhari’s request.
Kim and the Managing Director, International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde, who spoke at separate press conferences in Washington DC, United States, also advised Buhari to invest in things that would enhance economic growth.
Kim said, “You know, in my very first meeting with President Buhari he said specifically that he would like us to shift our focus to the northern region of Nigeria and we’ve done that. Now, it has been very difficult. The work there has been very difficult.

“I think Nigeria, of course, has suffered from the dropping oil prices. I think things are just now getting better. But the conversation we need to have with Nigeria, I think, is in many ways related to the theme that I brought to the table just this past week, which is investment in human capital. The percentage of the Gross Domestic Product that Nigeria spends on healthcare is less than one percent.”

Just as I wrote earlier...

"At every turn, in an attempt to maintain some semblance of peace or stability, African national governments are forced into making short-term decisions (paying off a particularly belligerent tribal group, running roughshod on traditional peoples in an area chock full of easily exploitable natural resources, etc.) that all but guarantee long-term dysfunction and stagnation."

It's important not to give into despair...but even knowing that eventually, over time, these issues will be resolved isn't enough to keep me from being pessimistic.