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

[BigMan]

The africans are still practicing Petty Tribalism. They refuse to simply see themselves as black. They still proudly see themselves as the dull knives of strategically insignificant "Ethnicities".

The African continent is a drawer full of dull knives. A dull knife won't cut.

This is what @mbewane and @TZiggy nean when they say you can't just apply western concepts to Africa

 

[BIXBY]

In order to get to super Power status, you need to first get out of "developing nation" status. which countries are doing that? South Africa is on the cusp of a major recession

 

[How Sway?]

I'm quite mixed actually. More specifically 75% Dagomba(from the Northern Region), and 25% Yoruba(my grandmother on my mom's side is from Kaduna State, Nigeria).

And i don't hear this term all that much nowadays compared to 20 years ago. Back then, it was used is to refer to separate the indigenous Yoruba community from the more recent migrant Yoruba immigrants that's been coming in from Nigeria and Benin.

what indigenous yoruba community is there in ghana?

unless your talking about the ga people who migrated from ile-ife centuries ago

 

[Free White & 21]

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"?

1. You're not disproving anything I said.
2. Again, not disproving anything I said.
3. I'll concede on number 3 simply due to my phrasing, lack of nuance, and oversimplification.

I have more to add, I stand by everything I said, but we'll just agree to disagree. Don't wanna derail the thread any further. You can have the last word.

 

[Frangala]

Tribalism is perhaps the most unsophisticated phenomenon/way of thinking especially when it comes to this continent. Mass poverty affects anyone regardless of ethnic/tribal affiliations. The ones who benefit from corruption are leaders and his entourage while millions are living in absolute poverty. Why would an individual pledge allegiance to his "own" while he is starving as a result of his "own" being in power and absolutely corrupt without impunity.

The phenomenon of tribalism would make even more sense in a developed country such as America where the vast majority of the wealth is concentrated in white hands and that almost the vast majority of Black people are either in poverty or living paycheck to paycheck no matter level of educational attainment. There is a clear line for those who have the wealth and those who have not among ethnic/racial lines hence making feelings of tribalism understandable.

Africa will produce a superpower if it produces quality leadership and changes mentality.

 

[mbewane]

Tribalism is perhaps the most unsophisticated phenomenon/way of thinking especially when it comes to this continent. Mass poverty affects anyone regardless of ethnic/tribal affiliations. The ones who benefit from corruption are leaders and his entourage while millions are living in absolute poverty. Why would an individual pledge allegiance to his "own" while he is starving as a result of his "own" being in power and absolutely corrupt with impunity.

The phenomenon of tribalism would make even more sense in a developed country such as America where the vast majority of the wealth is concentrated in white hands and that almost the vast majority of Black people are either in poverty or living paycheck to paycheck no matter level of educational attainment. There is a clear line for those who have the wealth and those who have not among ethnic/racial lines hence making feelings of tribalism understandable.

Africa will produce a superpower if it produces quality leadership and changes mentality.

Yep. It's a one-size fits all way of thinking that doesn't take into account history, economics and local dynamics. It also works for religion, in CAR the whole muslim vs chirsitian is also a lazy analysis of the whole recent issues we've had, as there are deep geographical and economic issues that explain the crisis much better. There hardly was any religious issues for decades before that.

 

[SmokyQuartz]

I'm rooting for the Congo

 

[Skooby]

Yes. But not in my lifetime.

 

[Scoop]

People really trying to suggest Ghana will be a superpower? Did you all forget what superpower means?

Africa has had 1 nation that maybe qualified for superpower status: Ancient Egypt. Songhai and Carthage were both nice middle/regional powers. South Africa and Egypt are middle powers today.

Africa is too fragmented and no one country has enough people/resources to make superpower status. The only way it would happen is if one country started conquering all the other ones or something like the EU formed.

 

[Bawon Samedi]

People really trying to suggest Ghana will be a superpower? Did you all forget what superpower means?

Africa has had 1 nation that maybe qualified for superpower status: Ancient Egypt. Songhai and Carthage were both nice middle/regional powers. South Africa and Egypt are middle powers today.

Africa is too fragmented and no one country has enough people/resources to make superpower status. The only way it would happen is if one country started conquering all the other ones or something like the EU formed.

Congo can easily fit the definition of a superpower.
Lets discuss the potential of what is the Democratic Republic of Congo

They have the size, population, abundant resources among other things. Just a very incompetent government holding them back and external forces too..


And what do you mean "maybe", Africa had way more superpowers than you're letting on. Ancient Egypt was a world power at its height and unrivaledt. So was Kush until the Assyrians. Hell, Mali which controlled 2/3 of the worlds gold and was more of world power than Songhai. It can be argued that Axum was a world power since they were said to be the world powers along with Rome and Persia, not only that but they dominated the Indian Ocean seas.

 

[Bawon Samedi]

No. You need a country with a massive population and this point in history. Over 200 million at least. On top of that, I wouldn't want to be, I quite like how our lands are untainted, rather not chop down all of our nature in favor for urban bullshyt. Keep a handful of cities for every country and it's good enough.

The USA did not destroy all its forests. In fact we have MANY national parks even here in New York state.
https://environmentlist.files.wordp...14ec270bd388067e4.jpg?w\u003d1400&h\u003d9999

And the Yellowstone national park is the biggest in the USA. But hell I'd argue that Africa producing a superpower country would actually be more positive for nature as such country would be more educated on green topics and be developed enough to have time to tackle such problems.

 

[Peak]

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"?

Great post.

 

[ChatGPT-5]

The USA did not destroy all its forests. In fact we have MANY national parks even here in New York state.
https://environmentlist.files.wordpress.com/2016/06/3fbb7f0fe1e48bf14ec270bd388067e4.jpg?w\u003d1400&h\u003d9999

And the Yellowstone national park is the biggest in the USA. But hell I'd argue that Africa producing a superpower country would actually be more positive for nature as such country would be more educated on green topics and be developed enough to have time to tackle such problems.

I never said all.

However, the great plains were once a forest. It is now considered tornado lane.
http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1006&context=usdafsfacpub

the great plains were used to give housing for the rest of the U.S back when you lot used wood for cabins/houses. Buffalo...where are they? Europe just about has zero predators left. I would rather africa not kill off its diverse species and animals. I think africa can co exist with nature, but its got to be cautious. The world needs the amazon and african jungle for oxygen FYI.

 

[Bawon Samedi]

I never said all.

However, the great plains were once a forest. It is now considered tornado lane.
http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1006&context=usdafsfacpub

the great plains were used to give housing for the rest of the U.S back when you lot used wood for cabins/houses. Buffalo...where are they? Europe just about has zero predators left. I would rather africa not kill off its diverse species and animals. I think africa can co exist with nature, but its got to be cautious. The world needs the amazon and african jungle for oxygen FYI.

That all happened before America became a world power and around the time America was industrializing. But today none of that is happening. Middle America is sparsely populated and filled with wildlife today and most of the biggest national parks are in that area. Most of the densely populated areas in America are in the coastal areas.


And Europe killing off its wild animals happened way before the modern world, hell I would say ever since the spread of the Roman Empire. In todays modern world there are more protections for wildlife. Even in the least developed African countries. I agree fully that Africans need to be cautious. But I'm sure they will as their national parks are big money makers[world wide] and harming any wildlife would only harm their money.

 

[panopticon]

The critical issue for almost all African countries isn't the corruption, tribalism, religious conflict, etc. Those are all maladies common to every nation on Earth, "developed" or not. You can't tell me the Germans, Poles, Czechs, Dutch, Belgians, English, French, Russians, Ukrainians and Hungarians having centuries-old beef with one another, switching allegiances whenever convenient and pillaging one another for resources and women isn't some "petty tribalism", and these guys went at it with the most lethal non-nuclear weaponry known to man, firebombing entire cities and exterminating whole religious groups while sending literally tens of millions of men to certain death on the battlefield. Postcolonial violence in Africa doesn't even approach 1/10th of the level of barbarity and loss of human life we saw in WWI and WWII.

The problem endemic to almost every African country (and this applies to the Middle East as well) is a devastating clash of traditional, smaller-scale cultures and social arrangements with the overwhelming scale and scope of modernity. Prior to the "scramble for Africa" and the slave trade, Africans across the continent had developed hundreds if not thousands of cultures, traditions, social mores, and practices that allowed for more or less sustainable, relatively benign government at a smaller, local scale. However, these arrangements do not scale up to the size of modern nation-states - it is far easier to keep an eye on and check corruption when it happens at the 1000 or even 10000 subject scale, but when you're talking about pilfering a national government responsible for tens of millions of people, it becomes an impossible problem to solve. 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.

Europe and the US had the benefit of being able to co-evolve with the onset of modernity - it wasn't *thrust* upon them in one fell swoop, but occurred over 10+ generations that allowed for the culture to change and shift in ways that would accommodate the new technologies. And it isn't like it was a cakewalk for the West - the Industrial Revolution was almost purely an exercise in human degradation and misery, and modernity has led to a pretty ugly disintegration of family life. And don't forget those two world wars either!

I think one area where we can viscerally experience this clash of traditional and modern society is the unprecedented population growth that the continent has seen post WWII. On the one hand, modernity brought amazing advancements in medicine and nutritional science to even the poorest people in Africa - pills for sleeping sickness, pills/DDT spraying for malaria, knowledge of germ theory and wound management...the list goes on. But on the other hand, in a traditional society where a mother could expect to lose the majority of her children before the age of 5, getting pregnant early and often was the only way to ensure that her family would have enough people to work the farm, protect the livestock, provide for her in old age, etc. So post-WWII, we shock the continent with all these medical advances without any real change to the underlying culture (how would it change, it never had the chance to!), and end up with an incredibly politically/economically destabilizing population boom. And of course the West, having had the chance to adapt to the onset of modernity and co-evolve with it, significantly dropped birthrates without even much prodding from their own national governments - it just became *normal* for people to have smaller families.

I've written enough for now. Interested to hear your thoughts. I don't write this as a cop-out for all the various terrible dictators that have ruled and ugly ethnic feuds that have been stoked over the years, but instead to simply try and understand the true roots of the current dysfunction.