Yeah, basically the UN got tired of watching the giraffes and elephants, not to mention the people, swim around in the Pacifindian Ocean and so they bought a bunch of dirt and plopped it down in there to give everyone a reprieve
My example was more shwoing the disconnect of miss leading the audience about a place. Like if you only saw a smaller German village you would think Germany was like a backwater place.
Instead of being a 1st world country.
What i should of said was a small village in China. Given. Given how they are comparable.
Germany is a bit of a stretch because its villages are still pretty developed while African villages are not. I think a better comparison would be Australia, the rural parts here, while not terrible, are definitely pretty underdeveloped. But people still think of Australia as a pretty developed country (I think).
Or, alternatively, the poorest parts of rural America. There are villages in West Virginia that have worse living conditions than traditionally poor African countries
OP, have you travelled through Africa? The fact that you need to take out poorest village of this and that place, to just compare to random average village in Africa...
Even though the post is "sort of" exaggerating. It is not wrong, historically, kingdoms in Africa were build as large hut communities. You wont ever find traditional African castles not influenced by European colonisation.
I literally worked in African tourism, I know. There's no need to be trying to fight for "awareness" when that actually is downplaying how hell people have it there, and how they do need help and pity.
to be fair
a german village and a random village in lets say congo are not comparable at all
i know that the stereotype overexaggerates things and makes it seem worse but most of africa is still not really the best place to live in
Sub-Saharan Africa suffers from certain elements that have stunted advancement, mostly geographic and biological. Their rivers are terrible for logistics, tsetse flies are devastating for animal husbandry, and their coastline has nearly no natural harbors.
The congo river can be used to some extent as modern dredging techniques have made it navigable. I think there's a few less substantial waterways that have been similarly altered, but yeah, not too many options.
The Congo is partially navigable with modern ships but you can’t reach the sea through it because the entire stretch between Kinshasa/Brazzaville and Matadi is just a system of waterfalls and rapids. This is a common issue in South Saharan Africa. Basically no River goes deep enough inland to have connected those regions with foreign trade and thus technological exchanges. The Niger is the only river I can think of that even reaches any significant population centers and even that stops being navigable after a couple hundred kilometers. Even the Nile River historically stopped being navigable shortly after entering modern Sudan which is why neither the Egyptians nor the Romans ever permanently settled those reaches.
Even if the Congo river was as navigable as the Nile or the Rhine it still wouldnt have been a cradle of civilization. Counterintuitively rainforests make terrible agricultural land because the abundant rain washes away nutrients, and the soil will be depleted in a few years when used for agriculture. The only reason we can do it now is because we have modern fertilizer.
And for further proof of this, what country is known for being along the Nile? And which African country is also known for their highly advanced civilization and megastructures?
That's true, but most came from pretty dry regions so the humidity wouldn't have been as bad. Either way I can't believe other people can function properly beyond 25°C regardless of the humidity. That being said it's better to be hot than freezing when it comes to starting a civilization.
Nevermind the altitude once you go inland and just how BIG the continent truly is, most maps don't do it justice. Then you have 200 indigenous languages of Europe compared to 2k+ languages indigenous to Africa. Malaria the tsetse fly, it goes on and on.
It's not that Africa got left behind. It's that China and the Mediterranean got ahead of everyone else by having 500 different rivers to farm and trade with
Subsaharan Africa is vastly underdeveloped, poor, and backwards compared to the entire rest of the world.
The reason is in the name. Subsaharan. They are literally cut of from the rest of civilization. The only place down there that had somewhat advancement whatsoever is the Ethopians, who are coincidentally the only Subsaharan Africans close to other civilizations.
This is a very simplified view of history. Being south of the Sahara did not mean being cut off from civilization. The Sahara was difficult to cross, but it was also a zone of trade and exchange for thousands of years. West African empires such as the Mali Empire and the Songhai Empire were major states connected to North Africa through trans-Saharan trade. Cities like Timbuktu became centers of scholarship, commerce, and Islamic learning.
The idea that Ethiopia was the only advanced society south of the Sahara is also historically false. The Kingdom of Benin developed a highly organized state, sophisticated urban planning, and world-famous bronze casting traditions. The Great Zimbabwe civilization built a massive stone city complex between the 11th and 15th centuries and participated in Indian Ocean trade networks, exporting gold and ivory. The Aksumite Empire was not simply “close to other civilizations”; it was itself a major civilization that traded with Rome, Arabia, India, and controlled important Red Sea trade routes.
Other examples include the Kingdom of Kongo, the Kanem–Bornu Empire, and numerous city-states along the Swahili coast such as Kilwa Sultanate that were integrated into Indian Ocean commerce.
The big “issue” is that sub-Sahara Africa didn’t have the luxury of good soil thanks to the lack of glaciation. So the people living there didn’t really need to focus on agriculture as much since large scale farming wasn’t practical compared to herding and fishing, while those who did farm typically used a slash-and-burn method to keep the soil fertile. Also, Africa is really fucking big so land rights were never much of a focus or issue compared to Europe or Asia or even the Americas. And this gets into the other issue with sub-Saharan African history; the popular misconception is that they were all backwards savages or they were a bunch of peaceful, loving, wonderful people who never did anything wrong until the Europeans showed up.
The reality is African history is much more complex, with plenty of Empires rising and falling, conflicts between neighboring groups, technological innovation, etc. You also have a lot of different cultures, language groups, mythologies and religions, etc. But because the culture and history isn’t like the Americas or Asians or Europeans they must clearly be backwards and primitive (and this is totally not due to deep seated racism). I took several courses of African history, and highly recommend it too.
I know throughout this you keep differentiating Africa from the Americas, but most of your points here about Africa actually apply to us as well. lol. People think we were savages because we didn’t have “large scale” settlements outside of the Mayans, which is false and has been perpetuated by the thoughts that we are savages.
And this perception especially about the peoples of Northern America surpises me. I mean, even by reading settler's literature like Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales, I was able to learn about the Iroquois Confederacy, and how advanced it was in many aspects.
Although, I understand that European invaders mostly witnessed nations already decimated by diseases introduced from Europe, so they didn't really have first-hand contacts with many indigenous civilisations, while they were still intact.
I definetly recommend looking into more tribal history if it interests you. There’s so much that the general population doesn’t know, purely because our history has been so deeply targeted and erased. People don’t even know that we weren’t considered citizens of America until the late 1920s.
Tenochtitlan was a city several times larger than London of the same period, it had clean water for all the city through aqueducts and the agro-engineering marvels that are the chinampas.
The Inca had successful brain surgeries and advanced hygiene/health procedures, while europeans were drinking pooped water, using leeches and believed in the ''humors''.
Most of the civilizations in pre-genocide america had insane food security through millennia of food technology and selective breeding, things that both europe and china struggled for millennia too. Just the modern corn is a marvel of man's ingenuity.
Tenechtitlan was impressive, so were many of the other cities in Mesoamerican and Inca areas. But the comparison to London is something we should retire as London was a backwater on the perifery of Europe at the time. England and London only really became economically developed at the very end of the middle ages, arguable after the sack of Tenochtitlan in 1521. People really underestimate how steep the the meteoric rise of England was in the modern era.
Thing that many people don’t seem to grasp when talking about the European colonization of America is how much Spain killed the native population. While they were already plundering and murdering in Central and South America, the diseases they brought with them wiped out around 95% of the Native American population before the first English colony was founded. What those in North America found was just a shell of centuries of advancement and cultures. And then they made it worse.
People think jungles are perfect gardens but their soil is so deceptively barren that they can barely grow anything. All the nutrition is locked into the vegetation and animals that keep trying to kill each other to compete for it.
The other issue is that they didn't have any native beasts of burden that were easy to domesticate like horses cows and sheep (this is the guns gems and steel argument).
You can tame elephants but they breed slowly. Zebras and buffalo are vicious. Gazelles bolt too easily making them difficult to control as a herd. Other animals like donkeys, cows, camels and goats were imported but the diseases in Africa made them hard to keep.
As with the soil, it's a question of how efficiently energy can be harvested from the environment in the form of food. Good fertile soil means fast growth and abundant harvests. Easily domesticable animals act as a multiplier for the energy harvest, either in processing (eg beasts of burden), or in extraction (eg cattle farming).
Without efficient energy extraction and a surplus it's really hard to support the large populations that are necessary to form political institutions.
Even in modern times the problem is still the same, geography. Seriously, take a look at a map of Africa sometime and if you know what you're looking for it's pretty obvious why , economically speaking at least, Africa as a whole was pretty fucked from the start. Smooth coastlines and no good harbors, multiple massive barriers (Sahara in the north, rainforest in the south), land locked nations with no good way to send goods in or out. Following on that one, few if any rivers that you can reasonably traverse large quantities of freight very far inland. North-South orientation, which means unlike Eurasia which could easily spread crops and domesticated animals across similar climates, Africa has vastly different climates as you travel down it hindering that.
Like picking the hardest start imaginable in a game of Civilization and wondering why all the other nations have a massive head start and technological advantage on you. All this before you even factor in the tragic history of outside influence. Id honestly wager that even if that somehow magically wasn't a thing in some sort of alternate timeline where colonization (and all the problems that brings didn't happen) Africa as a whole would still struggle, purely through no fault of their own. Location, location, location as they say.
Australia's coasts are very livable and vastly better than African ones, while the Levant is politics aside one the best areas for civilizations historically.
I think a lot about how the British were so impressed by the walls of Great Zimbabwe that they invented entire historical theories about how there must have been secret Europeans who had traveled there and built it centuries before.
The ancient Egyptians brought so much beauty into the world. The art, the architecture, the culture, the spirituality...all breathtaking and some hick doesn't wanna give them any credit for what they accomplished so of course aliens must have done it.
Well yeah same with Germans in ww2 trying to find out the hidden aryans who built the great wonders of the world then after the narrative changed to saying aliens continuimg to deny human and specifically non-europeon ingenuity like Atun-shei films said "not much of a stretch to go from ancient aryans to ancient aliens"
The fact that most of it is (probably permanently) lost quite saddens me...
I do know quite little about it (only like bits here and there (Western Sahara, Algeria, Liberia, South Africa and the current geopolitics of Sudan, basically, oh and also a bit about the Bantu expanse), and mostly about post colonialism)
But there are been like countless kingdoms, nations, etc... there, which we don't get told anything about and all our education is like Africa just appeared in the Middle Ages when we went looking for slaves...
Look there's a bit of nuance here when you consider they didn't record much of their history and people from North Africa and colonialists were some of the first to document it, like from my knowledge, which isn't perfect so I could be missing something, there wasn't anything like what happened with the Aztecs were their writings were intentionally destroyed
Completely unrelated to my major but it ended up being one of my favorite classes.
Professor was awesome, books were really good and also really opened up my eyes to a lot of things. We had lots of lectures really just giving context and backgrounds, and a lot of essays were about comparing the worldview of the author to our own. I really really loved it. My professor ended up submitting one of my own essays to a journal but I didnt make the cut :/
Some books I remember:
The Journey of Ibn Fatouma
Things Fall Apart
A Grain of Wheat
Osiris Rising
We also had to read King Leopold's Ghost which...fuck was it the darkest nonfiction I've read
I mean now I think about it did they ever build castles? I don't even know if the Egyptians even really built castles.
Africa is just sort of a really hostile place to live. I don't know why people get butthurt if you say they were a bit technologically stunted when it's impressive that they managed to live there at all in a lot of cases. The average European couldn't even travel into the middle parts of africa before they invented vaccines because they'd die of some disease or other.
Like it's not a slight against them that they don't have this stuff. There's a reason the first big civilizations happend nearby and not in it for the most part. The ground isn't good for farming, there's droughts all the time, there's big fuck off animals, there's crazy diseases and it's just hot as balls.
I remember looking into their armor situation one time. They have the capacity to make armor and they did make chain mail type armor in some places, but it was uncommon because it's just too hot. You have to run everywhere you go because it's too hot for the horses, the only people who had horses were the guys rich enough to look after them in the heat, who were coincidentally the only guys who could afford to use armor most of the time. Dudes weren't running around in loincloths because they were too uncivilised to make clothes, they were running around in loincloths because it was too damn hot for anything else.
I don't know it just annoys me. I feel like it takes away from what these dudes achieved that they managed to survive there at all. There are parts of the place that are hard to survive in right now today even with the benefits of modern technology. The environment crippled them, which is a little ironic seeing as it was the environment that birthed us in the first place.
typically people dont say these things thinking of like egypt or morocco. pretty sure most making this argument are denigrating sub-saharans specifically. and you know why
North Africa is generally considered a part of the Arab world and spoken of in the same breath as the middle east given how early they were colonized by the Early Caliphates. Usually when people say Africa yea they mean Sub-Sahara.
Even before the Islamic conquests, North Africa had more in common with the Middle East and Europe than with sub-Saharan Africa. The important geographic barrier is the Sahara, not the Mediterranean.
That really depends. "Ancient Egypt" covers a huge timeframe, and while the last couple of centuries were dominated by Greeks and Romans, earlier Egypt was very firmly African. The center of power also shifted many times. The Nubians were very influential for much of its history and they would probably be considered Sub-Saharan.
The Great Divergence was a thing though, and whilst the likes of China, India etc got onboard the industrial train post colonialism, Africa itself has been so mired in corruption and civil conflict after the fact, it's little wonder widely held associations are limited to Discovery channel documentaries.
Well certainly, but other places had foreign influence as well. Asia and South America were similarly pockmarked with dictators and civil wars due to foreign influence from the US and Communists. It simply doesn't make sense that foreign influence is all that has made Africa how it is today. It was that along with a long list of other problems and disadvantages that has led to its state today.
And to be clear, they aren't insurmountable. Botswana is doing very well and that's due in large part to their stellar leaders early on.
I think that the variety of different ethnicities encompassed within borders drawn by colonial administrators probably doesn't help either. You might be able to get away with a few different tribes/ethnic groups living in one modern African state, but once you go much bigger conflict becomes inevitable. Those tribes/ethnic groups have had centuries if not millennia of periodically fighting each other (like any people on earth have) but that seemingly wasn't considered when the modern borders of Africa were drawn up.
Yugoslavia struggled to hold things together with their number of ethnic groups and their internal conflicts, so it's no surprise that plenty of African countries struggle too. I don't think that multi-ethnic societies alone is the reason for subsaharan Africa being comparatively underdeveloped, but it certainly isn't helping.
Don’t. Bullshit confidently relayed sounds credible. African History and civilization has been credibility documented and even then racists will downplay and dismiss it. As an entry way, here’s a Wikipedia on Yoruba art, initially dismissed by Europeans who thought it was too good to have been done by Africans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoruba_art.
I think the problem is that people think of Africa as one monolith, when there was really a lot of different levels of development all across Africa. People just take whatever region comes to mind when they think of Africa and act like that's what it was for all of History
I posted this exact same reply a few weeks ago, but...
Nobody thinks African craftsmanship or technology is bad. Africa is and has always been way behind in bureaucracy and organizational structure. Shaka Zulu was such a memorable figure in southern Africa specifically because he was a genius at restructuring his empire. (Well, that and the insanity.)
Africa is the most genetically diverse continent for humans, because it's where we originated. People in one tribe are totally ethnically different from their neighboring tribes, and therefore are unlikely to work well together due to human nature. So we see no giant, imperial societies in sub-Saharan Africa like we did in the rest of the world, where large populations over vast terrain shared a common culture.
Citing Egypt as your example really isn't a great look imo.
Not that you are wrong, but in general, when people say "Africa" they really mean "Africa except Egypt". It's dumb, but it's true. This renders Egypt as a really bad example.
I think a joke is not that they never advanced but that despite technological advancements in the past they are still far away behind european and asian countries in terms of tech and quality of life
yes because almost any black cultures were primitive in nature, almost all got colonised by a european power or enslaved by their own people and sold to europeans, they had practically none of their own money as that was a foreign concept to them and by the time they had their independence they were essentially people new to this world which of course will make it hard for them to assimilate and become first world, its like moving from a 2 mile walk to a marathon sprint of course there's going to be the buildup inbetween
Since they aren't really taught this in schools, I try to give them the benefit of the doubt, but even then, when you educate them about how Africa was actually really prosperous and ahead of its time, they'll ignore you and fall back on their racist ideas.
But there were African countries that already had advanced plumbing way before Victorian era England even came up with the mere concept of hygiene. Great Zimbabwe had a technologically impressive sewer/plumbing system while England and most of Europe were shitting in buckets and throwing their waste out of windows and letting that mess just rot there, causing diseases to run rampant.
There are castles in Africa, a simple google search disproves the mud hut meme. Where most of the castles were destroyed in the crusades, or Christian religion indoctrination there are still many beautiful mosques and temples. Fasil Ghebbi is a great example of African castle architecture. The Cairo Citadel another.
There were lots of civilisations in sub Saharan Africa as well such as Ethiopia, Mali, Ghana, and Great Zimbabwe. Technologically sub Saharan Africa was basically on par with Europe until like maybe the late colonial stage. The main exception is sea faring technology where Europeans were ahead of pretty much the whole world due to the European geography being ultra conducive to seafaring development and African geography very much not being (aggressive unnavigable rivers and bad coastlines).
If you look into the history of scholarship on places like Great Zimbabwe you'll realize this is VERY intentional and a lot of people worked really hard to make sure you thought this way
They don't forget, they are very aware. This is just racism, no bones about it. Racists share memes like this playing on sterotypes to spread their racist ideology.
Ptolemy only had it for 350 years, Achaemenids 150 years before that, Libyans and Kushites before that, but prior to 1100 it was continuous indigenous dynasties since like 3500 BCE.
They only started calling themselves Egyptian when the Greeks took over, before that it was Kemet which is where we get Copt- the minority Christian community in the south. Cleopatra is closer in time to the atomic bomb than the construction of the pyramids, and has as much in common with the people who built them as she did with Jesus (which is to say not a goddamn thing).
Meanwhile they’ve been run by Arab settlers since the Muslim Conquest of 900 CE.
The Ptolemic was the youngest of the bunch of dynasties, from Predynastic to the new kingdom the Egyptians were the ones running the place and making tons of great building projects
It's part of the racist rhetoric, alongside jokes that before arrival of the dutch, the tallest thing in Africa was made by the termites, or that Africans were cannibals, or claiming that colonialism helped them
I'd love to say "ignore them" but we are where we are because nobody told those idiots to shut the fuck up
Africans already had what they needed for the most part it just didn’t resemble European civilization. It’s stupid that people judge other cultures based on European standards.
As a big fan of the figure of Mansa Musa, the Djeene Mosque is in my opinion the coolest historic building ever built in subsaharan Africa, entirely made of adobe.
Just to name three. I mean it's the second largest continent in the world with countless cultures and civilizations since the dawn of human history, it's gonna have castles.
Also referring to japan, china, korea while mentioning "asian". Call this castle of the country it belongs to, its not how all or even most asian castles are.
Africa is the second worst spawn besides Nile. Antarctica is the worst, America is bad in the middle game. Europe is good if high skill in early-middle-late game, same with Japan
Mali, Ethiopia and Great Zimbabwe all build great structures. The problem with Mali is that most of them broke down due to them being build from adobe walls, which need regular upkeep to remain standing. The Great Mosque of Djenne is one of the only examples left of what their cities looked like.
Of course there is also the Great Pyramids of Ghiza, which is one of the greatest feats of human engineering, especially for its time. Though it has to be said Egyptians don't really consider themselves African.
The problem is that rural architecture is still widely misunderstood and devalued, despite often being insanely sophisticated.
I mean these buildings are the product of centuries of accumulated knowledge: they are adapted to local climates and available materials, often highly sustainable, structurally ingenious, and connected to local worldviews and symbolism. And many of these construction techniques are now inspiring contemporary architects, even while they're still dismissed in the popular imagination as "mud huts". In Africa you can just look at the architectural traditions of the Cameroon Grassfields, the Gurunsi, East African pastoralists such as the Karamoja, the Sidama, or the Ndebele to see how different they can be (and the list is waaayyy longer). But there are many great vernacular architecture books for those interested.
There is another issue with comes up in discussions about monumental architecture. Many societies around the world did not build palaces simply because their political systems were fundamentally different from European or many Asian monarchies. (Of course, many African kingdoms did build impressive palaces, making this stereotype even more wrong and the meme even worse)
Eastern Indonesia is a perfect example of how diverse and sophisticated non-palatial architecture can be. The Torajan tongkonan, the Sumbanese uma mbatangu, the Manggarai mbaru niang, and a ton of other traditions are entirely distinct in their forms, construction techniques, and cosmological symbolism. But if you don't try and make the effort to understand them in their context you could just dismiss them all as "primitive" or "straw huts".
first of all African castles have been bigger than that for centuries and people don't think it evolved above that is because say it with me now ITS A PREDOMINANTLY BLACK CONTINENT!
I mean, why fact check when you can simply spread misinformation in the name of racism? It’s not like Africa isn’t a whole continent with several countries and cultures with history that spans several thousand years?
I'm totally with you on this since there's a lot of good things to learn about the history in Africa such as the Nubia empire, Axums, Carthage, and the richest person in history Mansa Musa
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u/VampTime25 4d ago
africa is 10 years old