Whatchu anons know about the Dark Continent? Have you ever been? It's maybe the region of the world I know least about, but obviously holds importance to the history of mankind. I'm interested in visiting at least MENA, though I have a good friend from Ethiopia who I'd love to visit that country with. It seems all very different from the ways which I know from America and Europe. The amount of conflict and poverty there do make me wary of just being a tourist bumbling about.
Pic related, I don't know much about Ethiopian Jazz, but I always like what I hear from the genre
Seems like a cool place. Would like to go but travel is so physically taxing for me. If I could choose I would definitely go to East Africa first, most likely Kenya. I've always vibed most with East Africans from that region, West Africans have too much chaotic energy, Central Africans can be too militant, South Africans have too many post-colonial hangups, as do North Africans with the whole Islam thing as well as their hangups about not being black (aside from picrel). In general I think it gets too much flack from the world as the proverbial whipping boy, though that seems to be fading at least for the younger generations who seem much more fixated on South Asia as the mental model for all that they hate about the "other".
I've never been to Africa, I'm very interested in it though. I wrote a bit here before about the M23 conflict in the Eastern Congo which is very interesting. The roots of it go right back to colonial and ultimately pre-colonial ethnic divisions / social structures.
I like African literature a lot. It's hard to generalise across a whole continent but in general I find that there is an ironical streak to African writing which is very cutting. In some ways it bears similarity to Russian pessimism, but I think as a rule Africans are funnier than Russians.
I think we are going to be surprised at how quickly certain parts of Africa develop in this century. The thing about exponentials is that their speed catches you out, even if you know about exponentials. At the same time some conflicts will remain intractable. Sudan may have the bleakest outlook of any country on the face of the Earth, excepting only brutal island nations like Haiti and Papua New Guinea.
In the sweepstakes of African countries the ones most likely to succeed are those with some degree of national pride, promising coastal geography, and at least some tradition of functioning governance. I would back Ghana, Cote d'Ivoire, and Tanzania to do well in coming decades.
Rwanda is a much heralded success story, but continuity of governance after Kagame is an open question, and they are not geographically blessed. Probably their best bet is to go all-in on aviation, but they have a lot of catching up to do if they want to best Ethiopia in this regard.
I have been to Africa, Well I was born there and spent every day of the first 19 years of my life there until I came abroad for school a couple years ago.
On visiting MENA...it's definitely the best Africa has to offer, certainly to anyone with more Western sensibilities, You'll have much less of a culture shock visiting somewhere like Casablanca compared to visiting Harare. I think in terms of most metrics for quality of life and stuff like that, most of the capital cities across the Maghrebi region do not trail ridiculously far behind ..but then in terms of visiting Africa...the MENA people themselves do not really see themselves as "African", much to the chagrin of people like myself and many others, the closest we've gotten in recent times towards some semblance of a "Pan-African" theory for the future, was Gaddafi, who kind of seemed like he had a manifesto of sorts, for what he wanted the Pan-African identity to be but he's long gone, dead and buried in an unmarked grave.
I'm going on a tangent now but all of that being said, they say travel is supposed to challenge you, help you discover new parts of yourself...who are "they", who are the people saying this..I don't really know but the half-baked point I'm trying to make is. Does visiting a country thats not too dissimilar from one you come from, really challenge you? Like visiting a place Where the veneer is mostly the same, everyone exists in mostly the same cultural milieu, does that really spark the growth they say travelling helps with?...It probably does but I don't know, maybe it's worth exploring somewhere else outside MENA.
On African development, its depressingly the usual, China has the whole belt-and-road initiative going but their commitment to that has waned and their approach nowadays has evolved to something much more resembling neo-colonialism. Nowadays, they just fund local terrorists to provoke insecurity and instability in certain regions. They pay the bandits to chase people off their land and more often than not, kill them if they are stubborn. Thus giving them free rein to loot as they please, with next to no opposition. There's the added benefit of the armed bandits, being some kind of quasi-militia who provides protection for the Chinese and the now armed bandits are further empowered to use their new found weapons to engage in brazen acts of terrorism and kidnapping, tangential to their initial goals. Its a real crisis.
The Us is building their biggest consulate in Nigeria, the French are still mucking about in the Francophone regions, Russia too. There's been a couple coup attempts very recently, all the more disheartening because some of these things are happening in places that were relatively stable and not exactly viewed as problematic as some other places are. Its all quite tiring and depressing.
Its not all bad though...Nigeria has the 2nd best performing stock market on the planet right now, A coup attempt in the Benin republic was unsuccessful, Places like Botswanna are doing quite well but there's caveats to that. There's much more to complain about than offer praise for, but we must be hopeful. I feel bad and super silly bringing up macro stuff as something worthy of praise because the reality is that, thats not what feeds people, It is quite bleak and life has really only gotten harder for people on the ground of late.
I'd say more but I don't know if its my computer but typing on this website is a real chore, so buggy, so sluggish and the user experience is pure hell. It shouldn't be like this because this site is pretty stripped back and lo-fi.Maybe I need to restart my pc.
One of the interesting things about Rwanda in particular is that the relationship between the colonisers and the Tutsi-Hutu caste binary is entirely more complicated than the conventional liberal / decolonial narrative.
It is true that the Germans did favour the Tutsi. But they were not arbitrarily selected as a ruling class, as is sometimes suggested - when the white man turned up they were very much already in charge. Unlike much of pre-colonial Africa, Rwanda and Burundi were long-established kingdoms which already resembled centralised states in many ways, and one of those ways was by having an established political elite. An elite that was entirely Tutsi.
It's also true that the Belgians introduced record-keeping to the caste system by way of identity cards. But don't let that fool you into imagining that it was somehow fluid beforehand. There probably was a small amount of social mobility between castes, but it would have been very much the exception rather than the rule.
There is a commonly held belief that Western colonialists were all esoteric racists who sought to find the Herrenvolken of the world and back them against all comers. As smug and over-simplified as this caricature is, it's not entirely wrong when it comes to the attitudes of the 19th century colonialists, but we have to remember that Rwanda and Burundi got their independence as late as 1962. It may seem like a contradiction in terms, but by the time that Belgian rule in Rwanda was coming to a close, the more liberal colonial officers were pretty much post-colonialists. The last generation of colonial administrations were men who had read Fanon and the Négritude poets in university. In practice, this meant that many of them inclined pro-Hutu.
One must also account for the fact that the majority of Belgian colonialists in the 20th century were Flemish. In this time, prior to the collapse of industry in French-speaking Belgium, the Flemish were politically and economically dominated by their Walloon compatriots. One of the few opportunities for advancement for a young Flandrian was to go into foreign service, and yet when they arrived in the heart of the dark continent, it seemed strangely like a reflection of home. The Flemish colonialists - and I want you to pay attention to how funny this is - drew a direct equivalence between the subjugation of the Hutu by the Tutsi, and the oppression of the Flemmings by the Walloons. Consequently all these young Jans and Dirks, already inclined to take the side of the dispossessed, became even more pro-Hutu.
This strange re-alignment, in which the colonisers became the guardians of the underclass, lead to a situation whereby the Tutsi royalty were agitating for independence, while the Hutu, broadly speaking, favoured remaining subjects of the Belgian crown. Ultimately, if I remember rightly, the Tutsi royalty tried to force through an independent state, the Belgians intervened to hand the country over to the Hutu instead, and most of the Tutsi elite were kicked into exile in Uganda. There they trained to became elite soldiers (I always imagine Rocky music) and won a civil war for their Ugandan allies, before their triumphal return at the end of the genocide, resulting in the modern Rwandan state.
(adapted from an rsp comment)
I would never fucking go. I would pay every $$$ I have not to go, if that was the requirement.
Hate them here, hate them there, I really hate them anywhere.
Best thing that could possibly happen is China colonizes that entire continent and makes sure it's all cleaned up.
PEPFAR saved more lives than WWI destroyed. Like twice as many. More people seem to remember, "George Bush doesn't care about black people" though.
I’m kind of indifferent. I don’t believe it will become anything significant within my lifetime so it’s hard to be that invested. Even China would need several generations to terraform it
If Africa is terraformed, rainforests spring in the desert, etc, it will harm the climate of Europe, so we cannot allow it to be terraformed.
Also, I would rather live in, e.g., South Africa than Singapore. Africans have a spark in them, a vitality (hence their contribution to blues, rock, jazz) which Asians but particularly Chinese don't have.
No hope for much of the continent, especially West Africa. I expect jihadist groups like JNIM and ISIS to keep marching southwards until Nigeria falls. Meanwhile East Africa (Somalia) will continue to be a basket case. Islamism has doomed Africa.
Government follows culture, which, in turn, follows genes: Chinese are humorless to the point of autism because of their Arctic origins.