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The Africa Thread
L.E.O.
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So I live in Africa, South Africa to be exact. This thread is a discussion about Africa, politics, culture all that shit.
I originally from Brazil, so i got to see Africa with fresh eyes, and boy does it suck. I mean its poor, violent and backward.
People usually feel sorry for Africa, that the people are victims and shit, but thats not really true, the people are also to blame. I also lived in Mozambique for about 3 years, and the main city Maputo is fucking filthy, as in people throw trash, piss and shit ANYWHERE they feel like it. (the piss thing is literally true.)
So I see Africa as a continent full of people that just dont give a fuck. They have accepted there victimized role the world has given them and thats it, they have no desire to be anything more.
The most advanced country in Africa is Southern Africa, why? Because of Apartheid (i know it sucks, but its true.) The rest of the world cut trade with SA so they had to step it up and do it themselves. It is true that they were using almost slave labor, but the fact remains that they shit got done. (roads, industries like car manufacturing etc.)
So my point is that other African countries also have to stop being victims and just get shit done, i think educating people is a lot more beneficial than throwing money at the problem, so anyways discuss African problems and possible solutions.
I originally from Brazil, so i got to see Africa with fresh eyes, and boy does it suck. I mean its poor, violent and backward.
People usually feel sorry for Africa, that the people are victims and shit, but thats not really true, the people are also to blame. I also lived in Mozambique for about 3 years, and the main city Maputo is fucking filthy, as in people throw trash, piss and shit ANYWHERE they feel like it. (the piss thing is literally true.)
So I see Africa as a continent full of people that just dont give a fuck. They have accepted there victimized role the world has given them and thats it, they have no desire to be anything more.
The most advanced country in Africa is Southern Africa, why? Because of Apartheid (i know it sucks, but its true.) The rest of the world cut trade with SA so they had to step it up and do it themselves. It is true that they were using almost slave labor, but the fact remains that they shit got done. (roads, industries like car manufacturing etc.)
So my point is that other African countries also have to stop being victims and just get shit done, i think educating people is a lot more beneficial than throwing money at the problem, so anyways discuss African problems and possible solutions.
L.E.O. on
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I guess, hm, import substitution can work well for African nations with unfriendly neighbors according to your S.A. example? Maybe?
I don't think that's really the case, though.
There are problems with poverty, huge problems, and obviously the main towns are not as modern in their entirety as the cities I have grown up in England.
However, the country and the people are lovely, amazing, kind hearted and caring. They are welcoming to visitors, grateful to people like my parents (for the most part) and care so much about their country.
The Rwandan government has put shit loads of money into education, and it is starting to help. There are still enormous problems in the country, but there are only a limited number of funds available.
I don't know what you were expecting of Africa, but you obviously haven't seen the best of it. My limited experience of Rwanda, and what my parents have told me of South Africa, Congo, and other countries they have visited or stayed in, makes me believe that you either have unrealistic expectations or you haven't really gotten to know the places you have been.
or maybe people are just too ignorant to say anything about it, which is the problem.
basically the question is, why is Africa not able to grow?
i think zeeny is stuck on the Africa is a victim idea.
It doesn't really seem to be the case. Botswana is frequently cited as a development success story, and I think it is fair to say they have been a heavily export driven economy that is relatively open. I'd even probably put them above South Africa in something as nebelous as 'advancement'. Though Botswana does suffer from devestatingly high rates of HIV infection, which threatens to partially undo all their accomplishments.
Read this book.
I don't think it's the case either, particularly as many nations are relatively unsophisticated. Producing cars? I hope you don't want to drive anytime soon..
There's been a push for more intra-African trade and relations, though as far as I know that's been another non-starter. I'll have to look into it again.
Africa has grown huge amounts in the last decade or more.
As much as it can be a cliche, the change from colony to independent really did fuck over things for a lot of people in many countries. For many countries becoming independent left a power gap that ended in military dictatorship or power struggles, there have been tribal issues, and a load of other stuff. Also, many countries were left without real access to their own resources while being left with no infrastructure to work with and very little money. It takes time for things to improve, and they are, but I think it is unrealistic to expect African countries to suddenly resemble European countries or the States in such a short time. Educating a populace takes time, training people takes time, building up resources takes time, providing infrastructure for an entire country takes time.
In South Africa though, the people are unfriendly and mistrustful as shit, probably cause they got so fucked over by Apartheid.
SA is a country that tries to be liberal and nice, but its one of the most violent. They have no death penalty so the prisons are crowded and guards are often killed by prisoners who want higher ranks in gangs. Its ridiculous, people here are scared of the country they live in.
Mozambique does not have the same violence problem, the people are just not like that, the problem there is poverty.
They might not have ongoing violence and crime problems, but they most certainly dealt with significant conflict-related violence up until fairly recently.
But Africa is kind of the world's bitch. Various world powers have interfered for a wide range of economic, military and religious reasons. International do-gooders have interfered with good intentions, but often with bad results. And the political lines that were drawn when African countries became independent don't make sense, in a lot of cases.
There's a lot of blame to go around. Though the average African is mostly a victim, rather than the guilty party when it comes to the question of who is responsible for Africa's problems.
(and I assume we're talking about sub-Saharan Africa here)
Rigorous Scholarship
Is this better or worse than China closing their eyes to corruption and violence and throwing money around to secure natural resources?
i dont think that will be a long ongoing situation though, i fact i think its over.
I meant the 15 year long civil war that ended in the early 90's. The riots were a one-off, I think.
On the other hand, Westerners come in and try to change these societies, but the changes they institute can be incredibly harmful or they can be incredibly helpful (look at the example of Western evangelicals and Uganda vis a vis homosexuality to see what happens sometimes when Westerners try to "help")
Rigorous Scholarship
Parktown Prawns to be exact (King Crickets to the rest of the world). One of the most stubborn things to kill down there. Fed one of these things a piece of raw meat (not big, probably meatball sized) once.
It... it didn't look pleasant.
and that war never reached the cities, so there is no excuse for how fucking bad they look. the city looks post apocalyptic.
Early 90's is not long ago, and the costs to a civil war are in the tens of billions of dollars in immediate costs, and (I think, I don't have the book handy) about 1.5% of lost GDP growth per year of conflict.
15 years of conflict that ended less than two decades ago most certainly has repercussions that the country is dealing with now.
The one that actually exists looks less pleasant.
It gets worse. Unlike most insects, these little bastards actually COME AFTER YOU! (well, not unless you piss them off first, of course)
I swear, no matter how many times you stomp them, they just keep coming up. It's like you need a steamroller to properly kill them...
but
I do remember a lot of poverty, quite a bit of theft, and a great many frustrated aid workers. My parents, who both worked there, will occasionally soliloquize about the country. It is one of if not the poorest in the world that does not have an ongoing war, and my mother thinks the economic situation is due to both how badly the colonialists fucked up and also an ongoing mindset of "inshallah" where people are sort of just whatever about the future, whether that is their political elections or the next year's crop. You know, if God wills it, so be it.
Me personally, i am shamefully ignorant about where I spent the first decade of my life
It's pretty straightforward. The vast majority of African nations have essentially a huge supply of un-utilized productive potential -- labor, capital, natural resources, etc. They also have relatively small GDPs, which makes it relatively easy for a foreign nation with a huge GDP to inject a big monetary boost through infrastructure projects, spur aggregate demand, and dramatically boost employment and growth while also generating long-term public capital (like roads) which will yield long-term increases in standard of living and growth.
How do we fix corruption, and dictatorial regimes? Fuck if I know, but it seems like a strong modern economy tends to solve that problem on its own somehow. Just look at...well basically every country with a functional and relatively honest government. Virtually none of them started that way, it's worth remembering.
I mean, shit, France really didn't even manage to figure out how to do modern democratic-capitalism with sound governance until the 1940s, practically. I'd hardly say the Third Republic was a model of democracy.
By comparison, many African nations are on a really accelerated timetable, compared to how long it took many European and Asian nations to figure out how to run shit properly. And there are the models and the bright spots, like Ghana.
In any case, foreign aid has been in the area of US$60 billion - US$100 billion a year to Africa for well over two decades, yet gains have been minimal. The Marshall Plan cost US$13 billion according to Wikipedia, though that's in 1940's or 1950's dollars and I don't care to adjust those numbers while I'm at work.
Is more money really the answer?
Money to keep people from falling under is pretty important, but it isn't a silver bullet. What's more, people, infrastructure, and training were already in place with the marshall plan, and unfortunately those are almost all collective action problems from a underdeveloped country's perspective.
If you're in a poor situation, it's not in your best interest to get training because there's no guarantee you can put your skills to use. If you're an entrepreneur there's little reason to train people because then you spend the money training them, and they often get wooed away by other countries or competing businesses that can afford higher salaries because they didn't invest in the training. And investing in infrastructure is only good if enough people and services can take advantage of it, meaning individual businesses wouldn't want to. These arguments have about the nuance of a club, I'm mainly recalling from my developmental economics text.
Sometimes there is talk of 'super entrepreneurs' that could go into these underdeveloped countries and essentially start an economy by themselves and then slowly auction it off at profit, but the sheer logistics of that make it unfeasible I believe.
On the black screen
Of course, if that's true the solution to Africa's problems is much more involved than "throw money at the problem." Institutional reform takes years if not decades to accomplish and it's only just being studied.
hell if i know how to go about this
i would imagine there are already attempts at birth control education that have not stuck for various reasons
maybe i'm streaming terrible dj right now if i am its here
Yeah... the Vatican. And George Bush.
Well Bush's "come on guys don't have sex" method wasn't working very well. Trying to lower the birth rate isn't very practical. Its easier to raise the standard of living which nearly always gives a lower birth rate.
Charter cities (proposed by Paul Romer) are sort of interesting as a concept. Basically an industrialized nation gets some land from a less developed nation in a voluntary trade. The industrialized nation sets all the rules and regulations governing a new city built on this land. Generally this is assumed to mean it would become a small-open economy governed primarily as a technocracy. These cities would also be subject to some amount of leeway in formualting policy proscriptions so there would be a certain amount of natural experimentation going on. There is an article in the Atlantic about it. I mean it seems really idealistic, but given how horribly everything else has failed, maybe it is worth a shot.
This is something that happens automatically when economic status improves, and was not a prerequisite for any current industrialized nation
Discuss.
Have you read Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth?
Artificially controlling childbirth is really tricky. Having lots of kids benefits people in the short term but hurts the country as a whole. Having less kids and more resources to spend on each kid can help in both terms but only if people do it at largely the same clip. When it doesn't happen naturally, bad things can happen though. China famously cut their child births artificially, and effectively I might add, and they're about to seriously pay for it now.
Personally, I'm of a mind that we shouldn't screw with child birth at all, try to fix everything else and let the people naturally have less kids as it becomes advantageous for them.
Saammiel that is really interesting. I have to go to work now but I will look at that when I get back.
On the black screen
Violent. Frequently poor.
I once saw a man pee on the street in China.
Er wait, sorry, that was Chinatown in San Fran.