https://www.thenewneo.com/2014/09/22/africa-cry-the-beloved-continent/#comment-829756

Ymarsakar on September 22, 2014 at 3:33 pm said:
“They could throw anybody who opposed them in jail. They took over and gagged the press. They took over and padded the judiciary with their own cronies. They declared themselves President for life. You couldn’t run elections against them.”

Is this supposed to be current day Africa or future day North America?

As some of the black people who are making waves on the Webz have said: “Please stop helping us.”

I think I’d take exception to your article inasmuch as what I see isn’t a centralized state giving economies bad direction as an erratic haphazard state which is ineffective at those tasks which provide an agreeable matrix for commerce and industry to develop while contriving injurious harassment. Not too up to date, but it was a common feature of political economy life in Africa 40-years ago to have overvalued currencies and state monopsonies in particular cash crops that acted to injure the peasantry and promote rural outmigration. Also, tax collection methods have been of necessity primitive.

The strongman remark was a general one and in particular referencing what has happened in Africa since independence from colonialism. It was not specifically meant to refer just to the present moment in time. In my comments here, I linked to two articles that explain my position about Africa in general. I suggest you read them if you want to quickly know what I think. One is by Thomas Sowell, and the other is this previous post of mine.

As we speak, about 1/3 of the governments in tropical and southern Africa are led by quondam men-in-uniform. Most were partisans, some professional military, one the chief of police. For the most part, African heads of government are drawn from the business and professional stratum in those countries, with some bias toward those who were in the employ of international agencies.

And when you say it’s a ‘mess’, compared to when? The continent has always been impoverished and it’s never been particularly well-ordered politically.

1. Nowadays, however, the areas which suffer the most (the Congo, the Central African Republic, Southern Sudan, Somalia, and the Borno province of Nigeria) are notable for a dearth of government, not for abattoir regimes like that of Idi Amin or Francisco Macias. Political pluralism is the order of the day all over Africa and the heads of government are more akin to machine bosses than to madcap tyrants.

2. There have been two fairly generalized accomplishments in Africa over the last 60 years. One is that the majority of the population over 15 has achieved basic literacy. There’s still a great deal of illiteracy, but it now encompasses 40% of the adult population, not 95%.

3. Life expectancy at birth is much improved. About 60 years now on average.

4. Over 60 years, there’s been a great deal of intramural violence, but very little inter-state war.

The downside is that improvement in real incomes has been quite slow over 60 years and non-existent in about a dozen countries. There’s also considerable urban disorder there which there was not previously (because hardly anyone lived in cities).

http://www.trueworldpolitics.com/articles/racism/images/dicussion-of-albert-schweitzer-quote-authenticity.pdf

Imagine the current political and cultural set up of the Giza plain or the deserts of the Sahara. Imagine on the same “continent” the political and cultural setup in Capetown or Rhodesia. Quite different.

Then there are the Somali pirates and then….. you get the picture.

If you want to make generalizations about Africa you need to be very specific. Old tribes don’t really recognize new borders.

https://archive.org/details/frommyafricannot0000schw/page/12/mode/2up