/Africa General /ag/

I really don't want to be "that guy" that just wont leave a topic alone but I find it increasingly frustrating that every time an Africa thread comes up, the mods don't even give us an opportunity to populate it with useful and relevant information to counter the trolls. Instead they all get deleted which forces them to just remake. So once for all, lets try and have a friendly, informative, productive, and good-spirited Africa General.

Other urls found in this thread:

genetics.org/content/161/1/269)
academic.oup.com/jcem/article/92/7/2519/2598282/Serum-Estrogen-But-Not-Testosterone-Levels-Differ
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoamine_oxidase_A
personal.lse.ac.uk/greened/nep.pdf
worldwatch.org/system/files/NtP-Africa's-Indigenous-Crops.pdf
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_African_kingdoms
twitter.com/NSFWRedditImage

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Great idea! I'll get this started. What are some historical reasons for Africa's failure to ever accomplish anything? No medicine, literature, philosophy, art, math, science, architecture, NOTHING. They haven't progressed beyond a mud hut in 50,000 years! How can a group of people be so stupid?

Same reason why abbos didn't progress, geographical isolation is a big issue.

why haven't this general apported nothing to Veeky Forums?

why did you bump this threaed? it was close to dying

it is because you spam the same thread over and over despite being given the answer

didn't notice that kek

>tfw you actually find the topic interesting but if you try to discuss it seriously on Veeky Forums you'll just be ignored or overwhelmed by retardation
I don't know how many times I've written several paragraphs explaining the lack of development and just been ignored. Why fucking bother? You people don't want answers or even discussion, you want masturbation.

Shitpost answer. Greeks, Vietnamese and arguably Yugoslavs experienced just as disastrous civil wars in the past 70 years but never went full sub-saharan tier in living standards and general behavior.

Because your answers always attribute it to either naked geographical determinism (that doesn't even make sense as it aribtrarily ignores the impermeability of other land/sea barriers) or just "hurr its actually really COMPLICATED, here let me spend four paragraphs discussing the symptoms rather than the fundamental cause".

Vietnam is literally worse off and poorer than most of Sub-Saharan Africa right now.

Because /pol/ infiltration and lazy mods. If the rules were actually enforced a third of the user base would've been perma-banned by now.

>muh safe space

So in other words
>Let's not talk about race and just ignore a fundamental aspect of culture that we ALWAYS discuss whenever we talk about any other groups
>Because whenever we talk about blacks, race doesn't exist a priori, but whenever we talk about anyone else it does

>Vietnam is literally worse off and poorer than most of Sub-Saharan Africa right now.

could you elaborate more on why geographical determinism isn't a valid response? Cause i find curious than the closes resemblances of civillizations in Africa were close and in contact with other cultures (
North Africa and the mediterranean, Ethiopia and the Arabian Peninsula)

>your answers always attribute it to either naked geographical determinism (that doesn't even make sense as it aribtrarily ignores the impermeability of other land/sea barriers)
You're not addressing any specific argument here. You're just attacking a strawman argument that you didn't even bother to explain.

>or just "hurr its actually really COMPLICATED, here let me spend four paragraphs discussing the symptoms rather than the fundamental cause".
Of course. Anything that can't be summed up in a sentence is too much for you subhuman trash.

Many areas of Yugoslavia and Greece did not see intense fighting, they did not see instability for decades like in Africa. Only the Vietnamese war is comparable in scale and its standards of living were comparable to Africa's at the time.

The term 'geographical determinism' has devolved into a buzzword used by people who don't like explanations that don't involve blaming somebody for something. Stormniggers hate it because it doesn't blame Africans, SJWs hate it because it doesn't blame evil colonists.

To anyone familiar with the processes of societal development it's exceedingly clear that geography, while not alone, is often the single most important factor determining where complex civilian emerges. In sub-Saharan Africa a late development of sedentary agriculture, which is the basis of civilization, meant that there was far less time to develop compared with Eurasia and the Americas. Geographic isolation across most of the continent meant that this could not be remedied by the introduction of developments from elsewhere (aside from the exceptions like Nubia and Ethiopia). Eurasian could civilizations had both antiquity and interconnectedness, American civilizations had a lesser antiquity and hardly any interconnectedness, and Africa had no antiquity and only a limited degree of interconnectedness in some regions. It was clearly at a disadvantage, only Australia being worse off.

But why is it that places like Nubia and Ethiopia are genetically different from Bantus?

>Why isn't geographical determinism the only aspect of the outcome of different folk?
Because there is still biological determininism

Explained by genetic determinism as well.
They we're more susceptible to neolithic migrations from the North (or across the Sea) than from the South, where agriculture couldn't meaningfully change the gene pool when everything south of the Sahara hadn't developed agriculture until very lately due to their geographic isolation.

I meant geographical

>The term 'geographical determinism' has devolved into a buzzword used by people who don't like explanations that don't involve blaming somebody for something. Stormniggers hate it because it doesn't blame Africans, SJWs hate it because it doesn't blame evil colonists.

No its because people here have an autistic hate boner for Jared diamond.
Not because if muh sjws and muh stormfront.

But what you are saying ignores the historical factor of a lot of these nation development.

The same reason they're more developed; they had connections with the rest of the world. Inevitably this results in both population mixing and societal interaction.

Also keep in mind that Africa has always been gentically diverse, and before the Bantu expansion there would have been people closer to Ethiopians and Somalis further into Africa.

>But what you are saying ignores the historical factor of a lot of these nation development
Can you explain?

And from where does that difference in biology come from? From what i know Aboriginal australians had to adapt to the island's harsh climate. So if Africans have a biological different to other people wouldn't that also be a result of geographical determinism?

*have biological variations

Yeah different environs select for different phenotypes (Usually Light skin in northern climate, Inuit fat metabolism). But they also affect social norms as well, see Inuit preference for THICC ladies

Lot of North Europeans are pretty swarthy.

Well yes that is how genetics works, environmental pressures forcing the genotype to change over time. Problem is , a person of given genotype will not suddenly change when placed into another environmental and still has the quintessential mannerisms and phenotypical traits of their heritage regardless of environment

True, but Africans has inhabited the arae of modern-day Ethiopia since about 200.000 years ago, and they have been isolated because of the Sahara except during about 2000 years when the Sahara was green after wthe iceage. So if Africans have stayed in a similar environment for thousands of years shouldn't they have remained genetically the same?

Oh and i'm not mentioning the Bantu expansion btw, i know there are different african tribes but i mean in comparison to Europeans and Middle Easteners

>All Africans are genetically the same
Generally speaking there is the Capoids, Congoid, and the Pygmy people who I am aware of. African is not really a race , Ethiopians are different from the pygmies who are different from the Khoisan

Yeah that's why i tried to partially rectify myself with So maybe Africans didn't "develop" civilizations because, asides from geographical determinism, they didn't have an overlaping ethnicity like Europeans? (pic kind of related, also this article says there's more difference within africans than between africans and eurasians genetics.org/content/161/1/269)

Also considering Europeans used to group themselves according to nationality (Frenchman, German, British) maybe the diversity of ethnicities in Africa didn't really serve to develop an organization more complex than those of paternal lines? (At least in the area below the river of Congo)

Not really. I think that Africans have a lower average IQ, higher amounts of testosterone, higher prevelancy of anti-social personality that stem from genetic determinants, and are generally high time preference. All of this would make it difficult for them to develop into a modern industrialized society.

Africans had their own form of society and civilization, it just wasn't what europeans would imagine it ought to be.

>japan
>sardinians

>social personality that stem from genetic determinants,

Which ones? Also testosterone doesn't work like you think it does (blacks don't even have mire of it)

HA

Australia is a lot more isolated than Japan and Sardinia, and the territory becomes quickly inhospitable after venturing into the northern territory so it's not a mistery why people like abbos had to adapt to live in a place like that

...

I feel that this thread has been a bit more constructive than other past discussions

In America Black males have no notable difference in Test. vs white and Mexican-Americans (Mexicans actually have more testosterone then both). Estradiol and SBHG they have more but not by much.

academic.oup.com/jcem/article/92/7/2519/2598282/Serum-Estrogen-But-Not-Testosterone-Levels-Differ (it's about prostrate cancer)

>Which ones
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoamine_oxidase_A
Also yes, testosterone is heavily linked with agressive behavior and anti-social personality traits

Woops, dead link
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoamine_oxidase_A

that's small as fuck 5% and those people only become an issue in dysfunctional homes.

No, anti-social personality traits are innate without environmental influences

>actually admitting to being one of those crayon eating morons that replied to obvious disingenuous bait every time
Kill yourself.

Every demographic in the fucking world has shit that causes "issues" like mental illnesses, degenerative diseases, ADD/ADHD, aggression, risk taking and being prone to addiction. MOA A isn't any special.

>Every demographic in the world has shit that causes issues
Right, just not in the same proportions as others. Some populations are more likely to become arsonists, develop schizophrenia, etc. Some are less likely.

MOA-A has only been tested in American Blacks so it's not really indicative of other populations just like White Americans aren't really indicative of Europeans. We aren't talking about Americans blacks so I don't know why you are bringing this up

But Africans did develop civilizations, you dumb shits. They were less developed than those in Eurasia because they developed later as a result of a later start to agriculture. It's so fucking obvious, I don't understand why you can't get this.

>Mesopotamia
Sedentary agriculture by 6500 BC, civilization by 3500 BC, 3000 years to develop civilization.

>Egypt
Sedentary agriculture by 6000 BC, civilization by 3000 BC, 3000 years to develop civilization.

>China
Sedentary agriculture by 6000 BC, civilization by 1500 BC, 4500 years to develop civilization.

>Mesoamerica
Sedentary agriculture by 6000 BC, civilization by 1200 BC, 4800 years to develop civilization.

>Indus Valley
Sedentary agriculture by 7000 BC, civilization by 2800 BC, 4200 years to develop civilization.

>West Africa
Sedentary agriculture by 1500 BC, civilization by 1000 AD, 2500 years to develop civilization.

Africans did not develop at a slower pace than any other group, they just started out later. They were not averse to urbanisation or social organisation. They were not 'antisocial'. You're coming up with racial arguments to explain something that doesn't exist. If there was some reason to think Africans were uniquely slow in their development then maybe your arguments would be worth some consideration, but they clearly aren't. But you don't really care about that, do you?

My post was referring to the area below the Congo river. I'm aware of the civilizations of West and North Africa but you can hardly consider things like Great Zimbabwe a "civilization",

>developed later because of later development of agriculture
And what exactly held them back from getting agriculture?

It was a pretty important state though if you bother to actually read up on it. On top of that the Kingdom of Zimbabwe was descendant of an early state and also was the predecessor of other local powers within South Africa.

There's also the Kingdom of Kongo as well.

You never said anything about below the Congo river. Either way it doesn't make any difference: the same thing applies. Southern Africa was settled by sedentary Bantu farmers in the first millennium BC, giving it even less time to develop than West Africa. Civilization shouldn't have developed at all, and yet it did in the Kongo area during the late Middle Ages/Early Modern period, and even later further into central Africa, such as Kuba in the 17th century and Buganda in the 19th century (prior to any Arab or European influence).

Great Zimbabwe, while not a civilization, is clear evidence of southern Africans' ability to achieve social complexity. It would be ridiculous to expect a fully formed civilization in the region so soon after the introduction of agriculture.

Agriculture emerged in the last 10,000 years in different societies at diffferent times and for different reasons. The earliest was the Middle East around 8000 BC, a result of subsistence on abundant wild grasses, and it was from this origin that agriculture spread into Europe, North Africa and India. Most societies got agriculture from other societies. Middle Eastern crops couldn't grow south of the Sahara except in Ethiopia and the Cape, which have rain patterns closer to the Middle East, so agriculture couldn't spread south. Africans could only recieve animals from the Middle East, leading to a pastoral economy across the Sahara. It was only when the Saharan climate declined that these pastoralists were forced to suplement their diet with other forms of cultivation, leading to the domestication of finger millet before 2500 BC. However this crop was only integrated into a pastoral economy and did not lead to sedentism until about 1600 BC, when pastoralists began to migrate south and settle in areas like Tichitt, Central Nigeria (the Nok culture) and around Lake Chad. This also seems to have had the knock-on effect of enourging domestication of yams further south.

>American blacks have nothing in common with Africans
>In terms of genetics

The saddest part of Africa is Europe was well on their way to conquering all of Africa and probably geocoding all the blacks before WW1

what makes The Kingdom of Zimbabwe not a civilizations but those other places like Buganda one?

> probably geocoding all the blacks before WW1

Why would they kill all their laborers user? Serology man think it through.

Huge amounts of difference between the two

Well, it's hard to say with Zimbabwe since we're mostly relying on archaeology, but it's generally thought to be a chiefdom based on kinship ties rather than a state with a government bureucracy. Buganda, on the other hand, is known from written sources to have been a centralised state and has been described as the only African society which could properly be called a 'nation state' before colonialism.

personal.lse.ac.uk/greened/nep.pdf

Yeah, Africans actually have lower IQ's and African countries have higher murder and overall crime rates if they even bother to record it

This is a special kind of retardation.

That's not it user.

I'm suprised how many people fell for such an obvious shitposter. Oh well, Veeky Forums's gullibility strikes again

yeah but you have to be a retarded to decide to live in a desert rather than live in fertile land. they literally evolved to be retarded

Would you stop making Africa threads?

Kek

I remember posting the journal of a British military officer about Yorubaland immediately after the conquest of Nigeria

Went very smooth until /pol/fags started screeching in all caps about it being fake and that everyone was a violent cannibal who lived in caves and didn't farm

You can't win

fallacies don't win arguments kid

Geographic barriers to the spread of information.

Agriculture really got hopping in the Levant first (for our purposes anyways). You may note that major civilizations seem to radiate out from there as time goes forward.

Another possible cause is that Africa had really shitty native crops for farming, with poor nutritional value and low calorie per acre yields. Most of those crops were unceremoniously abandoned after the Columbian Exchange. I suspect that agriculture is a much harder sell when the decline in nutritive value is not offset by a surplus that can accrue to the benefit of a social elite.

Can you link the journal? Yorubas are fun.

African crops weren't abandoned. Pearl millet, the first African domesticate, was always a staple and was actually adopted in India, while yams never lost their importance in jungle regions.

It's pretty clear

>Bananas, yams, taro, and other SEA crops arrive in Africa
Population boom
>Corn, cassava, sweet potato arrive in Africa
Bigger population boom

Some fools seem to think that Africa is like a cartoon jungle island with mango and papaya and shit everywhere, really grinds my gears

t. Nigerian

Do you really not understand why I'm making fun of you with that picture?

same can't be said about the inca empire, or hell, a lot of native tribes in the americas. they learned to farm themselves. egyptians didnt come to north america and be like "lmao here how u farm"

>muh corn beans and squash

not an argument, considering africa does have a fuck ton of indigenous crops

worldwatch.org/system/files/NtP-Africa's-Indigenous-Crops.pdf

>muh weather

iroquois grew food and dealt with long lasting winters and lots of snow

>muh they got lucky

native americans came to the americas 10000-25000 years ago, africans had a massive head start

>muh

no you're not, the guy in the picture is autistic, however i am referring to sardinia when neolithic farmers inhabited the island. they developed and did shit themselves.

The Japanese were backwards for most of history. It's only after Sinocization and the Meji revolution that they changed.

Which map is right?

Latin America has a higher crime rate overall than Sub-Saharan Africa

You're more likely to get mugged, raped, and killed in Juarez than Nairobi

You just admitted Africans independently developed agriculture

The land used to be a lot more fertile, but abos overpractived fire-stick farming on the ground which reduced fertility

But they did shit, the hell are you on about?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_African_kingdoms

egyptians == subsaharans lmao cuz this is 100% true right???????

even if i did admit to them developing agriculture, that solidifies that even with agriculture, something else stagnated the creation of society in africa. if agriculture means society, and africa had agriculture but no society, than agriculture is no excuse.

where did european settlers build farms when they arrived? i dont think europeans became hunter and gatherers due to infertile land.

maybe something you didn't know, but north africa and the african horn are caucasoid - they are more related to a european then they are to someone from the congo

This whole post in incomprehenisble.

>same can't be said about the inca empiresame can't be said about the inca empire, or hell, a lot of native tribes in the americas. they learned to farm themselves. egyptians didnt come to north america and be like "lmao here how u farm"
Agriculture emerged in Mesoamerica around 6000 BC and though it might not be as old in the Andes, it's still much older than in Africa. So both regions had more time to develop. What point are you trying to make here? You really don't seem to understand anything we're discussing here.

>>muh corn beans and squash
>not an argument, considering africa does have a fuck ton of indigenous crops
Yes, we've been over this. Africans domesticated pearl millet in the 3rd millennium BC and other crops later on, while also reciving crops from Southeast Asia and the Americas. Again, what is your point?

>>muh weather
>iroquois grew food and dealt with long lasting winters and lots of snow
Nobody said anything about weather. You're just making shit up. And pretty much any given African tribe was more advanced than the Iroquois, so I really have no idea what you're on about.

>>muh they got lucky
>native americans came to the americas 10000-25000 years ago, africans had a massive head start
The head start is in sedentary agriculture, not when they arrive in an area. This is a very simple concept.

>the guy in the picture is autistic, however i am referring to sardinia when neolithic farmers inhabited the island. they developed and did shit themselves
The guy in the picture is probably a troll, but you're actually an idiot. Sardinia was not isolated. They got agriculture from the Middle East like all Europeans and thus had a massive head start over any African society.

>egyptians == subsaharans lmao cuz this is 100% true right???????
You fucking idiot, you just said yourself that 'africa does have a fuck ton of indigenous crops'. None of these come from Egypt, the Egyptians got agriculture from the Middle East.

>even if i did admit to them developing agriculture, that solidifies that even with agriculture, something else stagnated the creation of society in africa. if agriculture means society, and africa had agriculture but no society, than agriculture is no excuse
You haven't understood a single thing anyone has said in this thread, apparently not even yourself. Nobody said Africans lacked crops. What Africans lacked was an early start to agriculture equivalent with Eurasian and American regions.

Ile Ife is in Nigeria, you geographically illiterate moron.

>where did european settlers build farms when they arrived? i dont think europeans became hunter and gatherers due to infertile land.
>comparing agricultural techniques that have evolved for millenia since it's birth and spread in the ME to some people starting out from scratch

>but north africa and the african horn are caucasoid - they are more related to a european then they are to someone from the congo
ayy lmao

#truth

None of those societies are African in the practical sense

I don't even understand what this means.

Again, what the fuck are you talking about? Like another user said, Ife Ife is in Nigeria, and there are a lot of kingdoms in the list quite far from the north or the horn. Stop with this "muh racial superiority" bullshit, nobody is putting "whites" and "blacks" in opposition to each other and it's quite annoying desu.

when i was doing the muh greentext meme i was implying these would be arguments that you would use, and alas, you aren't using any that i greentexed, so i'm guessing i did a good job on that, right?

anways,

we are arguing on what held africa back from agriculture just in case you forgot, and the native american argument i had was that the retarded isolation concept has nothing to do with spread of agriculture, which is the key arguments in both posts i referred to.

let's not use insults here, because you're wrong. agriculture can spread from country to country, but it doesn't necessarily need to is the point i'm making. therefore egypt can get it's agriculture from the middle east, that's literally common sense.

>you haven't understood a single thing anyone has said in this thread
hold up, let me quote "Another possible cause is that Africa had really shitty native crops for farming, with poor nutritional value and low calorie per acre yields. Most of those crops were unceremoniously abandoned after the Columbian Exchange. I suspect that agriculture is a much harder sell when the decline in nutritive value is not offset by a surplus that can accrue to the benefit of a social elite."

am i wrong for arguing against this? apparently so. sorry.

>Ile Ife is in Nigeria, you geographically illiterate moron.

what are you talking about

Did you quote the wrong person?

Was actually intended as a response to

>Yorubas, Binis, Akan, Hausa, Mande, Kongolese, Swahilis and Ugandans aren't African

He either didn't look past the North African examples or didn't he's that one lunatic who thinks everyone outside of the Congo is a 'Med'.

Yes, i fucked up the quote,
and are both mine.

oh nice, thanks

and no, i'm not arguing about me being superior, that's an assumption. and i did not say there were no subsaharan kingdoms, read what i wrote. i wrote that the north african and african horn are caucasoid peoples. what you thought i wrote, for some reason, was "we are superior to blacks and subsaharan kingdoms do not exist"

Das rite

You responded to a post that was itself a response to some dude saying that the Africans did absolutely nothing ever outside mud huts. A thing that is not true. Didn't you write it? Because that + "the ones who did something were Caucasoids" usually implies that kind of ideas.

>we are arguing on what held africa back from agriculture just in case you forgot, and the native american argument i had was that the retarded isolation concept has nothing to do with spread of agriculture
I've already explained why Africa had a late start to agriculture here . Agriculture emerged in the Americas before Africa because the right conditions arose there first. I'm not an expert on Mesoamerican agriculture so I can't explain in detail what those conditions were, but elsewhere such as the Middle East it was the result of people subsiding on abundant wild grasses, allowing populations to grow and eventuall leading to cultivation and domestication. In West Africa people did not primarily live off of wild grasses, but only gradually integrated them into a pastoral economy before eventually turning to sedentary farming. There was no reason for it to emerge at any earlier date.

Geographic and climactic isolation is important because if Africa had been able to adopt crops from the Middle East like Europe, it would not have fallen behind in development. Conversly, if Europe had not been able to adopt agriculture from the Middle East it would have ended up like Africa or worse.

>am i wrong for arguing against this? apparently so. sorry.
Fair enough, I argued against the same point here >what are you talking about
The guy posted a statue from Ile Ife. I assumed your response was in reference to that.