Why has Africa historically been so poor?

>>2157546

because niggers.

they didn't pull themselves up by their bootstraps and start a business

Will poorfags ever learn?

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>>2157546
Because they don't let Mama Ethiopia rule them

All praises be to H.I.M

Same could have been said by some Roman, Persian or Egyptian about all of Europe except Greece and Italy for 4000 years out of 5000 years of human civilization.
Also, why do you suppose that progress has some intrinsic value? It's just a tool to achieve a happier life and it's really not clear if a life of the tribal hunter gatherer is worse than a life of many people in Dickensian Britain. It also demands much more skill and intelligence and can be more satisfying than the life of the modern cubical wage slave.

>>2157596
>lol relax man let's smoke weed erryday instead of work n shit
Your kind of thinking is why the Indians got almost whiped out by Europeans.

>>2157546
>Why has Africa historically been so poor?

Don't go with "Africa". It's a big continent, with many diverse peoples and cultures.

In medieval times the Mali kingdom was one of the wealthiest states in the world, supplying an incredible amount of gold through the saharan trade routes. On 4chan people tend to laugh at Mali though, because they used mud bricks to build structures - a consequence of their environment.

Temperate zones, except for the incredibly fertile river systems like the Nile and the Euphrates and Tigris, were simply better suited for advanced civilization in the past once agricultural practices and architecture had spread. Large and varied timbers and woods, easy access to stone, so many factors come into play. In most of Africa you don't have this, discounting the Nile and Egypt (and ancient Egyptians were mostly Asiatic-Semitic in the lower Nile)

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>>2157596
The fuck, cities and that stuff were common in the late Neolithic/calcolithic,castles, fortified villages and all that stuff is found from Spain to Greece(even in the fucking isles) before Aqueans existed. Heck, the proto-Romanians could have been the first to invent writing, and were exporters of copper axes to they neighbours 6.000 years ago.

>>2157546
They have bad guns, germs and steel

>>2157546
Due to a lot o reasons, they weren't technologicaly advanced as europeans, thus being violently raped by them when Europe was out to rule the world.
Also, differently from contries like Japan, for instance, it has never been a good strategy for developed countries to invest in the actual improvement of Africa. That's why Japan has recovered from World War II and Africa is a gutter to this day.

>>2157546
Why Nations Fail. Should be mandatory reading desu

No trade routes were going through central and south africa

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>>2157546
The Anglo-Dano-Dutch tried (And failed) to colonize western africa, after all, the place was rich in gold, pepper, ivory and slaved, so why did they fail?

Western Africa might possibly be the worst for transportation, the lowlands are malaria infested marshes, so disease riddled that not even Africans settled there. Go inland and you will find tropical savhanna. The Savhanna, while fertile and ideal for agriculture, floods unpredictably making roads and other structures buildt there impossible to maintain.

If that wasn't enough, driving livestock is difficult when your stock is impossible to protect from the tsetse fly, without cattle freeing up people from subsistence agriculture you can't have specialization of labor, trade or cities. This is why west africa, while having a relatively high population density, never had large cities.

So you have no surplus because you have your agriculture is unproductive. If you get surplus and want to sell it, can't go by land because you have no horses or roads, you can't go by river because the river dries up in the dry season, you can't go by sea because the coast is a disease plagued hellhole

Everyone was a subsistence farmer. This can also explain why West Africa never developed a strong work ethic like the Protestant or Sino world, there were simply no need to work overtime because there were no complex markets to sell to or buy from.

This is not to take away that africa is cityless continent, cities and empires did exist, but centralized empires only existed in Ethiopia and Mali, and then again they were far less centralized and impressive than the Roman, Persian, Chinese, Khmer, or early modern European empires.

Disconnect from the silk trade route.