what a strange accident of geography
We all know how Earth’s magnetic field pulls wealth northward
Spain and Portugal being spicy whites and forgiven for their uwu cowoniawism
I think they were just trying to make the landmasses recognizable, we’re not excusing Florida or California either
For sure, just found it funny
I fucking hate the pick mes every time there’s a video or article like this. “As a Nigerian…” Etc. just the most subservient colonized mindset.
This is why I will never diss Mao for getting rid of our Chinese gusanos and their egg monopolies.
Online I just assume anyone who starts a sentence with “as a xxxxxx” is a white person trying to defend the status quo.
Especially with Nigeria being an English speaking country there is a type of rich person who would talk like that, so I would say it’s a toss up
I came here to say the exact same thing. Also “I’m farther left than most but…”
“I’m not a bigot but…”
if africa is so shitty how come the europeans are so desperate to control it
As a resident of Easter Island I feel as though I must warn the world that the Moai stir
Their dreams have turned sour and soon they will wake and unleash their vengeance upon the world!
they’re coming
🗿
Man videos like the one in the post make me really upset and I can’t seem to verbalize why :(
I think it’s because westerners know so little about the continent that youtubers can make up whatever to their audience that will watch and be like, “huh, that does make sense”.
You can say the Namib desert is a very hostile location in a much less racist way, it’s amazing that this person was friends with secondthought, maybe they still are, but they clearly aren’t watching secondthought videos
trying to explain African underdevelopment to YouTube commenters: imagine a Vidya
I used to follow this fed account and a couple of the videos were just SO wrong I figured it had to be atroturfing lmfao
What does the video say?
According to a comment:
========= Summary:
- Isolation & Access
-
Sahara Desert blocks north-south connection
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Smooth coasts lack natural harbors
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Rivers blocked by rapids/waterfalls near coasts
- Triple Transport Trap
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No deep-water ports
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No ocean-navigable rivers
-
Most landlocked countries globally (16)
- Disease & Agriculture
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Only continent fully spanning tropics
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Tsetse fly prevents livestock use
-
Limited, fragmented farmland
- Resource Paradox
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World’s richest mineral deposits
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Highest transport costs globally
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Geography prevents efficient resource use
This creates a devastating cycle: Rich resources can’t efficiently reach markets, limiting development, which in turn prevents infrastructure improvements that could overcome geographic barriers.
================
These are of course totally unresolvable issues and colonialism and crippling foreign debts imposed upon conquered natives have absolutely nothing to do with the lack of programs controlling tsetse flies or developing farmland or building roads through those nasty natural barriers or anything like that, just pure geographical determinism as as result of the world materializing as it currently is 72 hours ago
Cool, some Jared Diamond style geographic determinism.
It’s so easy to imagine an alt history version of this explaining why Europe is so underdeveloped:
- it’s cold half the year, plummeting productivity
- the lack of sunlight causes mass vitamin D efficiency
- the lack of key resources stymies progress
- the intertwined borders cause regular wars which destroy progress
Unfortunately due to a quirk of evolution any time you try to build a train in Africa it gets attacked by lions, just an unavoidable thing that happens and a perfectly good reason why there’s less infrastructure
The minute African nations start building a pan African railway, the crackers are going to swarm out of the woodwork with overwhelming concern for the “pristine natural environments of the African continent” mark my words
There might be some small merit to analyzing “why, 500 years ago, was sub-saharan africa not as built up as Europe, China, or India were at the same point in time” where you could point to environmental factors making large scale, bureaucratic, agricultural states with long range logistics and trade more difficult but even that relies on the incorrect assumption that Africa didn’t also have that, which it did. It may not have been the same as those systems were on the Asian continent (including Europe, despite Europe being a relative backwater) and the Indian subcontinent, but there were still large scale trade networks and large agricultural civilizations mining iron and forging steel.
And of course everything after that is explained by “European imperial powers did it, with guns and/or the threat of guns and/or local comprador fucks collaborating with European empires for personal gain at everyone else’s expense.”
The thing is 500 years ago northern Africa was arguably more developed than Europe was at the time, had thriving mineral trades, and African goods were regarded as being of exceptionally high quality
Remember that the richest man in recorded history was an African king
Most landlocked countries globally (16)
just a quirk of plate tectonics, really
He mentions colonization and exploitation at the beginning of the video
For like 15 seconds, never actually analyzing it before launching into an hour-long video about how it’s just geography, maaaaaan
“uNbUrDeNeD bY wHaT hAs BeEn”
I think the apple’s rotten right to the core
From all the things passed down
From all the apples coming before
The real life lore of the invisible hand magically extracting all riches from Africa and transferring them to North America
Probably lives comfortably in a NATO country if they’re actually Nigerian.
