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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32994 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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There’s clearly more going on in Africa than just low IQ. Europe has had waves of migrants. At no point did white people decide that sub-Saharan Africa was worth settling. And often these migrations were at knife point. For most of history people from places with civilization did not decide to move to Africa.

Most places in sub-Saharan Africa were death sentences for European settlers due to various diseases that there were no good ways of avoiding before the late 19th century.

And "death sentence" often in a very literal sense: some European countries would exile troublesome individuals to their African trading posts / islands as a means of killing them without having to execute them.

At no point did white people decide that sub-Saharan Africa was worth settling.

The parts that weren't that hazardous like e.g. the fortuitously depopulated highlands in Kenya, or South Africa were settled.

By the time the tropical lowlands stopped being hazardous to health (1950s+), the population pressure in Europe had abated, and elite opinion was changed against colonisation.

Specifically, the tsetse fly made it difficult to maintain the herds of livestock euros relied on for agriculture, which meant Islam couldn’t expand southwards either even with lots of subsaharan African blood that granted some resistance to malaria.

Gotta love Wikipedia. After several paragraphs casting shade on the British for their dastardly deeds in stealing the highlands

Today, the region is at the heart of Kenya's economy. It is the country's best served region by road and rail and has many flourishing cities such as Nairobi, Nakuru, Eldoret, Kitale, Thika, Kericho and Nyeri.[6] Although covering only five percent of Kenya's total land area, it produces most of Kenya's agricultural exports, particularly tea, coffee, sisal and pyrethrum.[6]

Just a coincidence I'm sure.

And that in some form is basically true everywhere. The wealthiest and most culturally influential black group today is where they were slaves. Of course many groups do not notice these correlations when reading these articles.

At no point did white people decide that sub-Saharan Africa was worth settling.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Africa

You’re probably overstating the attractiveness of South Africa to settler colonists. The boers were settled more to allow Dutch trading ships to the East Indies a convenient source of resupply than because holland had vast numbers of people clamoring to move to Africa.

Fair I said this too strongly. And was more referencing the ancient regimes and movement of people.

Still fairly limited considering Africa is closer than to Europe and the new world was largely settled first.

Still fairly limited considering Africa is closer than to Europe and the new world was largely settled first.

It's about over 2400 miles from northern France to Nova Scotia. The only sane way get to Nigeria would be by sea, which is nearly 5000 miles, which about the same as the distance to New York.

When you arrive in Nigeria, you are facing a land full of unfamiliar diseases, before vaccines. You are competing with many established civilisations. When you arrive in Nova Scotia, you arrive in lands that have already been considerably emptied by European diseases, and with diseases that have not been enhanced by urbanisation, and the nearest civilisations are thousands of miles to the south.

To put some numbers on that, estimates I could find put the African population at a lower figure of 50 million in 1500 (mostly Sub-Saharan, I think) whereas the North American population was 1 or 2 million.

Except the places that were settled quickly in the Americas were farther away and had higher populations like the Caribbean’s, Aztec/Mayan empires. 50 million for all of Africa is about the same estimates for the Americas.

There were special political factors in the case of the Aztecs that made colonisation easier. That's a long story, which you probably already know.

It's actually a very similar distance (by sea, of course) from Europe to the Caribbean vs. Europe to Nigeria. In terms of places where Europeans ultimately settled (South Africa, Zimbabwe) it is much further to Africa.

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