Why is Africa underdeveloped?

Examining the disparate evolution of human history across the world

 COMMENT | NNANDA KIZITO SSERUWAGI | I am a citizen of a Third World country. I live in the Global South. I hope that explains all about my interest in the subject of development, or, to be more exact, the subject of Africa’s underdevelopment. My search for answers compelled me to open pages of multiple books. One of the insightful ones, whose acclaim and criticism are both constructive for a curious mind seeking to unravel the disparity in how human history unfolded across the globe, is Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies”.

Jared Diamond seeks to understand why Eurasia became disproportionately powerful and innovative compared to other continents, especially, for my interest, Africa. He engages the proximate factors usually raised to answer the foregoing query. If capitalism, mercantilism, scientific inquiry, technology, and nasty germs that killed the people of other continents when they came in contact with western Eurasians are the proximate forces responsible for the development disparity, why did those factors arise in western Eurasia and not in other places, say, sub-Saharan Africa? Or why did they arise only to a lesser degree or not at all in some continents?

The modern world is quite unevenly developed. By development, here, I mean the level of advancement in technology, wealth, and consequently, power. The peoples of Eurasian origin, i.e., Europeans, eastern Asians, and North Americans (who were transplanted from Europe), dominate the world economically and politically. As for most of us Africans, even after liberating ourselves from colonialism, still remain at the bottom of the global distribution of wealth and power.

How did wealth and power become distributed so disproportionately? Why weren’t Africans or Aboriginal Australians the ones who conquered Europeans and Asians? This is the question intriguing my mind, and it is the question Diamond tries to answer.

History tells that by A.D. 1500, when Europe had just begun to colonise parts of the world, there were already noticeable political and technological disparities on different continents. However, until around 11,000 B.C., all peoples on all continents were still hunter-gatherers. The different rates of development on different continents between 11,000 B.C. and A.D. 1500 were what led to the technological and political inequalities of A.D. 1500. Diamond, therefore, asks, why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents? The history of interactions among disparate peoples at the time shaped the modern world through conquest, epidemics and genocide. The colonisation of Africa and other societies is therefore not simply an explanation of our underdevelopment but also a consequence of it. In other words, we are economically and politically weaker because we were colonised, but we were colonised because we were economically and politically weaker. And my question, and Diamond’s, is why that happened in the first place.

There is no single, absolutely acceptable explanation for the inequality in the distribution of development across Europe, North America, Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. The answers I am looking for, including Diamond’s explanation, are only proximate. For Diamond, the proximate explanation for this disparity is that some peoples developed guns, germs, steel and other factors which conferred upon them political and economic power before others did. This is why the modern world is unequally developed.

When European explorers first understood the differences in technological and political sophistication among different peoples, they assumed that those differences were due to innate biological capabilities. When Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and natural selection gained global repute, explanations of these differences were recast in terms of natural selection. Technologically primitive peoples, especially sub-Saharan Africans, were considered less adept at evolving, remaining as vestiges of their apelike ancestors. When the science of genetics was discovered, explanations were once again recast to say that Europeans were genetically superior and more intelligent than Africans and other less advanced peoples. Racism had finally found a seemingly more objective backing.

However, contrary to the above theories, Jared Diamond posits that history followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples’ environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves. Despite dismissals of this theory, often discounted by historians as simplistic environmental determinism, Diamond maintains that geography obviously has some effect on history. The question for him is the extent of that effect, and whether geography can amount to history’s broad pattern.

Whereas Diamond’s subject matter is history, the approach he takes to reach answers is that of science, or specifically, historical sciences, such as evolutionary biology, biogeography, and geology.

Diamond conducts a small-scale natural experiment to test how environments affect human societies by studying the history of the Moriori and Maori. Both groups had diverged from a common origin less than a millennium earlier. They were both Polynesian peoples. The modern Maori are descendants of Polynesian farmers who colonised New Zealand around A.D. 1000. Another group of the Maori colonised the Chatham Islands and became the Moriori. Diamond notes that in the centuries after the two groups separated, they evolved in different directions. The North Island Maori developed more complex technology and political organisation, while the Moriori developed less complex technological and political systems. Why this outcome? Because upon separation, the Moriori became hunter-gatherers while the North Island Maori reverted to more intensive farming. But still, why did this happen?

It happens that the differing environments of the Chatham Islands and of New Zealand moulded the Moriori and the Maori differently. Here is an example where people from a common founding culture who went their separate ways, and encountered radically different environments, eventually evolved divergent social outcomes. The Maori-Moriori experiment disqualifies the argument of innate cultural and racial differences.

The Maori inhabited large square miles of arable land, which supported the production of crop surpluses. Large harvests made it feasible to invent redistribution and storage. This ultimately led to an increase in population growth, since nutritious food was abundant, but also, and importantly, led to the emergence of non-farming and non-hunting specialists such as armies, bureaucrats, and chiefs. The Moriori who remained in the Chathams were unfortunately confined to small, remote islands, which limited both agriculture and population growth. Isolated in small bands of hunter-gatherers, they had to learn to live harmoniously, hence adopting cultural practices like castration of some male infants to control overpopulation, and even renouncing war. While the Maori developed complex social, political and economic systems, and invented weapons for their armies, the Moriori lived peacefully, never learnt how to fight, and developed no weapons. When the two societies eventually collided about 500 years later, Maori warriors exterminated and enslaved hundreds of the Moriori, rendering the small, isolated population of peaceful hunter-gatherers, equipped with only the simplest technology and weapons, entirely inexperienced at war, lacking strong leadership or organisation, extinct.

Diamond presents the Maori-Moriori collision as symbolising a small test within a medium-sized test to understand environmental influences on human societies. The practice of intensive agriculture supported high population densities among the Maori, and variations associated with different population densities and sizes were such that economies remained simplest within societies with low population densities (such as the Moriori on Chatham Islands). This was because in those societies, each household made what it needed. There was little or no economic specialisation. On the flipside, specialisation was higher on larger, more densely populated islands, such as those inhabited by the Maori. Therefore, social complexity and political organisation required larger, more densely populated societies, which in turn were supported by intensive agricultural production. Diamond broadens his theory from the Maori-Moriori collision, applying the same logic globally. He posits that the difference in wealth, power, and social complexity between societies across world history can be explained by environmental and geographical factors rather than anything inherent in the people themselves.

Another key factor Jared Diamond uses to explain the disparity in the way human history unfolded across the globe is germs. He argues that diseases transmitted to peoples lacking immunity by invading peoples with considerable immunity played a major part in shaping world history. For instance, smallpox, measles, influenza, typhus, bubonic plague, and other infectious diseases endemic in Europe played a decisive role in European conquests by decimating multitudes of peoples on other continents. In America, diseases spread from Europeans to several native tribes, killing an estimated 95% of the population, even before interacting with the Europeans themselves. However, diseases didn’t only advance colonial forces; they also played a defensive role sometimes for victims of colonialism. For instance, malaria, yellow fever, and other tropical diseases in Africa, India, and Southern Asia were the most reliable line of defence against advancing European colonisers in those tropical areas.

But why weren’t Africans or Native Americans the bearers of diseases and weapons against which Europeans lacked immunity?

To investigate the above question, we need to look at the differences in time when different societies acquired agriculture. Food production was indirectly a prerequisite for the development of guns, germs and steel. Diamond finds that geographic variations in whether or when the peoples of different continents became farmers and herders explain to a large extent their subsequent fates. As already stated, the direct correlation from agriculture to dominance is that the availability of more consumable calories meant more people or a higher population. The domestication of large mammals also meant more food from the meat of animals themselves, but also increased food production by pulling ploughs, hence making it possible for people to till land that had previously been uneconomical for farming.

An indirect consequence of farming is that it led to a sedentary lifestyle enforced upon farmers. People of many hunter-gatherer societies would move frequently, searching for wild foods, but farmers had to remain near their fields and orchards. The result of fixed settlement contributed to denser populations by permitting a shortened birth interval, whereas hunter-gatherer mothers would often shift camp, making it difficult to carry many children alongside personal possessions. Another consequence of a settled existence is that it encouraged food storage, which was essential for feeding non-food-producing specialists, as earlier stated. This was a prerequisite for the development of settled, politically centralised, socially stratified, economically complex, technologically innovative societies.

But also, as earlier stated, the germs that played a key role in wars of conquest evolved first in human societies with domestic animals. Infectious diseases arose as specialised germs of humans derived from mutations of very similar ancestral germs that had infected animals. Therefore, the availability of domesticated plants and animals explains why empires/Kingdoms, literacy, and steel weapons developed earliest in Eurasia and later, or not at all, on other continents.

Jared Diamond states that one of the central facts of human history is the early importance of the part of Southwest Asia known as the Fertile Crescent, which is said to have been the earliest site for a whole string of developments. These developments included cities, writing, empires, and other inventions. He notes that all those developments emerged, in turn, from the dense populations, stored food surpluses, and feeding of non-farming specialists made possible by the rise of food production. He suggests that any attempt to understand the modern world must come to grips with the question of why the Fertile Crescent’s domesticated plants and animals gave it such a potent head start. He further observes that the crops and animals of that region enabled its people to meet humanity’s basic economic needs, including carbohydrates, proteins, fat, clothing, traction and transport.

Diamond connects the Fertile Crescent’s fortunes to the idea that the differences in the orientation of the continents’ axes had an enormous, sometimes tragic consequence on how human history evolved on those continents. The shape and orientation of Africa and the Americas are such that they span a much greater distance from the North to the South, while Eurasia spans a greater distance from the East to the West. Diamond finds that the East-West axis orientation greatly favoured the early spread of crops, writing, wheels, and other inventions, while the North-South continental axis orientation did not favour the spread of crops and innovations.

The spread of crops from the Fertile Crescent was so rapid because localities distributed east and west of each other share the same day length and its seasonal variations. They also tend to share similar diseases, regimes of temperature and rainfall, and habitats or biomes (large, distinct geographical regions defined by their unique climate, soil, plants, and animal life). Plants are also adapted to diseases prevalent at their latitude. Therefore, part of the reason why Fertile Crescent plants spread east and west rapidly was that they were already adapted to the climates of the regions to which they were spreading.

Not only did continental differences in axis orientation affect the diffusionof food production, but also of other technologies and inventions. Whereas wheels and writing are not directly linked to latitude and day length in the way crops are, they are instead linked indirectly in terms of food production systems and their consequences. Diamond posits that the earliest wheels were parts of ox-driven carts used to transport agricultural produce. Additionally, writing was restricted to elites supported by food-producing peasants, and it supported economically and socially complex food-producing societies (such as royal myths, goods inventories, and bureaucratic record keeping). In other words, societies that engaged in intensive agricultural exchanges were likely to become involved in other exchanges as well.

An irony in the pride of many African societies is the social value of Ubuntu, which exists in many of our cultures. It speaks to harmonious co-existence and is characterised by empathetic and supportive communal existence. Unfortunately, this pacifism historically proves to be catastrophic. Why? Because throughout history, war has often been the leading stimulant of technological innovation, and the fate of technologically primitive societies was often subjugation by technologically superior invaders.

Technological innovations, Diamond argues, were historically not mostly invented locally, but instead were usually borrowed from one society to another. The relative importance of local invention and of borrowing depended mainly on the ease of invention of the particular technology and the proximity of the particular society to other societies. The reason why complex inventions were usually acquired by borrowing was that they spread more rapidly than they could be independently invented locally. The process through which new technology could be diffused from one society to another may occur through peaceful trade, espionage, or emigration. Jared Diamond notes that, depending on their geographic location, societies differ in how readily they can receive technology by diffusion from other societies.

There are three key factors whose variations led to intercontinental differences in the development of technology. These are: time of onset of food production, barriers to diffusion, and human population size. Eurasia (effectively including North Africa), being the world’s largest landmass, encompassing the largest number of competing societies, was also privileged to be the location with the two centers where food production began the earliest, i.e., the Fertile Crescent and China. As already stated, its east-west major axis permitted many inventions adopted in one part to spread relatively rapidly to societies at similar latitudes and climates elsewhere in Eurasia. In other words, geographic and ecological barriers to the diffusion of technology were less severe in Eurasia than in other continents.

The fate of sub-Saharan Africa was unfortunately shaped by the Saharan desert, which remains a major ecological barrier separating us from Eurasia and North Africa, yet we were physically more accessible to Eurasia than the Americas. Africa’s north-south axis orientation also posed a further obstacle to the diffusion of technology, both between Eurasia and sub-Saharan Africa and within the sub-Saharan region itself.

The disparities in population size across history on various continents also had a profound effect on the unequal development we see today. Larger populations mean more inventors and more competing societies. Sub-Saharan Africa and Australia historically have had the lowest populations. Diamond argues that continental differences in axis orientation, population, ease of diffusion, and onset of food production, exerted by the rise of technology, became exaggerated because technology catalysed itself. Therefore, it was not a distinction in human intellect, but rather the considerable initial advantage that Eurasia had that translated into a huge lead.

Using multiple stories in various chapters ofthe book, capturing the history of different human societies, Jared Diamond proves that whenever people with access to the prerequisites of food production, favoured by a location that supported technology diffusion from elsewhere, always replaced people who did not have those advantages. Similarly, whenever people of a common ancestry spread out over diverse environments, their descendants developed in separate ways, depending on those environmental differences.

It is very surprising that it was Europeans who colonised sub-Saharan Africans, and not the other way around. Why? Because Africa was the cradle of mankind for millions of years, and was also the homeland of modern man, i.e., the homo sapien. Therefore, Africa had an advantageous head start, yet it also enjoyed highly diverse climates and habitats of the world’s highest human diversity. Diamond suggests that sub-Saharan Africa was conquered easily when it collided with European colonialists because the Europeans entering Africa enjoyed the triple advantage of superior technologies (guns), widespread literacy, and complex political organisation necessary to sustain expensive programs of exploration and conquest.

The subsequent question to address would be why Europeans, and not Africans, were the bearers of the above three decisive advantages. As I have already explained, all three advantages arose historically from the development of food production. An important fact to note is that food production in sub-Saharan Africa was delayed compared to Eurasia, largely due to the insufficiency of domesticable plant species and native animals in Africa. Additionally, Africa had a much smaller surface area suitable for indigenous food production, while, as already noted, its north-south axis orientation retarded the spread of food production and innovations. As far as plant and animal domestication was concerned, Eurasia had the advantages of a head start and diversity. Also, Africa’s surface area is about half that of Eurasia. Again, only about one-third of its area is in the sub-Saharan zone north of the equator, where the earliest farming societies lived.

Africa today is home to about 1.5 billion people. In comparison, Eurasia has about 5.6 billion people. When all other factors are held constant, more land and more people mean more competing societies and more inventions, which consequently lead to faster development. Africa’s dominant north-south axis orientation also greatly disadvantaged us. Diamond observes that, as one moves along a north-south axis, they traverse zones differing greatly in climate, habitat, rainfall, day length, and diseases of crops and animals. As such, plants and animals domesticated in one part of Africa had a great difficulty in moving to other parts. In contrast, we noted that crops and animals moved easily between Eurasian societies thousands of miles apart because they were located along the same latitude and shared similar climates and day lengths.

Jared Diamond’s scholarship destroys white racism because it reveals that Europe’s colonisation of Africa had nothing to do with racial or genetic differences within the people themselves. Instead, it was due to accidents of geography and biogeography. Diamond contends that all human societies harbour inventive people. However, some environments provided more starting materials and more favourable conditions for utilising inventions than others. As an African, I would wish to see a world where sub-Saharan Africans, Aboriginal Australians, or Native Americans dominate in wealth and power. That seems unlikely, because our fate was greatly disadvantaged by the trajectory history took thousands of years ago.

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The writer is a Ugandan thinking about Uganda.

Snnanda98@gmail.com