To be sure, there are individual major cities in Africa which rival any high-tech city in the world: life there is very much like life in New York, London, Berlin, or Vienna. Africa’s modern large cities are every bit as good as the rest of the world’s.
But those large cities are a rare exception to the average life of the average African.
Africa’s developmental delays are due, at least in part, to the physical structure of the land itself, as scholar Tim Marshall writes:
Africa’s coastlines? Great beaches, really, really lovely beaches, but terrible natural harbors. Rivers? Amazing rivers, but most of them are rubbish for actually transporting anything, given that every few miles you go over a waterfall. These are just two in a long list of problems which help explain why Africa isn’t technologically or politically as successful as Western Europe or North America.
The landscape of Africa, then, is an obstacle to internal connections between different regions of the continent, and an obstacle to external connections to the rest of the world.
The problems in Africa have resisted a bewildering diversity of attempted solutions, both those proposed by the Africans themselves, and those proposed by outsiders.
There are lots of places that are unsuccessful, but few have been as unsuccessful as Africa.
The landscape of Africa sharply divides the northern edge on the Mediterranean coast from the much larger southern part of the continent. The Sahara Desert forms an effective barrier between these two areas.
Tim Marshall explains that the civilizations of sub-Saharan Africa were
separated from everyone else by the Sahara Desert and the Indian and Atlantic oceans. Almost the entire continent developed in isolation from the Eurasian land mass, where ideas and technology were exchanged from east to west, and west to east, but not north to south.
The coastline of Africa, with its lack of harbors, and the mostly uncrossable Sahara Desert effectively cut much of Africa off from the rest of the world. Much more important than the exchange of material goods is the exchange of ideas, but the Africans got neither.
Inside the continent, unnavigable rivers kept the communities of Africa apart from each other.
It is therefore a what and not a who responsible for Africa’s lack of development: the land itself kept Africa away from the marketplace of ideas and the marketplace of goods. Africa’s greatest obstacle is the lack of deepwater ports, its unusable rivers, and the impassable Sahara Desert.
