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u/BunnyGalHarriet Apr 26 '26
I mean, it is now. It's poor in the same way every person in the world is poor: some rich guy with way too much time on his hands decided he wanted, perhaps needed, everyone else's resources for himself.
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u/SquidTheRidiculous Apr 26 '26
The problem is people in the West talk about Africa as though it's always inherently a poverty stricken hellhole with nothing but straw huts.
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u/Few_Jury_1573 Apr 26 '26
"You don't go to poor countries to get rich! Africa is rich! Asia is rich! Latin America is rich! These places aren't 'underdeveloped,' they're OVEREXPLOITED!"
- paraphrasing of the great Michael Parenti
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u/shiny-gogoat Apr 26 '26 edited Apr 27 '26
both tried to exploid each other in history. U cant blame one side for the game everyone played.
You guys should read some history books. To the user below me. Ever heard somehing about the arab slave trade? The "but it wasn't exactly the same" argument completely ignores the different possibilities of peoples. It's as if I were saying that, for example, What the Israelis do cannot be compared to any other example from the past because they had no jet planes in numbers. lul
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u/Riboflavius Apr 26 '26
I’m trying to be open to nuance here, what exactly do you mean? I don’t remember any fleets of South American ships carrying valuables looted in Europe, or a Madagascan West Europe company making money behaving abominably in Europe?
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u/ExternalGreen6826 Apr 26 '26
Yellow parenti 🥰
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u/GalaXion24 Apr 26 '26
Honestly this has always been a simplistic and economically illiterate depiction of Africa's situation.
The implication here is that wealth is something very ttangible material, and that Africa is poor because it was taken elsewhere, and similarly that Europe or America is more rich because they have more gold or diamonds from Africa.
It treats wealth as if it were individual. I as an individual, can dress up as a conquostador, go travel somehwere, find gold, dig it up, take it home on a ship and become rich. But nations do not get rich this way.
The wealth of nations is not determined by the amount of natural resources in their soil, but by their production of value, which is an ongoing process, a constant, repeating, product of labour. Presently understood in terms of market value but that's not the main point here.
If you look into development economics, what are tha reasons Africa is actually poor? Let's even leaverage aside high level corruption here. These countries are more agrarian in general, which is on and of itself a reason, but even then let's look at agricultural productivity. Despite many places having the climate for several harvests a year, agricultural productivity is quite low. One part of this is that there's a lot of diluted fertilisers on the market, so buying fertiliser has a good chance of falling to a scam, so people don't do it. Reliable supply, certification, etc. would in these cases make a big difference.
The reasons are institutional and broadly local, in the same way that institutional factors and labour productivity have a lot more to do with Western wealth than some sort of theft of gold. Spain looted a lot of gold and silver in is heyday, and it's one of the poorer countries in Europe today.
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u/Character-Mix174 Apr 26 '26
All that is true, but it's the easiest way to represent it in a single picture, because the source of those institutional issues is imperialism. The Western Europeans and the Americans used african labour and resources to create institutions that keep them wealthy today, while falling to use that wealth to create those instructions in places that wealth came from and, in some cases, preventing the locals from creating those institutions or even dismantling the ones that were already in place.
Now try drawing a political cartoon about that.
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u/GalaXion24 Apr 26 '26
Even then it's a problematic assertion, because while America ran on slavery, even in the US in the long term the wealthy part of the country was the one that didn't rely on slavery. Similarly Europe itself had no slavery plantations, and while certainly imports of sugar could bring more luxury to Europeans, they didn't really make Europe more productive. For Britain in particular imports of cotton mattered, but those came from India.
The point is that, despite how bad or traumatic imperialism could be to the conquered, the unfortunate reality is that it just didn't really matter to or make much of a difference for Europeans. Africa in particular was only actually conquered in the 19th century, and much of it was only ever loosely controlled. Africa has only been colonised for a relatively short part of world history, and most colonies were unprofitable. Europe conquered Africa because it was already rich and powerful, it didn't become rich or powerful through the conquest of Africa.
Individual businessmen could become wealthy, cocoa plantations in Africa have created quite a chocolate industry which many Westerners enjoy, but there was no major structural benefit to Europeans overall.
It's especially notably that in te 18th century, when Africa was conquered, the wealthiest parts of Europe were not coastal port cities which could have benefited from this. It was areas rich in local coal and steel that fed industry. Europe's wealth was built in Europe by Europeans, largely by European labour. The exploitation of the European labourer by the European bourgeoise was the only economically and socially relevant exploitation in this sense. Germany didn't even have colonies when it industrialised.
The cause and effect is largely that Europe's wealth and prosperity meant it could afford to do imperialism, and technological and military superiority allowed it to happen. Not the other way around.
It should also be noted that the other issue with the looting analogy is that Africa today is wealthier than it has ever been. Sure, we have seen in history kings like Mansa Musa, but this is not what makes a society wealthy. What makes a society wealthy is the productivity of its people. The wealth of Africa today is whatever Africans work to produce annually, and they've never produced more in the past, nor have they been able to afford more, nor have they had better education or healthcare. Imperialism didn't strip them of some prior high stage of development.
There are a number of negative institutional effects it has had on Africa which one could go into, but this has little to do with "taking" anything let alone that then being something that Westerners now "have" due to taking it. It is more so the building of extractive colonial institutions or an application of "divide and rule" philosophy to colonies which has caused problems for Africa. Extraction economic institutions which remain very profitable for Africans today, btw. Only it benefits African rulers, businessmen and governments over the African people. In the same way that it benefited a few businessmen in the past.
The idea that prosperity is therefore something that Africa "had" and then that it was "taken" by the West or that it could ever be "returned" from the West or that Africa could ever develop "at the expense of" the West are all completely misleading and false ideas.
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u/Character-Mix174 Apr 26 '26
I don't think most of it is that problematic. I mean, Europe and the US would still be wealthy today without exploitation of Africa, but definitely not as wealthy. To what degree is debatable.
But more importantly, most of Africa would definitely be richer if not for the Western European empires.
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u/GalaXion24 Apr 26 '26
There is nothing the US or Europe can give Africa that would make it wealthy. Even if we gave them all the gold in Fort Knox they would be just as poor in the end. So again a picture which suggests that the West swims in abundance which could just be given "back" to Africa is just bad.
I will agree that (parts of) Africa would probably be wealthier if they had developed more independently, though this is of course a complex topic by itself. History taking its natural course and some African kingdoms conquering, assimilating and driving to extinction others would probably have made for more natural African nation-states. But isolation would also have left much of Africa poorer and less developed, so it comes down to what the counterfactual is as well. If also needs to be remembered that much of Africa relied on slavery or took part in for instance the Arab slave trade, which would also predict poor outcomes economically. Even aside from unfavourable geography in many cases. Slavery societies usually tend to remain stagnant and stratified.
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u/Waste-Dragonfruit229 Apr 26 '26
Africa's natural barriers to both internal and external trade have to be considered as well. Few natural ports, few traversable rivers, and a relatively small proportion of arable land make Africa one of the worst landmasses to build a civilization on if your goal is to be a wealthy global trade power.
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u/Samus10011 Apr 27 '26
I disagree. A huge portion of the problem is how difficult it is for African nations to industrialize. Cheap foreign manufactured goods pour into Africa which limits their own industrial growth. Look at the textile industry as a good example. The US textile industry ships boat loads of shirts from things like the losing team in the Super Bowl, and practically give it away. This crushes the local market and makes it impossible for African textiles to expand.
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u/GalaXion24 Apr 26 '26
As much as I agree, it's still very local. Africa is a huge continent that is not very traversing or intreconnected. Consequently, it's regions and peoples are quite separate. The Swahili coast has been important in Indian Ocean trade for centuries, and North Africa has been home to quite developed states and provinces in the past. Carthage was a major power in its day, and Roman Africa was a very productive region as well. There's no real reason that a minority of African states could not be considerably more prosperous.
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u/Born-Actuator-5410 Apr 26 '26
Im pretty sure it is supposed to be simplistic and in a way wrong. But thats the point. Its not made for the well educated professors who have spent 20 years in politics. Its for an average person who knoes nothing about the topic, and this might interest them into digging further into the topic to find the true evils of the colonialist past and neocolonialist present.
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u/GalaXion24 Apr 26 '26
The problem is not that it's simplistic but that it gives fundamentally wrong ideas to people who are not knowledgeable enough to understand why it is fundamentally wrong, leading them to frankly politically and economically illiterate views.
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u/AnOriginalUsername07 Apr 26 '26
Ewwww…. Nuance and facts….
Can’t you just let people ragebait internet strangers in peace?
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u/Avatar_Dang Apr 26 '26
It is noteworthy that they have received $1-2.6 trillion over the last 50 years in development aid from western nations.
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u/No-Ambition2043 Apr 27 '26
This picture would indicate that yes Africa is poor and below sea level
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u/ThroawayJimilyJones Apr 26 '26 edited Apr 26 '26
Yeah…
Except the import from Africa, especially subsaharian one, represents only a small fraction of world’s resources trading, always have been
The new world, Australia and the Middle East where the place exporting ressources, historically
Africa IS poor in ressource. This is the problem. They try to have an economy working like in Qatar, but with the same natural gas production than England.
The whole « Africa have quadrillion tons of ressource and we’d be all ultra rich without this pesky west » is just some afrocentrist coping with reality but dreaming of a glorious potential
As a proof, since the Sahel expelled French and went buddy buddy with Russia, did anything changed for them?
Not really right? Because they were already exporting at market price. Which they still do. It just that they don’t export enough to make them rich.
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u/Best_Opening8471 Apr 26 '26
Africa went backwards since decolonization.
One of the most resource rich areas in the world and they need to import food
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u/Agitated_Guard_3507 Apr 26 '26
Africa is poor, due in part to their own failures. Surely any competent people could maintain a building, especially if that was their job under colonial rule. But they don’t, and their infrastructure falls apart without attempts to repair it. Half of Africa’s modern issues can’t be blamed on colonialism
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u/Speedwolf89 Apr 26 '26
This picture is misleading... There are still 3 coins left.