Africa’s Tribal Foundation Is Its Downfall
There are more people in Africa than in any other country on Earth. Except that Africa is not a country. You can fit the world’s five largest economies, the US, China, Germany, Japan, and India, into Africa, and there will still be enough space to fit in Western Europe, South Korea, and many more countries.
However, when Africa is mentioned, most people typically refer to sub-Saharan Africa, or, best put, Black Africa. For the purpose of this video, I will separate North Africa from Africa. Its historicity and reality seem divorced from sub-Saharan Africa.
Africa was home to people who lived in petty tribal chiefdoms and occasionally kingdoms. Their languages are so diverse, even among people living in close proximity. Their world was not designed to grow past their limited tribal existence. For example, Cameroon has about 30 million people but over 270 ethnicities speaking different languages. Tiny Gabon, with fewer than three million people, has over 40 ethnic groups speaking other languages. This made nation-building difficult.
The structure of the African chiefdoms before the Europeans arrived largely lacked a standardised educational system, city planning, recycling, waste management, and hospitals in the true sense of the word. They had human sacrifices with human skulls on display in most of the various chiefdoms and kingdoms. The great kingdom of Benin kept human skulls in the king’s palaces. Imagine a land the size of Belgium, with over 50 chiefdoms and kingdoms, each speaking a different language. Africa was cursed by its diversity. Early Africans were hunters and lived in hierarchical systems, never learning about the world beyond their little tribal chiefdoms.
They had slaves who were of the lower caste, and women and children were assets. So, the more wives and children a man had, the more he was thought of as a wealthy man. They fought many internal battles and didn’t develop proper scripts that could have evolved into a top-notch writing system until the Europeans arrived. The European colonisers who were in charge at the time didn’t quite understand this. When they conquered Africa, they met people who were so underdeveloped both mentally and structurally. It was difficult for Europeans to consider the conquered Africans equal because they lacked many of the same rights.
The Europeans divided Africa amongst themselves and tried to teach the Africans how to govern and run countries. Of course, humans are going to be humans. The Europeans exploited Africa, but during that exploitation, they taught the Africans skills, introduced a structured educational system with Western languages and script, and built cities in Africa. But the tribal incompatibility of the Africans was never fully understood by the Europeans, who were used to nations formed around single ethnicities like Germany, France, or England, and wanted to create, out of Africa, nation-like countries resembling theirs. Never did they envision that the Black African functioned differently. If Europe had known that Africa would have turned out the way it is today, it would have never left that land to the Blacks when it had control over it.
In the late 1950s and the 1960s onwards, the various African countries were granted independence, with foundations laid by Europeans and institutions that had functioned whilst under European rule all intact. Africa was this shining baby that was going to prove everyone wrong. As soon as the white man left, that tribal tendency that governed the mindset of the Black African for centuries ignited. Black African culture is characterised by a boss-servant mentality. The elders are always right: the youths are always wrong. The man is the boss; the women are subordinate. The weak and non-connected are relegated in the hierarchy, whilst the connected, chiefs, and those in power can do no wrong and shall not be spoken to anyhow.
They had no provision for the disabled, the visually impaired, the poor, or those born with a defect. Instead, up to this day, such persons are considered a curse from the gods. The immediate concern was their bellies, women, procreation, and their immediate family. As long as my belly is full and my family have a roof over their heads, everyone else can go to hell. This mindset is the order of the day, even in contemporary Africa. The concept of a universal charity doesn’t exist in the Black African world. Throughout its tribal history, physical strength and dominance established the social hierarchy.
The universities, streets, infrastructure, judicial systems, or, in general, the countries left by the Europeans were ignored or treated as if they were their little chiefdoms in the centuries before the Europeans came. In other words, colonisation only paused Black Africans. As soon as the Europeans left, they reverted to their true nature. Colonisation was, in my humble opinion, too brief to have transformed people who had lived for centuries, if not millennia, in such mentally underdeveloped chiefdoms into countries like those we see in Europe. The Europeans should have continued colonisation for at least another two centuries. This would have wiped out two to three generations of the African tribal chiefdom mindset and propelled it into an equipped people capable of running nations.
Black Africans have lived through centuries of tribal coexistence in which the concepts of maintenance, nation-building, engineering, and innovation have no place in the worldview. They weren’t challenged or competitive. They simply ate what their blessed environment provided, killed their wildlife without control, ate anything that moved, urinated and defecated in public, and yelled and fought as a way to determine who was stronger, without ever evolving past their little tribal chiefdoms. You can still see these traits in many Black Africans.
Anyone who thinks Black Africa under its current shape and structure has a future is either delusional, being politically correct, or being deliberately dishonest. In the last fifty years, it has produced almost one billion more people. At the same time, it has gotten poorer, dirtier, and uglier, and its IQ is the lowest in the world. There is no hope in Black Africa under the same trajectory. Until something is changed fundamentally, Black Africa is doomed to fail.
Lions, elephants, hippos, and many other wildlife species have gone extinct in many African countries. The countries that still have some left are countries that have White people or countries where White people intervened to stop the killings. The Black man has lived like that for centuries, killing everything that moves and eating them, from dogs to cats, chimpanzees to elephants, snakes to rats, and everything that moves. It will take an absolute benevolent dictator with the IQ of an average Chinese, Japanese, or Korean to transform the various African countries.
Watch the video version on YouTube at: https://youtu.be/0lwZm15nMUs
By Ikechukwu ORJI
