Mysterious Africa

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Africa has always been mysterious to the rest of the world. The Greeks and the Romans traded with the peoples of Northern Africa. However, they thought that the land mass went no farther south than present day Somalia. In fact, Alexander the Great even considered shipping supplies for his armies around this smaller Africa to India. This same idea continued well into the 15th and 16th centuries until it was discovered that Africa has an extremely large southern protrusion making the second largest continent in the world after Asia. These vast areas used to bring Africa wealth well into the 18th and 19th centuries, trading gold, salt, and also people. Their greatest wealth actually came from this slave trade; they wouldn’t trade their friends and brothers but the enemies that they captured in their inter-tribal wars. As the slave trade wore down after the 1880’s the Europeans started to take over large swaths of land. Like in Arabia the strongest European countries came together with a map and some straightedges and divided the continent among them. Soon the countries put in provisional governments and wrote up constitutions in French and English and left them on their relative lonesome. Most of the problems associated with Africa are caused by the misconceptions that Africa got poor but that the rest of the world got rich.

What is generally misunderstood about Africa is the wealth available in its boundaries, and the misconception of the middle-class in the U.S. and other countries of a similar economic bent. Though nine out of the ten poorest countries are in Africa and all but three of the top twenty, there is a nearly zero homeless rate, and everybody seems to be doing just fine. However it used to be similar in every single so...

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...e parliament to have no real majority so the prime minister or president would have to force their way to the top, often using military might to keep their power. There would then be dissension from the other groups who would be angry at the government’s use of money from the rich outside world that would donate supposedly to AIDS prevention in Africa or some other worthy cause when all they were doing was fueling the pocket book of the government. As stated earlier when people see that there is better they will try to get it. Some of these brutal takedowns are seen in Rwanda, though it counts more as genocide, and the seeming stability of places like the DRC are the antithesis of the idea, mainly held up by extreme militarism. So, the relative wealth of the world caused the many uprisings, revolutions and coups that have occurred in the last fifty years in Africa.

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