So why did all this scientific achievement not transform Africa like it did Europe?

The Major Axes of the Continents

For the past four posts I have been discussing achievements in science and technology on the African continent in times past. A question possibly on the minds on all who have been reading those posts is why such achievements didn’t lead to the economic transformation that lifts most people out of poverty as it did in Europe. That would be a particularly tough question with possibly many interacting factors and that may be impossible to answer definitively. Nevertheless, I will try to do the question justice.

Perhaps we should start with the well-known link between population density and political organization. Political scientists are well aware of the fact that as human societies reach certain levels of population density, they forced to adopt increasingly more complex forms of political organization with modern nation-states being the most complex. Modern states are characterized by the presence of strong, centralized governments, cities, fiat money, distinctions between rich and poor, and many other political, economic, and social institutions. Now, modern states are able to concentrate resources in a way that enables large-scale scientific and technological deployments in a way that societies at lower or simpler levels of political organization simply can’t. Perhaps some figures will help furnish the necessary perspective. Africa in 1975 was reaching a population density that Europe had already reached in the 1500s, some 400 years earlier [1]. Even in the year 1900, when Japan’s population density was 118.2 persons per square km, and China’s 45.6, sub-Saharan Africa’s own was 4.4 [2]. Now it is important to note that while Africa did have some recognizably modern states about the same time or even earlier than Europe and I have mentioned some of them in previous posts like the Kingdom of Kongo and the empire of Mali, the fact is right up to the eve of colonization in the late 19^th century, at least half of Africa consisted of small tribal societies [3].  

It should also be obvious that with low population density, it is harder for ideas to spread. As a result, exceptional individuals with the capabilities and the outlook necessary for scientific achievement on the continent in times past, very often found themselves isolated, and whatever breakthroughs or innovations they made tended to die with them. This wasn’t particular to Africa only. In fact, this was the general pattern also in the rest of the world until the 16^th-18^th centuries when Europe made the crucial breakthrough of creating “institutional memory”, such that institutional mechanisms were set up such that the knowledge of individual geniuses was captured and made available to be deployed on a society-wide basis, independent of the geniuses that originally thought up the innovations [4]. More on that later.

You might be asking “but how did Europe achieve the population densities that set them on the road to modern development so quickly (relatively speaking)?”. That was primarily determined by the different rates with which different societies in different parts of the world transitioned from hunting and gathering, to agriculture, and the natural geographic features of the different continents plays a crucial role here [5].

The continents of Europe and Asia, collectively called Eurasia, (with North Africa often considered to be a part), has a mainly East-West Axis as opposed to Africa (and the Americas) that has a mainly North-South axis. What I mean by this is that Eurasia spans a much greater distance going from East to West than from North to South whereas in Africa, the reverse is the case. Now because Eurasia has a major East-West Axis, much of it lies within the same latitudes. Locations sharing the same latitudes share exactly the same day length and its seasonal variations. To a lesser degree, they also tend to share similar diseases, regimes of temperature and rainfall, and habitats or biomes (types of vegetation) [6]. For example, Portugal, northern Iran, and Japan, all located at about the same latitude but lying successively 4,000 miles east or west of each other, are more similar to each other in climate than each is to a location lying even a mere 1,000 miles due south [7]. The different orientations of the major axes of the continents played a crucial in determining the onset of agriculture and the relative ease with which agricultural innovations could spread from place to place. Among the first places to develop agriculture were Sumer (that would be southern Iraq today), and China [8] (The rest were in the Americas). From these two centers, agricultural innovations could spread with relative ease to the rest of Eurasia because of its East-West axis. The spread from the original centers of agriculture in the Americas to other parts in it, was much more difficult. This was also true of Africa though to a less extreme degree, and the reason in both cases being the North-South orientation of their axes. The onset of Agriculture increased food production, thus increasing population and hence population density, thus leading to the more complex political organization of societies that had acquired agriculture, thus making them increasingly capable of developing and deploying science and technology on a wide scale. It is important that you realize that this process was thousands of years in the making.

Moreover, the onset of Agriculture created food surpluses that required bureaucracies to manage, thus creating demand for useful technologies like writing. The first writing system was developed in Sumer. It was known as cuneiform and it was strictly used for record-keeping [9]. In the 15^th-17^th centuries, writing alongside the development of the Gutenberg printing press, the development of institutional mechanisms like the academic journal and formal scientific societies helped create the institutional memory talked about previously that helped turn scientific development in Europe into a self-sustaining process [10]. If you want to read a definitive account of how geography decided the fate of nations, you can do no better than Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel.

Another crucial factor that that emerged roughly during that same period of 15^th-17^th centuries in Europe was attitudinal in nature, in that there had developed in Europe a widespread, relatively extreme curiosity about the natural world such that there was a determination to unlock nature’s secrets and use that knowledge to manipulate nature in order to extract material benefits for mankind as a whole. Such a worldview led to a very comprehensive experimentation program. Some point to the emergence of Protestantism as a leading cause for the development of this worldview [11]. This is in contrast to what obtained in contemporary China, where the values tempered such curiosity such that a premium was placed on keeping in natural harmony and balance with the environment thus leading to a much a less extensive experimentation program [12]. Also in Europe there was a much greater separation between spirituality and scientific activity compared to elsewhere. The mixing of the two seems to act like a brake on the experimentation necessary for obtaining material benefits useful to a society and instead steer focus to divining the will of the gods and what that means in the personal lives of people seeking divine guidance. I will illustrate with an example. The Ifa divination system of classical Yoruba society of South-West Nigeria has a highly intricate mathematical foundation based on binary logic and hexadecimal systems [13]. It is essentially as sophisticated as identical systems that has been produced by western Discrete Mathematics.  Such abstract mathematical systems coupled to extensive physical experimentation and devoid of spirituality, has led to the development of digital computing in the west. In contrast, with the Ifa divination system where the mathematics is mixed up with spirituality (some would say fetishes), the most common use cases today are probably young ladies seeking husbands and politicians seeking election (or re-election) victory.

You would have noticed that in the myriad of factors discussed, the subject of genetics or more specifically, intelligence has not come up. I am really hoping that this exposition would convince all once and for all that genetic superiority of other peoples is not the reason we are behind. You would have also noticed that I didn’t discuss corruption. Corruption, while currently a major problem on the continent, is a very recent phenomenon, relatively speaking. The factors that have determined who has raced ahead and who has been left behind like I said before, have been thousands of years in the making.

Some may be tempted to infer that given the significant role geography has played in our relative positioning with the rest of the world, that we have been cursed by God. I don’t think that would be wise. It hasn’t been all bad. If I remember correctly, Africa has the most stable tectonic plates making natural disasters like volcanos and earthquakes a rare occurrence here. Also more hurricanes happen in the U.S than the rest of the world combined. Such a skewed distribution can’t be random. It is actually caused by specific wind patterns that start off mildly from the African coast and gathers a murderous rage once it reaches the coast of the Americas. One shudders to think of what would be happening here if the wind patterns worked in reverse.

Finally, even if you don’t subscribe to the idea of us being cursed, you might nonetheless think Africa’s fate has been sealed by geography. There is room for optimism. Virtually all of Africa now is organized along the lines of modern nation-states with the associated institutions, though generally fragile or flawed. Strengthening those institutional mechanisms will be key to getting the breakthroughs we desperately need. In the next set of posts I will be discussing those institutions (as a result of increasing demands on my time the posts won’t come as quickly as this series on science has). I have insinuated in a previous post that those institutions are built on a value system that we are yet by and large to imbibe. Doing that will take enlightenment. I try to do my part by writing. Each of us playing a part will make the process faster.

BEFORE YOU GO: Please share this post with as many people as possible and please check out my book, Why Africa is not rich like America and Europe on Amazon. Thank you   

References

1. Fukuyama, Francis. 2011 The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution. London: Profile Books
2. Fukuyama, Francis. Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
3. Ibid
4. Cohen, H. Floris. 2010 How Modern Science Came into The World: Four Civilizations, One 17^th century Breakthrough. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press
5. Diamond, Jared. 1997 Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: W.W. Norton and Company
6. Ibid
7. Ibid
8. Ibid
9. Ibid
10. Cohen, H. Floris. 2010 How Modern Science Came into The World: Four Civilizations, One 17th century Breakthrough. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press
11. Ibid
12. Ibid
13. Segla, Aime Dafon, 2016 ‘Viewing Formal Mathematics from Yoruba Conception of

the Sky’ Journal of Astronomy in Culture Vol. 1, No. 1