How Africa Works

Long before colonization, Africa’s challenge was (and remains) low population density. The continent is so big that people who didn’t like their rulers just moved away and started a new micro monarchy, so no centralized governments ever really had to develop. A scarce resource was not land, but people, so the political structures that did develop focused on controlling them. In other words, internal slavery was endemic: the subject of conflict wasn’t acquiring land, but acquiring people to work it. (And the land wasn’t as productive as in Eurasia nor as amenable to agriculture: for centuries, tsetse flies and marauding elephants wreaked economic disaster.)

When colonization did happen, it was “low budget” colonialism: rather than the overhead of setting up centralized governing structures (even bad ones) in such a population-light place, just pay strongmen of local fiefdoms to run it for you, including selling slaves.
Colonial governments ruled through approved tribal leaders that created them where they did not exist. Yoruba was a colonial construct and many Yoruba speak mutually unintelligible languages even today. what we think of as “traditional” African tribal ethnicities is in fact, largely colonial in origin “The violent process by which state formation took place in Europe was interrupted in Africa. The civil wars that have played the continent after independence are a reflection of this.”

The result of low-budget colonialism is that even when “liberated” from colonization, there was no durable infrastructure or governance systems left behind (oppose India).

but since improvements in life expectancy and infrastructure, poised for major population dividend

What worked to get southeast Asia out of its rut? Investing in sectors that soak up a lot of cheap labor. Initially small family farms, but with government providing credit, access to markets, and other ways to turn the agricultural product into liquidity or other leverage. Then manufacturing, which didn’t require an educated labor force. Then economic policies that regulated capital flow and encouraged investment rather than saving, eg artificially low bank interest rates.

Before Europeans came, 4-6M were enslaved by Muslims from north Africa (since enslaving Muslims was forbidden by the Quran), and even during the Atlantic trade, only about 5% of slaves went to the american colonies as opposed to Latin America and the West Indies. “At the time of the US Civil War, there were probably more slaves in the Muslim states of West Africa than in the confederacy or in Cuba and Brazil.” European colonizers in the late 1800s tried to dismantle international slave trading (although they more or less replaced it with indentured servitude) but more or less ignored domestic slavery in Africa. Notwithstanding, the massive slave trade was the first truly profitable centralized operation that African states started to coagulate around.

In modern times, Africa has urbanized, but urbanization is not densification. Its cities are urban sprawl, so they do not get the economies of density required for building things like intensive infrastructure.