anon_juqi said in #4624 2mo ago:
The purpose of this thread is to discuss the the fourth rail: the challenge of Africa.
Over a century ago, Joseph Conrad wrote his seminal novel set in the Congo, Heart of Darkness. The biggest city in this vast tribal jungle region was Leopoldville, named after the Belgian king, containing fewer than 5,000 people.
Today, this settlement is known as Kinshasa. The Kinshasa-Brazzaville urban area is a vast slum containing roughly 20 million people, though no reliable statistics exist. It is substantially larger than New York City.
A river bisects Kinshasa and Brazzaville. Deeply corrupt and sclerotic, neither country has sufficient state capacity to build even a single bridge. As a result, travel between the two sides is by ferry or air.
The world's shortest commercial flight connects Kinshasa and Brazzaville airport, lasting 5 minutes. The airline is based in a third, slightly more functional country; it leases its planes from Ethiopia, lacking the capability to perform maintenance.
Subsaharan Africa is hugely genetically diverse, more so than the rest of the world combined. It is the precivilizational human source population. As discussed in depth in previous threads, it is clear today that migration to colder climates ca. 50k+ years ago, followed by advent of the city ca. 10-20k years ago, created new selection pressures and a feedback loop with human evolution. Certain SSA countries, in particular those with significant back-migration from post-city societies such as Europe and the Arab world, have a sufficient right-tail of competent human capital to self-sustain.
These may include Ethiopia (with centuries of Arab influence) and specific small countries such as Rwanda. The twitter "world IQ map" caricature of the entirety of subsaharan Africa as a 75 IQ red zone is oversimplified.
However, the Heart of Darkness remains. There are huge areas of the continent that lack a right-tail subpopulation capable of maintaining, much less building any of the elements of modern society. They are sustained entirely from the outside. And unfortunately, these areas are precisely the ones that have enormous birthrates without much sign of decline. Ethiopia currently averages 3.5 TFR and falling; they may triple by end of century without any dramatic incident.
The Democratic Republic of Congo, meanwhile, is currently 100 million people, roughly half of which are under the age of 17. The TFR is 6 and flat; if this remains the case, they will multiply 80x to 8 billion Congolese by 2100. Even today, they import 70% of their food.
"Secure the borders and ignore" is not a realistic option. The Gaza war has killed 50k people so far; ask yourself honestly if the world would watch the daily tiktok livestreams emanating from a 10-million-death famine without taking action. Then consider that even a 10-million-death famine would not meaningfully dent the growth curve.
It is a mathematical certainty that growth rates in the Heart of Darkness will decrease dramatically in the coming decades. Anything else is logistically impossible. However, the current default way this happens looks very ugly, both for them and for us. Nobody has a solution. The problem itself is invisible; to mention it is haram.
Treat this question with as much realism, candor, and maturity as you can muster. What do, anon?
referenced by: >>4667
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