There are four global trends that threaten major crises in our lifetime: birthrate collapse, US-China conflict, AI runaway, and the one singular continent whose population continues to double. The first three of these are discussed ad nauseum in popular discourse; the fourth is taboo.
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?
One thing I’d be curious to know is whether the fact that Bill Gates-style campaigning to promote birth control has been seemingly quite effective in, for instance, South Asia, yet hasn’t seemed to make much of a dent in the Congo region, is due to differential allocation of NGO resources or simply because the population of the latter is so high-time-preference and incapable of meaningfully thinking about cause and effect that it renders such campaigning largely ineffectual. Does anyone have any insight on this question?
There is a large capability gap between Africa and South Asia. South Asia, for all of its issues, has capable subpopulations that have organized complex civilizations for thousands of years. India has a functioning space program.
Westerners lack intuition for what Africa is like. The DRC, for example, is about the same size as the Western United States. The country has 100 million people and two paved roads.
Nobody has any clue what is going on in Africa. Nobody has any clue if there are as many hundreds of millions of them as the statistics say, because the statistics are made-up estimates by African bureaucrats and UN/NGO flunkies who need to over-estimate the number of people they need to "give aid" to. If the UN/NGO complex was defunded, which can be done with a few simple bureaucratic decisions in Washington, D.C., which is where all the money for this complex comes from, all the UN/NGO flunkies would have to leave, and nobody would have any idea whether millions of Africans are dying or not. Supposedly they have all been dying since Trump cut USAID in February. Where are the videos? The photos? Not one. It's all statistical imputation. Africa practically does not even exist outside of UN/NGO types using it to gain personal power and the fact that some darkies manage to board boats to Europe via the Arab smugglers.
It's true that sub-Saharan official statistics are unreliable, but that doesn't mean we know nothing.
We have satellite imagery. We have export statistics, eg. we know how much food we're sending. We have direct anthropological observations.
You can quibble details, but the reality is that SSA has roughly 1 billion people; a median age below 20; and a TFR above 4. In short, it's a billion and doubling every ~20 years.
>>4633 How can you effectively turn off the cameras though? Aren’t there already enough camera phones in the area to prevent that from working? I’m guessing if you looked, you could find all kinds of footage of warlords butchering people on DRC or the CAR (admittedly I haven’t tried). Would you need to like carve certain areas out of the western internet?
A basic question here is whether Europe is about to undergo another Völkerwanderung this time from the south rather than from the East.
The political will to control these movements is likely to increase. Politics, especially in Europe, will likely become increasingly ethnic in the coming decades. In that environment, I'd expect the influence of universalist left-wing ideologies to fall. In this scenario, there would still be left-wing parties, but they could often be quasi-fronts for ethnic groups, like the Socialist Party in Brussels for the Muslims there.
The changing ethnic composition of Europe could cut both ways in terms of support for restrictionism. Arabs, or specifically North Africans, are probably more hostile to Sub-Saharan Africans than Europeans are. The Tunisan president, Kais Saied, who already warned against population replacement, may be a harbinger of this (see: https://www.ft.com/content/c4ecf01d-c01a-4b06-a574-896bc0822850). So that may offer an additonal belt of protection around Europe.
On the other hand, those already in Europe with a Sub-Saharan background may lobby in favour of such migration; however, they don't seem to be as politically organised in counries where there a lot of them, like Brussels -- at least right now.
The attention Gaza gets is somewhat exceptional. That may be due to the fact that Palestine is a very long-running issue, so has accumulated interest over time. The area is of religious significance as well, meaning everyone knows about it. So I wouldn't use that as a benchmark for the attention other events could attract even today, let alone twenty or thirty years from now.
India is a far, far greater existential threat to the human species than Africa. Africans are extremely stupid, have no effective ethnic solidarity with each other (the continent is pretty diverse), and have no political unity.
India's population relative to the rest of the world will continue to increase for at least several decades. They are politically united and their government pursues an extremely aggressive policy of exporting their people into other countries in order to gain economic and political footholds to use as leverage. They are extremely racist, psychopathic, sadistic, greedy, and shameless about exploiting loopholes in the legal systems and cultures of the host countries that they invade.
Don't waste your attention or energy worrying about Africans. Indians are who we should be worried about. You should be spreading awareness of this threat to everyone you know. They are a detestable and hostile enough group that it is actually possible that public opinion in the West will turn against them to such a heated degree that they will be expelled en masse.
This India hate is wildly overblown. "Existential threat to the human species"? Where in Pakistan are you from?
India has below-replacement TFR today. There are 1.4 billion Indians, about as many as there will ever be. India's default outcome is to complete a modest upgrade from deeply poor to what development economists euphemistically call "middle-income", aging into a low-growth slow-news country like Indonesia, a nation of grey-haired saars. That's not much of a threat.
> India's population relative to the rest of the world will continue to increase for at least several decades.
Wrong. The fraction of the world that is Indian is decreasing. Peak India occurred several years ago.
Meanwhile, SSA has 1.3 billion people today; they are about to overtake, then wildly exceed. There is an excellent chance that you and I will live to see a 10-billion-person world, 5 billion of which are Sub-Saharan. Game out what that world looks like.
A meta-point: it's a cliche that people have a hard time grasping exponentials. Regardless, it is absurd how much epistemic alpha remains in entertaining the possibility that a *very consistent exponential curve will continue to be consistent*. The One Weird Trick to being less wrong about lots of things.
The people who predicted the implications of AI a decade ago? They understood exponentials.
The people who wrote that Covid was going to be a pandemic in Jan and Feb 2020, when the regime line was that it was no big deal, and in fact a heckin raycism to worry about? Exponentials.
Pic related.
A final corollary; there is a reason why China is expanding its presence aggressively in Africa. For all faults, they are a country run by people who understand exponentials.
>>4641 Why did you ignore the substance of my post to nitpick about exact numbers for half a page?
India's population will continue to increase until around the 2060s according to current demographic estimates, topping out at ~1.7 billion. There are currently 1.5 billion Indians in the world, not 1.4, not that the distinction matters. And yes, the proportion of Indians to white Westerners - the only people who matter - will continue to increase for several decades until that 2060s peak, and probably beyond, because their fertility rate will likely still be higher than the white fertility rate unless something changes.
Now that we've gotten that completely pointless quibbling about easily-googleable-in-10-seconds exact numbers out of the way: I urge people to take the substance of my post seriously. Indians are the real existential threat to the human species. This is a deeply, deeply hostile and evil group of life forms that has already wormed its way into Western institutions and power networks in an unfortunately impressively short period of time.
It's very important that the Indian threat is dealt with ASAP before they are able to gain a greater foothold in the West. Canada is already completely destroyed by them and serves as a warning. I remain hopeful on the matter because awareness of the Indian threat seems to be increasing very rapidly both online and offline among the native populace. We should do everything we can to help it along.
>>4643 > Why did you ignore the substance of my post > Indians are the real existential threat to the human species. This is a deeply, deeply hostile and evil group of life forms
Then you’ll have to substantiate your post. For now, it reads as mindless hate. Here's the truth about the Indian Question:
You're correct that Canada has an Indian problem. This was caused by an unforced error of immigration policy. America, with a higher bar to entry, has proportionately fewer and higher human capital Indians.
We have our own unforced errors, including the dumb design of the H1B visa and the bizarre issue of states issuing CDLs to unqualified foreigners. We should fix them. But overall, our experience with Indians has not been that bad. Satya Nadella is good, Dwarkesh is great, and the guy who owns a gas station in Duluth Minnesota is still a low-crime net taxpayer.
Indians are not a uniquely hostile group. We have some legitimate problems with Indians in America, but they fall far short of being an existential threat. If you want to argue otherwise, you'll need evidence beyond mere assertion.
Now let's compare the Indian issue to other issues.
In terms of sheer hostility, Muslims are clearly worse; look at overtly hostile acts from the rape gangs in Europe, to global terrorism, to the Omar/Mamdani wing of American Muslim revenge politics, and it's not particularly close. On national security and national interests, the Chinese are the salient threat. And in terms of demographic deluge, well, that’s what this thread is about. The only large groups left on Earth who still have positive birthrates are Muslims in MENA and Bantus in SSA, and the latter utterly dwarf everyone else over the next 40 years.
Back to the issue at hand! My Pakistani friend--If You Would Please Consult The Chart
Indians (read: subcontinentals, including Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka) are not a threat to all life on Earth, which would rather be the blaqqs but they are definitely a threat to >>4649 the white race, in large part because of the reasons you bring up that make them unobjectionable, because every boomer retard in Canada and Poland and Texas will want to import ten million Indians to be his new helot slave class when the fucking AGI robots fail to materialize. Indianization of the West will be the last gasp of the boomer tyranny. I think deep down even they aren't insane enough to do mass Africanization (only France has even half-way tried this because of colonial ties) but they will see Rajesh and Vishpurna wearing eyeglasses and order 10 million of them on the spot, consequences be damned.
I wish you could say more about why it would be untenable to "secure the borders and ignore." Hey. Why not give it a shot? If it helps, I would argue strenuously that the second part of the job is already done.
In the lifetimes of the people I expect to be reading this, tens of millions have been killed by warfare in the region we're talking about—and, if we included indirect premature deaths, it could probably be rounded out to hundreds of millions. There are kids starving in Biafra! Who gives a damn? I mean that sincerely—can you name them? It's hard to get news in English about these places. Maybe the French newspapers care. I don't know. Do they carry op-eds about the recent aid cuts written by indignant aid industry bureaucrats or the children of the diaspora? This, I can imagine. Are there refugee TikTok stars in the slums of Paris raising funds for their preferred North Kivu militia? I can imagine this, as well. But, for various reasons, most of which they would be too polite to explain, Americans could not be convinced to care. If they need a clear villain, there have been, at least since the Soviets left, few in Africa, save the Muslims, maybe. Bring back our girls!
No, simply secure the borders and do everything necessary to keep them secure. And then treat Canal Street like Xiaobei!
But I wonder if the correct question might be how we advise Black Africa to go about avoiding meeting a fate like ours. Things are going downhill fast. The entire region is slowly becoming too stable and self-sufficient. I'm pessimistic. The likely successors to the aging dictators are far too reasonable. I fear that governments will take power that are capable of putting the rape gang boys to work in Chinese-built office parks or sweeping up the new riverside promenades, and that the corrupt bureaucrats that keep the bridge from being built will be replaced...
Angola and Botswana seem to be relatively stable with a modernizing economy and manageable TFR. If we restructure the foreign aid complex into industrial development (like the Chinese), we could build those into the kinds of states that will either absorb the migrants or annex the less developed geographies on a 1-200 year time frame. Redirect the migration op describes towards places on the continent. Build up state capacity where it already exists rather than pouring money into the pit. If one of those countries ends up ruling 1/2 the continent with our tech / industry behind the scenes, fine.
We will have to reestablish colonial governments and give them the gift of civilization and good institutions. This will be the compromise solution between totally ignoring their plight and letting them into the west en masse under political equality. Perhaps something like charter cities will make the neo-colonialization more palatable, maybe no euphemistic device will even be required. We will read Kipling's White Man's Burden in high school again with positive valence attached this time.
Even when colonialism was in vogue, our success rate "giving the gift of civilization and good institutions" was poor. Humans are not computers that you can just flash different software onto. Importing Western social and institutional technologies to the local population works well in places like Japan, poorly in places like India, and not at all in Subsaharan Africa.
The closest Westerners have come to creating functional states in SSA are Rhodesia and South Africa. Both were utterly reliant on European settlers who moved there to farm the land, build the factories, and run all the institutions from scratch. One ended with a bang and the other is currently ending with a whimper. Both succumbed, in part, to the exact demographic deluge that this thread is about.
But more importantly, there is no realistic statecraft intervention that would impact TFR on a relevant timescale. Even Rwanda, the crown jewel of central African governance, whose leader the Western press keeps referring to with desperate optimism as the "Lee Kuan Yew of Africa", has a median income around $1000 a year and a TFR above 4.
It's also fun to entertain the possibility that, in the long arc, the most based man to have ever lived may turn out to be none other than Mr Bill Gates, the man who, by sheer NIETZSCHEAN VRIL and under deep cover as a corpulent turbolib, took it upon himself to Flatten The Curve of the GNI
>>4655 ok, but you admit South Africa and Rhodesia kind of worked for a while. It stopped working once we insisted on political equality, but now we know much more about what happens when you do that. If you can't get enough whites, you can also import indians, arabs, indonesians etc.
Regarding TFR, I think it's mostly a function of gdp and population density. South Africa is at replacement level TFR, Botswana is at 2.7 at a similar wealth level. Africa has higher tfr at similar GDP as south asia because they have a lot more land -> lower pop. density. So just increase GDP and bring in more people.
I understand that this might not be politically realistic, but it is probably the right thing to do. If you can't undo the political equality shibboleth maybe the best you can do is Bill Gates style chipping away at the edges.
>>4658 > ok, but you admit South Africa and Rhodesia kind of worked for a while. It stopped working once we insisted on political equality
Neither of them were able to achieve a healthy society, which is why I wrote "closest we've come". Importing people to build a functional economy next to the metastasizing megaslums from behind 10 foot razor wire walls is not much of a solution.
The closest I'm seeing here is this: competent outsiders could partner with the least-incompetent locals to enforce order. You can solve public safety and corruption, or at least mitigate the chaos enough to support industrial and resource development and unlock non-Chinese foreign investment.
The end goal is not "Getting to Denmark" or anything close to it. The goal is getting to India: a poor but stable country with a functional local elite running things well enough to avoid crisis. No population explosion, no wars or famines, no refugee floods.
I'll go further and say South Africa and Rhodesia failed precisely because did not understand the exponential. If you really internalize what these demographic trends mean, you see that "secure the border and ignore" is a hopeless strategy. Those two countries tried the local version--"secure your compound and ignore". Even more hopeless.
Compartmentalization is the wrong strategy on two levels.
One, the math doesn't work. The idea that you can just sequester a rapidly-doubling population is naive. You must solve the part where they keep doubling, and the only realistic way to do that, as others point out, is to urbanize them and raise their development level.
Two, attachment to this strategy of compartmentalization meant that South Africa and Rhodesia completely failed on messaging. A competent player would've seen the Civil Rights Movement, with its total narrative dominance, and would've pivoted. Instead they stuck to meme policies like having separate white and black bathrooms, painted "no coloreds" signs on neighborhoods. This resulted in a total loss of international legitimacy. It didn't help that "Apartheid" is a goofy word from the same language that gave us "wir hebben ein seerius probleem"; naming your national system a stupider-sounding synonym for Segregation is a top 5 all time Political Aesthetics fuckup.
The correct strategy is demonstrated by Bukele and Lee Kuan Yew. Legal equality. Colorblind meritocracy, which in South Africa or Rhodesia would've resulted in a Euro-run institutions anyway. You make a show of celebrating local achievement; some Obamas in key positions, but not running the country. And above all, you do the *exact opposite of compartmentalization*, instead forcing integration in the Singapore model. Favelas are a failure of state capacity and must not be allowed to exist. This policy would've reduced internal Bantu population growth. Finally, you need strong borders to avoid external flood; South Africa in particular completely failed at this, taking on millions of illegal migrants from neighboring countries. And you run universal elections. If you control the state, the media, and you still can't win voters whose average IQ is in the 70s, frankly that is a skill issue.
Yes, I know that Singapore played this game on an easier level, with more favorable demographics. El Salvador is a closer comparable; they've achieved a lot starting with a violent, low-human-capital population.
TLDR; the South Africans and Rhodies had three seerius probleems: hypergrowth favelas, public order and legitimacy. Compartmentalization completely failed to solve any of them. The opposite strategy of law, order and integration is the only one with a shot at success.
There are currently already attempts to reduce the population of SSAs. One may remark upon greater proportion of abortion clinics in predominantly AA neighborhoods. There is also another technique affecting the food supply.
