Why Africa is poor, explained by a leftist

This video is about why the biggest continent on the planet with plenty of natural and human resources is so poor compared to smaller continents like Europe and America. I explain the history of Africa starting with geography and the slave trade, moving through colonialism to decolonization and eventually neocolonialism. I explain the factors that prevented Africa from economically developing in the past and the factors that prevent African nations from becoming the industrial powerhouses they would be in a different world. For this I explain issues with the free market as well as Neo-colonial policies by the EU, USA and African Union that devastate African economies for the profit of highly specialized monopolies from the first world.

Patreon:   / viki1999  
Second channel:    / Канал  
Subreddit:   / viki1999  
Twitter:   / viki1999yt  
E-Mail Address: [email protected]
The song in the outro was produced by 08 (who gave me no way to credit them), you can listen to the whole remix on my second channel:    • Видео  

Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
1:40 Geograpy
4:00 Slavery
7:03 Colonialism
14:02 Decolonialisation
17:12 Today
22:17 Conclusion

Sources for the hard to believe claims:
https://www.france24.com/en/20130125-...
https://www.dw.com/en/europes-meat-wa...
https://www.swp-berlin.org/publicatio...
https://allianceforscience.cornell.ed...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African...

5 person discord invite. Hit the bell to catch it under the next video. And please only use it if you willbe active on the server, otherwise leave it for others:   / discord  

Transcript:
Hello everybody, in my last video I mentioned how for complicated political and historical reasons Africa is poor compared to other continents. This video will explore these reasons. If you are new to my channel please note that I am a socialist, so I will be using socialist tools to analyse the history of Africa. If you don’t want to see that, you are hereby warned.
If you want a behind the scenes look on my video and get all the extra information I had to cut for time, because the original draft was 60 minutes, check out my creator commentary stream that will go live 6 hours after the upload of this video, it will be archived so you can watch it even if you missed it. Link in the pinned comment!
If however you are new and interested in videos about historical and political topics from a leftist perspective then I recommend you subscribe because I make this type of content every week.
African history is massive, as such I just can’t go into detail about the history of every ethnic group and country or even every region. If you are interested in me making more in depth videos on specific African regions tell me so in the comments. And leave a like while you are at it.
In my video I will broadly cover the geography of Africa, the history of the African slave trade and colonialism, decolonisation and current day Africa, all of which will be needed to understand why Africa is still so poor nowadays despite colonialism ending half a century ago.
All that being said. Let’s start with geography.
As you may already know discussing history without geography is often hard and pointless so let’s go over it again. In the north of Africa you have Mediterranean desert in which the Arabic muslim nations reside. Below them you have the Sahara, the greatest desert on the planet which made travel between north Africa and central Africa all but impossible for centuries.
For this reason north Africa and sub-Saharan Africa are very distinct, so distinct that I will straight up ignore north Africa because it is closer related to the middle east than the rest of Africa. The only people who travelled through the Sahara were camel caravans in the western Sahara traying to travel to the mali empire because it had lots of gold.
In the east the two ways connection to the rest of the world were made was the nile and the red sea. Both of which allowed more cultural exchange which caused nations there to become muslim. Going further south we see the Swahili coast which traded with Arabic merchants a lot. We can also see the second and 3rd major barrier in Africa, the jungle at the equator and the namib desert.
And the issue with tropical jungles is that it’s impossible to set up any large scale government there. Trade and travel through a jungle is very hard and so is cultural or religious exchange. This is why if we look at this more detailed cultural map we can see that the parts of Africa with jungle in them are the most culturally and linguistically diverse region on the planet.
Before the year 1500.