The biggest challenge for Africa is Africans.

Back in Oct of 2017, famous economist Marc Faber made some career ending comments on how America was lucky that it was colonized by whites instead of blacks. Instead of just debating the facts of his arguments, people called him a racist and he has not appeared on financial media ever since.  I commented on that at the time but I did not offer any view on WHY it is perhaps it is the way it is. That is something I will try to address now.

In another more recent post I pointed out why blacks are so angry.  I want to re-use one of the charts from that post to help explain the basics on why Africa cannot seem to get out of its own way economically, socially, technologically or in any other way.  You see, when things go on for a long time in the same way with the same mechanisms, something is probably fundamentally at work.  That is how an engineer views it.  So the trick is to look at the data and speculate on why things might be that way.

It is for this reason that I found the modified chart below so interesting.  You see, in any situation where one group massively overpowers another, the more powerful group is going to dominate. Of course the word "powerful" is relative.  If you recall the Planet of the Apes movies, the apes were not as technological as the humans they had replaced. Thus, the big strong military apes were actually in charge.  They were better suited to domination in that environment.  But in today's real world environment, mental power is far more important than physicality.

It is also fair to say that when power is concentrated, abuses abound.  But if the power is spread out over the population, abusive behavior has a harder time gaining tyrannical control.  Its the very reason the founders of the USA want us all to have the protected right to keep and bear arms. Without this, all the power would be in the hands of the few and when that happens a society cannot perform at its best.  The powerful ones essentially enslave the weaker ones and the societal output, as a whole, is greatly reduced.

So if intelligence is power in an information society then look at the chart above.  Let's say that starting at an IQ of 105 or above you become much harder to control and punish and push around than at intelligence levels below that.  Look at how much of white society falls into that group.  You have about 1/3 of the people in that class.  So while there is some intelligence concentration for whites, it is quite muted relative to the intelligence concentration for blacks.  The data, at least back in the mid 1960s, showed that black population with intelligence above 105 was very small relative to the rest of the population.

The significance is that all the power in black society, which today means Africa, is concentrated into the hands of a small minority.  It is because of this intellectual power disparity that black nations are so backward.  Their own elite find it much easier, if not trivial, to dominate the lower intelligence echelons simply because there are fewer other smart black people to compete with.  This is why their dictators rule for long periods of time and pretty much without exception drain the country of billions of dollars into their own pockets.  Their elite have much higher relative intelligence and that gives them absolute power over their fellow citizens.  In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king.  Also, absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely.  

In fact there is really only 1 man that I know of in history who had every opportunity of holding absolute power yet walked away from it for reasons of principle. His name was George Washington.  It's a very interesting story but Americans were very happy with him after he helped oust the Brits.  Americans wanted to make him king.  Instead, he did two normal 4 year terms as president and then left the public life and died at his home at the age of 67.