Wow!
First time I’ve seen this guy, a Nigerian, aka Bantu Dude,, and his channel, Bantu City Diaries. First time I’ve seen this question asked so clearly and so bluntly.
Namely:
"Why is it that Africans can't or won't make things?"
They could just "Copy and Paste" existing technologies. Bantu Dude mentions lots that they could be making in Africa. But they don't. Why?
The question is asked and discussed, but it's not really answered by the Bantu Dude.
My one contribution: Tribalism. Everything in Africa comes down to the tribe. It's your most precious group after yourself and your family. Not easy to undo tribalism. Bantu Dude doesn't touch on this. Perhaps because he knows it's just too difficult. If it'd been easy to overcome, Africa would have done so long ago.
We did a car trip from Cape Town in South Africa to Cairo in Egypt, back in 2011. Here's the blog of that trip. We enjoyed it tremendously and I think of it often. Some thoughts on the vid above, based on our trip.
 |
| Gordie and me. With the Mighty Mustang. Table Mountain in background. Cape Town, 6 September 2011 |
Comments on the Bantu Dude's video, at the top:
Africans are friendly: yes. We found that. Especially from southern to middle Africa. The more north, around northern Ethiopia onwards, to Sudan, Somalia, there's more reserve. My theory: it's coz an ideology they follow.
Africans value education: Yes. We saw, every day, young kids, usually in crip uniforms, marching off to school. They absolutely try to get their kids to school if they can.
Africa is not crowded. Agreed. It's generally not crowded; though major cities are. The larger, the more dense and dirty. But there's plenty of land. We drove hour upon hour, through empty lands, both desert and fertile lands.
There were deserts, in Namibia and Angola where I thought: "the Israelis could turn this green".
There were rivers, lakes and land, in Zambia, Tanzania, Kenya, where I thought: "the Chinese could turn these into food bowls".
The best roads in Africa that we drove on were built by the Chinese. I remember one lovely, lonely, long straight new highway through the Sudanese desert, all a kaleidoscope of oranges, reds, blues, khaki greens, and up the brown Nile. I so remember that day.
We drove at top speed. Foot to the metal. 100 mph, 110 mph, 120 mph as far as our old girl, a vintage vehicle would go, so fast the front kept lifting off the road, so you'd have no steerage for a disconcerting second or two, till you let it settle down. The speed made the trip even better.
So much of the desert is the same, you have to be fast to get the feeling of the changing desert, which it does -- change -- all the time, usually slowly; but at speed, it's like Kubrick's psychedelic scene in "2001: A Space Odyssey"... we on our own odyssey, over the crystal sands of a vast desert, flying along the one black asphalt strip, straight as a sudanese spear. Into the foothills of the Nile, past scenes from the Bible, white-clad children in a quarry, chipping stone. Sudanese slaves. Till we drop down to that Biblical river, the sluggish-brown Nile, palm-tree flanked, and feluccas, lateen-rigged, drifting lazily downstream.
When we asked why Africans hadn't helped build these roads, and others in Africa, we were told: "we wanted them to work with us, but they didn't. So we had to do it ourselves". That could just be an excuse. But we heard similar stories over and over, throughout Africa. Enough to think they were likely true. The Bantu Dude comments fit right in with this. "We're doing fine, boss; no need work hard on that road there". Kind of thing.
It's not true they won't build anything. With our car, a 50 year-old Ford Mustang, we could get any part repaired, or a bodgy-dodgy part made from scraps, on the spot. A Ford was the best car for Africa, because there's so many. Ditto Mercedes.
Any town we arrived in, any village, with a few cows, scrawny dogs and a few feral goats, has always got a "Hakim's Fix-it-Well Garage and Repairs" or a "Oil Be Back Car Repairs", that will make you a shock-absorber bush from an old tyre, or be happy to weld your broken tie rod. "Jus' in one short hour, sah". Those kind of shops are there, for sure. Just not the slightly bigger, slightly more ambitious factory, producing, say, paint, or... those shock absorber bushes we needed, let alone factories to make the shocks, or, heaven forfend, to build a whole car. That's the mystery that Bantu Dude is looking at.
Random fact: our route took us over some truly high elevation country. Like the middle of Ethiopia, at 12,000+ feet. Whole swathes of Africa are high elevation. I never knew that. Ethiopia was green-green when we drove through. Green. Not a hint of drought or famine of the past.
The Bantu Dude makes a point about relative populations on the earth in a century, given current birth trends: very few White people; very few Asians; lots and lots of Africans. So, he says, if Africans don't want to make things, or are not able to actually make things, or invent things, or improve technology, we're going to have an existential problem as homo sapiens.
That's surely cause for a "hmmm...".
