Why did traditional Africa not develop technology ?

[MrFun]

Read the book, "Guns, Germs, and Steel."

[SlowwHand]

When you're up to your ass in alligators, it's hard to remember that your original intent was to drain the swamp.

That analogy certainly fits Africa.
Technology? Let's get a little food in here.

[WRangler Rhymer]

Because in those day to advance in tech you need more of a Empire do anything, plus they would mostly merchants not soldiers. They probably didn't care as long as the trade kept moving though them.

[Sandman]

This is an interesting Theory, Sandman, but AFAIK, Chinese didn't have their faboulous naval tradition until much after they have evolved as a glorious civilization.

China had a lot of other advantages, and it was doubtless in contact with other seafaring civilizations for a long time, which would be almost as good as being seafaring itself. West Africa, however, was isolated from sea trade until much later.

[Az]

it COULD play a part.

[Lonestar]

Spiffor

Go pick up Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond. He covers this very well. In short:

In Subsahara Africa, there was no domestication of local animals and crops. Though Cattle, horses, and goats were introduced in the middle ages by Arab traders, most of the continent never left hunter-gatherer status. As a result, the liesure class never formed.

Now, there are exceptions, of course. Zimbabwe has already been mentioned. But all of these great cities occured rather late in the game, later even than Mesoamerican cities.

[GePap]

Originally posted by Spiffor
Well, Ge, I fear your theory is contradictory:
- on the one hand, you explain nature is easier in Africa, and thus it is useless to develop new technologies to tame it.
- on the other hand, you explain that nature had more time to keep the human population (the human parasite ?) in check.

It is simple biology. Man evolved in Africa. That cuts both ways. The climate of any area in which a being evolved is almost be definition hospitable to it (perhaps even most hospitable). BUt iron does nothing to keep bacteria in check. The biggest check to human populations, given man's status in the food chain, is disease, and no culture had the ability to fight disease until the last 200 years. And bacteria and viruses in Africa have had hundreads of thousands of years more to addapt to great apes, of which man is one.

Edit: also, not needed and useless are not the same. Why use energy making somehting you don't need, even if perhaps, by making your life much easier, you may want? That is not the way things work, speically in soceities without large amounts of craftmen and other people who do not have to participate in the daily activities necessary to food production or gathering.

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by Boddington's
They are very primitive..intelligence maybe wasn't required for survival in Africa..if you get me.

Nor apparently, to go and live and study in Wales.

Tool.

African mathematics:

Gerdes, Paulus. On mathematics in the history of sub-Saharan Africa. Historia Math. 21 (1994), no. 3, 345--376. SC: 01A13, MR: 95f:01003.

This paper broadly surveys the recent research in sub-Saharan mathematics (and some related areas as well). Areas discussed include prehistoric mathematics (e.g., the Ishango and Border Cave bones), number systems and symbolism (including algorithms and education), games and puzzles (for example, a leopard-goat-cassava leaf river crossing problem and a "topological" puzzle), symmetry in African art, graphs or networks (e.g. Tschokwe sand drawings), architecture (one case involving magic squares; also a brief reference to fractals). Gerdes mentions string figures as a possibly productive future research area; he gives some starting points. He also discusses related areas, such as technology, and studies on language and mathematical concepts. A goal of the studies mentioned is apparently to better understand mathematics learning in Africa. Some studies focus on logic. Questions on interaction with ancient Egypt are still largely open. A better understanding of Islamic mathematics in sub-Saharan Africa is desirable as well. The author also touches on factors connected with the slave trade; e.g., the remarkable but not perhaps entirely atypical abilities of Thomas Fuller. Includes an extensive bibliography.

http://math.truman.edu/~thammond/history/Ghana.htm

Closely related topics: Sub-Saharan Africa, Games, Puzzles, Topology, Symmetry, Continuous Tracing Problems, Architecture, Magic Squares, Fractals in Art, String Figures, Ancient Egypt, The Reckoning of Time, Education, Mathematics in Language, Logic, The Islamic World, and Thomas Fuller (1710-1790).

There are a variety of reasons for technology not to have reached certain levels in various parts of Africa (sub-Saharan, that is).

The pernicious effects of outside influences- Arab slave traders and raiders, European colonial powers. Arab Islamic iconoclasm effected the cultural life of African peoples often adversely (although Islam did widen literacy, and cultural links).

The nature of the land- jungles and swamps and river deltas are reservoirs for disease and disease vectors- mosquitoes, river blindness, yellow fever, lassa fever, smallpox, monkey pox, cholera, a host of diseases that just love human beings. If you think the impact of these is overemphasized, consider this: the plague that devastated Justinian's Byzantine Empire seems on best evidence to have originated in Africa- transmitted along the trade routes that brought gold, ivory, incense and ostrich feathers to the empire. If it could devastate a settled, sophisticated culture, with access to proper hygiene, medicine and with a centralized power, imagine what it could do to cultures and peoples with fewer weapons to fight such an epidemic.

http://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/bioter/anempiresepidemic.html

The nature of the climate- some foods will go off quickly, some foods cannot be stored, some animals (draught animals, especially horses) will not prosper, some crops cannot be grown- all things that contribute to saving time, providing leisure time, creating an excess of food.

Conversely, some food will always be there, meaning that hunter gathering will continue, and slash and burn remains an agricultural technique until modern times.

[Soul Survivor]

I think terrain is one of the most important factors

In sub-saharan Africa the two most common types of land are jungle and grassland. Also most nations (tribes) were isolated from large bodies of water. The first problem is lack of production, only the grassland shields provide production, and jungles will never provide any. This means it will be very difficult for any city to build a library, marketplace, granary or any other improvements necessary for growth and expansion. Often they would have to concentrate on building military forces to fight off barbs. Also trade was difficult to come by, since roads take so long to build through jungles (hundreds of years sometimes) it simply wasn't practical and trade was very slow to develop. Without any trade you didn't have many beakers or money available to combat the lack of production. The jungles make travel slow and exploration into strange huts quite dangerous. Without access to oceans they couldn't expand very far, nor seek out other civilizations to share knowledge with. Their best shot would have been to find some gems in a jungle, build on top, fortify the city and go straight for trade. But by then they had already fallen so far being in the wonder race, due to their lack of research and production, that there was little they could build to jump start their civilization. Eventually barbs become tougher, better equiped and more money is needed to keep the settlements, leaving less for research. By then each technological advancement became so expensive that they decided to basically stop and wait for marco polo to come by.

Had they been playing SP they would have been all the way to monarchy to make up for their poor starting position. But when there are barbs everywhere, your people are revolting and you're in debt - theres no time for oedo's revolution.

[connorkimbro]

You could just as well ask what took all the barbarians in what is now europe to catch up to the rest of the civilized world (the middle east, and the far east, most notably)

They were "civilized" and technologically advanced thousands of years before europe was.

[Sikander]

Originally posted by Albert Speer
say what?

you apparently didn't read enough if you came up with this stupid, horribly wrong conclusion that sub-saharan africa was primitive

Taking a lot of Black Studies classes in school?

[Sikander]

Originally posted by Sandman
Perhaps the Africans suffered because a lack of a naval tradition?

Africa has a relatively short coastline, despite being the second largest continent. Most of the African nations, if I remember correctly, were some distance inland, and they did most of their trade by camel over the Sahara.

Compare this with Europe/the Middle East, where we have many, many successful seafaring civilizations: The Phoenicians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Vikings, the Portuguese, the Spanish etc.

There's no benefit to having a technological edge when your trade is done across the Sahara The only thing that matters is carrying enough water to stay alive. There's not much that can be done to upgrade a camel. Compare this with a ship, which can be improved constantly with technological innovation; better sails, better design, better carpentry, better metallurgy, better glassmaking, better pottery, and so on.

Improving naval technology also has a direct benefit in improving fish catches.

Ships also have a far wider range, even a modestly designed ship can range from the Arctic to the equator without serious trouble. Look at the wide ranging explorations of the Phoenicians, Vikings and Portuguese. Camels and other animals are slower, favour certain ecosystems, and have inherently less range than a ship, since the Earth is almost 3/4 ocean.

Ships have a lot more room than camels, so there are much greater opportunities for trade goods, gifts, trinkets, supplies and passengers. This allows much more technological transfer than crossing the Sahara, where every kilo counts.

Of course, there were other factors as well as this, but I think this could be quite important.

Yes.

[Kramerman]

even the mighty Romans couldn't even beat off the Huns

How many centuries did it take? How many untimely epidimics? How many corrupt emperors and government systems? How many wars? How much financial trouble? What degree of growing cultural problems and conflicts?
People who say rome fell because of barbarian invasions piss me off

[Sikander]

IMO it has mainly to do with location and topography. Subsaharan Africa has no easily navigable rivers, very few natural ports, very few mountains, and a lot of disease and climate zones and other natural boundaries (oceans, deserts, jungles). The outcome of these factors meant that contact with the rest of the world was extraordinarily difficult, while internal communication was likewise quite difficult.

For a very long time Egypt accounted for the majority of the population of the continent of Africa, and for some of that time it accounted for the vast (over 75%) majority. Egypt had a navigable river (denial) and easy contacts with neighbors in Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean to trade both goods (very critical for Egypt as it had very little in the way of natural resources other than soil and water) and techs. Thus Egypt was poised to take any innovation and spread it easily along the length of the Nile, and even further to Mesopotamia and the rest of the Med.

Africa meanwhile may well have had intelligent people who invented things just as there were people in Egypt who undoubtedly did so. Unfortunately, these people were isolated from one another and not particularly numerous to begin with. While learning how to bring water from the Nile to your fields is a relatively easy thing (the Nile is very regular and deep), it is another thing to do so in Africa where rainfalls vary widely from year to year (no real mountains except those that produce the Nile). One year your channel is high and dry, and the next year it is washed out. Thus opportunities to build a critical mass of population were limited, as were opportunities for that mass to communicate and remain coherent. These communication difficulties occur at every scale, local regional and continental, making trade impracticible for all but the most valubable items. Thus ideas from other places as well as many scarce materials remained where they were.

Add to these difficulties some others like a North / South orientation and according to Diamond a lack of easily domesticatable animals and Africa's condition isn't much of a surprise.

[Al B. Sure!]

Sikander and whoever else mentioned Diamond...

he is wrong in the case of domesticatable animals. The Bantu who went from a small area in west africa to suddenly settling nearly all of sub-saharan africa around the turn of AD were initially pastoral cattle herders who then settled in the rest of africa. the zulu, a bantu people, were known as farmers and cattle herders before Shaka.

as for muslim intervention in west africa... explain states like Ashanti, Dahomey, and especially Benin which remained pagan and developed with no contact with the muslim world.