Africa would had it if the west didn't interfere in African affairs or support dictators stealing africa's wealth. Gabon for instance small country with small population blessed with oil, but majority of the population don't see any of the oil revenue, instead it goes to private accounts in France and Gabon's leaders got support from France. Many other examples exist.
Its hard to hear but the reality is that even before colonization in the 1800s africa was behind the rest of the world. It had been for at least 2 millenia. 90% of africa with a few exceptions had
My biggest problem with this is how can you list Asian counties and leave China out?
Not to mention that most African countries are actually underpopulated despite the fear mongering by racists.
Most of North Africa is developed they have access to water,electricity and food
West-Africans are actually impressive if one truly cares about stuff like agriculture and civilization. They discovered both plant and animal domestication independently as well as metallurgy and forms of proto-writing like Nsibidi. And their terracotta and bronze art is some pretty impressive stuff on par with anything out of the Middle East or China. These guys were mostly just behind in terms of monumental architecture but even then stuff like Ashanti architecture or Sudano-Sahelian architecture, if you believe the latter is mostly native, is fairly impressive. And not to mention that they discovered all of this alone which is more than can be said for cadaans who had to have everything I just outlined exported to them from the Middle East via the Aegean.
West-Africa is in many ways one of the original cultural cradles of mankind alongside the Fertile Crescent, Eastern China and Mesoamerica. It was even the home of a massive, demographic changing expansion like the former two.
I would divide west africa into 2 civilizations both are pretty intresting. One is the sahelian stuff which has very deep roots in places like mali and Mauritania with djeene-dao and tchaliit.To be honest, West Africa was pretty on-point in all of these respects historically. Especially along the Sahel but even to some extent in the tropics. Once you went south of this particular line the tsetse fly among other issues made creating any sort of "advanced" societies pretty prohibitive even though Bantus still managed to do an impressive enough job in some cases:
It's no shocker that European settler colonialism only really proved feasible and successful below that line and even then was not remotely as successful as in Australasia and North America where they mostly encountered Hunter-Gatherer populations. Most of the societies above that line had too high population sizes thanks to intensive enough agriculture and pastoralism, and through trade and some of their own industries had access to gun powder weapons. Cadaans themselves knew this and wrote reports about how infeasible it was to settle places like Egypt, India, the Horn, China or West-Africa.
West-Africa is, frankly, one of the main cultural cradles of mankind comparable to the Fertile Crescent, Eastern China and Mesoamerica and mainly lagged behind in terms of monumental architecture:
They're not all that irrelevant on the world stage either despite the incredibly extreme wealth inequality that we're all heading toward worldwide, make no mistake. Nigeria, their Germany of sorts, is the most populated country on the continent, is part of OPEC, has produced billionaires and has urban centers about as massive as those of some the Asian countries other than China, Japan and South Korea, the latter two of whom pretty much got handheld and developed by the West.
What the two regions went through in the last few hundred years is nowhere near comparable. It's frankly dishonest to even try to compare them in the simplistic manner you just did with this short paragraph. You're also completely glossing over how much the USA pretty much propped up and created Asia's two main success stories within the last 65 years as I pointed out above. Japan's current development isn't due to its Meiji Restoration. Japan was finished after WWII. The US propped it up as a satellite of its global empire. This is historical fact. And mostly the same goes for SK.
Once you discount these two and the libaax that was always going to be China, Asia is not in reality that ahead of SSA. Countries like Thailand aren't even going to see "first world" wealth and status before their population begins declining. They're just more "developed" than SSA on the underdeveloped scale in part due to being right next to those Western propped up success stories and China but who wants to flex "I'm less poor than you." ?
