 I'm Salvatore Bonas and today's lecture is on the peripheral countries of sub-Saharan Africa. Sub-Saharan Africa, the region of Africa south of the Sahara Desert, is the poorest and most peripheralized region in the entire world. European colonialism has had much deeper roots in sub-Saharan Africa and has had a much more severe impact on Africa than on any other continent. Today's African countries have relatively little social, cultural, and political cohesion. They're still massively affected by the legacies of colonialism. As a result, most African countries have among the lowest scores in the world on nearly all social problems indicators. Sub-Saharan Africa is a huge region of 48 countries that have a combined population of around 800 million people. Don't let typical map projections fool you. Africa is an enormous place. Most map projections minimize the size of countries near the equator and maximize the size of countries closer to the poles. As a result, Europe, North America, and Australia look big, while Africa and India look small. But in fact, Africa is an enormous place and with only 800 million people, it's actually one of the most sparsely populated areas of the world. The Sahara Desert is a cultural border that separates the Arab and Berber peoples of North Africa from the mostly agricultural heritage cultures south of the desert in Sub-Saharan Africa. And although Sub-Saharan Africa contains around one quarter of the world's 48 out of 200 or so countries of the world, it accounts for less than one eighth of the world's population. The entire continent was occupied by European countries. The only questionable exception to this is Liberia. Liberia was actually occupied by former American slaves who were resettled to the African continent from the United States that can hardly be called an example of a country that avoided colonialism. The rest of Africa, every inch of it, was colonized at one point or another by European countries, the last holdout being Ethiopia, which finally fell to Italy in the 1930s. European colonialism lasted longer in Africa than in any other region of the world. And as a result, Africa is full of straight, arbitrary, and otherwise meaningless borders that were imposed by European occupiers. The history of European colonialism in Africa spans about 500 years. Portuguese explorers first established forts along the trade route to India, so Africa began to be colonized in the mid 1400s, 50 years before Columbus's discovery of America. These Portuguese colonies in Africa eventually became the countries of Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, São Tomé, and Príncipe, and Equatorial Guinea, some of the poorest countries in Africa today. The Portuguese legacy of long-term colonization has been terrible for those countries or those peoples who were affected by it. Portugal held on to these African colonies longer than any other country and in fact did not let go of its African colonies until the 1970s, a full 15 years after most British and French colonies had gained independence. Slavery was at the heart of Portuguese colonialization in Africa, and slavery, especially the transport of slaves to Brazil and Hispaniola to work on sugar plantations, had a dramatic impact on African societies, starting from the late 1400s and early 1500s. Remember that Christopher Columbus himself bought African slaves from Portugal to work in his gold operations, starting with his third voyage in 1498. Columbus's first voyage in 1492 discovered the Caribbean in the existence of the Americas. In his second voyage in 1495 he tried to enslave the local population of Hispaniola to provide labor for his gold operations. By 1498 there were no longer any natives left and he began turning to African slaves. It wasn't gold though that caused most of the African slavery in the Americas, it was sugar. Sugar was the big slave crop of the Americas, concentrated in northern Brazil and in Hispaniola. The island of Hispaniola by the way is now divided between Haiti and the Dominican Republic in the Caribbean. Large-scale enslavement for sugar plantations started in the early 1500s and quickly became economically more important than gold. In fact, the exports from Portugal's Brazilian sugar plantations were larger in value than the entire exports of the United Kingdom throughout the 1600s and 1700s. The tragic expansion of North American slavery with which most people are more familiar only occurred 300 years later in the 1820s through 1840s. Slaving, the purchasing and capturing of slaves, had a massive impact on African civilizations even far away from those coastal forts run by Europeans because Europeans would buy or capture slaves on the coast who were transported inland for the very purpose of being sold to Europeans by other African tribes. As a result the impact of slavery ran far inland even though the European occupation for the first few hundred years was confined to the coast. The formal European colonization of the interior of Africa didn't occur until the 1880s. There was a notorious conference in Berlin in Germany presided over by Otto von Bismarck, the German chancellor who you see here caricatured in this period cartoon. Bismarck called the conference because he was very angry that all the other countries of Europe had African colonies of one kind or another and Germany did not. He wanted a quote-unquote place in the sun for Germany, a tropical colony for Germany to produce tropical products for the German economy. What he got were the leftover areas of Africa, the areas that had not yet been claimed by other countries and thus the areas that were economically more marginal to Africa. As a result Germany's exploitation of its colonies was typically even more severe than that of other African colonies that had been colonized earlier. Most African countries gained independence between 1960 and 1975 but one might more accurately say they were created between 1960 and 1975. Gaining independence implies that the country existed previously. For example Vietnam gained independence from France but Vietnam was a country before it was occupied by France. Its independence was restored. The same could be said for India or for many other post-colonial societies in the world. But in Africa there were no pre-colonial countries or more properly the pre-colonial countries were not the same countries that were created after independence. There were many tribes, empires and other organized polities in sub-Saharan Africa before European colonialism but none of the post-1970s countries of Africa are actually the same entities as the pre-colonial countries of Africa. Of the post-independent sub-Saharan African countries Ghana was the first and Zimbabwe was the last to achieve independence so to bookend the independence period the full period ran from 1957 to 1980. The only historical institutions existing in countries like Ghana, Zimbabwe or everything in between are those institutions that were inherited from their former colonial occupiers. Occupying European countries erased most of the records of the pre-existing countries whether intentionally or simply through neglect the pre-colonial records of pre-colonial entities simply did not exist to form the basis of post-colonial countries in Africa. As a result colonial era laws were inherited by these new countries most notoriously are laws outlawing homosexuality which are still on the books in all British colonies in Africa and as a result have been re-energized in the 21st century or reactivated in the 21st century to conduct anti-gay policies all around the African continent. Again these are not native African laws these are actually British laws criminalizing homosexuality that were inherited by the African countries where they are now being enforced. Similarly colonial patterns of social relationships persist to this day in many places around Africa European powers chose one particular ethnic group to work with as their clients in the country or you know chose one particular language to be the language of administration and that one group to work with to fill all administrative posts in the country. Well those ethnic groups that were favored by European occupiers are usually in most places still the group in power today. As a result in a way they have become new colonial masters over their own countries. One very obvious example of this is Liberia where the post-colonial elite have been the descendants of the American slaves who were transported to Liberia in the 19th century in a movement to repatriate slaves from the United States back to Africa. These people of American descent in Liberia are English speaking and form a social elite that rules over the non-native English speaking but native people of the country of Liberia. As a result of these poor institutions and these lack of historical depth of institutions there are few real democracies in Africa and even those few democracies that exist are severely compromised by a lack of rule of law. As you can see in this ratings map from the Economist magazine almost all of Africa are rated as failed states, authoritarian regimes or hybrid regimes meaning that there's some aspect of democracy but not nationwide democracy throughout the country. There are a few countries that are listed as flawed democracies meaning that there are elections but there is not widespread rule of law and the countries are not necessarily representative of their entire populations. As you can see not a single country in Africa is considered by the Economist magazine to have full democracy. Now some might say that South Africa Namibia and Botswana have full democracy. They certainly have more solid democratic institutions than the rest of the continent but even if a few countries in southern Africa are real democracies that still leaves most of the rest of the continent in one form or another of unfree rule not based on the rule of law. Poverty, cultural disintegration and lack of democracy give Sub-Saharan Africa most of the worst social problems of any region of the world. This map shows the availability of clean water and sanitation but that's just one indicator. Any map of social indicators that I put up would show a big blank spot in Sub-Saharan Africa where most of the countries that score worse than the world are. Now sanitation and clean water are actually very good indicators of state power and state control of territory since sanitation and clean water are very easy to provide. Ancient Romans provided clean water and flushing toilets to the citizens who lived in comfort in the capital city of Rome. The technology is ancient to be able to provide these simple luxuries of life. The fact that countries lack these luxuries really is a failure of governance not a failure of income or a failure of technology. As you can see African countries largely lack clean water or sanitary facilities for their population. You can also see in this map clearly the other peripheral areas of the world. South Asia so you see India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Afghanistan in brown on this map. The poor countries of southeast Asia, Cambodia and Laos and also Central America and the Andes. Bolivia and Honduras coming in also at very low levels of sanitation. Key takeaways. European colonialism started earlier in Africa and lasted longer in Africa than in any other region of the world. The 1884-1885 Berlin conference represented the final carve-up of African territory by European colonial powers but was only the end point of a process that had already been going on since the 1400s. And finally there are a few functioning democracies in Africa partly because most African countries lack deep-rooted social institutions of all kinds not just of political institutions but all of the political and social institutions that make up society as we know it. Thank you for watching this lecture. You can find more about me at my website salvatorbabonus.com where you can also sign up for my monthly newsletter covering contemporary global affairs.