FW: The North-South Gap

The North-South Gap

I have been thinking about why nations south of the equator are almost always less wealthy than the nations to the north. When you think of Europe, you think of industrial progress, social reform, free thinking, and very often, you think of big business. When you think of America, you think of McDonald's and Coca-Cola, the enterprising spirit, and lots and lots of capital resources. What's the first thing that comes to mind when you try to imagine life in Nicaragua? Probably a couple of wealthy criminals, a corrupt government, and an overwhelming majority of the population living on a few dollars per day. How about Kenya? The country is losing billions of dollars every day due to lack of production because of civil unrest and rioting. The people are in battle with the police every day. You think of election fraud and the misery that follows in its wake. Why are the two hemispheres so different?

I heard one theory that basically says, "that's how it's always been". The basic premise of this theory states that the root of all the social and economic problems in the southern hemisphere lie in the geographical orientation of the continents. While North America and Eurasia are principally situated as east-west continents, Africa and South America lie on a north-south axis. In the Northern hemisphere you have maybe two or three distinct climate patterns because all of the land mass lies on the same latitude. In the south, you could find at least seven different climate patterns, incidentally all in thin horizontal bands all along the continents. This means that if you raise corn, you could go anywhere in the northern hemisphere and find land capable of nourishing your crop. In Africa, you have a slim chance of finding workable farmland. Much of Africa and South America's lands are totally unusable because of rainforests, deserts and mountains. This means that in the earliest times of civilization, people in the north were able to establish broad trading communities and complex social institutions and were able to accumulate profit much more rapidly than the inhabitants of the southern hemisphere, who had much more difficulty trading for the resources that would have helped them live more comfortably. Maybe this explains why there was always a lure to trade with the nations of the Orient but there was never a lot of trade with Africa, except for along the Mediterranean coast.

Did Africa have nothing to offer its neighbors to the north? Is that why they were left out of the republics and empires of the Romans? Without trade, Africa is just a nobody, and they were essentially the continent that didn't get invited to any parties. And the consequence is that while Africa waited to be noticed, the civilized world went on refining their civilization over and over again, gradually progressing toward huge expanses of knowledge and information and technology. Africa was absent during the Greek philosophers' discussions on politics, they missed out on much of Christianity and Islam, which were two of the most socially unifying forces of all time, they missed out on the renaissance in Europe and the anti-feudalistic political and social reforms that followed, leading to democratic thought and a sense that the people had individual rights. Without those events in a nation's history, it is hard to compete in the modern world.