Africa and technology

Cultivation,however, brought a series of problems: in order to make farming profitable, techniques were needed for harvesting, storage, and planting, aiming at transforming food by making it more edible and palatable. 

Over time, all the innovations intended to solve these difficulties resulted in an ever increasing separation between the nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes and the settled tribes devoted to cultivation and domestication of animals. 

Innovation comes from necessities: the chase for resources

Thanks to agriculture, the first urban civilizations arose around the Mediterranean Sea within a few millennia: from the Assyrian to the Romans. Many of these were structured into empires, forms of government in which a single authority has supremacy over subordinates. 

This type of organization was preferred when, occasionally, for various reasons, a people could benefit from a population increase. Population increase results in a greater demand for resources, and this can reach a dimension that can no longer be sustained by local assets. The solution to this problem has been to acquire resources from neighboring territories.

Because trade implies a cost concerning the exchange, obtaining what is needed by force allows one to exploit the only surplus resource: people. Consequently, for these civilizations, investment in war technology has been the most effective and profitable to achieve for millennia. 

As empires were being formed, populations located in the central regions of Africa kept the structure of small, semi-nomadic tribes. This form of organization is based on foraging for wild plants and hunting for game, so the amount of resources is severely limited. An occasional increase in population triggers a series of consequences that restore the number of individuals to an ecosystem-imposed “equilibrium value”. 

Therefore, for semi-nomadic tribes it proved more advantageous to find practices that kept the number of individuals as close to equilibrium as possible, a priority profoundly different from that of urban civilizations, which led African populations to avoid investing in the development of technologies to sustain (or kill) large numbers of individuals. 

The consequences of colonialism: from the age of discovery to the climate crisis

The pillaging of the African continent began on a systemic level in the second half of the fifteenth century, with the explorations of the West Coast and sub-Saharan Africa. After centuries of direct exploitation and slavery, the cost of World War II made it unsustainable to maintain the colonies as such: the local peoples thus seized the opportunity to gain independence, even though it often turned out to be merely a formal process. 

It should be noted that even today the newborn African states find themselves subordinate to the interests of other countries, thus relying on them. In addition to this, they end up paying the greatest price of the climate crisis. However, Africa’s pursuit of  identity and independence is continuing through projects which start precisely with the restoration of natural resources. These often include reforestation projects, such as the “Billion Trees Project”. 

In conclusion, fortunately today one is able to answer the question posed by the imaginary extraterrestrial scholar without having to resort to the judgments that have fueled racist thinking since ancient times. Thanks to anthropology, one can discover the needs that led genus Homo to make use of technology. Thanks to history, it is possible to understand how the current situation came about and suggest practices to solve it: the exploitation of raw materials must be curbed and it is necessary to rethink our understanding of the natural world.