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it's well known around the world that Africa is by far the poorest continent in the world by just about every kind of metric you want to measure by if you want to look at countries by their nominal GDP per capita a whopping 24 out of the bottom 30 of them worldwide are all located in Africa if you want to look at countries by their human development index score a full 27 out of the bottom 30 of them worldwide are also all located in Africa Africa is the least urbanized of all the world's
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inhabited continents and is the only continent where a majority of people continue to live in rural communities out sight of cities only 43% of Africa's population in 2024 live within cities compared to 53% in Asia 74% in Europe 81% in Latin America and the Caribbean and 82% in North America people born in subsaharan Africa today are expected to live shorter lives than anywhere else in the world with the life expectancy as recently as 2022 of only about 60 years
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from birth multiple decades shorter lives than people born across Asia Europe and the Americas are expected to enjoy and if it isn't the continent's crippling poverty that is the most well-known fact about it in the western world it's the frequent Wars and conflicts that have been continually fought across Africa for decades now with no less than five conflicts fought across the continent since the 1960s that each killed more than a million people and more than a dozen others that
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killed hundreds of thousands of people and all of Africa's poverty and conflict is despite the fact that Africa is perhaps the richest continent in the world in terms of Natural Resources especially mineral resources nearly half of all the gold ever mined throughout all of human history has come from Africa and about a fifth of global gold production today continues to take place there Africa has the largest known reserves in the world of diamonds and platinum in addition a phosphate Rock
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that's vital for fertilizers Cobalt that's vital for battery production and boite that is vital for aluminum production in addition to some of the world's largest reserves of copper uranium oil and natural gas as well and a whole bunch of other resources the Democratic Republic of the Congo alone Africa's second largest country also called the DRC has been estimated to have recoverable mineral resources worth around $24 trillion within its borders at 2023 market prices and yet the drc's
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entire GDP in 2023 was only a little more than $66 billion meaning that the resources present in the country are worth more than 360 times the country's current total annual economic output Africa's modern poverty is despite this abundance of resource wealth and also despite the fact that Humanity as a species originated in Africa in the first place which should have in theory given African peoples a generous Head Start of tens of thousands of years over their cousins who migrated Out of Africa
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and settled in other continents it's not a situation that you might really expect at first and throughout the past Century there have been many many theories proposed and put forward to attempt and explain all of this some that have been proposed honest ly and some more pseudo scientific and racist that do not Merit any further analysis the truth is there isn't one single explanation that will easily answer why Africa is so poor today there were numerous maybe even
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countless explanations behind it that ranged from the lasting negative effects of colonialism and the slave trade that were wrought on the continent to the continued neocolonial exploitation of many African countries into the present to the rampant corruption that has been endemic in many African societies since the end of the colonial era African is an enormous and extremely diverse and Rich place with a huge amount of History it is not a single giant monolith and
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attempting to explain the entire continent's poverty through just a single lens or from just a single perspective will never satisfactorily give the entire picture and trying to give you that whole picture to fully explain Africa's poverty would fill up volumes of books and thousands of pages any attempt to explain Africa's current poverty in any shorter context such as this video will inherently be an over simplification and leave a lot of context and Nuance out for the sake of
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time nonetheless in this video I will be specifically looking at how the geography of the African continent in my opinion has severely handicapped and held the continent's peoples back for Generations throughout its entire history from the ancient past right up through the present day and why geography has therefore been a major contributor to Africa's chronic poverty that exists today first of all it's important for you to understand how truly utterly massive a place that Africa really is
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you could fit no less than three United States including Alaska within the African continent in fact you could cram in the United States China India Greenland the UK France Germany Spain and most of Eastern Europe all into Africa and still have room left over because of this huge size the distances involved across the African continent are far greater than most people assume you will notice that unlike Eurasia Africa stretches far longer from the north to the South than it does from the
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East to the West the distance from the northern tip of Africa down to the southern tip is roughly 8,000 km about the same distance away as Portugal is from Nepal now because of Africa's length and its location on the Earth's surface it is also very notably the only one of earthe continents that straddles the Tropic of Cancer the equator and the Tropic of Capricorn meaning that it is the only one of earthe continents that extends fully throughout the entire tropical Zone the climates that are
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found throughout AA afca vary significantly when you travel from north to south across large distances but they vary much less from west to east across much shorter distances from north to south you will go from a Mediterranean climate to a desert climate to a semi-arid climate to a grassland climate to a rainforest climate back to a grassland climate back to a semi-arid climate before finally returning back to a narrow Mediterranean climate again in the very far south these climatic shifts
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across the continent from north to south are significantly more extreme and variable in smaller distances than the shifts you will find in other continents like in EUR Asia which stretches more wide west to east than it does tall north to south as a result Eurasian climate zones are significantly larger and more contiguous than they are in Africa where the climate zones are smaller and more fragmented and splintered moreover Africa has substantially larger amounts of desert
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semiarid and jungle type climates in environments than seen in places like Eurasia where Agriculture and livestock hering is substantially more difficult to perform the Sahara desert in particular is the world's largest hot desert and its location and size has served to isolate the rest of the continent beneath it from the rest of the world for thousands of years now a region of the continent known as subsaharan Africa the Sahara is an absolutely massive and extremely
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inhospitable Place coming in at roughly the same size as the entirety of the United States stretching all the way clear across the continent from west to east the presence of the Sahara effectively functions as an unlivable difficult to Traverse over ocean of sand that separates all of the land south of it from the rest of the land in the old world it makes subsaharan Africa effectively an island or a completely separate continent entirely and so across generations of history as Traders
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ideas technology and culture traveled across Eurasia and North Africa from west to east and from east to west they generally struggle to penetrate through the nearly 2,000 km worth of barren Sahara Desert from all of the lands below and even to day in the 21st century crossing the Sahara by land is still no easy feat with only a handful of highways that cross it and not a single Railway that connects it from North to South leaving camels is one of the most efficient methods of crossing
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the Sahara even still today most people are already pretty familiar with how big of a barrier the Sahara desert really is in Africa but the Sahara is in truth only the very beginning of how geography has isolated subsaharan Africa from the rest of the world for Generations one of the other most peculiar things about the African continent besides for being owned to the world's largest hot desert is how incredibly smooth the continent's coastlines are literally all around it
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no matter where you go throughout Africa's coastlines in the north the West the South or the East you'll largely find plenty of smooth coasts and beautiful beaches but you'll struggle to find any good or even any decent natural Harbors to protect ships and conduct trade at this is most reflected When comparing the lengths of the African Coastline to the lengths of other Continental coastlines for example despite Africa being nearly four times larger than Europe is in terms of
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overall area the coastline in Europe is about six times longer than the coastline in Africa is because of this Europe's significantly more Jagged and longer Coastline contain substantially more inlets and usable natural ports and harbors that are available in Africa to put it into even more of an insane perspective keep keep in mind that the Chesapeake Bay in the United States a huge area of enclosed Waters that includes access to cities like Washington DC Baltimore and noral
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encompasses a coastline length all on its own that's equivalent to more than 60% the entire Coastline of the whole African continent because of this smoothness of the African continent's coastlines there is a severe shortage of usable natural Harbors to use for protecting ships from the roughness of the Open Sea which has handicapped the ability of Africans to conduct Maritime trade and project Naval power for all of human history and if that wasn't enough a substantial portion of subsaharan
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Africa also has very shallow Coastal Waters as well which prevent large ships from being able to approach these shallow coasts without grounding themselves this forces large Merchant ships to conduct trade with large amounts of the subsaharan African Coastline through the timec consuming and expensive way of anchoring offshore and then transporting cargo to R and from the coast with smaller vessels that can navigate through the shallower waters without grounding themselves
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historically as Arab explorers and Traders in the Middle Ages began navigating from Arabia down the east coast of Africa they didn't encounter a good natural and defensible harbor to Ed as a trade Outpost along Africa's smooth and shallow coastlines until they encountered the island of UA only about 35 kilometers off of the African Mainland it was there on that island at the sight of a rare sheltered Harbor in Africa where the Arabs established a strategic Trade Post that gradually
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evolved into the city of Zanzibar a port based around a natural Harbor that could facilitate trade and contact between the mainland Swahili coast and the Arab world that made Zanzibar one of the largest and wealthiest cities in all of Africa for centuries but the smoothness of Africa's coastlines and the lack of very many good natural Harbors presents the continent with a problem to trade that is only exacerbated by the fact that virtually none of Africa's rivers are
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actually navigable out to the ocean eliminating their ability to facilitate Maritime riverine trade between the interior of Africa and the global market across the oceans to understand why this is largely the case you have to understand the unique nature of Africa's elevation first virtually everywhere on the continent outside of Western Africa the interior will jut up rapidly from the coast which forms a series of escarpments throughout the rest of the continent all throughout the majority of
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Africa these High escarpments create a series of very narrow coastal plains that are often no more than only a few dozen kilometers wide that are backed up by steep Rises and elevation behind them creating very small coastal hinder lands where even in locations with a few good natural Harbors they're still just connected to these narrow Coastal hinder lands that offer little space for civilization building and trade compare this again to Europe where natural Harbors at Venice and Trieste are
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directly connected to the large low-lying po valley and where natural Harbors all along the North Coast of Europe from ANP to roddam to Hamburg to gdin are all directly connected to the great European plane and because most of the interior of Africa is covered by these high plateaus nearly the entire continent is more than 300 M or 1,000 ft above sea level and about half of the continent is more than 760 M or 2500 ft above sea level and the way that the elevation rapidly descends down to sea
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level that takes place near the coasts the rivers of Africa that begin in the interior have to plunge down these great elevations in order to reach the sea which turns nearly all of Africa's Rivers into torents full of cascading Rapids and waterfalls as they approach the coast which prevents them from being able to be used by Traders in their ships as Maritime highways that are used on every other one of Earth's inhabited continents the Congo River for example is the second longest river on the
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African continent and the ninth longest river in the entire world and yet across a stretch of 350 km as the river approaches the Atlantic it plunges down more than 270 m in elevation which has created nothing less than the largest most powerful and most dangerous series of Rapids in the entire world as all of that water in the Congo River crashes down which creates an impassible barri that blocks Traders from the interior of the Congo from using the river to
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transport Goods cheaply out to the ocean for global trade for the sake of comparison during the final 800 km of the Amazon River's course towards its mouth on the Atlantic the river drops an elevation by only about 6 M compared to the Congo River's plunge of 270 M during just the final 350 km an absolutely enormous difference and the Congo River is far from unique in Africa of being unusable for facilitating direct Oceanic trade with the outside world the third longest
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river on the continent the Niger originates only about 320 km away from the ocean in Western Africa but it then arcs deep into the interior of the continent before finally turning back again towards the sea and stretches out for nearly 4,200 km before it finally reaches the sea because the elevation in West Africa is lower over larger distances than anywhere else on the continent the Niger is generally regarded as the most navigable river in subsaharan Africa as about 34s of its total length is
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theoretically usable by some kind of commercial shipping the length of the River from its mouth in Nigeria towards the city of onicha about 200 km deep into the interior is fully navigable throughout the entire year but from there any further Upstream navigability is dependent on the season and on the rainfall during the dry season in this part of the world between about November and early summer the niger's water levels will plummet to as low is only 4 M deep in some parts and navigability
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becomes extremely impaired in sections larger vessels won't be able to continue from onicha Upstream towards loosa between February and March and they won't be able to continue any further Upstream towards jebba until as late as May or even June before the wet season starts again in July effectively this makes the advantage of of large scale Maritime usage of the Niger River largely restricted only to modern-day Nigeria and even then it is only seasonally useful anywhere deeper than
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about 200 km into the interior and that's considered the best River for maritime trade anywhere in subsaharan Africa all of the others have the same problems as the Congo River has and have a series of Rapids or waterfalls nearby to the coast that blocks them from being able to be utilized for trade between the interior of the continent and the sea as a result there is not a single River throughout all of subsaharan Africa that is actually navigable out to
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the Sea throughout the entire year which is an enormous handicap for the continent in its ability to actually conduct international trade and to actually generate Capital compare the river systems of subsaharan Africa that are largely useless for direct Maritime trade with the sea with the river systems in Europe Asia and in the Americas in Europe rivers like the Ry and the danu are naturally navigable from the sea for hundreds to even thousands of kilometers deep into the
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continent's interior in China the yank sea river is also fully navigable from the ocean for thousands of kilometers deep into the interior and in North America the vast web of interconnected rivers and tributaries in the Mississippi Basin offer up the largest network of navigable waterways in the entire world that are all easily connected to the global ocean through New Orleans subsaharan Africa meanwhile in extremely sharp contrast to all of these other places has never had the
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same built-in Geographic advantage in using rivers to connect its interior with the outside world through trade the sole exception on the entire continent of Africa is the Nile River but even the Nile naturally ceased being navigable any further into the African interior than modern-day cartoon and Sudan the location where the Blue Nile and White Nile stems converge that creates a series of Rapids elimin the use of the Nile for navigability out to the sea to the peoples of subsaharan Africa and
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reserving the river's navigability out to the Sea only for the peoples north of cartoom which of course became the Cradle of the powerful Egyptian civilization the frustrating thing is also that most of Africa's Rivers actually have large sections within their interiors that are actually very navigable but because none of them are fully navigable all the way out to the Sea African merchants in the continent's interior have been forced to painstakingly load their caros up onto
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Riverbats sail them through the actually navigable parts of those Rivers cheaply and quickly and then unload them for time consuming an expensive landbased Transportation around all of the various unnavigable parts in comparison to European Asian and American Merchants who have been able to continually ship heavy products from deep within their Interiors for trade on riverboats directly to the ocean for centuries allowing them to reduce their transportation costs and retain more
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capital in comparison to African Merchants who have never been this geographically fortunate especially when you combine the lack of Africa's navigable rivers with the lack of Africa's usable Harbors on the coastline and the Sahara Desert that essentially makes subsaharan Africa a fully separate continent that is also the most challenging continent in the world to actually conduct trade with because of their lack of practically any good Harbors or navigable rivers that
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penetrate substantially deep enough into the interior this is also why historically African peoples and civilizations without navigable rivers to the sea or usable harbers never really became seafaring peoples compared to their peers that emerged elsewhere in Europe Asia Oceania and North America who all actually had all of those Geographic advantages this can be most clearly observed by the fact that a very large amount of islands around the African Mainland were initially settled
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and colonized by non-african peoples with the most notable and EXT extreme example being the huge island of Madagascar which rather than Africans from the mainland was initially settled and colonized in large numbers of people by The austronesians Who sailed to it all the way across the entire Indian Ocean from modern-day Indonesia probably beginning around the 6th Century CE which is why the malagi language of Madagascar spoken today is an austronesian language whose closest
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living relative is the Maan language spoken more than 7,000 k away over on the island of Borneo rather than any languages spoken in Mainland Africa only about 400 km away and Beyond Madagascar huge numbers of islands all around the African Mainland were initially discovered and settled by Europeans rather than Africans during the European age of Discovery from adira to Cabo Verde to sa to and Principe to Maisha s runion moreover the large amount of Africa beneath the Sahara Desert within
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the tropical Zone has enabled for the proliferation of tropical diseases throughout the majority of subsaharan Africa that further handicap the continent's ability for Progress many of the world's deadliest tropical diseases are believed to have originated in subsaharan Africa including mosquito born diseases like chicken gunia Denay yellow fever zika and most notoriously of all malaria malaria is such a deadly disease that it has been estimated by researchers from the Liverpool School of
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tropical medicine to have killed as many as one in 20 of all all human beings who have ever lived throughout our entire history around 600,000 people continue to die from malaria every single year even today in the 2020s and around 90% of all of those deaths from malaria have been concentrated exclusively in subsaharan Africa so tragically While most of subsaharan Africa is elevated just high enough to the continent's rivers for navigability and to make even landbased Transportation
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difficult over the rugged terrain it's not elev ated high enough to lift most of the continent outside of the tropical Zone where mosquitoes and their diseases are able to run rampant and even more tragically even in the areas of subsaharan Africa south of the tropical Zone that are elevated high enough to keep the mosquitoes out they have been handicapped by devastating non-tropical diseases in recent times like HIV anyway HIV was likely first spread from chimpanzees to humans sometime in the
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1920s in modern day kinasa the capital of the RC in central Africa since then HIV has spread most rapidly across the southern third of the African continent and has been particularly devastating in the highly elevated areas south of the tropics that have largely been spared from the historical mosquito born tropical diseases like malaria on the continent in eswatini laoso batswana and Zimbabwe more than 20% of their populations are HIV positive today while
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in South Africa Namibia mosm Beek Zambia and Malawi more than 10% of the population are infected with HIV further restricting life expectancies in these countries and holding their economies back even further in addition to all of their other inherent disadvantages thus there is today no area of subsaharan Africa that is not devastated by African born diseases whether tropical diseases throughout the tropical environment of Africa or HIV throughout the non-tropical southern areas of the
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continent to then make matters even worse the burdens of mosquito born tropical diseases that affect humans in Africa like malaria and yellow fever are exacerbated by the disease carrying TIY fly as well which affects both humans and Liv stock alike the range of the TIY fly extends throughout the tropical region of Africa south of the Sahel and the mountainous Highlands of Ethiopia when the tly bites an animal it spreads a parasitic disease through their blood known as
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trypanosomiasis which results in the animal growing a fever and becoming lethargic and in many cases if left untreated results in the animal's death throughout the area of tropical Africa within the TIY flies range they've effectively handicapped the use of domesticated animals throughout all of history by simply killing them which has historically eliminated the widescale use of animals for transportation like horses and camels and eliminated beasts of Burden for agriculture like oxen or
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donkeys for pulling plows by crippling the potential of livestock and beasts of Burden throughout this region the TIY flight made it significantly more challenging for Capital intensive AG agriculture to emerge in subsaharan Africa since the people had to rely almost entirely on human Manpower itself as opposed to the civilizations that arose elsewhere all around the world who didn't have to deal with the TIY fly and so had plenty of pack animals to assist
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with Agriculture and land transportation without the use of animals to assist with land transportation and denied many navigable waterways on top of that many African societies were forced into the much more inefficient method of Simply carrying baskets or bundles on their heads and simply walking to transport goods from one place to another a significantly more time consuming and expensive process a study conducted across 2017 by epidemiologists from the University of Edinburgh and the
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University of Hong Kong concluded that the prevalence of the TIY fly throughout tropical Africa undermined the ability for African peoples in these areas to develop complex institutions and trade relationships the study argued that denied the use of animals for agriculture and transportation the societies that arose throughout here were more likely to resort to hunting and Gathering and to remain divided in smaller groups which solidified and perpetuated more narrow ethnic
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identities in these regions and contributed even more to subsaharan Africa's High degree of ethnic fragmentation moreover in addition to the agricultural problems throughout Africa presented by the prevalence of the TIY fly there's also just the fact that Africa doesn't really have very much arable land that's actually suitable for agriculture in the first place especially not in relation to its overall size all of the available arable land throughout the whole of subsaharan
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Africa is comparable to the arable land found just within the United States alone and the arable land found throughout subsaharan Africa is significantly more fragmented and separated than the gigantic patches of contiguous arable land found throughout North America or even in Eurasia and South America as well Eurasia has huge continuous stretches of Arab land all throughout Europe Russia India and China South America has huge continuous stretches of arable land throughout the
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Rio de La Plata region and North America has a huge patch of continuous arable land throughout the Mississippi Basin that is also overlapped by all of the navigable rivers of the Mississippi towards the sea meanwhile not only is Africa's arable land not continuous and significantly more fragmented than on any other inhabited continent but much of the continent's arable land is enveloped within the range of the TIY flly that undermines their usability by denying the use of beasts of burden and
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to even further this land's usability none of the rivers from any of these pockets of arable land can be used to cheaply transport produce out to the World Market since none of them are fully navigable out to the Sea throughout the whole year and since none of the navigable sections of the rivers really connect with one another in the same ways that they do in Europe or in North America trading agricultural products by river even throughout much of the interior of the continent is
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extremely difficult as well the end result of all of these compounding problems in subsaharan Africa from the lack of very many usable natural Harbors along the smooth Coastline to the lack of really any navigable Rivers out to the sea to the commonly shallow coastlines that prevent larger ships from approaching to the sharp rises in elevation almost immediately from the coastlines that make developing infrastructure into the interior challenging to the a rugged terrain that
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makes traveling by land difficult to the prevalence of numerous tropical diseases that undermines the potential of both Manpower and animal power and which cripples land-based animal transportation it's no wonder that the almost countless barriers towards conducting trade with subsaharan Africa has made the cost of transportation for any Goods outside of Africa the most expensive to Bear of any of Earth's inhabited continents because of subsaharan Africa's many barriers to
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trade that Mak shipping and transporting things just significantly more timec consuming and expensive than from literally anywhere else the only products from Africa that have historically been worth paying the high Transportation cost for getting them out of the continent have been the few products with a very high value relative to their size or weight such as minerals like gold diamonds and platinum Ivory and most infamously historically slaves which have all rought their own
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longlasting negative economic effects on the continent it for hundreds of years that continue well into the present day one of the other results of Africa's Geographic disadvantages relative to other continents in terms of all the numerous barriers to transportation and trade is that the continent's fractured geography and climates have produced an enormously fractured Mosaic of cultures languages and ethnic identities all across the continent as well Europe for
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example with all of its harbors and interconnecting navigable rivers and ease of transportation across numerous flat planes of assisted with the help of pack animals is a continent that is largely dominated by just a single language family today the Indo European family and even more specifically by just three branches of the Indo European family the romance Latin languages the Germanic languages and the Slavic languages Africa's much much more fractured geography meanwhile produced a
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significantly more complex Mosaic of languages across the continent to the point where Africa is divided between at least seven different primary language amilies today in comparison to Europe's one dominant language family it has usually been estimated that somewhere between 1,250 and 2100 different languages are spoken across the African continent today and some counts put the number at more than 3,000 different languages outside of Papua New Guinea subsaharan Africa is the most linguistically
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diverse place in the world for the sake of comparison there's only around 250 languages that are indigenous to Europe today while the country of Nigeria IA alone a single country in Africa is believed to be home to more than 500 different languages double the number of languages found throughout the entire European continent as a result communication and common identity between different peoples throughout subsaharan Africa has been significantly more challenging to establish throughout
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history than it has been on other continents which further reduced the odds of large complex Empire spanning civilizations from emerging on the continent there are Loc Asians in the continent where such complex civilizations did arise but they generally did so in the few parts of Africa where the geographic handicaps were fewer and less concentrated such as the s High Empire in West Africa that was largely beyond the reach of the TIY flly and Encompass the generally more
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navigable Niger River system or the Ethiopian Empire that emerged in the Ethiopian Highlands where the elevation is high enough to lift the area outside of the tropical climate beyond the reach of disease carrying insects like the TIY fly many of us are familiar with the many lasting negative effects of European colonialism in Africa and the political borders imposed by the Europeans across the continent The Divided ethnicities and linguistic groups across artificial borders and
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pitted multiple different competing ethnicities and linguistic groups within the same new artificial countries to go into depth here in how the political geography of Africa has further handicap the continent would be an entirely separate video in its own right but Les talked about in this context is also the fact that Europe's Colonial border drawing across Africa resulted in the establishment of no less than 16 completely landlocked countries emerging on the continent in the postc colonial
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era a higher number of landlock countries than exist on any other continent in the world including in Asia a continent that is much bigger than Africa and yet contains fewer landlocked States within it landlocked countries generally struggle to generate excess capital and wealth because they are denied any direct access to the by way of a coastline and so conducting international trade is significantly more challenging but even worse for Africa's landlock countries is the fact
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that they have even fewer Geographic means to reach the sea for trade than the landlocked countries on other continents do in Europe when excluding micro states there are 10 landlock countries present on the continent but most of them still have natural means to reach the sea in order to conduct Maritime International Trade Switzerland has the navigable length of the Ryan River Austria Slovakia Hungary Serbia and mova all have the navigable length of the danu river czechia has the
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navigable length of the vava tributary that connects to the navigable elb river while Bellis maintains a navigable link to the ocean through the daepa river the only two non- microstate landlock countries in Europe that do not have a navigable link out to the ocean are North Macedonia and coo but even these two landlock countries are significantly closer to the Ocean than many of the landlocked countries in Africa are in extremely sharp contrast to the landlocked states of Europe not a single
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one of Africa's 16 landlock countries maintain a year round naturally navigable link to the global ocean meaning that all of their trade with the outside world must be conducted over great distances by less efficient and more costly land-based or air-based Transportation instead and unfortunately for Africa's landlocked countries the continent's land-based infrastructure for carrying out trade is also the most minimal of any of Earth's inhabited continents and what little does exist is
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generally either not fully developed or are extremely old leftover Rail lines from the colonial era that have largely fallen into disrepair this is a map of all the current existing Railways across the African continent today and I believe that this map helps explain a lot of the geographic barriers to trade in Africa in the modern world many landlock countries in Africa do not have a single railroad at all that connects themselves to the global ocean such as
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deer Chad the Central African Republic and Burundi but large stretches of the interior of Africa in countries like Mali morania South Sudan the Republic of the Congo and the DRC are also located hundreds of kilometers away from the nearest rail line and many countries are extremely over dependent on just a single country for their rail access to the Sea South Sudan relies on just a single railroad that connects through Sudan in order to reach the sea Ethiopia
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the most populous landlocked country in the world to 126 million people relies on just a single railroad that connects through jibuti in order to reach the sea Rwanda relies entirely on the railways of Tanzania Malawi relies entirely on the railways of mosm Beek mly relies entirely on the railroad that runs through Sagal and Bina vau relies entirely on the railroad that runs through Ivory Coast presenting all of these landlock countries with a single point of critical failure they can shut
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down their rail access to the sea with no navigable waterways to to fall back on moreover most of Africa's countries are not connected with one another by Rail and there's no continent-wide unified System since most of the continent's railways were constructed back during the colonial era by their European overlords who built nearly all of them with the extraction of resources in mind instead of any benefits for the people in mind the densest concentration of Railways on the continent today can
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be found in South Africa which helps to explain a large part of South Africa's outsized influence on the continent and relatively more powerful economy South Africa may not have any navigable Rivers out to the sea but its dense rail network extending out from its ports connects to nearby countries like Namibia lzo eswatini batswana Zimbabwe Zambia and the DRC which enables them to export and import products through South African Maritime ports and grants them
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an ability that nature and its rivers had denied the continent building Railways in Africa from the coast into the interior both in the past and in the the present are also just difficult because again of the nature of Africa's sharp changes in elevation almost immediately from the coast as just one of many examples here the railroad that connects the Porta jouti to the capital of Ethiopia Adis Ababa Rises more than 600 m in elevation across only the first 100 km of the route and then it sharply
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Rises by a whopping 1,400 m in elevation during the final 300 km of the route virtually all Railways and all highways that are built in Africa connecting the coast to the interior must contend with these sharp and immediate Rises and elevations straight from the coasts which add to their costs and complexities in comparison to other continents the countries of subsaharan Africa therefore face more barriers to international trade and therefore to the ability to
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generate capital and wealth than on any other continent in the world in isolation any one of these problems would be a huge barrier to a country's ability to conduct trade but in combination they have all worked together to handicap the African continent's ability to facilitate trade Commerce and connections with the outside world for all of human history right up until the present day in this view Africa's overwhelming poverty in the modern world and throughout history
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is hardly a surprising outcome but there is perhaps no other country on the continent today that has been as thoroughly cursed by both geography and by history as the Democratic Republic of the Congo or the DRC to put it simply the DRC should not really exist and only does so because of the legacy of brutal Belgian colonialism that pillaged the country's resources and brutalized its people for nearly a century it is the second largest country in Africa in terms of land and is home to roughly 110
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million people today the country is larger than France Spain and Germany all combined encompasses the second largest rainforest in the world and more than 200 different ethnic groups coexist within its borders who speak several hundred different languages and that's only the beginning of the drc's issues in 2022 the DRC was ranked 180th out of the 193 UN member states by its human development index score the 14th lowest score in the world and the lowest score
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for any large country with a population of more than 50 million people as of 2024 more the nominal GDP per capita in the DRC is just $72 per person per year the 11th lowest measured in the entire world and a mere 5% of the same annual product created by the average global Citizen and this is despite the fact that the DRC is also one of the most materially wealthy countries in the entire world with an enormous mineral reserves of cobalt colan copper gold diamonds and lithium
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that in 20230 were estimated to be worth approximately $24 trillion at the market prices of the time a very large part of the drz's current and historical poverty and its lack of development is due to the Belgian Colonial period and the previous slave trade before that and the lasting legacies that have lingered from those periods in addition though another large part of the drc's poverty is simply due to the country's cripplingly bad natural geography that the Belgian
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and European border drawers left them with to prevent most of the people who live there from being able to actually conduct any kind of meaningful trade first of all the DRC is very nearly landlocked save for just a very narrow sliver of land here along the mouth of the Congo River the Congo River itself is the defining geographic feature of the country from a transportation and trade perspective and the entire reason why the DRC was created in the first place the Congo is the ninth longest
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river in the world and the longest river in Africa after the Nile but length isn't everything in terms of water discharge volume the Congo is the third largest river in the world followed only by the Ganges and the Amazon Rivers it is also the deepest measured river in the world with depths at some points plunging as deep as 220 M deep enough that you could dip the Eiffel Tower into the river and only the top 30% of it would stick out above it the amount of
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water that flows through the Congo River is Absolut absolutely enormous and that's important to understand because it directly correlates to the Congo's usability as a navigable trade in transportation artery from the river's mouth on the Atlantic Ocean it is only navigable to ships just 160 km Upstream into the interior at the location of the city and Port of matadi which was founded in that precise location as a result from there an absolutely enormous series of dozens of violent Rapids and
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cataracts extend for another 290 km Upstream to the location of the malbo pool a wide and calm Basin of the river which has always blocked and prevented the ability of ships to travel between the interior of the Congo and the ocean undermining the Congo River's ability to serve as a maritime trade artery the same way that the Mississippi does in America the Ry or the danu do in Europe or the Ying sea does in China and the worst part from a historical perspective
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is that Beyond these series of rap and cataracts there is a vast network of the Congo River and its tributaries that are very navigable for literally thousands of colomet deep into the Congo's interior with the longest singular stretch of navigability extending all the way from the malbo pool towards another series of Rapids here called The boyoma Falls a length of about 1,000 kilm worth of navigable waterway that is about as long as the navigable section of the Ry is in Europe but unlike the
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rine it is isolated deep within the African interior and it's impossible to use to reach the sea when including the many navigable sections of the Congo's several tributaries that also extend and converge towards the location of the malbo pool this is by far the largest network of Inland navigable waterways within the entire African continent but they are cursed by their inability to access anywhere outside of the continent directly and they are further cursed by the fact that the many navigable
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sections of them are not continuous and interconnected since they're divided by sporadic Rapids and waterfalls in order to get around the limits of the Congo's natural geography and to access the Abundant Rich mineral resources deep within the interior the Belgian Colonial Administration and the later DRC government post Independence developed the so-called National route as the primary Logistics Corridor of moving goods and people between the country's small Atlantic Coast in the far-flung
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eastern part of the country bordering Rwanda and Uganda and it's probably the most fast fascinatingly convoluted Logistics Corridor that any country has ever established in modern history before a railroad was built to the connected Mata to the malbo pool Porters were forced to carry Goods around the Rapids between them that took nearly 3 weeks to complete by 1898 the Belgian Colonial authorities had finally finished building out their railroad around the Rapids that for the first
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time in history connected the 1,000 km of the isolated navigable section of the river in the interior to the small smaller navigable section of the river past matadi out to the ocean afterwards the timec consuming Journey for moving Goods around the Rapids that used to take 3 weeks was reduced to only 2 days and has been further reduced to only around 8 hours today modern-day kinasa the capital of the DRC was strategically founded at the location of the malbo pool precisely at the spot where the
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river stops being navigable after about a th000 km of navigability into the interior towards the boyo Falls kinasa and neighboring brazaville just across the river at this point in the Republic of the Congo thus evolved into the largest Inland Water waste port on the entire African continent and it became the Hub of the drc's logistics Network directly connecting the country's vast natural resources internal navigable waterways and the railroad connecting around the Rapids to the global ocean
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which is why kinasa eventually evolved into literally the largest city on the Entre ire African continent today home to more than 17 million people from kinasa the main stem of the Congo River remains navigable and open to commercial shipping all the way towards the boyoma Falls which was where the city of kissani was founded at from there another railroad had to be built around the Rapids connecting kiss andani to the city of ubu where the Congo River becomes the Lua laa River and once again
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becomes navigable for a long stretch up until another series of Rapids blocks any further passage past the city of kindu so from kindu another Railway was built to connect the whole system to the city of calamy on lake tanganika and then from there boats will transport goods and people across the lake towards the port at UVA on the Lake's Northshore and then finally from there a road connects the port up to the major city of bukavu that's on the Southshore of lake kevu so to recap all of that
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absurdity in order for the DRC to transport Goods or people from the Atlantic to the east of the country they must sail from the Atlantic through the Congo River towards matadi unload everything onto a rail car and then travel towards the Inland Port of kinasa where they unload everything again onto a riverbat and sail all the way Upstream towards kiss andani where they have to unload everything again onto another rail car and travel towards yug gundu where they then unload everything again
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onto another river boat and sail further Upstream towards the city of kindu where they once again have to unload everything onto yet another rail car for transport towards the city of calamy where they again have to unload everything onto another boat for Transit towards the ported UA where everything has to be unloaded yet again onto trucks for transportation up the highway towards the city of bukavu that is extremely convoluted and timec consuming and it means that goods and people have
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to be loaded and unloaded a total of eight times just to make it across the country by land and river and it often still takes months worth of time to complete even a day it is why still today throughout a good deal of the DRC air transportation is really the only effective method of moving people or things across the huge country and why the transportation and in some cases the smuggling of high value minerals that pack a lot of value into a relatively small and lightweight space are taken
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out of the country primarily by aircraft instead the ex extremely challenging logistical transportation Corridor between the west and the east of the country is also a large part of why the central DRC government is only able to maintain a very tenuous control and influence over its easternmost territories closer to the borders with Rwanda Uganda and why this part of the Eastern DRC is effectively a black hole on the world map where large swast of territory are dominated by a diverse
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collection of rebel and militia groups and Warlords that is the most underreported on major war zone in the entire world despite the fact that this area of the Eastern DRC was largely the sight of the biggest and the bloodiest war fought anywhere in the world since World War II that potentially killed more than 52 million people and it all took place very recently between 1998 and 2003 and yet hardly anybody outside of this region has ever even heard about it that devast stating recent War
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massively damaged what little existed of the drc's infrastructure in the first place crippling roads and highways all across the country to the point where the drc's two primary highways both include large sections that to this day are considered completely unusable leaving behind only the complex and convoluted National route or expensive air travel as the only methods of reliably moving goods and people from the major population centers in the west of the country to the unstable Frontier
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in the East and contributing to the drc's lack of control and influence over the east of the country even further the war that raged across the Eastern DRC in the late 1990s and the early 2000s is sometimes referred to as the African World War because of the enormous scale and the catastrophic loss of life that was caused by it it is widely regarded as the biggest conflict fought worldwide in history since the second world war but because of where the war was fought
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it a remote difficult to access part of the Eastern DRC where information and knowledge of the war struggle to get out it remains largely in tragically unknown in the outside world but the origins of that devastating War began with another tragedy of catastrophic proportions that took place in neighboring Rwanda a few years previously in 1994 a tragedy that you already may be at least partially familiar with or have at least heard of the Rwandan Genocide what happened in
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Rwanda in 1994 can only be described as one of the darkest chapters in all of the thousands of years worth of chapters in human history during a stretch of only a 100 days that year the radical government of Rwanda at the time that was dominated by ethnic hu extremists carried out a genocide that was largely targeted against the country's ethnic Tootsie minority that outpaced even the scale of the Holocaust in Europe and with saw as many as 800,000 people in the country systematically and
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ruthlessly killed largely by and the horror of that genocide in Rwanda in 1994 and the events that led up to it is perhaps the single darkest chapter in all of modern contemporary history worldwide and its causes were in many ways directly related to everything you just listen to me talk about throughout this entire video and it's especially related to a major subject of Africa's geography that we didn't really explore in this video its political geography and artificial borders that were
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established by European Colonial Powers across the 19th and 20 centuries but unfortunately if I made a video covering this much darker s of Africa's political geography and its Colonial Legacy and their consequences including the horror show of Rwanda in 1994 the many many disturbing violent and controversial details of discussing the worst genocide in all of recent history would without a doubt cause the video to become demonetized and age restricted which I
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actually completely agree with and think is understandable I don't believe that ads are anyone younger than 18 should go along with discussing events that are this traumatic but it also means that YouTube's algorithm which is incentivized to only show you videos that have ads on them would never promote the video to you if I uploaded it here and there's simply no way that you'd ever see it here as a result and that's why instead I created yet another fulllength companion video to this one
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in my ongoing modern conflict series that covers to the best of my ability the entire course of events and explanation into how the reand and genocide took place in 1994 and what happened during it and I uploaded it directly to nebula where you can go and watch it right now as I'm sure you've probably already heard by now nebula is the home of tons of exclusive adree content like my entire modern conflict series with more than 30 other fulllength exclusive videos over there
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that you can go and watch right now covering dozens of recent major Wars and conflicts that'll help you stay up todate on what's going on in our world and why from this video covering the events of hamasa OCT October 7th attack on Israel and this video covering all of the Decades worth of backstory of the Israel Palestine conflict prior to that date to these six videos covering the history and progression of the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine to these
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videos covering the history of America's Wars against Al-Qaeda and Afghanistan and the International Coalition against Isis and many many more with brand new episodes releasing every single month and even better I also recently started another completely new monthly series on nebula called War room which will track all of the latest breaking geopolitical news developing from conflicts all around the world and break them down into a single easily digestible monthly
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video briefing series that'll help you stay even more up toate and informed on what's currently happening around the world and why the latest episode in war room covering all of the breaking geopolitical news and developments from last month in October is live on nebula for you to go and watch right now and new episodes will be released every single month just like the monthly new episodes in modern conflicts of bad meaning two new exclusive real life floor videos on nebula that you won't
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find on YouTube going out every month going forward and what's even more you also get access to all of the other amazing exclusive content that's also on nebula because the best part about this site is that it's jointly co-owned by all of its creators built by me and hundreds of other independent YouTubers and podcasters and because it's a subscription based service we all get to work on way bigger and higher budget Productions over there than we could ever afford to do on our own on YouTube
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that's why there's tons of other exclusive content that you'll find equally fascinating from all of these other creators over there some of which you might already know as well and best of all if you sign up for nebula by clicking the button that's here on your screen right now or by following the link that's down below in the description you'll receive an insane 40% discount off of an annual subscription which means it'll only cost you $3 a month or $36 a year for all of this
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awesome exclusive content from myself and hundreds of other independent creators with even more stuff getting added every single month it's the absolute best way to help support what I'm doing here on real life lore and as always thank you so much for watching
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