Jm8 writes:
RL: Even in the catastrophic environment of South Asia (often regarded as worse than Black Africa in many ways)…
In terms of disease burden, it does not seem to worse than in Africa but rather the reverse (Africa’s is significantly worse.). See the link below labeled Global Infectious Disease Deaths by Region 2004 from the work of Christopher Eppig, near the top.
What is the cause of all of these diseases? Simply living in a tropical country? Or is it living in utter filth? If Africans have lots of diseases simply due to living in a tropical country, then there is nothing to be done about this, and this is a problem that will go on forever. If they have all of these diseases due to living in utter filth, then that is a problem that could be remedied.
By all accounts, India is a much filthier place than Black Africa.
I agree that Africa has a garbage problem. The garbage, filth, stench and utter depravity of India is only mirrored in some places in Africa. I read a recent travelogue by some men who went to Africa, and as they approached the capital of Burkina Faso, they said the entire desert surrounding the city was covered with swirling garbage. They had to drive through what seemed like tornadoes of swirling garbage on the highway just to get to the city.
The beautiful white sand beaches of Ghana are often dotted with piles of shit because Ghanaians living near the beach are in the ages-old habit of going down to the beach and squatting at the tide line to take a dump.
You see something like an Indian-level collapse in some urban areas in Africa. Urban Nigeria approaches Indian levels of sheer filth, garbage and stench.
Look at Lagos:
Only 1% of the population of Lagos is hooked up to a sewer system. Shitting on streets and sidewalks is very common. Nothing works. The city has a lot of electricity due to oil, but there are continuous blackouts because the people who run the power companies steal most of the oil that is intended to power the city, so there is not enough to power Lagos. Most Lagos residents with any money invest in a generator.
Perhaps not coincidentally, urban Nigeria is also morally collapsed on something like an Indian level.
The slums of Nairobi are horrifying and insanely dangerous. The sheer filth and ruin of these zones approaches the level of a Mumbai slum.
Cities in the “new South Africa” are starting to degenerate into filth, chaos and in particular mass crime, especially violent crime. There is now horrible pollution on some South African beaches because sewer pipes break due to Black workers jerry-rigging things instead of fixing them. Then when the pipes beak, no one comes out to fix them for a few months, and the people who do come out to fix it don’t know how to repair them. South African beaches are now full of garbage.
The sort of collapse there looks something like a Detroit/Newark/Baltimore ruined war zone big city look. The city still functions much as Detroit still does, but it is a mess. Whether America’s urban slums are worse than India, I have no idea. But the entirety of America is not Detroit. And people don’t shit on the sidewalk in Detroit. There are no dead bodies floating in the rivers. There are no rivers of raw sewage flowing down the gutters. The police force is not corrupt and incompetent. There is no mass corruption and bribery in government and business.
This is a higher level of FAIL.
Something has gone seriously wrong in urban South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria. Africans just can’t seem to do this modern urban thing.
However, if you look at basic health indicators, they are actually worse in India than in Sub Saharan Africa! Indicators like infant and maternal mortality, malnutrition, stunting and wasting, and especially access to toilets and shitting outdoors are all worse in India, typically much worse, than they are in Africa.
This shows me that Africans seem to care something about these problems. Your average African seems to be unhappy about high levels of infant and maternal mortality and surely malnutrition, stunting and wasting. Your typical African probably looks around his country and says that it sure would be nice if we had less starvation and deaths of mothers and babies in my country.
He probably considers it somewhat shameful that so many of his countrymen lack food and die in the process of childbirth or soon after. I doubt if your typical African hates most of his countrymen. You can say what you will about tribalism, but I do not think that even members of different tribes hate each other that much. I doubt if African Tribe A wants to see the children of African Tribe B starving and mothers and babies dying in childbirth. Perhaps he does, but I haven’t seen much evidence of it. Sure, they fight sometimes, but tribalism in modern Africa does not typically produce that level of sheer callous sociopathy.
I read a lot of articles about the toilet and sewage crisis in the 3rd World. In India, no one seems to care. Those guys shitting over there in the street? Who cares about them? Those are poor or low caste people who deserve to be living such lives of utter misery because their poverty and low caste is proof that they sinned in past lives, and now they are slowly working it off through many generations of purgatory.
Your average Indian looks at the starving, stunted, children, the diseased, deformed and limbless beggars, and the legions of men shitting in the streets and thinks that he could care less whether those people live or die. Now you just don’t see that sort of callous viciousness in Africa. Faced with such scenes of suffering by their countrymen, I think most Africans feel bad for these people who on some level they probably regard as brothers.
The articles all said that the shitting outdoors problem in Africa, while rather serious in a few countries, was nevertheless not nearly as bad as in India, and furthermore the societal response seemed to be completely different. African governments, confronted with reports that their countrymen were shitting outdoors and on the streets, regarded them with embarrassment and shame. Many governments said that they were aware of the problem and had ongoing programs to deal with it. And indeed, in a number of African countries, dramatic progress had been made on this question in the last 5-10 years.
Interviews with local Africans in countries like Ghana showed the same thing. Locals were ashamed, embarassed and humiliated that they or their countrymen had to shit outdoors. Over and over, they told the reporters things like, “This is just terrible. I cannot believe we have to shit on the sidewalk like this. This is so humiliating. What is wrong with my country that we cannot fix this?” They reacted the same way that the government officials had. Their attitude was that shitting outdoors was embarrassing, shameful and humiliating for them as citizens of that country. They wanted this problem gone, now.
But in India, no one seems to care. The people who shit outdoors either say they like to do this, or they have been so browbeaten and downtrodden that they feel that they are scum for being low caste and that they somehow deserve this degraded fate to have to shit on a beach. Further, even if they thought this was a problem, almost no one seemed to think that anything would be done about it. There was a sense of total hopelessness about them.
It is these sort of things that I am talking about when I say that the environment is worse in India than in Africa and that honestly I think that most Africans are better human beings than Indians. There still seems to be some sort of a real soul and beating heart in there somewhere in most Africans. In India, I just don’t see it. It’s like those ultimate essences of humanity shriveled up and died.