In all the various and sundry talking points that touch upon Africa to a greater or lesser degree, it often seems to me that the place itself tends to be neglected. Africa is just ‘the poor place’, or the place where atrocities are happening, or the place where slaves came from. The victim continent, if you will. This is particularly illustrated by the fact that most westerners (at least from what I’ve seen) tend to lump the whole of sub-Saharan Africa together as a single unit, when of course that covers an enormous amount of land, peoples, and places.

Basically, we don’t learn much about Africa except slavery and colonialism, and not much about those.

In the video below, Thomas Sowell gives a crash-course on African geography and how it’s affected the development of the continent’s peoples. Specifically, well, that Africa is hard-mode when it comes to human civilization. It’s a fascinating look, both for people wanting to understand the issues at play and for anyone looking to design their own world.