Africa's social disaster cannot be blamed on lack of resources. The continent is the greatest source of untapped resources in the world. In an age where many First World nations have exhausted their resources, Africa has had an excellent opportunity, which it has squandered. From the early 1970s to the 1990s, Black Africa's share of world trade has fallen 50 percent, its gross national product has declined about 2 percent per year, food production has declined almost 20 percent, malnutrition has increased, genocidal warfare has increased, and the continent has even less a semblance of democracy than it had just 25 years ago.¹

Skyscrapers built and once maintained by Europeans in Nigeria now have intermittent electricity and toilets that overflow. Sanitation, hospitals, power generation and telephone services all depend on financial aid and imported Europeans must keep them running even at the most minimal levels. European colonialists who once curbed the bloody tribal warfare were no longer present to stop the Hutus and the Tutsis from murdering between 600,000 and 1,000,000 people in Zaire. European colonialists who outlawed slavery in Africa over 100 years ago are no longer present in great enough numbers to stop the enslavement of tens-of-thousands of Africans today. Slavery is technically outlawed in every country in the world, but in Africa it is still widespread. It is present to a degree in almost every African nation. Sudan, Ghana and Mauritania, in particular, are acknowledged as world leaders in the slave trade. In the Nuba Mountains of Sudan alone, 30,000 African children were sold into slavery in the mid-1990s for the price of two chickens each.²

Racial Egalitarians blame Europeans and White racism for the African disaster. Some have argued that the Europeans did not adequately prepare Africa for independence. Yet while the decolonization went on, some European nations adamantly maintained that more time was needed to develop the African nations before their independence. Such claims were dismissed by White liberals in the West and by African tin-pot revolutionaries as racist and patronizing. Of course, the very idea of a need for preparation for independence begs the question, for who prepared the European nations for their independence?

Of course egalitarians always have an excuse for Black historical failure. The latest apologia for the lack of African culture argues that climatic and ecological factors facilitated development of civilization in Eurasia but prevented it in Africa.³ Jared Diamond though, does not answer the question of why successful colonization by the Arabs preserved civilized qualities for centuries (until the colonist's race was subsumed by the native Black population), and why the spark of civilization in Africa only burned when the European was there to nurture and sustain it.

Race and Nation

When the race is good, so is the place — Ralph Waldo Emerson

As I became more aware of the profound biological differences between the races and better understood the impact of these differences on education, crime, poverty, and other societal areas, I began to read about the historical realities of race and culture.

If racial composition can have great impact on a school, how much does it have on a nation? Can race be instructive about the development and conditions of nations? One of my friends in high school, George Cardella, came from Colombia. He spoke to me at length about the conditions of his own and other South American lands. Often his revelations of the low living standards and crude human values startled me. He was conscious of his light eyes and European Spanish ancestry and talked frankly about the racial realities of his and other South American nations.