This has been Africa week at the blog. The Dark Continent is an endlessly fascinating place for some of us in the Occident, primarily because it is such a baffling place. That and the greatest degree of human genetic diversity exists in sub-Saharan Africa. As much as it pains many white people, the cradle of humanity is Africa.
I see Steve Sailer has gotten in on the act this week. His angle of entry is, as always, immigration. There are a billion Africans in their huts right now thinking about how life would be much better in a country not run by Africans so it is a good place to start. African migration is driven by sky high fertility rates and that’s a unique feature of Africa. Everywhere else has figured out how to stabilize fertility.
That brings me to another metric to consider and that’s national IQ. I used the list here from Richard Lynn, Tatu Vanhanen and Jelte Wicherts. I spot checked some figures against other sources and that list seems to square with others so I’m using it here. Raw numbers are not important. Relative IQ is what we’re after.
Here’s the consolidated version for Africa:
Country Name | IQ | Country Name | IQ | |
Libya | 83.00 | Mali | 74.00 | |
Mauritius | 76.00 | Cameroon | 64.00 | |
Egypt | 81.00 | Equatorial Guinea | 59.00 | |
Sierra Leone | 91.00 | Algeria | 83.00 | |
Morocco | 84.00 | Nigeria | 84.00 | |
Tunisia | 83.00 | Chad | 68.00 | |
Cape Verde | 76.00 | Liberia | 67.00 | |
Comoros | 77.00 | Burundi | 69.00 | |
Madagascar | 82.00 | Angola | 68.00 | |
Eritrea | 85.00 | Namibia | 74.00 | |
Senegal | 76.00 | Niger | 69.00 | |
Tanzania | 72.00 | Rwanda | 70.00 | |
Mauritania | 76.00 | São Tomé | 67.00 | |
Seychelles | 86.00 | Mozambique | 64.00 | |
Sudan | 71.00 | CAR | 71.00 | |
Republic of the Congo | 78.00 | Kenya | 80.00 | |
Djibouti | 68.00 | Somalia | 68.00 | |
Benin | 70.00 | Ivory Coast | 69.00 | |
Guinea-Bissau | 67.00 | Uganda | 84.00 | |
Ghana | 73.00 | Republic of Sudan | 71.00 | |
Gabon | 64.00 | Malawi | 69.00 | |
Togo | 70.00 | Botswana | 70.00 | |
South Africa | 77.00 | Lesotho | 67.00 | |
Ethiopia | 69.00 | The Gambia | 66.00 | |
DR of the Congo | 78.00 | Swaziland | 68.00 | |
Guinea | 67.00 | Zambia | 79.00 | |
Burkina Faso | 68.00 | Zimbabwe | 82.00 |
What jumps out here is you have scads of people in many of these countries with the cognitive skills of the retarded bag boy at your local grocery market. Africa has a very small smart fraction and a very large not so smart fraction. In order to conduct any large scale public projects, you need people smart enough to think of them, but also a large cohort that is bright enough to implement them.
Africa is, in many respects, the exact opposite of what is required for a modern complex society. Steve Sailer seems to think Africans can be trained to used condoms and birth control to reduce fertility rates, but that may not be possible. There’s a reason that white trash girls from the trailer parks get knocked up as teenagers. They are simply not smart enough to think beyond the moment.
Putting that aside, the issue for Europe is how many of these low-IQ people can they reasonably absorb into their societies? Modern, automated societies require far fewer people who can only provide labor. Europe, on its own, can supply all of the low end labor it needs. Bringing in 75-IQ Africans may help bolster the local soccer team, but at what cost?
Of course, part of why these numbers are what they are is that every African with something on the ball left a long time ago. Africa has been boiling off its high-IQ population for generations. If you are someone in Ghana, for example, who speaks English and has a 105 IQ, you are getting out of Ghana at the first opportunity. Those left behind breeding like rabbits are the low-IQ nitwits.
In this regard, the best thing Europeans countries could do is send the high-IQ Africans they have now back home. Skimming off the smart fraction is part of why Africa is such a mess. The world has plenty of funky sounding guys at the UN and World Bank. What the world lacks are native Africans with the wherewithal to run a sane country in Africa.