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.
[…] problems far more serious than income mobility or the lack of self-actualizing jobs. Africa is a low-IQ world with high disease rates and massive public corruption. Add in a staggering murder rate and it is […]
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I lived for two years (Peace Corps) in a country near the bottom of the list. It is a largely peaceful, sparsely populated country. My conclusions were that the problem is — modern technology is ahead of the culture. Africa actually kind of works within its own terms. Given their native tools and set on the land they have, they can make a decent life of it. There are luxuries of space and beauty that are extremely costly in the First World that are free there. You have to be prepared to die stupidly (mostly motor vehicle accidents), and you… Read more »
There’s an African economist who makes this point. Aid from the West has been a disaster for Africans. Health care and food are at the root of the population explosion, which has destroyed the native organizational systems.
The best thing we can do for Africa is leave it alone and stop helping them.
I don’t care if I evolved out of a horses ass, but Africa was not the cradle of humanity, but it’s bottleneck. Once Erectus made it out of there a million years ago things began to pop.
Africa is where it all started so it is endlessly fascinating to those interested in human biology. It’s endlessly uninteresting to people wedded to the Standard Social Science Model. In the view of those people, Africa should not exist. That said, humans did not stop adapting once they started leaving Africa. The evidence says the opposite. I suspect that adaptability or the lack of it is the big dividing line. Populations that remained in Africa had not use for adaptability, while populations roaming the rest of the world had the opposite. It’s why Africans never go native. You move them… Read more »
Yes. The point is that Homo Erectus and his 800 cc brain was present from Africa to the Steppes to Indonesia, and for a very long time, while other forms of humans came and went more inconspicuously. The many stops and starts which became Neanderthal, or later, Homo Sapien, did not so much happen in sub-Saharan Africa as bleed into it. My brother did four stays in Cameroon. He said that it is true that they are of low intelligence, but clever. More clever than he. He saw the day to day life, the schoolchildren walking home from school and… Read more »
You look at a place like Zimbabwe and see what happens to a country with huge farmlands and natural resources that has kicked the whites out. Even an African I know who implicitly believes in the continent thinks that Mugabe is nuts and Zim is on a fast track to ruin. Same with South Africa, which has huge potential and resources, but the intellectual turds in the west were so quick to hate the whites there and applaud the murderous tribal thinking of the terrorist black organisations there was never a chance of objectivity. When the west started to elevate… Read more »