AHC: Black Man's Burden

With the POD anytime you want, make black-skinned people colonizing and dominating white-skinned people's kingdoms/empires (at Imperial/Colonial age), and later liberating them and giving them the equal rights (at Modern age).
(basically switching the role of white men and black men in OTL)
 
No Tsetse fly. These insects transmit diseases that wipe out humans and livestock. If you remove the tsetse fly, and the mosquito, you put sub-saharan Africa in a better position for the development of organized civilization.
 
Even then what about the Guns, Germs and Steel theory?
Eurasia is east-west hence crops can spread easily and survive over a wide area.

Africa and the Americas meanwhile are north-south. Big variations in climate so what survives in one place will not in another.

I'd never see Africa as a whole being Europe whilst Europe is Africa. The best you're going to get is some parts of Africa on top- it does have a Eurasianesque climate in some places.. But even that's hard.
 
Wiping out Europeans en masse would help. Greater Black Death, truly devolving into squabbling stupid barbarians after Rome fell (instead of being stereotyped as such), even greater and bloodier conflicts retarding development.
 
You probably could start with having the Nubians manage to continue their hold over their imperial possessions in Egypt and Palestine and have them expand further into places like Greece or Crete or Cyprus
 
You probably could start with having the Nubians manage to continue their hold over their imperial possessions in Egypt and Palestine and have them expand further into places like Greece or Crete or Cyprus

I'm not sure, but weren't the Nubians light-skinned, not 'pure' white but closer to white-skined then black-skined. Most people from North Africa are/were considered white up to some degree, the 'true' black people lived south of the Saharah.

Btw I like the idea, original:cool:
 
You probably could start with having the Nubians manage to continue their hold over their imperial possessions in Egypt and Palestine and have them expand further into places like Greece or Crete or Cyprus

I was thinking Nubians, but maybe on a different basis - Rome when it breaks up includes an Egyptian super-state which over time sees the Nubians come to dominance... From this base they reach out unto the world...

Best Regards
Grey Wolf
 
I was thinking Nubians, but maybe on a different basis - Rome when it breaks up includes an Egyptian super-state which over time sees the Nubians come to dominance... From this base they reach out unto the world...

Best Regards
Grey Wolf

The Egyptians never had much of an independence streak unless you count the centuries they were dominated by foreign groups of people. I think a longer-lasting Nubian empire would be the way to go since their culture is similar to the Egyptians and were black to my knowledge. The thing is that how to get people to cross the Sahara.
 
Even then what about the Guns, Germs and Steel theory?
Eurasia is east-west hence crops can spread easily and survive over a wide area.

yeah, I think you'd need a POD back in prehistoric times, basically taking away the European crop/livestock domestication and giving Africa a complete package of crops and livestock instead. That would probably involve an Ark load of PODs...
 
Even then what about the Guns, Germs and Steel theory?
Eurasia is east-west hence crops can spread easily and survive over a wide area.

Africa and the Americas meanwhile are north-south. Big variations in climate so what survives in one place will not in another.

I've been looking at the spread of crops OTL, and I think Jared Diamond underestimates the connectivity between Africa & Europe/Asia. Middle Eastern crops arrived in parts of East Africa (Egypt, Nubia, Ethiopia, the Sahel, the southern Sudan) fairly rapidly. Even the early east Asian crops, like millet, were in Africa well before 1 AD, and had made it all the way to the Niger basin by the fall of the Roman Empire. Plus, the Niger basin had its own native rice domesticate. Really, looking historically, East Africa has been no less isolated from the major east-west axis of Old World culture than India is - and India is one of the great centers of world civilization! So I think that without the Tsetse fly, the more fertile parts of subsaharan Africa, especially in East & Northeast Africa, have the definite capacity for sustaining quite substantial cultures & nations. Of course, turning this into a "Black man's burden" scenario is still pretty ASB, barring some major climatological or geological POD. Europe is just too fertile and well-connected by trade to be turned into as much of a backwater as subsaharan Africa was OTL.
 
how about the Sahara doesn't go dry 7,000 years ago and still holds more water than the Great Lakes. I think this fixes our agriculture problem
 
Barring major climatological changes, I'd say no Tsetse fly and/or no malaria in humans as the most likely PoDs to make this possible.

Keeping the Sahara some sort of steppe climate makes it more do-able, but I don't know enough about climate to even guess as to how to do that, let alone without fracking up everything else. The Sahara pump theory is very important for how humans evolved in Sub-Saharan Africa, and we'd need to get rid of the Sahara in a relatively recent time-period (potentially leaving the possibility for widespread desertification in the history of human civilization) to avoid screwing with that.
 
Steven Barnes' "Lion's Blood" trilogy does this, with the PoD being Rome coming to an understanding with Carthage - Carthage civilises West Africa, Islam sweeps through, and Muslim Spain and West Africa are colonising the New World with slaves raided from the British Isles, among other places.

The history's a bit contrived, but they're a good read.
 
You probably could start with having the Nubians manage to continue their hold over their imperial possessions in Egypt and Palestine and have them expand further into places like Greece or Crete or Cyprus

Then though they'd marry natives and over time become more caucasian than black.

Didn't some Nubians take over Egypt at one point? IIRC they became whited out. But then people just didn't think so racially then, racism is quite the modern invention. If you live in Egypt it just stands to reason the chances are greater you'd marry an Egyptian.

I've been looking at the spread of crops OTL, and I think Jared Diamond underestimates the connectivity between Africa & Europe/Asia. Middle Eastern crops arrived in parts of East Africa (Egypt, Nubia, Ethiopia, the Sahel, the southern Sudan) fairly rapidly. Even the early east Asian crops, like millet, were in Africa well before 1 AD, and had made it all the way to the Niger basin by the fall of the Roman Empire. Plus, the Niger basin had its own native rice domesticate. Really, looking historically, East Africa has been no less isolated from the major east-west axis of Old World culture than India is - and India is one of the great centers of world civilization! So I think that without the Tsetse fly, the more fertile parts of subsaharan Africa, especially in East & Northeast Africa, have the definite capacity for sustaining quite substantial cultures & nations. Of course, turning this into a "Black man's burden" scenario is still pretty ASB, barring some major climatological or geological POD. Europe is just too fertile and well-connected by trade to be turned into as much of a backwater as subsaharan Africa was OTL.

Yeah, just to look at a map the northern half of Africa is right there on the east-west axis (to grossly oversimplify things).
As I said parts of Africa could well have decent countries develop in them given some big PODs like elimating disease the like.

However. To have the whole of Africa be equivalent to Europe whilst Europe is Africa...its just not going to happen.
If we make a super Ethiopia and Nigeria then thats fine but you won't get rid of the very primitive parts of the continent just because of that, it'd be a unique scenario, not just a reverse of OTL as the topic seems to be asking for.
 

Teleology

Banned
The Jewish and African post-Roman trade civilization (of which Ethiopia is supposedly a remnant) that made way for the Arabian Caliphate becomes dominant if the Arabians remain scattered tribes rather than being united under a visionary like Mohammed. Instead give the Ethiopic civilization their own visionary conqueror.

Actually, an early Christian North African like St.Augustine of Hippo building an empire by christianizing the Northern heathens would be fun; but Northern Europe is the rock that makes imperial wars last forever in terms of Mediterranean empires.



But anyway, a North and West Africa civilization that first conquers the Middle East (creating say, the Second Class citizen of the empire) and then pushes into Spain, Italy, Greece) would be fun. Have something nasty happen to the Byzantines (like an equivalent of Justinian fleeing during the Nika Riots or something) so that it can be gobbled up Ottoman style.

The same way there was once an Islamic Golden Age before Western triumph, there would be a temporary Norse Golden Age of adventurer-kings until eventually even North Europe is sattelitized and Scandinavia is a desolate rock of isolation with nothing anyone wants.
 
Top