WrappedInShadows
Banned
How far back would a POD need to be so that the African continent holds most powerful nations, with Europe and most of the Americas as "third world" areas.?
As I said in a recent (and unpopular) post, the problem is the petty squabbling between tiny Bantu nations ("tribes" as they are inaccurately and unfairly known in most media; Bantu peoples almost always have cheifdom level, if not state-level, societies).Have Carthage win the Punic Wars and destroy Rome, then go on to make itself the master of the Mediterranean world.
I honestly don't understand your point here. I do agree on your point of Bantu societies, given the only recent movement towards the study of African history beyond simply the colonial era. Yet, while the Rwandan genocide was terrible, there were systemic issues, largely stemming from post-colonial legacy and colonial power structures (Mamdani's famous decentralized despotism), none of which relate to some culture of homogeneity. Certainly, an argument can be made about the relative weakness of the state in Africa, but in the case of the Rwandan Genocide, that is fairly irrelevant. In any event, the factors that lead to the Rwandan genocide stem largely from the colonial era, and we would need to establish a PoD quite some time before that, at any rate.Example: Just look at that horrible and frankly idiotic genocide in Rwanda: The Hutu and the Tutsi spoke (along with the citizens of the neighbouring state of Burundi) the same language, looked the same (not that this should have mattered, of course) but, instead of working together to solve problems caused by a shared oppressor (the Belgians), the Hutu Rwandans decided to destroy their already unstable and impoverished country by wasting resources in an (thankfully not fully complete) atrocious genocide against their fellow Tutsi Rwandans.
If you can get a culture more like the Inka, the Ottomans or the Chinese - in terms of its capacity to unite people under a single, more or less centralized government and assimilate them into a correspondingly more or less harmonious society (not necessarily homogeneous; note the Inka and Ottoman Empires' controlled heterogeneity) - then you have some serious potential for a truly Afrocentric world.