What makes sub saharan africa a realm




















The civil war in Rwanda and the many refugees it created destabilized the entire Central African region. The shift in population and the increase in military arms along the Zairian border resulted in an extensive civil war in The Congo Zaire that has resulted in the deaths of more than five million people, many by disease or starvation. Over three million deaths are estimated to have been related directly to the war and another two million by the harsh conditions in the region AmericanRenaissance.

The civil wars in The Congo from to changed the cultural and political landscapes and destroyed valuable infrastructure. One of the driving forces in these wars is the control of valuable mineral resources found in the Great Rift Valley along the eastern boundary of The Congo.

Diamonds, gold, copper, zinc, and other minerals are abundant in this region, and wealth that can be gained from the mining of these products attracts political forces to compete for their control. All have experienced some amount of serious conflicts in the past decade. Many of the civil wars are not reported by the news media worldwide, even though the number of people affected, injured, and killed is deplorable. In places such as Ivory Coast, Nigeria, and Zimbabwe, the streets have become a battleground.

Creating stability in parts of Africa has been challenging, as civil unrest and political corruption continue in many African countries. The core industrialized countries have been hesitant to step in or invest in the peace and stability of Africa. Governments of more than a few African countries have been unable to bring stability or to provide for their people.

For example, Somalia has no central government; rather, it is ruled by warlords and village chiefs. Corruption, dictatorial rule, and military force have been major components of government rule in these cases. From South Africa to Kenya, there is a line of countries with some of the highest percentages of HIV-infected people in the world.

HIV-infected individuals can pass the virus to others without knowing they have it, and millions of people die of AIDS in Subsaharan Africa without ever knowing they were infected. The lack of education, HIV testing, and medical services hinder progress toward stopping this deadly disease.

Prevention is an ideal that has not materialized yet. Many people do not want to be tested out of fear of rejection by their families and friends if they are infected. AIDS will surely kill millions more in Africa before a solution is found. Many other diseases are common in Subsaharan Africa. Some are spread by vectors in the environment. Mosquitoes spread illnesses such as malaria and yellow fever, which are common throughout the realm. Sleeping sickness is spread by the tsetse fly, which can also infect cattle and livestock.

Hepatitis is widespread. Schistosomiasis, tuberculosis, and typhoid are also common. Unsanitary conditions and polluted water are breeding grounds for microbes that cause diseases. People living in less-than-sanitary conditions are more likely to come in contact with and become infected with these diseases and are also less likely to obtain medical attention at an early stage of the disease.

Subsaharan Africa has great potential for the development of tourism. Tourism is considered a postindustrial activity with mixed income opportunities. Tourism is a growing sector of the global economy. Travel and tourism jobs are increasing worldwide. Africa as a whole attracts less than 5 percent of total world tourists and accounts for only a small percentage of international tourism income. Subsaharan Africa has a strong supply-side potential to attract tourists.

Beach resorts alone create a large draw for tourists. The coastal waters of the Indian Ocean boast some of the finest beaches in the world, with plenty of opportunities for sailing, diving, or other water sports. South Africa is proud of its secluded beaches and beautiful coastline. Other well-known coastal tourist destinations include Zanzibar-Tanzania, Benguerra Island in Mozambique, and the Seychelles.

Other areas with tourism potential are the wildlife parks and game preserves. Cultural locations with a rich heritage of historical significance are growing in their attractiveness to and accessibility for world travelers.

Africa excels in attracting tourists to its wildlife and game reserves. Safari tourism highlights exotic creatures, including elephants, lions, rhinos, hippos, and big game. Africa is full of extensive game reserves and national parks. Subsaharan Africa is replete with natural features or attractions that tourists gravitate toward, particularly tourists who are in search of outstanding scenic sites or desire an environmental adventure.

There are dozens of awe-inspiring national parks throughout Africa. Cultural and heritage tourism has grown immensely in recent years. Cultural assets and heritage landscapes have always provided for excellent tourist attractions. Subsaharan Africa has a great wealth of culture and heritage to attract tourists. Wildlife and big game are natural resources for tourism. Countries in Subsaharan Africa have created many protected areas for wildlife.

Every African country, urban center, or rural village is its own unique tourism magnet. The tourism business, however, is broader than just the sites themselves. Considerations need to be made for transportation to and from the country and final destination. Hotels and guest accommodations, such as food services, restaurants, and the availability of other types of consumer goods, need to be considered.

Services need to be available that link the various components of a trip, such as guide services in national parks or city bus tours. A serious financial investment is needed to bring Subsaharan Africa up to par with the global marketplace. Africa has huge potential for growth in its tourism market. There are many positive and negative aspects to tourism, and a trade-off is usually needed. Heavy tourism traffic might have a negative impact on the environment, cultural stereotypes tend to be exploited, and the disparity between wealthy tourists and service workers earning a modest wage may lend itself to divisions and social friction.

Tourism demands higher levels of security and public health at all levels. Money spent on tourism development is money not spent on schools or clinics. On the other hand, without the tourism income, there are no jobs. Tourism brings to the surface both centrifugal and centripetal cultural forces. To be successful, Africa will need to balance out the economic need for tourism with its willingness to comply with the requirements of the tourism industry.

Privacy Policy. Skip to main content. Chapter 7: Subsaharan Africa. Search for:. Analyze how the concept of rural-to-urban shift applies to the development pattern. Distinguish between the formal and informal sectors of the economy and understand how each would apply to the various core and peripheral regions of the realm.

Explain how countries fit into the index of economic development model and the relationship between family size, urbanization rates and income levels. Understand the diversity of languages and religions in the realm. Develop a theory about why, with the increasing population, the number of languages spoken decreases. Explain why many former European colonies still retain the language of their colonizer as their lingua franca, or official language. Identify the various areas in Subsaharan Africa that have experienced devastating civil wars or political conflict in recent years.

Outline the general pattern of HIV infections in the realm. Understand why it is difficult to contain and prevent the spread of AIDS. Explain why Subsaharan Africa has such great potential for economic development through tourism.

Articulate the difficulties in creating a tourism market. Figure 7. Incomes, Urbanization, and Family Size The socioeconomic data illustrate well the conditions for people in Africa in comparison to the rest of the world. Languages in Subsaharan Africa Subsaharan Africa covers a large land area more than 2. Religion in Subsaharan Africa Before the monotheistic religions from the Middle East were even in existence, the people of Africa followed traditional animist beliefs.

Ethnic Divisions and Civil Wars Subsaharan Africa is home to thousands of ethnic or traditional groups. Tourism Potential Subsaharan Africa has great potential for the development of tourism.

If left without proper treatment, the disease can also reemerge months later. Other insect-borne diseases that have a significant clustering in Africa include Yellow fever, which is also spread by mosquitoes, and trypanosomiasis, better known as sleeping sickness, which is transmitted by the bite of the tsetse fly.

In the hardest-hit countries, like Swaziland, Botswana, and Lesotho, more than one in five adults are infected. The disease is most often spread here by unsafe sexual practices, such as having sex unprotected with multiple partners even after marriage. Still, there have been strides to try to slow the spread and assist those with the disease.

Countries like Uganda have supported public awareness campaigns promoting monogamy in marriage and contraceptive use. They were able to slow the prevalence of HIV infections from 15 percent in the early s to just 5 percent in In recent years, however, the infection rate in Uganda has once again climbed.

Some say the government squandered aid money from the international community and did not keep up the public health initiative once rates decreased ultimately causing the infection rates to rise.

There is also a concern that religious initiatives promoting abstinence have not had the desired effect. In a survey, around one-quarter of married men in Uganda reported having multiple sexual partners in the past year and just eight percent of them reported using a condom. Periodically, regions in Africa, particularly West Africa, have experienced epidemics of Ebola, a viral hemorrhagic fever. Although Ebola is relatively difficult to transmit from person-to-person — it cannot be spread through the air like the flu — a combination of lack of understanding about disease transmission, inadequate infrastructure, and a distrust of Western intervention has made the region particularly vulnerable to deadly outbreaks.

An outbreak beginning in in the coastal West African country of Guinea spread across the surrounding area and killed 11, people over the course of two years see Figure 6. Bribery, even to access some public services, is common in many areas. Several governments deteriorated to the point where they are no longer functional, which is referred to as a failed state. In fact, of the ten states most vulnerable to failure in the world, seven are located in Africa.

In some areas, political conflict has gone hand-in-hand with ethnic conflict. Where competing ethnic groups found themselves sharing the same territory after independence, civil wars sometimes erupted as one group vied for power. Some groups turned to genocide , the systematic elimination of a group of people, in order to gain territorial and political control.

The Belgians perceived the Tutsi as closer to Caucasian, and this policy of granting power to minorities was a global colonial strategy aimed at suppressing the majority ethnic group.

After Rwanda gained independence in CE, the Hutu, who represented around 85 percent of the population, came to power and violent conflict between the Hutu and the Tutsi began almost immediately. Hundreds of thousands of Tutsi fled, becoming refugees , people who have been forced to leave their country. By the early s, the Hutu began preparing for genocide, seeking to eliminate the Tutsi minority.

Over the course of days between April and July , , Tutsis were killed — around 50 percent of the entire Tutsi population.

Rape was also systematically used against the Tutsi women. Conflict between Tutsi and Hutu, particularly in neighboring Burundi, has continued, however. In South Africa, the ruling party that came to power after independence was dominated not by an indigenous African group but by the descendants of Dutch settlers, known as Afrikaners. Africans in South Africa outnumbered non-Africans by 4 to 1 and the ruling Afrikaners instituted a policy of racial separation known as apartheid aimed at maintaining minority rule.

This system of segregation led to an entirely different system of education for non-white South Africans, limited their use of public spaces, and forced the relocation of millions into separate neighborhoods. Some countries have tried to overcome political instability and the lack of colonial connectivity by creating interregional organizations aimed at economic and political cooperation.

The largest of these organizations is the African Union , which formed in and consists of every African state, including Morocco which recently rejoined the AU in Among other objectives, the African Union seeks unity, integration, and sustainable development. In some cases, the lingua franca is the language of a common colonizer, such as English or French.

In other cases, the language is native the region, such as with Swahili, the lingua franca for much of Southeast Africa. Although formal colonization of Africa ended by , in many areas, it was replaced with neocolonialism , the practice of exerting economic rather than direct political control over territory.

This makes the economies of countries in the region vulnerable to price fluctuations and global markets. Furthermore, although Western countries no longer directly control African land, corporations based in these countries have either bought land directly or invested heavily in the region.

Investors have also purchased the water rights to some areas. Neocolonialism is also evidenced on a broader scale. The peripheral regions of the world generally supply goods and labor used by the core countries. Thus, the core continues to exert economic pressure on the periphery to maintain beneficial trade partnerships and cheap products, labor, and raw materials. In many countries, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, a dual economy exists, where plantations or commercial agriculture is practiced alongside traditional agricultural methods.

Critics of neocolonial theory argue that too much blame is placed on colonialism for the modern economic problems in Sub-Saharan Africa. Indeed, government corruption, inefficiency, and internal exploitation remains a significant barrier to long-term economic development. In some cases, economic pressure has come from loans granted by the core to the periphery.

Although the intention of these loans was to assist the periphery in infrastructure development, many countries have struggled under the weight of staggering debt. Loans by the IMF and World Bank to countries experiencing economic crises are accompanied by structural adjustment programs SAPs , stipulating economic changes a country must make in order to make it better able to repay its loans.

These conditions might include decreasing wages, raising food prices, or making the economy more market oriented. In practice, though, structural adjustment programs limit the ability of states to make their own economic decisions, which some see as neocolonialism. In addition, SAPs require governments to drastically cut their spending which most often leads to cuts in social services and public health. Furthermore, aid packages and loan programs were generally designed to reflectWestern ideas of development.

This could be viewed as further evidence of neocolonialism in the region. For some countries, the interest payments alone far exceed what they are able to pay. Globally, 39 countries, 33 of which are in Sub-Saharan Africa, have been identified as heavily indebted poor countries and eligible for debt relief through a joint venture by IMF and World Bank.

Changes have been made to the program to specifically address poverty in these countries and shift the loan payment amounts to funding for social and public services. Increasingly, African countries are partnering with investment groups rather than lending organizations and private investment now exceeds development assistance. In Angola, Chinese investors built Kilamba New City, a town complete with 25, homes, schools, and commercial facilities, to be repaid by Angolan oil see Figure 6.

For low-income individuals in Sub-Saharan Africa, microfinance has provided a way to access a range of financial and investment services. These services might include small loans, known as microcredit. Women in particular have benefitted from microcredit, which does not require complex paperwork, extensive employment history, or collateral as with traditional loans, but has provided a way for women to become entrepreneurs. Interest rates on these loans is generally quite small, and over 95 percent of loans are repaid.

Globally, most of the million microfinance clients are in Asia, but microfinance in Africa is growing. The African Transition Zone cuts across the southern edge of the Sahara Desert at the widest portion of the continent.

Maps vary in terms of which countries are included in each region, but this general geographic breakdown is helpful in identifying country locations and characteristics. Madagascar is a large island off the southeastern coast of Africa and is usually not included with the other regions because its geographic qualities and biodiversity are quite different from the mainland.

The continent of Africa is surrounded by salt water. The Indian Ocean borders it on the east, and the Atlantic is on the west. The continent of Africa has a number of small island groups that are associated with the realm and are independent countries.



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