WHY IS AFRICA SO STUPID?

Earlier this month, on April 12, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice warmly welcomed the ruler of a small African country called Equatorial Guinea at the State Department.  "Thank you for your presence here," she told Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo.  "You are a good friend and we welcome you."

The colony of Spanish Guinea became independent in 1968, changed its name, and went straight to hell under a murderous dictatorship run by a monster named Fernando Macias, who slaughtered over a quarter of the country’s population to keep his power.

In 1979, Macias’ nephew and director of the Black Beach Prison where vast numbers of political prisoners were tortured to death, Teodoro Obiang, staged a coup, executed his uncle Macias, and became president-for-life.  Ever since, Obiang has run one of the most corrupt, oppressive, and anti-democratic states in the world.

Of the 158 countries surveyed in Transparency International’s Corruption Index, ranking from least corrupt (#1 is Iceland, the US is #17) to most corrupt, Equatorial Guinea is #152. 

It is not, however, without resources.  Oil was discovered in 1996 and is being pumped out of Equatorial Guinean ground in vast amounts, which is why Obiang was wined and dined by our diplomats.  Most of the oil wealth goes into the pockets of Obiang and his friends.  Most of the people are as dirt poor as always.

I am sure you are not in the least shocked.  Endless wars, bottomless corruption, disease, tyranny and dictatorship seem standard operating procedure for Africa.  Out of the over 50 nation-states on the continent, one can point to the mild success story here and there – but these are exceptions to Africa’s being the bottom of humanity’s barrel.

What is going on here?  Why can’t Africa get its act together?  Billions upon billions of foreign aid dollars have been poured into the place, nothing ever works.  Democracy and free markets rarely catch on.  Paleolithic poverty seems hard-wired into Africa.  How come?

Here’s the blunt truth:  Africans, on the whole, are stupider than folks in other parts of the world.

Of course, there are plenty of very smart individual Africans.  But the average IQ of sub-Saharan Africans is 67.  The American Psychiatric Association classifies people with an IQ of 70 or below as mentally retarded.  The majority population of the entire continent of Africa (excluding North African countries such as Morocco and Egypt) is suffering mental retardation.  The average IQ in Equatorial Guinea is 59. 

The world’s foremost researcher on IQ is Richard Lynn, professor of psychology at the University of Ulster in the UK.  His exhaustive research over 30 years has been compiled in monumental studies entitled IQ and the Wealth of Nations and Race Differences in Intelligence: An Evolutionary Analysis. 

Sifting through 168 national IQ studies covering 81 countries and published in peer-reviewed scientific journals, analyzing the entire body of scientific psychometric (psychological measurement) research for the last 100 years, Lynn has determined that:

*East Asians (Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, but not China) have on average 5 IQ points higher than Europeans and European-Americans.

*East Asian mean IQ is 105,  China excluding Hong Kong is 100 (Hong Kong is 107, the world’s highest), European/European-American is 100, Inuit Eskimo is 91, American Indian is 87, Mexican is 87, American Black is 85, South Asian (e.g. India, Pakistan) is 84, Middle East/North Africa Arab is 83, Sub-Saharan African is 67, Australian Aborigine is 62.  The world average IQ is 90.

*Men have 5 IQ points higher than women on average throughout the world.

*There is a strong correlation between a country’s average IQ and its prosperity.

Plot a country’s per capita GDP on an x-y axis with that country’s average IQ:

And it jumps out at you:  There are smart-rich countries, smart-poor countries, and stupid-poor countries, but there are almost no stupid-rich countries.

Of course, liberals want to dismiss IQ tests because they don’t give liberals what they want:  multicultural equality.  But IQ is not a theory, it is a discovery:  people who can solve one kind of problem or puzzle can solve other and very different kinds.  There really is such a thing as general problem-solving ability and that’s what IQ tests measure.

Here is Lynn’s dismissal of liberal criticism of IQ:

The position of [liberals] that over the course of some 100,000 years peoples separated by geographical barriers in different parts of the world evolved into different races with pronounced genetic differences in morphology, blood groups and the incidence of genetic diseases, and yet have identical genotypes for intelligence, is so improbable that those who advance it must either be totally ignorant of the basic principles of evolutionary biology or else have a political agenda to deny the importance of race. Or both.

Lynn considers a number of explanations for differences in IQ among racial groups.  There must be a genetic component.  An evolutionary history of surviving the Ice Ages selected for high intelligence.  And then there is something called the Flynn Effect.

Named after New Zealand political scientist James Flynn, this is the established rise in IQ in many countries, at the rate of about 3 IQ points per decade from the mid-1930s to the mid-1990s. (IQ seems to have stabilized since then.)  Lynn correlates the Flynn Effect with improvements in nutrition. 

A clear example would be Japan.  As the Japanese diet improved dramatically with more protein and nutrients, so did the average Japanese IQ.  He cites a number of other examples.

The Flynn Effect has not occurred in most African countries – and neither has any significant improvement in their diets.  Malnutrition, severe protein/nutritional deprivation is the norm for the great majority of Sub-Saharan Africans.

The average Black American IQ with little or no Caucasian ancestry is 80.  As the average Black African IQ is 67 with the genetic component being the same, Lynn attributes the significant 13 point difference to better nutrition in America.

Thus, for all the heroic efforts being made to encourage political and economic freedom in Africa, as outlined by Paula Dobriansky, Under-Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs, the place to start is to improve average African intelligence by improving African nutrition.

This will take decades (3 points improvement per decade, per the Flynn Effect).  We can applaud the efforts of Ms. Dobriansky and advocate in every way more economic and political freedom in Africa as we should everywhere else.  But some of the world’s deepest problems are not going to be solved soon.  They may not be solved at all.

It’s important to understand this, as liberals rant about world injustice and blame it all on America.  Famous fools like Bono are forever claiming that Africa’s problems can be wished away with the magic wand of billions of American taxpayer dollars.

The world is not a rose garden.  This is not America’s fault.  It is reality.  And one reality is that the thorns of Africa will be here for a long time to come.