Poorest European Countries/Richest African countries

[parochial boy]

I've always wondered about African countries like Gabon that nominally post decent GDP and HDI numbers but that don't often make subjective lists of relatively-rich parts of the continent. Are these actually okay places to live for the average person to the same extent that, say, Botswana is, or do their governments just pump a bunch of resource-exports money into favored sectors of society?

It depends - Botswana has much higher living standards than most of Africa, even if it still has a quite surprising levels of rural poverty that you might not expect from a country with a similar income to, say, Thailand. In contrast, Equatorial Guinea is a disaster, and has pretty bad living standards even by African standards - such is the breathtaking kleptocracy of the ruling regime.

Honestly, the best place in Africa to live is probably Mauritius. Seychelles would be there too, but it has a pretty nasty problem with heroin addiction.

[parochial boy]

I've always wondered about African countries like Gabon that nominally post decent GDP and HDI numbers but that don't often make subjective lists of relatively-rich parts of the continent. Are these actually okay places to live for the average person to the same extent that, say, Botswana is, or do their governments just pump a bunch of resource-exports money into favored sectors of society?

It depends - Botswana has much higher living standards than most of Africa, even if it still has a quite surprising levels of rural poverty that you might not expect from a country with a similar income to, say, Thailand. In contrast, Equatorial Guinea is a disaster, and has pretty bad living standards even by African standards - such is the breathtaking kleptocracy of the ruling regime.

Honestly, the best place in Africa to live is probably Mauritius. Seychelles would be there too, but it has a pretty nasty problem with heroin addiction.

The island countries in Africa in general seem better off than the mainland (Mauritius, Seychelles, Cabo Verde, etc). Is this real, and is there a reason behind it?

I wouldn't pretend to have any expertise on the matter, but they are all settler societies - and those tend to always be slightly better off - and all had fairly specific roles in their respective colonial empires. So Cape Verde had the slave trade (erm) transit point thing, Mauritius had the sugar cane economy and import of indentures labourers. So they were colonised earlier, and for a different purpose than the typical scramble for Africa experience. All that contrasts the the likes of Madagascar and Comoros, which are much poorer, and had a different experience of settlement and colonisation.

(or to put it bluntly, a large part of the reason they are wealthier is racism, pure and simple).

Plus then they generally have had more post-independence stability and in the case of Cape Verde, Mauritius and the Seychelles, been able to develop succesful tourist industries. Although whether this was all helped by the points in the first paragraph is an argument you could make.

[parochial boy]

In what way? Do racism magical cause money to materialize in people's hands?

Countries which are less unequal and more stable are better places top live and invest. When American companies outsource to East Asia instead of West Africa even through the labor cost are cheaper in West Africa, it's not because of racism but because it's a better investment thanks to other factors like stability, infrastructure and a strong monopoly of force.

Well, think about the demographic and economic effct that a certain industry may have had on Western Africa. Said industry didn't just impact the people who were transported themselves, but on the whole economic ecosystem of the region, and that was a major long term impact.

Even ignoring that, think about the way those countries were colonised, the way borders were drawn, the way they were governed (brutally in some cases, nepotistically and corruptly in others, both in a lot), the interference that has gone on since the 1960s, the resources that were extracted and who actually benefited. You know, quite a lot of things. I'm surprised you seem to have never encountered these points before to be honest.

In contrast, large swathes of Asia have been incredibly unstable since the end of the colonial era. But are still better off than comparatively more stable African countries.

[parochial boy]

A impressive mix of factors. The transatlantic slave trade de fato ended as a major factor around 1830 almost 50 years before the Berlin Conference. While the transaharan slave trade was in decline through the 19th century thanks to European states disrupting the west part of it and the eastern sea route. In fact the end of it was a major factor which enabled the European states to conquer Africa, simply because they disrupted the African states main source of income by removing the income from the slave trade.

As for borders based on ethnicity in Africa, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Somalia and Burundi all have a single dominant ethnic group. You could only change the border with hindsight in Africa, outside Nigeria coastal West Africa tend to have border which makes a lot of sense and relative little ethnic strife.

Also European ran Africa pretty much like they ran Asia and the colonies was equally poor in 1960.

Africa have a lot of problem Western or any other outside racism toward Africans isn't even in the top ten.

Erm, err, how do I put this... What do you think, has been, the, er, defining sort of thing in the post-colonial history of those two countries? I'll give you a clue, the events of 1994 in the first one; based on a division that the Belgian colonial administration had fuelled.

The other countries are not actually ethnically homogenous - Mugabe led a nasty ethnic cleansing against the minority Ndebele in Zimbabwe; Somalia may on the face of it seem homogenously "Somali" but that is papering over the actual social divisions that exist in the country in a similar way to have describing Algeria as homogenously "arab" would be pretty misleading.

As for the slave trade - as I hinted at, and Al made a bit clearer (among other things, certain ethnic groups were essentially charged with "harvesting" slaves for transportation, wars were started with this objective, regions were depopulated, economies and cultures destroyed...) - the way it disrupted societies in West Africa, the Sahel and further afield was a deep, long term, structural disaster. It had profound impacts on the way those societies worked which were then immediately pushed into colonial administrations and artifically constructed borders in a way that meant they were never given the chance to heal.

Racism isn't the only problem Africa has faced. In fact it's a massive continent inhabited by over a billion people. It is enourmously diverse politically, culturally and economically in way that you can't even begin to generalise. But to argue that racism and the consequential way that the continent has been treated by the western powers hasn't been a major factor in fuelling poverty and instability across the continent means shutting your eyes to a lot of what has actually gone on there.