The Oil Drum

I'm always fascinated by what people do or don't know about the world outside their own country.

Mind, I've seen shanty towns on the Texan border that looked little better.

Seriously, people live like this in parts of rural China, which is a fast progressing country.

The US has a GDP per head of $40k. I would think the richest African nations have GDP/head of around $2k, and the poorest around $100.

So how would you expect people to live?

Relatively speaking that's not bad. Take a look at the West Point slums in Monrovia, Liberia.

So where is the "pure squalor" in the video?

I have never been to Senegal, but it is a popular tourist destination - especially to the French and to gays.

Anyone who has been to West Africa for a while will appreciate that the ex-French colonies are much pleasanter than the ex-British colonies. The people are much more friendly and civilized. The French like to claim that it was due to their benevolent (ahem) policies and the British like to say that the French grabbed the places with nicer tribes. Perhaps the slave trade (by the British) brought out the worst in the peoples who they traded with - let us not forget that it was the coastal tribes that enslaved the populations of the interior before selling them on.

The pictures show a place that is a good deal better off and safer than is most of Lagos (the commercial capital of Nigeria) - probably because Senegal has no oil. Indeed, I am sure it is much pleasanter than slums in a lot of other places such as Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro. They do not have the gun and drugs culture that is so prevalent in the Americas.

The article misses out on the two main problems in the Senegal - population-growth and desertification (which is linked to oil consumption).

The population of Senegal has increased by a factor of 3 over the past 40 years. If the US's population had increased at a similar rate, it would now be around 600 million. In fact, the US's population, if immigration is removed, has barely changed over this period.

How wealthy would the average American be today if the US's population were 600 million? So much investment would have needed to go into schools, hospitals and infrastructure that there would have been little left over to go towards technology, research and higher education.

On this website, and elsewhere, I have repeatedly seen the assumption that when people are hungry, they rebel and revolt. Not true. If you read carefully books by the famous French historian Fernand Braudel, you will see that the French revolution had somewhat more complex causes. To take an American example, the revolt against the British was not caused because the British in America (the colonisers) could not afford to pay the tax on tea from India. Quite the opposite.

Hunger causes weakness and apathy. Just try going on a serious diet for a while and you will see for yourself. Indeed, dictators like Stalin and Kim Jong-II use hunger to control entire populations - something that you cannot do as easily by force. Hence the reluctance of North Korea to make deals that include food in exchange for disarmament.

Personally, I think that places like Senegal are going to go through a severe form of "population destruction" rather than "demand destruction" - through hunger. Their populations drift to the cities because the urban population control the politics and are able to grab resources from the rural hinterland - for example, by having a grossly inflated currency, taxing food exports and subsidising imports. This will eventually come to an end and people will have to go back to the land. They will have to relearn all the tricks needed to keep the desert at bay.

Sadly, I think that their population will eventually stabilize at around one third of its current number.

I was born on the other side of Africa and love the place and its peoples so this makes me really sad.

Bring business to Dakar? Business has gotten to Dakar. That's why the local economy has been trashed there and in much of Africa. The technology/culture/terms of "business" is a big part of what's sucking Africa empty.

cfm in Gray, ME

I just read your article and saw the video, DISMAL is the best i can say about the place. The place is a pure squalor!

Huh? It looks like an ordinary third world city... better than many. The cars looked recent and in good condition in many cases.

You think you can fix things easily and that the whole thing will look like suburbia in a few years just by bringing business to Senegal? Why don't you dig into some details. Go to Senegal and try and start a business. You will see that developing economies are enormous gordian knots of inter-related and sometimes very politically incorrect problems that you probably never expected. You'll also see that in warm countries, as long as people get enough to eat, they get by for the most part and don't suffer greatly by not having pretty fixed up buildings and brand new clothes.

There is a whole field devoted to studying the problems of developing countries. If you're interested in a business oriented take I'd suggest "The Mystery of Capital" by Hernando De Soto.

the ancien Regime, the old French Monarchy may have been corrupt, but what followed it, during the Revolution, was far far worse.

Read up on Danton, Robespierre and the Terror. Or see the movie Danton with Gerard Depardieu. Or the TV series The Scarlet Pimpernel with Richard E. Grant.

The Committee for Public Safety and its Terror was the model for Lenin, Stalin and the Bolsheviks in 1917 Russia.

Honestly? Squalor? My reaction to the YouTube video was 180 degrees away from yours. I saw healthy looking people walking along a bright, lively street. Commerce, pervasive reuse and recycling, women walking safely unescorted with or without full Islamic covering, children playing outdoor games, people engaging in honest manual labor, etc.

You want to see a pit of desperation? Visit my neighborhood of greater Boston. It's one of the few places near the specialized technology work that I do in which a family can rent instead of buy, and we have staunchly refused to get suckered by the modern-day equivalent of tulip mania by taking on a creative mortgage time bomb.

So where can a well-educated, young, single-income family afford to live in Boston without adding credit card debt to our hefty educational loans? I should post some photographs of our neighborhood (hint: they don't call it Slumerville for nothing). As seen from street level, the primary business activities appear to be selling lottery scratch tickets, waiting tables at the local stuffyourfaceteria, and writing parking tickets.

When the house we occupy was built 100 years ago, it was a nice, comfortable single family house in a thriving, walkable community like the one seen in the footage from Senegal. Now it is subdivided into five separate apartments housing a dozen renters who don't care one whit about this place as it rots and falls apart around us. The slum lord who collects our rent doesn't either. There was a tram rail down the center of the main street two blocks away which has since been paved over. I've never seen children playing double dutch here. The streets are filled with trash and potholes and the sidewalks are cracked and shifted like tectonic plates. A family of squirrels have bored into and taken up residence inside the structure of the house across the street, which is now three different shades of peeling paint where it has been subdivided. The side wall bulges out in a slow-motion structural failure. The house around the corner that caught fire in the fall is still boarded up. Graffiti abounds, as does chain link fence.

To be fair, there are also libraries, numerous well-appointed parks, and high-end products and services for the well-to-do or deep-in-debt. For the right price, we have year-round access to fresh organic vegetables, which is a lavish luxury by world standards. We walk to the farmers' market to buy local produce in season. The public transportation is Dickensian and irregular but pervasive. We have easy access to several cinemas playing excellent independent and foreign films that are unavailable to most of the U.S. We have access to a top-notch automotive recycler for used car parts to keep our old car running. We have many high-quality lessons and activities for children in affluent parts of Cambridge. So we make it work, but the fact remains that large swaths of Boston have degraded into places not worth caring about (in the parlance of J.H. Kunstler).

Compared to the deplorable condition of U.S. cities, I'm extremely impressed that Dakar is thriving on a tiny fraction of the energy we use in our squalor. It gives me hope that in the wake of peak oil, we can reconfigure our neighborhoods in ways that will make them better than they are now, in which neighbors communicate in ways other than hand gestures and horn blasts exchanged across traffic lanes choked with pollution from SUVs. From the looks of the U.S. today, we need (little 'd') democratic revolution more than Senegal.