I’ve often wondered why Africa, which is often pointed to as the cradle of civilization (they had Egypt, for example), and clearly pre-dated the existence of the US, never emerged as a global military and economic super-power during any of its history.
Maybe economics and wealth are just angry, old, white male concepts.
I mean they never invented anything at all!
I don't count picking up a rock or stick to bong each other as an invention. Even today's apes do that, and they aren't showing any signs that they will ever ‘evolve’ into anything smarter.
Because it is only the cradle, nothing else. Egypt was basically Semitic.
Honestly the only peoples who seemed to make really great accomplishment are caucasian and oriental.
It has largely to do with geography.
Jared Diamond wrote a book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, which pretty much explained why.
Africa and other places, like Central and South America, did not have land masses which stretched distances lattitudinally. It is possible to travel across Eurasia from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans, and he described how that was advantageous to cultural, agricultural, and scientific advances.
For example, the types of crops grown in the equatorial region of Africa will not thrive in the southern most tip of the African continent. The Dutch found that the food they grew in Holland did very well in that climate, which explains why no native agricultural tribes were established that far south.
For further information you should read his book. It was a very good read.
Egyptian civilization was effectively white, or at least not a sub-Saharan-African civilization, regardless of what Afrocentric academics might say. The Egyptians were part of the culture of the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, consisting of the Nile valley, Phoenicia (Lebanon and Israel) and Mesopotamia.
Agriculture originated in this region, probably around Sumeria, and spread out. I would not be surprised if Ancient Egypt was settled by Sumerian agriculturalists spreading out from Mesopotamia, down the eastern Mediterranean coast, and down into the Nile, exterminating any prior hunter/gatherer tribes that may have been there.
Carthage was a major power for a couple of centuries BC when it was a republic set up by the Phoenicians and later as the capital of the Vandal kingdom in the fifth and sixth centuries AD. However, its founders and rulers came from outside Africa.