I actually agree with you that we created the greatest country that the earth has ever seen, but trying to compare the American Miracle to what happened in Africa is not analogous. This country was founded by very educated men who were steeped in the enlightenment era. When Europe left Africa they left a power vacuum, having failed to prepared the native people for independence. Africa was left mostly uneducated, and still stuck in the portion of the "Mercantile System" that depended on raw materials with no value added industry on the continent. They were also left with a small ruling class that had no enlightened ideals. The rest of the population were a mass of uneducated lower laborers. In the United States, we had industry, an educated "ruling class", and a merchant based middle class.
You also cannot compare a Virginian and a Marylander to a Hutu and a Tutu. The former had shared ideals, people who mostly identify themselves to place and less to "tribe". The Hutu and Tutu have had a blood feud that extends back to the age of Rome. It would be analogous to having an Indian nation with Sioux and Apaches and expect them to get along, they never did, so why would they now?
I am not saying that they are not their own worst enemy, they are, but I still think some of the current issues lie at the feet of France, Belgium, and Germany. Notice I did not include Great Britain, that is because they looked at their colonies as children that needed to have education, industry, and an educated middle class, sound familiar?
Also absent from Africa has been a George Washington, or Simon Bolivar. There has never been anyone that have been able to rally the various peoples to identify with country over tribe. This has meant that despot after despot have ruled many of these nations, and whenever there is a civil war to remove the current tyrant, it is only to replace him with another one.
I cannot see any easy solutions to Africa's problems. The idiocy of Geldof and his lot is that they do not see famine for what it is, a political tool used by authoritarian governments to eliminate enemies. To simply send money and food that will only go to feed the armies of these countries will do nothing to solve the continent's woes.
Europe did not "leave" Africa -- they were driven out by so-called liberation movements and anti-colonial agitation. Whether colonial rule was too long or too short, it ended because of pressure from the Left and the desire of Africans to take what the Europeans had built. Contrary to all promises and expectations -- except for the warnings of a few reviled ex-colonialists -- even the most fortunate African countries in terms of natural resources and benign colonial rule, such as Uganda, Rhodesia, and Kenya, all went downhill, persecuting and driving out their most productive citizens.
The European and American industry and educated middle class that you refer to were not created in place by force of nature but were the product of human effort. The problem with Africa is the Africans -- or more accurately, the behavior, culture, and beliefs of Africans. To progress, they have to embrace the beliefs and practices that led to Europe and America's development and rise -- but that is utterly contrary to the advice they usually get from the West and their own intellectuals.
Africa's best hope is not aid or leadership from its intellectuals or its rapacious political class. Rather, the hope of Africa is the strongly traditional and energetic brand of Christianity that has developed there and which, in several generations, may remake its peoples. Indeed, even before then, African Christianity seems likely to become a pillar of strength for traditional Christianity in the West. On the whole though, we are more likely to get a Black Pope before Africa rises from its self-forged and profitable misery./p>