Yes, Africa is a pit, and yes, Africa will probably fall backward into a true nightmare for much of the next century.
Yes, "the dynamism known as Western culture..." far outstrips the competition.
But,
(1) don't count out the Chinese, absent their long tradition of Mandarin rule the Chinese are not to be ignored.
(2) Both Africa and the Middle East (Islam) suffer from localism and tribalism rather than over-control from the center. They remain rooted (again, no pun) in spite of ideologies or clear means to move ahead.
(3) The causes are not in anyone's genes but in the history of the place - where would western culture be today had the elites of its nation states not been inter-twined by marriage and trade and had their religeous differences not been taken from the same set of books?
Even in Latin America (my personal worst nightmare), as in the rest of the third world, efforts to educate a few and to 'influence' governments toward reform have failed almost totally. Those South American states with large european populations have done well but they generally share a religeous basis with the west and, I expect, that made the transition much easier. ('Though it was pretty tough on the original population when first encountered.)
I'd say that history and relegion have far more to do with the current disasters than any other cause - after all, Jews and Arabs are both semetic and black Americans fit into the bell curve no matter how you want to interpret it.
Ideologies converge only where it is convenient; Bill Clinton, Kofi Anan, Jimmy Carter, and Robert Mugabe DO come together when they need to justify grasping for power. I expect they would all get along quite well with Stalin, Hitler, Amin, or Peron.
None of this could possibly offer hope to Africa, Indonesia, or to the average Saudi, but it should give a hint as to what the actual enemy is.