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While your take on the situation is tempting, I don't agree. I lived and worked in the boonies in eastern Africa for almost 2-years and there is a lot of reason for hope for Africa...but real change may not occur in my lifetime.

And all the Africans I've known over the years (Zimbabwe, Sudan, Rwanda) have been gracious, optimistic, good people, entirely lacking in the cynicism that seems to permeate so many blacks in the U.S.. A major problem is that too many people have partaken of the specious idea that all people everywhere in the world are all open to some kind of spirit of progress and conclude that because some places are more ethically or technologically advanced it is because those particular people are inherently smarter or better than those who are not.

The spread of civilization and humane society has been contingent on many different factors--some of them simply geographical and meteorological. Sometimes one sees a confluence of many particularly good things such as the Judeo/Christian attitude to physical labor and inventiveness with the scholasticism of the medieval monks. When these were set in the context of a more northern Europe not so bound to the mentality of the Roman world and then combined with Medieval Climate Optimum, there were optimum conditions for advances on all sorts of fronts.

One of the really big problems in Africa was that so many of the really intelligent youngsters were sent off to school in Europe and thoroughly infected by socialism/communism and returned with the belief that 1. all woes were caused by white imperialists and 2. they would disappear when the white imperialists, their culture, and their laws were destroyed. Combine this with the too prevalant human tendency toward avarice and you have a recipe for disaster such as seen in the lust to appropriate the wealth of both white and black farmers in Zimbabwe.

Whatever the problems of the continent of Africa are, they don't come from people who are too inherently childish or too far down on some imaginary evolutionary ladder to do any better.