Paleoanthropology appears to have established that the early vestiges of human society or humanoid presence surfaced in Africa.  China, possibly may be a contender for that distinction.  Ancient Africa boasted an advanced civilization in Egypt where science and medicine vied with distinctly primal behaviours associated with societal traits reflected by tribal and clan affiliation.  China does its utmost to stifle those instinctual proclivities, resorting to yet another, more macro version of it, nationalism.

Slavery, the ownership and use of other human beings by those considering themselves superior, reflects an ancient culture, one that still has currency in Africa.  African villages were comprised of clan memberships that had gained for themselves reputations reflecting aspects of human behaviour; some were considered to be moderate, by nature and inclination, others viciously pugnacious.  There was always the danger of one clan of a tribe or an entire tribe mounting violence on another.  And the same held true of other primitive societies, like North American indigenous people.

Africa appears mired in its ancient tribal-clan antipathies.  The countries of Africa whose territorial lines cross haphazardly over and around, often bisecting traditional tribal territories, have added another degree of xenophobia to their usual cultural heritage of tribalism, through the imposition of nationalism, and territorial challenges lured and inspired by natural resources and human greed.

Women live lives of misery, where clitoral excision is yet another cultural expression of yet another human emotion; misogyny and control.  Men have power over women feeling themselves superior beings and women their useful underlings.  Just as animals are valued and herded in ancient practices of animal husbandry, so are women maintained as chattels, valuable for their child-bearing and -rearing natures.

The puzzle is that the very geography identified as having originally given life to homo sapiens, its predecessors and successors, exemplifies a broad society incapable of rising above its instinctual-emotional inheritance.  The continent is wracked by inter- and intra-violent conflicts.  Governments are generally comprised of dictatorial autocrats and society tends to be rife with corruption.

In many African countries another layer, of religion, has been laid over their values - from animism to Christianity to Islam.  Primitive expressions of animosity to those from other tribes who present territorial threats result in religious sectarian belligerence and violence on top of every other contributing factor to unrest and misery.

The torments of forced mass migration, deadly conflicts, mass rape, child abductions and slavery remain rife in the continent.  Advanced countries of the world, mostly from the Western democracies, have sent their humanitarian government agencies and NGOs in an ongoing effort to aid Africa - and the near and the far East as well - to little seeming avail.  Vast sums of treasury have been expended to the same cause.

And in a country like Egypt, with its fabled societally advanced history resorts to ousting an imperial, military-backed tyrant only to have yet another, theocratic dictator impose his will, while the nation declines deeper into backwardness, misery and poverty.  In Libya, one brutal dictator has been removed through tribal rage, and that same tribalism remains responsible for an utter lack of order and a proliferation of armed militias expressing the ongoing antipathies rife in that society.

In Mali, a president who has an advanced degree in astrophysics has been removed by a military coup, while a great swathe of the country has been taken over and is now controlled, through threat and applied violence, by Islamist terrorists.  Billions of foreign aid has poured into that country with the best of intentions to aid yet another African country to lift itself out of poverty and ignorance and despair.

To what avail?