Even Thomas Sowell (who is certainly no excuse-maker) has written about how bad Africa's geography is economic factors. For one example I remember off the top of my chips, the Mississippi river you can ride all the way down from America's north to the gulf. Conversely every major African river has a falls along its route.
Why does this matter? Imagine you have a load of goods to get from one place to another. Now you can pick it up and carry it by either your own hands or with pack animals. Which will be slow, exhausting, and have a weight limit. Or you can put it on a boat, where you can transport a lot more weight a lot quicker. Unless somewhere along the way, you have to stop, get out of the boat, and move it and all your goods by land (like if you encounter a falls, the water transport equivalent of a barricade) and then get back into the water. If you have to do that very many times, you're not going to be able to transport as much as you could otherwise and lose all the advantages of water transport.
Here's a little something more interesting. I went looking for the video that was reading from the Thomas Sowell book all this info was in, and it was called "Facts about Africa's Geography never taught in school | Thomas Sowell."
That video has apparently vanished from YouTube. The only record of it now are some reaction channels reacting to it. Instead if you do a search for it, you'll get that "RealLifeLore" video at the top of the feed. A nebula backed channel.
Interesting.........
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