Annotate Congopen

Warning: the first part of this post consists of a theory. Before you mark it for deletion, though, please bear in mind that the theory is not the idea; the idea is for a grandiose engineering project half-justified by the theory. Thank you.

The Theory:
Why is Africa poor, backward and unstable? Well, partly it's because of the colonial and neo-colonial interventions of outsiders, but that just begs the question - why is it that Europe & Arabia were originally in a position to exploit Africa, and not the other way around?

Well, this theory is that there's a reason in the physical geography of Africa, namely, the lack of navigable water. Right up until the railway revolution of the nineteenth century, water was by far the easiest way to move stuff around in bulk. Moving stuff around enables prosperity directly, through trade, but also it enables transfer of ideas (and hence technological development) and the sharing of language and culture (making possible stable political entities on a larger scale). The Adriatic Sea and the Delta of the Rhine, for example, were enormously useful maintenance-free bits of transport infrastructure, which enabled Venice and the Low Countries, for example, to emerge triumphantly from third-world-style medieval wretchedness.

Africa's coast is short of deep inlets (sorry, Slartibartfast), so most of Africa is distant from the sea, and most of Africa's rivers are not navigable, because there are too many cataracts. The one place in Africa which has had a long history of prosperous civilisation is Egypt, which has two useful sea-coasts and, in the lower Nile, a huge navigable river.

Enough theory - on with the explosions:
So, what I propose is to use as many demolition charges as it takes to smoothe out the major waterways of the Congo basin, eliminating cataracts wherever possible, so that anyone with enough resources to build a raft can start to take control of their own destiny.

Repeat with the Zambezi, etc.

I anticipate the following objections:
1. It will take centuries before any benefits are noticeable.
2. In the meantime, the improved communications will be exploited mostly by outsiders.
3. Improved communications will be bad both for bio-diversity (as human development intensifies) and for cultural diversity (as Africa's many micro-languages go the way of the medieval dialects of Europe).
4. There will be an immediate destructive effect on ecosystems that have adapted, in one way or another, to the presence of all those cataracts.

Otherwise, I can't see any flaw in this at all. ;)