Let’s get one thing straight before anyone starts jerking off over IQ charts or seasonal climates: the claim that “Africans can’t conceive the future” is not intellectually lazy, because really objectively retarded. It misreads what anthropologists like John Mbiti actually say.
Mbiti observed that many traditional African cultures organize time differently. Time isn’t a straight line stretching infinitely forward, nor a cosmic wheel endlessly repeating. It’s event-based. Past is what happened. Present is what’s happening. “Future” only exists if it’s tied to a concrete event you can anticipate: harvest, initiation, migration, seasonal rains. If no event is scheduled, there is no “time” in the abstract. That is not ignorance or stupidity. It’s simply a different cognitive framework that fits the environment and social needs. No snow? No need to obsess over six months ahead. That doesn’t make anyone dumb, so it makes sense in context.
Western culture treats time as a linear abstraction, a container to be filled, measured, and manipulated. This allows for grand-scale planning: industrialization, rockets, satellites. But it also produces wars on an unprecedented scale, climate collapse, and a culture obsessed with abstract progress. Linear time = potential for technological marvels and catastrophe. Event-based time = local efficiency, cultural cohesion, survival without unnecessary abstraction.
IQ tests designed by Western societies will always favor linear-future thinking, because they measure abilities optimized for a Western conception of time. To extrapolate from those numbers that African societies are “dumber” is not science. It’s racism masquerading as rationalism. The idea that seasonal context dictates intelligence in some universal, measurable way is complete horseshit. Intelligence manifests differently depending on culture, environment, and societal structure.
Also, in any way, this is not across all of Sub-Saharan Africa. Lots of /pol/tard immigrants here.
