Really the only successful African country was South Africa but that place is falling apart under native rule. Consider that over 90% of patents in Africa came from South Africa. And the year of this study, Africa accounted for 0.0001% of all patents.
Consider this Ethiopian bridge built by Europeans in the 1600’s. The bridge was destroyed by Ethiopians during the Italian occupation in the 1930’s. This is how the bridge was crossed afterwards. The Ethiopians didn’t have the will or skill to fix the bridge.
It wasn’t until American Ken Frantz saw the picture and decided to launch a foundation (Bridge to Prosperity) to repair the bridge. Ken and his fellow colonizers raised money, traveled to Ethiopia and did this:
The Ethiopians had ~70 years to fix the bridge, but they instead crossed it using ropes. You get the idea…
I'm not really confident that it is well to say that South Africa was successful. There was prosperity for a time, but much injustice and lots of violence. The violence of the Cecil Rhodes crew was embarrassing to some in England, so they got the Afrikaans of Dutch heritage to take over, since the Boer war (like all wars) didn't settle anything. The forcing of native populations off their farms and into mines and refineries and factories benefited European companies and resulted in some education for the native people of South Africa. This forced urbanisation was very violent. The homelands policies were violent.
One can make the argument that the richest man in the world is African, and it is true, in its way. The mElon was born in South Africa. His billions arose from his cooperation in scamming the internet with the fractional reserve PayPal digital payment methodology followed by working really closely with the mass murdering demon worshippers in the war profiteer industry starting at Kwajalein island. Then he became the world's biggest welfare queen, getting endless subsidies for electric cars and electric houses with solar panels so load sharing can be forced onto a wide population. Most of his money was made being not in Africa. So it is more or less incidental to his biography that he was born in Africa, a matter over which I suspect he had no control.
It is nice to see a truss over the water. But it's kind of a strange solution to restoration, making a truss that sticks out, instead of making a wood frame and restoring the original arch. The truss will rust, the wealthy donors will forget, and eventually the rope crossing will return. Meanwhile it was the Italian military that blew up the bridge and I'm just going out on a limb here, as it were, guessing that the Italian government did not force any of the Italian war profiteer companies to pay reparations to Ethiopia to fix the bridge. Italy certainly bears responsibility for atrocities all over Italian Somalia, Ethiopia, Tunisia, and other parts of Africa, and it will not soon pay any cost for fixing the horrible things it did, because the government of Italy and the war profiteers who work for it are protected by demon worshippers. But, hey, we can all admire the plucky "Bridge to Prosperity" donors for making an abomination slightly less abominable.
Decency, humanity, freedom, dignity, peace, and love, compassion, understanding, these are worth having, these would be markers of success. Temporary prosperity isn't much on which to base a claim of "successful."
I wrote a bit about the topic of decency in my most recent essay, Liars Poke Her, and about the value of an actual civilisation in this essay: https://l5news.substack.com/p/it-would-be-a-good-idea
Next year in a free country.