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Why Africa is Lagging Behind

...Most of Africa, especially sub-Saharan Africa, is a plateau. The rivers in much of Africa cascade from the interior to the coast by way of waterfalls, cataracts, and rapids, which do not permit easy navigation. Given these non-navigable rivers, plus the forest and the deserts, one can see that communication in the past was not easy. Without easy communication, trade, mobility and the spread of ideas became very difficult.
The climate in most of sub-Saharan Africa did not exert enough pressure on Africans in the way that the harsh northern hemisphere climate forced the Europeans and Asians to become more innovative. Similar conditions would have forced our ancestors to look for ways of manipulating nature to ensure survival. In sub-Saharan Africa however, people merely depended on the bounty of nature. They did not have to work hard in order to live.
Because of conditions in which many diseases could spread easily, the African population did not grow as rapidly as it did on other continents. Thus there was no pressure on people to become aggressively competitive and no need for political expansionism of African kingdoms, because each unit was self-sufficient in terms of natural resources.
Thus Africa's weak micro-states and backward technology made the continent easily susceptible to foreign domination by more organised societies. While the Arabs were encroaching on African sovereignty and resources from the North the Europeans
started plundering from the West, South and East. In time, this created an additional two problems: the slave trade, which further depopulated the continent, and the social, economic and political cohesion that had been achieved was completely disrupted.

President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda New African, November 2003, page 13