has a long period of common history. Before the Korean
War and the division at the 38th parallel, it had an
unprecedented homogeneity in terms of language,
ethnicity, and culture. Just as in Nogales, what matters is
the border. To the north is a different regime, imposing
different institutions, creating different incentives. Any
difference in culture between south and north of the border
cutting through the two parts of Nogales or the two parts of
Korea is thus not a cause of the differences in prosperity
but, rather, a consequence.
What about Africa and African culture? Historically, sub-
Saharan Africa was poorer than most other parts of the
world, and its ancient civilizations did not develop the
wheel, writing (with the exception of Ethiopia and Somalia),
or the plow. Though these technologies were not widely
used until the advent of formal European colonization in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth century, African
societies knew about them much earlier. Europeans began
sailing around the west coast in the late fifteenth century,
and Asians were continually sailing to East Africa from
much earlier times.
We can understand why these technologies were not
adopted from the history of the Kingdom of Kongo at the
mouth of the Congo River, which has given its name to the
modern Democratic Republic of Congo. Map 6 shows
where the Kongo was along with another important central
African state, the Kuba Kingdom, which we discuss later in
the book.
Kongo came into intense contact with the Portuguese
after it was first visited by the mariner Diogo Cão in 1483.
At the time, Kongo was a highly centralized polity by African
standards, whose capital, Mbanza, had a population of
sixty thousand, which made it about the same size as the
Portuguese capital of Lisbon and larger than London, which
had a population of about fifty thousand in 1500. The king
of Kongo, Nzinga a Nkuwu, converted to Catholicism and
changed his name to João I. Later Mbanza’s name was
changed to São Salvador. Thanks to the Portuguese, the
Kongolese learned about the wheel and the plow, and the
Portuguese even encouraged their adoption with
agricultural missions in 1491 and 1512. But all these
initiatives failed. Still, the Kongolese were far from averse