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 I hope the peanut gallery didn't scare you away, terenkleo! You've brought up a very important historical question and I'll try to answer based on the things I've read about it.

Folks on this forum generally understand the human world as something very dynamic (that is, changing over time) and based on relationships of unequal power between different groups of people. When looking at the history of a place like Africa we are looking at our own history, not only in that all humans share basic needs, abilities and traits, but also because understanding why Africans are poor necessitates understanding how the developed world got so rich.

Joseph Kay mentions Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel as a good place to start. I agree. While Diamond doesn't deal specifically with Africa, his core argument applies.

To make a long story short, geography played a big part in affecting how human civilizations developed. Peoples who lived in a specific latitude (running from China to India to Mesopotamia to Egypt to the Mediterranean) were able to utilize powerful 'packages' of crops and livestock to build sedentary, stratified societies with a lot of agricultural surplus. These 'packages' could be cultivated along this latitude and spread from east to west and vice versa. This gave these civilizations an advantage over others, one that would become dramatically clear after Columbus' encounter with the New World.

By extension, Sub-Saharan Africa was at a relative disadvantage because Africa, unlike Eurasia, is longer north to south, while deserts and jungles made trading cultivars and ideas more difficult. Also, it was also impossible for anyone to sail south or north past the Cape of Bojador in West Africa until about 600 years ago.

Still, people like Eric R Wolf (whose book Europe and the People Without History is another great starting point) have argued persuasively that Sub-Saharan Africa gave birth to its own complex civilizations situated around the Congo and Niger rivers. Wolf points out that around 1400 West Africa, for example, had an advanced society with networks of trade and types of technology that weren't that far behind Europeans or the Chinese.

However, Europe's main advantages were its sailing and navigation technologies, its centralized states and its weapons. These allowed them to reach West Africa to trade for the massive amounts of gold, ore and minerals there. For hundreds of years, these Africans were powerful enough that they kept the Europeans to little trading posts on islands off the coast. But the encounter still had a devastating effect on many African peoples.

From 1400 to around 1800, Europe was going through vast social and economic changes, towards a way of organizing the making of things and organizing power between people that we call capitalism. While in Europe social and economic power was based on the ownership of productive property, historians (like John Thornton in Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1650) have learned that in Africa power was based on the direct control of other people's labor. So while slavery had faded away in Europe, it was still very central in many parts of Africa. It's important to note that the African slave system was very different from the much crueler system the Europeans developed in the New World (slavery was not hereditary or racial, slaves could often work unsupervised, slaves could be educated officials and win their freedom, etc.)

Why did Europeans want to tap into the African slave system? Well, the growth of prosperity and power for the rich in Europe depended on buying lots of other people's labor, whether those people were the European poor kicked off their lands or unfree Africans. As Europeans set off to conquer much of the world over the next 500 years, they used the land, resources and people of those areas to increase their wealth at home and further spread their power abroad. We call this imperialism and it is closely connected to the dynamics of the capitalist system.

Imperialism, capitalism and the slave trade destroyed much of African society. Through this whole period, slaves captured by African raiders were often traded for European guns, so warfare in Africa got much bloodier. The wealth that could be made by capturing other Africans lead to heightening violence and social dislocation as whole generations were carried away in the horrendous Transatlantic slave trade. At least several million Africans died in transit. Countless more were killed in warfare and slave raids. Europeans and colonists justified this all by creating in their minds and in their activity the ideas of race and racial inferiority.

By the late 1800s Europeans were economically and militarily powerful enough (and the Africans sufficiently weakened) that they could take direct control over African lands. Through wars with Africans and between each other the Europeans managed to colonize almost all of Africa. This increased the displacement of peoples, families and cultures. Resources like rubber and diamonds were now taken directly. Africans were forced to labor for Europeans in mines and on plantations. (Look up King Leopold and the Congo Free State for a vivid illustration of how brutal the drive for profits can be.) Raw products were then sent to factories in the developed world to be worked on by wage laborers while the final product was taken by employers and sold for their profit.

Much later, after WWII, Africans managed to shake off the European yoke, but the damaging effects of hundreds of years of imperialism, capitalism, forced labor and murder persist to this day....

Oof! There is a lot more that could be said about this. I'm only trying to give you a rough sketch the history and I'm sure others can add a lot more. The main points are:

There is nothing inherently inferior about Africans that led to their current situation; the idea of race (that seems 'natural' to us) was created out of a system of exploitation and death that needed a biological or cultural justification.

You can't separate the relationship between the poverty of Africa from the prosperity of Europe.

The brutality exhibited by Europeans was not because they were inherently horrible people, but because they were part of a system that dehumanized people (both poor Europeans and African slaves) and used those people's brains and muscles to make profits for bosses.

The system to blame is called capitalism and people on this board argue (rightly!) that this is based on the exploitation of people who have no way to live except work for another group of people who manage to control all the property and tools, and the political system to boot.

Despite all the destruction and misery that it has and still does cause, capitalism has made such abundance that we can imagine a world without exploitation and war.

We think that all people (Africans, Europeans and Asians and so on) will never be free until all of us who live by renting ourselves out to other people succeed in coming together to eliminate capitalism and the state and replace them with a different type of society: one where people don't work all day to make things for the profits of somebody else; where we are free to spend our time doing the things that make life worthwhile with the people we care about.