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Re Africa — judge them by their fruits. Either intelligence isn’t really helpful to building prosperity or the Africans aren’t that intelligent.*
*On a large enough time scale.
Intelligence is helpful, it just isn't sufficient. African kingdoms have been prosperous before (at least in a similar way to other old civilizations, which is to say, they had rich rulers and impressive art, even if the average person's life sucked). But building truly prosperous societies, in the sense of benefiting a large portion of the people, is incredibly difficult. What many African countries have now--a strong man extracting wealth from an oppressed populace--is probably closer to many ancient societies that we now glorify as being important steps on the road to civilization, than the latter are to what we have today.
There is no question, that Mansa Musa, King of Mali, was immensely rich.
This is more questionable. Here are some highlights from Met. Which do you consider impressive?
The model African model of a strong man extracting wealth is only possible because of Western (or recently Chinese) trade. The ruler can now exchange what he takes from his people for useful things. Prior to being able to trade with the developed world, there was little reason to oppress the populace as they had nothing (save some daughters) that was particularly worth much to the ruler. It takes a lot of organization and manpower to extract rents from the poor.
I can only assume that you don't consider Egypt to be "Africa" if you are questioning the impressiveness of African art and architecture.
Rulers have been extracting wealth probably since rulers and concentrated societies existed. This review agrees with you that it is difficult, but it seems an exaggeration to say that Africans couldn't figure it out until the past few centuries. Unless I'm wrong, but if Africa also lacks anything worth anything worth stealing, maybe that contributes to its lack of developed nations?
When HBD proponents talk about “Africa” we are pretty much exclusively referring to sub-Saharan/“black” Africa. Egypt, Carthage, and other historical North African superstates were Semitic or Semitic-adjacent, and part of the Mediterranean world, not the “African” world as most people intend it when doing comparative history like this.
Ok, but the Northern part of Africa is still incredibly dysfunctional and poor today, so it still seems to present a question about what makes people capable of building civilization which can't be answered by reference to inherent intelligence. I don't know enough about the ancient history of sub-Saharan Africa specifically, but I do know that Botswana has seemingly dodged most of the problems plaguing its neighbors and is substantially richer than Egypt today.
The northern part of Africa today has basically no genetic continuity with ancient Egypt or Carthage; Northern African countries are overwhelmingly Arab, due to the Arab conquests of the seventh century under the Umayyad and Rashidun Caliphates. I agree with you that hereditary IQ is not the entire story of why many MENA countries are as poor and dysfunctional as they are, but trying to link them to the ancient Mediterranean empires of the Bronze and Iron Ages doesn’t make any sense either, since there’s little to no genetic carry-over between then and now.
But the ancient Arab world didn't lack large and rich cities, centralized empires, writing, art, mathematics, etc. either. Even today some Arab countries have most of those things; yes, it's unsustainable decadence due to oil rather than true economic development, but they still managed to maintain a reasonably stable government, something resembling property rights, etc.
Actually, Arabs are Semitic, so yes the current inhabitants of North Africa are not directly descended from pharaohs or Carthaginians, but they aren't that distantly related either.
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