Thomas Malthus by Jasper Keith Manake Dube

2734 Words11 Pages
The Malthusian assumptions have been manifested in the continent of Africa at large. This is evidenced by several events which occurred in Africa which are as follows; the Rwandan genocides, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) crisis, the Uganda crisis, floods in Sudan, the Northern Mali crisis, cholera outbreak in South West Guinea as well as conflicts in south West Kenya. Africa has also witnessed some vast developments in contraceptive use, abortions, late marriages, women empowerment as well as celibacy which had already been prophesied by Malthus in 1878. However, the evens in Africa seem to have a diversity of causes other than population growth which renders the Malthus theory invalid. Thomas Malthus wrote a book called ‘An essay on the principles of population growth’ in which he argued that the power of population is superior to the power of the earth to produce for subsistence for man. In this book he argues that population grows at an exponential or geometric growth rate while food production grows at an arithmetic rate. A point would come when human population would reach the limit up to which food sources would support. Any further increase would lead to some measures like positive checks notably famines, hunger, epidemics, wars and other natural miseries which results in large scale deaths. Malthus also suggested that there may also be some preventive or negative checks which are efforts in reducing birth rates notably abortions, late marriages, use of contraceptives, celibacy, just to mention a few. These proved to be some developments which were designed to curb population increase in the New Millennium Africa. There had been some atrocious genocides in Rwanda in 19994 where over 800 000 deaths were recorded. Analysts have argued that it had been a confirmation of the prophecy of Thomas Malthus. The events greatly reduced the population of Rwanda
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