more obvious link ... which is that until recently they were colonies
I call BS on this. I think it is used pervasively as an excuse which panders to left-wing white guilt, but doesn't actually do any explanatory work. E.g. America was once a colony (and had good growth not too long after), Hong Kong was a colony until 1999, Vietnam was until recently a colony but now has GDP growth that most first world countries would be proud of. Israel was until recently a colony, populated by people who have been until recently harshly persecuted, and to boot got invaded several times by surrounding hostiles. Yet has excellent GDP per cap, growth, etc. South Korea was until recently a colony. etc etc.
And one African country that didn't start off as a colony, Liberia, is an utter disaster, having displayed the usual sequence of coup, civil war, dictatorship and ethnic tensions. Many Liberians live on less than $1 per day.
...The independence of Ethiopia was interrupted by the Second Italo-Abyssinian War and Italian occupation (1936–1941).[67] During this time of attack, Haile Selassie appealed to the League of Nations in 1935, delivering an address that made him a worldwide figure, and the 1935 Time magazine Man of the Year.[68] Following the entry of Italy into World War II, British Empire forces, together with patriot Ethiopian fighters, officially liberated Ethiopia in the course of the East African Campaign in 1941, while an Italian guerrilla campaign continued until 1943
Last Wednesday (2010 Dec 01), BBC Radio 4 broadcast a studio discussion on the question: "should we actively try to extend life itself?" The programme can be listened to from the BBC here for one week from broadcast, and is also being repeated tomorrow (Saturday Dec 04) at 22:15 BST. (ETA: not BST, GMT.)
All of the dreadful arguments for why death is good came out. For uninteresting reasons I missed a few minutes here and there, but in what I heard, not one of the speakers on any side of the question said anything like, "This is a no-brainer! Death is evil. Disease is evil. The less of both we have, the better. There is nothing good about death, at all, and all the arguments to the contrary are moral imbecility."
Instead, I heard people saying that work on life extension is disrespectful to the old, that to prolong life would be like prolonging an opera, which has a certain natural size and shape, that the old are wise, so if we make them physically young then old people won't be old, so they won't be wise. Whatever cockeyed argument you can construct by scattering into a Deeply Wise template the words "old", "young", "wise", "decrepit", "healthy", "natural", "unnatural", "boredom", "inevitable", "denial", I heard worse.
If I can bear to listen again to the whole thing just to check I didn't miss anything important, I may write something on their discussion board.