u/Beneficial_Yak3379

Over the past month I’ve been autistically working on an excel sheet cataloging African demographic figures (birth rates, TFR, pop., etc). The population numbers and statistics for Africa are totally unreliable. Fertility and total population are all wrong. my methodology is simply going to the national statistics office of every country and comparing them to the UN / WorldBank figures. For countries in which there are no reliable statistics, I just average the sum of percentage discrepancies in realized UN data errors in (based on reporting by Jesus Fernandez Villaverde) that we have on hand and VERY roughly extrapolate to the unknown data.

The unavoidable conclusion is that the numbers for Africa are maximally unreliable. There are various reasons for this that we can speculate on, (lack of state capacity, foreign aid dependency, etc) but take any official numbers with a grain of salt.

To give some examples…

Ethiopia UN figure (2024) - 129-132M people

Ethiopia 2025 census figure - 111M people (difference of ~21 MILLION people, an 18% discrepancy). (Ethiopia may poltical reasons to actually underestimate its pop. but given increasing urbanization + lack of state capacity in rural areas + faulty previous baked-in projections, we can move the margins and give/take a few million)

Zimbabwe UN figure (2025) - 17M people

Zimbabwe 2022 census found 15.2M people, assuming a 1.90% growth rate gives 16.1 million people for 2025 (a difference of 900,000 people, or a 5.2% discrepancy)

Togo UN figure - 9.6M people

Togo 2022 census found 8,074,600 people, using 2022-2024 modest pop. growth rates that gives ~8,400,000 people for 2025 (12.5% difference)

This is just for 3 countries, all with functional statistical organizations, the list goes on and on… With failed states, the lack of statistical state capacity + baked-in previous demographic projections can add the discrepancies as much as 15 to 20 percent in some cases (Nigeria is the most extreme example, 60 million people who do not exist given the food proxies + biometric ID / digital SIM registrations)

If I had to give a final estimate, it would be 800M to 1B max for the entire continent.

My Russian dad served as a Soviet tank commander in Afghanistan from 1979-1982 in the 40th army I think? I don’t know what his rank was. Of the combat stories he used to tell me, it always involved allusions to “revenge”. In one early story I can remember him telling, he says that after taking mortar fire riding in a convoy from Turkmenistan or Uzbekistan, he and his unit went into the suspected village where they took fire from and “Наказание” - “Punished”. In the way that he said it, it meant something like “he showed them”. He said that nobody came out of that “Village” alive. I put village in quotes because I do not know what he referred to when he described the place where they took fire from. Other times, when he talks about performing combat duties, he basically says that he got orders to got to a specific spot and fire on a specific set of grid coordinates, he says he doesn’t know what he fired on.

In another instance, he told me tales of ”teaching” the Afghan Republic soldiers on how to perform their duties correctly. One time, he was showing an Afghan soldier how to mop a floor. But whatever method he used the Afghan soldier couldn’t do it correctly. So he said that he took the mop and stuck it up his ass. I didn’t know what I should have said in reply to these stories. He just told me his experiences. I am sure that he might have brutalized some of the populace, but would it be possible that he participated in mass killings and massacres of communities?

Lately I’ve come across a category of novels of socially atomized protagonists that I think can be grouped together, the following traits are

• Almost always exclusively young male to middle-aged male
• Socially atomized and disaffected
• Alive, feral, scary, ruthlessly in dialogue with their circumstances and compulsively trying to break free of them at the same time
• Oscillate between self-loathing and contempt for others

You probably get the idea, psychologically corrosive fiction centered on unstable, emotionally blunted narrators. I think it’s important to distinguish works written before and after the digital era, since the internet has such a profound impact on perpetual spectatorship, irony poisoning, and the collapse of stable identity into performance, etc.

• Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Whatever by Michel Houellebecq
• Taxi Driver by Richard Elman
• Filth by Irvine Welsh
• Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
• Bukowski also fits this theme

Post-internet era

• Worst Boyfriend Ever: a Sensitive Young Man by Worst Boyfriend Ever
• Harassment Architecture by Mike Ma
• INCEL: A Novel by ARX-Han
• Amygdalatropolis by B. R. Yeager

Open to any other recs / suggestions.