E.g. the oldest "company" in Switzerland is Gasthof Sternen (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasthof_Sternen), built around 1230, and affiliated with a monastery. Quite possibly the inn WAS in continuous operation, but I have doubts as to the continuity of the "company" behind it. It appears to have been started by the adjacent monastery, which ceased to be a going concern in 1841.
This map is nothing but a racist pissing match created by enlightened Europeans who've worked out some novel way of considering them better than the civilisations they trashed. It's an embarrassment.
The number looks more like 1962 to me (maybe they changed it).
The actual youngest seems to be South Sudan's Ivory Bank, which was only founded in 1994. This is easily explained by the country being relatively new.
South Sudan is only a country since 2011, they include establishments older than the country they operate in.
https://businessfinancing.co.uk/the-oldest-company-in-almost...
1996 seems to be the correct date: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guinea_Ecuatorial_Airlines
Regardless, with other entries in the 1990s, that's amazingly recent.
My first guess would be colonialism and its consequences.
It would be pretty hard for, say, people in the Congo at the time to have started or continued lasting businesses when they were still getting over the whole "spend eighteen hours a day tapping rubber or they'll cut off the hands of everyone in your family, and even if you do they'll still kidnap your children and put them in schools where half will die of disease" thing that had been officially ended only six years before, and were still subject to wildly oppressive taxes and labor drafts that made getting out from under the weight of the Belgian overlords impossible.
But a lot of the other examples were informal business at some point, or activities conducted by governments with no formal independent existence till centuries later. It's just a double standard. Facts were not important to the creators of this graph.
This assumption of an entire continent as having a single culture is something that I find cringy at best.
Often with extreme prejudice, such as when the British destroyed and burned Benin City to the ground, destroyed large parts of its walls, which were once a single fortification threading through the city measuring four times the length of the Great Wall of China, looted it's art, which then for a long time was "explained away" because the bronze sculptures were a lot more advanced than Europeans liked to think Africans were capable of, ignoring the descriptions of Benin City from those who'd been there.
The result was that for a long time the idea of what pre-colonial Africa was like was based on ignoring the things the colonial powers had stolen (the Benin Bronzes were sometimes assumed to have been brought by Portuguese traders, for example; a more comfortable idea than Africans making bronze statues), and looking at the aftermath of colonial destruction as evidence of lack of large structures and cities.
yeah, it is their own fault, lmao.
E.g. after the third Anglo-Ashanti war, the conquering British noted how impressive the palace was, and called out the number of books in different languages, and then they promptly burned it... So vast amounts of information about the operation of the Ashanti just went up in smoke.
Similarly they burned the entire capital city of the Benin empire to the ground.
It was not just that these empires ended; they were in many cases close to being erased from history.
- The prevalence of drinking and dining establishments amongst oldest-national businesses.
- And banks / mints / financial institutions.
- The relative youth of oldest-national-businesses in Africa. Most notably Equatorial Guinea with Guinea Equatorial Airlines, the country's oldest business corporation, founded in 1996.
This suggests either a data artefact in which older going concerns are not formally reported (or those reports available), or an extreme level of institutional instability.
Possibly both.