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>>1849
Okay, I'll bite. I see your point: like a lot of African countries, Korea has been repeatedly invaded and conquered, divided, its people stolen as forced laborers and then set against each other as proxies for invaders. It is a similar story, but with a very different outcome.
Keep in mind South Korea isn't the whole country--technically speaking North Korea and South Korea are one country still engaged in a civil war despite the long-term armistice.
So how did South Korea build up so high so fast, while North Korea remains in squalor?
Because they didn't do it on their own. In fact, I don't think either country can be held fully accountable for their current socioeconomic status. This is an ongoing proxy war: South Korea is, very generously, supported militarily and financially by the United States as--in my opinion--a propaganda piece against the global communist revolution that never happened, and on a smaller scale, a message to the North Koreans that they should overturn their government.
Russia meant for North Korea to be its opposite number, but the cost of losing the Cold War nixed those plans, leaving only China to take care of them. China's only real interest in North Korea is having a puppet state, which hasn't worked so well since the Kim Family (put in power by the Russians) has turned out to be insane.
On top of that, North Korea has been under extreme sanctions since the armistice was signed; a situation not helped by their crazy and despotic leaders. Nonetheless, even if they would stop building nukes and firing rockets, I doubt the western powers have any intention allowing North Korea to succeed as a "communist" country.
Why isn't there an African South Korea? I think, for the same reason there will never be a prosperous North Korea under the Kim regime: the leadership--put in place with western assistance--is awful, and western powers have a vested interest in keeping them down. Sure, we send billions of dollars in aid to African countries, to governments we know to be corrupt. When paying dictators to keep their people helpless and poor fails, we send in troops or arms to support this faction and that until their society collapses into poverty and/or war once again.
I think what you're really asking is How is it that Asian people can build up a prosperous nation when African people can not? Which is so loaded, racist, and ignorant of history that it cannot be answered. If perhaps you asked "Are African people capable of nation building?" it would be somewhat more answerable, and I would say we simply don't have the data to know one way or another: western powers have been interfering in both regions for so long, pushing such various agendas, that we have no idea what they would be capable of if we left them to their own devices.