What drives civilization? Fossil record indicates humanity arose on the African Continent - in/around Gauteng. Yet the oldest civilizations on record are far afield - Ebla, Mesopotamia

What drives civilization? Why is the cradle of civilization not nearer the cradle of humanity?

In my opinion civilization is that state of intellect when beings of a community recognize that collaboration rather than competition for resources is feasible, and actively work in that direction (granted we humans still have competition at the level of village, town, company, &amp; nation). Unlike other contemporary civilizations (ants and bees for instance) humans are not segregated into castes such as the warrior, worker - intellect drives human civilization.
Not a real explanation of why writing or cities appeared where they appeared but by that time humans had already spread to many parts of the world so I am not sure there is any particular need to explain why they did not appear in southern Africa, specifically.

Also, the “cradle of humankind” in Gauteng is a large source of hominin fossils (possibly for reasons that have more to do with their preservation than anything else), not of homo sapiens sapiens or anatomically modern humans. We are not talking about the same periods at all (millions of years before present vs. 200 000 years for homo sapiens sapiens and 6000 years for writing).