# Are the after effects of colonialism to blame for most African countries current problems? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [March 14, 2010, 5:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-the-after-effects-of-colonialism-to-blame-for-most-african-countries-current-problems/532456 "2010-03-14T17:41:37Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Cisco](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/ccd318/32.png) [@Cisco](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cisco)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2010, 5:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-the-after-effects-of-colonialism-to-blame-for-most-african-countries-current-problems/532456/21 "2010-03-15T05:05:14Z")
> [@Chen019](#): > > That their problems may be due, in part, to population changes in response to different environments & cultures. James Watson summarised this in his book ‘Avoid Boring People’: > > Or as Michael H Hart puts it in ‘Understanding Human History’: > > [http://www.wspublishers.com/uhh.pdf](http://www.wspublishers.com/uhh.pdf) Dumb and racist, IMO, for the following reasons: First off, you can take a baby from any race and stick them in the best schools in the world and they will be capable of doing just fine. I have no doubt that there are African scientists and mathematicians out there who would blow the average American out of the water on any quantifiable intelligence test. Lots of 'em. Is there a difference out to some decimal point? Maybe, probably, hell, I don’t know. Everybody’s different. But the _practical_ difference in intelligence between races has got to be nil. Secondly, and far more insidiously, is that it assumes intelligence = Living Like We Do, and those who do not Live Like We Do are unintelligent. Of course whoever writes the rules is going to win the game. Duh. It’s not coincidence who comes out on top in these studies. I’m sure plenty of North Korean scientists have “proven” that Kim Jong Il is the smartest man on the planet. ---
**Author:** ![Chen019](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f19dbf/32.png) [@Chen019](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chen019)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2010, 5:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-the-after-effects-of-colonialism-to-blame-for-most-african-countries-current-problems/532456/22 "2010-03-15T05:19:58Z")
> [@](#): > > Cisco wrote: > > Dumb and racist, IMO, for the following reasons: > > First off, you can take a baby from any race and stick them in the best schools in the world and they will be capable of doing just fine. I have no doubt that there are African scientists and mathematicians out there who would blow the average American out of the water on any quantifiable intelligence test. Lots of 'em. Is there a difference out to some decimal point? Maybe, probably, hell, I don’t know. Everybody’s different. But the _practical_ difference in intelligence between races has got to be nil. This is true, there are scientists from all groups but we are talking about population differences. The difference in group average is around 2 standard deviations. Say an engineer would have an iq of 115 or over. This is about 1 std dev above the european mean, so about 16% of the population, but it is over 2 std deviation above the African mean. So you only have about 2.3% of the population in that threshold (or lower if you take Lynn’s average figures). > [@](#): > > Secondly, and far more insidiously, is that it assumes intelligence = Living Like We Do, and those who do not Live Like We Do are unintelligent. Of course whoever writes the rules is going to win the game. Duh. Of course it is context specific, but if you’re talking about things like building bridges or multi-level buildings that don’t collapse, sewage systems, basic infrastructure, then IQ as measured here matters. > [@](#): > > It’s not coincidence who comes out on top in these studies. I’m sure plenty of North Korean scientists have “proven” that Kim Jong Il is the smartest man on the planet.[/ Ashkenazi Jews and East Asians (those of Chinese, Japanese & Korean ancestry) have the highest averages. They didn’t design the tests either. ---
**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2010, 5:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-the-after-effects-of-colonialism-to-blame-for-most-african-countries-current-problems/532456/23 "2010-03-15T05:41:57Z")
> [@Blake](#): > > > [@even\_sven](#): > > > > Around the world, the poorest regions are often desert. > > Except in all those cases where this isn’t true, like Australia or the US. In fact it seems like deserts are not significantly poorer than adjacent non-desert neighbours anywhere in the world. This is just silly. The portion of the U.S. that is desert is relatively small and poverty is pretty much a standard there except for the odd case of Las Vegas where modern technology has brought in substantial water and electricity. Similarly, the wealth in Australia is limited pretty much to the arable tracts along the coast, not the central desert. The Gobi is not noted for its wealth. The wealth of Chile is not in the Atacama. Saudi Arabia was never wealthy until the discovery of oil. The deserts in Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan have never been wealthy–at the time that the various empires occupied that region, much of it was the Fertile Crescent, now desert due to saline poisoning from riparian irrigation. The wealth of Egypt was directly limited to the Nile valley. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2010, 6:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-the-after-effects-of-colonialism-to-blame-for-most-african-countries-current-problems/532456/24 "2010-03-15T06:16:46Z")
> [@Chen019](#): > > That their problems may be due, in part, to population changes in response to different environments & cultures. But, the colonization of Africa only goes back to the 19th Century. How much change can there have been in the African gene-pools since that time? ---
**Author:** ![Blake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/a9a28c/32.png) [@Blake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blake)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2010, 6:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-the-after-effects-of-colonialism-to-blame-for-most-african-countries-current-problems/532456/25 "2010-03-15T06:53:02Z")
> [@even\_sven](#): > > Obviously if your desert is attached to an astoundingly rich country that is willing to subsidize you, it’s a lot easier. Where would the deserts of America and Australia be if we didn’t spend millions pumping in water and trucking in food? Really, if you want to play “gotcha”, maybe I should also point out that it doesn’t count if there are billions of dollars of oil under your desert either. So your argument is that countries are poor because they contain a lot of desert, except in those cases where countries with a lot of desert are rich, and then the desert isn’t an issue at all because it is supported by a rich country. Except in cases like Botswana, which is relatively poor, yet is probably the best performing of all African nations and also one of the driest. The deserts of Australia, and I suspect the US, are massive revenue earners. They aren’t liabilities they are assets. Nobody spends millions pumping water and food into those regions just for fun. They do that because the returns on those investments are massive. The problem at this point is that you have a theory that explains everything, and hence nothing. If a nation is poor then it can be explained way because of the desert. If it has a desert and it’s rich then being rich is the reason why the desert isn’t a hinderance. No matter what the observation, your theory explains it away. > [@](#): > > The soil from cleared rainforest is notoriously prone to erosion and generally has poor nutrients. Yet despite this the most productive farmland sin the world, from China to New Guinea, were cleared form rainforest. > [@](#): > > When I lived in Cameroon, those of us who lived in the wet humid areas were far more prone to parasites and the like than those of us in drier areas. Cite please. Repeating the same assertion isn’t evidence. > [@](#): > > Have you seen maggots crawling in a wound? I have. It happens when stuff is wet all the time. Cite please. ---
**Author:** ![Chen019](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f19dbf/32.png) [@Chen019](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chen019)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2010, 7:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-the-after-effects-of-colonialism-to-blame-for-most-african-countries-current-problems/532456/26 "2010-03-15T07:16:12Z")
> [@](#): > > Originally Posted by Chen019 View Post > > That their problems may be due, in part, to population changes in response to different environments & cultures. > > BrainGlutton wrote > > But, the colonization of Africa only goes back to the 19th Century. How much change can there have been in the African gene-pools since that time? I probably should have worded that differently. I meant that the disparities you see may be in part due to the fact that different groups had to handle different selection pressures. That seems to be the thesis of Greg Clark in ‘A Farewell to Alms’ above - and in ‘The 10,000 Year Explosion’, that with agriculture and population increases you had genetic changes (some innocuous like lactose tolerance), but also you could have selection for other traits that are conducive to modern economies. Clark discusses that in the second link I provided: > [@](#): > > The book thus conceives of a gradual evolutionary process. Hunter-gatherer societies, with little trade, little capital and much violence, give way to settled agrarian societies which are trade and capital intensive and more pacific. The evolution of the institutions of settled agrarian society – markets, secure property rights, inheritance, limits on violence - is seen as stemming from the technology they employed. This through the operations of the Malthusian processes leads to a change in human nature and eventually much faster economic growth… > > Similarly Sillitoe reports of Papua New Guinea tribes that though they vary enormously > culturally, they are all “big men” societies where “Big men achieve their positions because they excel in the things that matter in life, they are good talkers, they are courageous, they are skillful in exchanges of wealth.” (Sillitoe, 1978, 253). Success in these societies - status, pigs and wives – comes not from skill in production or innovation, but from success in war, social intercourse, and > social negotiations. So the move to societies where violence is centralized and limited seems to be an important social evolution distinct from the achievement of settled agriculture. It was this that changed the nature of competition in societies for reproductive success towards strictly economic means. > > This evolution took place in some parts of the world, but notably not in others such as the Highlands of Papua New Guinea. This suggests that there was another interesting institutional transition much earlier than the Industrial Revolution, and one that we have little understanding of. Economic history, as George Grantham argues, may indeed have three phases as opposed to two. [http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/Farewell%20to%20Alms/EREH%20response%20-%20revised.pdf](http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/Farewell%20to%20Alms/EREH%20response%20-%20revised.pdf) ---
**Author:** ![Blake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/a9a28c/32.png) [@Blake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blake)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2010, 7:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-the-after-effects-of-colonialism-to-blame-for-most-african-countries-current-problems/532456/27 "2010-03-15T07:27:07Z")
> [@Chen019](#): > > I probably should have worded that differently. I meant that the disparities you see may be in part due to the fact that different groups had to handle different selection pressures. That seems to be the thesis of Greg Clark in ‘A Farewell to Alms’ above - and in ‘The 10,000 Year Explosion’, that with agriculture and population increases you had genetic changes (some innocuous like lactose tolerance), but also you could have selection for other traits that are conducive to modern economies. But Africans have been agriculturalists longer than Europeans. So how could this explain anything? ---
**Author:** ![Chen019](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f19dbf/32.png) [@Chen019](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chen019)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2010, 10:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-the-after-effects-of-colonialism-to-blame-for-most-african-countries-current-problems/532456/28 "2010-03-15T10:05:27Z")
> [@Blake](#): > > But Africans have been agriculturalists longer than Europeans. So how could this explain anything? It seems it developed in the ‘near east’ and fertile crescent. From the paper above, Clark comments: > [@](#): > > Once we follow this logic the tremendous advantage that East Asia and Europe had in technology over Africa, the Americas, and Oceania by 1500 would have to stem from some geographic advantage they had that have led to faster development of settled agriculture in these areas. In the paper, ‘Recent acceleration of human adaptive evolution’, they discuss agriculture and population increase: > [@](#): > > Demographic growth intensifed during the Holocene, as domestication > centers in the Near East, Egypt and China underwent expansions > commencing by 10,000 – 8000 years ago [36, 37]. From these > centers, population growth spread into Europe, North Africa, South > and Southeast Asia, and Australasia during the succeeding 6000 years > [37, 38]. Subsaharan Africa bears special consideration, because of > its initial large population size and influence on earlier human dispersals > [39]. Despite the possible early appearance of annual cereal > collection and cattle husbandry in North Africa, subsaharan Africa > has no archaeological evidence for agriculture before 4000 years ago > [37]. West Asian agricultural plants like wheat did poorly in tropical > sun and rainfall regimes, while animals faced a series of diseases that > posed barriers to entry [40]. As a consequence, some 2500 years ago > the population of Subsaharan Africa was likely fewer than 7 million > people, compared to European, West Asian, East Asian, and South > Asian populations approaching or in excess of 30 million each [1]. > At this time, the Subsaharan population grew at a high rate, with the > dispersal of Bantu populations fromWest Africa and the spread of pastoralism > and agriculture southward through East Africa [41, 42]. Our > model based on archaeological and historical evidence includes large > long-term African population size, gradual Late Pleistocene population > growth, an early Neolithic transition in West Asia and Europe, > and a later rise in the rate of growth in Subsaharan Africa coincident > with agricultural dispersal (Fig. 2). > > As shown in Fig. 3, the demographic model predicts the recent > peak ages of the African and European distributions of selected variants, > at a much lower average selection intensity than the constant > population size model. In particular, the demographic model readily > explains the difference in age distributions between YRI and CEU > samples: the YRI sample has more variants dating to earlier times > when African populations were large compared toWest Asia and Europe, > while earlier Neolithic growth in West Asia and Europe led to > a pulse of recent variants in those regions. The data that falsify the > constant rate model, such as the observed genome-wide heterozygosity > value and the probable number of human-chimpanzee adaptive > substitutions, are fully consistent with the demographic model. [http://www.anthro.utah.edu/PDFs/accel.pnas.smallpdf.pdf](http://www.anthro.utah.edu/PDFs/accel.pnas.smallpdf.pdf) One of the co-authors Cochran discusses the changes accompanying agriculture in this series of interviews: > [@](#): > > 2B: The main example you use to illustrate how cultural developments can influence evolution is agriculture. Why was the development of agriculture such a major event where human evolution was concerned? > > GC: It increased human density by tens of times, which made a big difference in disease risks. It radically changed diet, and it dramatically furthered hierarchy and social complexity. > > 2B: You and Henry assert that populations that adopted agriculture were much influenced by the development, and in non-insignificant, deep-in-the-biochemistry sorts of ways. What would your favorite examples of those adaptations be? > > GC: Metabolic/diet changes like lactose tolerance, many changes in genes involved with defense against infectious disease, many changes in genes that affect hearing and smell, changes in neurotransmitters and related genes that most likely influence personality, changes in genes involved with the regulation of nerve connections and brain growth. [http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/2009/01/a\_week\_with\_gre\_1.html#005818](http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/2009/01/a_week_with_gre_1.html#005818) ---
**Author:** ![Blake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/a9a28c/32.png) [@Blake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blake)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2010, 12:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-the-after-effects-of-colonialism-to-blame-for-most-african-countries-current-problems/532456/29 "2010-03-15T12:29:59Z")
> [@Chen019](#): > > It seems it developed in the ‘near east’ and fertile crescent. Yes and, as your own reference says, it then spread into Africa. All the evidence I’ve seen says that it spread into Africa before spreading into Europe, which makes sense given that it’s climatically identical and accessible via a direct land route rather than the circuitous land or sea route into Europe. But let’s not quibble. Even according to your own reference, at the very least Africans have been practising agriculture at least as long as Europeans. So once again I ask: In light of this fact, how does the theory you posted above explain anything? ---
**Author:** ![Rune](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e68b1a/32.png) [@Rune](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rune)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2010, 12:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-the-after-effects-of-colonialism-to-blame-for-most-african-countries-current-problems/532456/30 "2010-03-15T12:43:38Z")
Other regions and countries have suffered far worse and worse much more recently than the Colonisation. And have surged ahead to prosperity despite that. Other nations have been created with awkward borders. Most learn to either live with it (Belgium, Spain) or come to some other arrangement (Czechoslovakia, Denmark/Germany). The worst thing Africa can do is to blame their condition on some outside force. The first and most important step in altering your situation is taking responsibility for your own mess. The problems besetting Africa is due to decisions made by Africans and predominantly hinges on defective culture. ---
**Author:** ![Rune](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e68b1a/32.png) [@Rune](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rune)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2010, 12:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-the-after-effects-of-colonialism-to-blame-for-most-african-countries-current-problems/532456/31 "2010-03-15T12:55:05Z")
> [@even\_sven](#): > > The first bad roll of the dice is environmental. Huge swaths of Africa are desert and Sahel. Deserts are, in general, difficult places to live. Huge swats of Scandinavia are arctic deserts where it is extremely difficult to live. Same goes for Canada. How is that even a problem? It just means that fewer people live there. The problem only occurs when the people living in those areas engage in unsupportable and irresponsible population increase, to enlarge the population to a number that the area cannot support. ---
**Author:** ![even\_sven](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/dfb087/32.png) [@even\_sven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/even_sven)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2010, 1:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-the-after-effects-of-colonialism-to-blame-for-most-african-countries-current-problems/532456/32 "2010-03-15T13:22:02Z")
Think about this for a moment. You have a continent. Some of it is good rich farming land. Some of it is desert. Some of it is rain forest. In it, you have a variety of separate populations that are well adapted to their environments. Some are hunter-gatherers. Some are pastoral nomads. Some are farmers. Each occupies their area and for the most part stuff works out. People have their own political systems. Sure there are border skirmishes and even full on wars, but there is enough stability that atrocities are relatively rare. Now, draw random lines all over that area, lumping together bits and pieces of different people and habitats. Suddenly, your nomads don’t have access to their dry season pasture land so they start moving into the fertile farmland. Meanwhile, the farmers, who are cut off from the hills they would normally expand into, are trying to expand into nomadic lands and cutting down rain forest. The hunter gatherers retreat deeper into the forest, into even more difficult terrain. Because farmers are going into marginal lands, erosion on all sides is causing famine among the farmers. These tensions start erupting on a grander scale as each separate group seeks to control the government and ensure some stability for their way of life. > [@Rune](#): > > The problems besetting Africa is due to decisions made by Africans and predominantly hinges on defective culture. Wow. Just wow. What, exactly, do you know about African cultures (you recognize that Africa is a huge continent with many diverse cultures, right)? And where, pray tell, did you learn this? ---
**Author:** ![Cisco](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/ccd318/32.png) [@Cisco](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cisco)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2010, 2:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-the-after-effects-of-colonialism-to-blame-for-most-african-countries-current-problems/532456/33 "2010-03-15T14:35:12Z")
> [@Rune](#): > > Other regions and countries have suffered far worse and worse much more recently than the Colonisation. And have surged ahead to prosperity despite that. Other nations have been created with awkward borders. Most learn to either live with it (Belgium, Spain) or come to some other arrangement (Czechoslovakia, Denmark/Germany). The worst thing Africa can do is to blame their condition on some outside force. The first and most important step in altering your situation is taking responsibility for your own mess. The problems besetting Africa is due to decisions made by Africans and predominantly hinges on defective culture. Holy shit. People say this all the time but this really is probably the dumbest post I have ever read on the SDMB. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2010, 2:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-the-after-effects-of-colonialism-to-blame-for-most-african-countries-current-problems/532456/34 "2010-03-15T14:42:48Z")
> [@Chen019](#): > > I probably should have worded that differently. I meant that the disparities you see may be in part due to the fact that different groups had to handle different selection pressures. . . . OK, you must mean something **entirely different** from what I’m hearing, because what you **seem** to be saying sounds exactly like the long-since-discredited bullshit from [the article on “Negro” in the 1911 _Encyclopedia Britannica._](http://www.ety.com/HRP/race/negroes.htm) > [@](#): > > At the same time his environment has not been such as would tend to produce in him the restless energy which has led to the progress of the white race; and the easy conditions of tropical life and the fertility of the soil have reduced the struggle for existence to a minimum. > > But though the mental inferiority of the negro to the white or yellow races is a fact, it has often been exaggerated; the negro is largely the creature of his environment, and it is not fair to judge of his mental capacity by tests taken directly from the environment of the white man, as for instance tests in mental arithmetic; skill in reckoning is necessary to the white race, and it has cultivated this faculty; but it is not necessary to the negro. ---
**Author:** ![Rune](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e68b1a/32.png) [@Rune](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rune)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2010, 2:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-the-after-effects-of-colonialism-to-blame-for-most-african-countries-current-problems/532456/35 "2010-03-15T14:53:06Z")
> [@Cisco](#): > > Holy shit. > People say this all the time but this really is probably the dumbest post I have ever read on the SDMB. Perhaps you should start to preview before posting then. ---
**Author:** ![BrotherCadfael](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/977dab/32.png) [@BrotherCadfael](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrotherCadfael)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2010, 2:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-the-after-effects-of-colonialism-to-blame-for-most-african-countries-current-problems/532456/36 "2010-03-15T14:55:28Z")
Looking around the world, does it look as though the former colonies of the British are in quite good shape, the former colonies of Spain and Portugal are not bad, but that the former colonies of the French suck majorly? That’s just an impression, I make no claim to have looked into the subject seriously. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2010, 3:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-the-after-effects-of-colonialism-to-blame-for-most-african-countries-current-problems/532456/37 "2010-03-15T15:19:22Z")
> [@BrotherCadfael](#): > > Looking around the world, does it look as though the former colonies of the British are in quite good shape, the former colonies of Spain and Portugal are not bad, but that the former colonies of the French suck majorly? > > That’s just an impression, I make no claim to have looked into the subject seriously. Well, Quebec (French) isn’t doing too bad; neither is French Guiana (never yet decolonized, still a department of France); while Mozambique (Portuguese) sucks ditchwater and the less said of Spanish Sahara the better. As for Pakistan . . . ---
**Author:** ![Mr.Excellent](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/f19dbf/32.png) [@Mr.Excellent](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mr.Excellent)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2010, 3:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-the-after-effects-of-colonialism-to-blame-for-most-african-countries-current-problems/532456/38 "2010-03-15T15:50:37Z")
> [@Chen019](#): > > The problem is that colonialism ended. The various colonial regimes were by no means perfect, but their average quality of government service was far better than either their predecessors, or their successors. Actually, the Belgian Congo was a huge swath of central Africal that rivaled Europe at the height of Nazi power for sheer nightmarishness. King Leopold ruled it as his personal rubber-factory and outlet for the inferiority complex that being a constituional monarch gave him. ---
**Author:** ![Mr.Excellent](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/f19dbf/32.png) [@Mr.Excellent](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mr.Excellent)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2010, 3:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-the-after-effects-of-colonialism-to-blame-for-most-african-countries-current-problems/532456/39 "2010-03-15T15:55:59Z")
> [@code\_grey](#): > > Likewise, in the advanced world you will find rich nations that have had a violent and turbulent history (Germany, Russia, China) as well as nations with relatively quiet and peaceful history (Canada, Sweden). And yet, the rich countries that had destructive wars finished those wars, rolled up the sleeves and rebuilt things back to the prewar level and even better. WW2 in Europe and Civil War in American South were no picnics - but they did not stop advanced nations from being advanced. > > To take a more current example, the relatively advanced nation of Iraq did not collapse into the stone age because of the chaos of post-Saddam civil war. That’s because you can be advanced in war and chaos and you can be poor in total and absolute peace. Just like Madagascar. Or maybe Tanzania. Actually, the lesson here is that you can retain relatively high levels of development after disastrous wars _if_ the winners of those wars came out without a scratch, and are willing to help you. Western Europe recovered after WW2 largely because the United States was incredibly wealthy after the war - it had a massive industrial base that hadn’t even been _touched_ by the Axis powers, and it was willing to use that wealth to rebuild allies and former enemies alike. See: The Marshall Plan. The Soviet Union _didn’t_ have the same level of wealth (or forgiveness), and lo and behold, East Germany _didn’t_ recover to nearly the same levels as its Western counterpart. As for the American South - are you kidding me? By the 1870s, Reconstruction was over and the government of the Union was as dedicated to developing the South as to any of the Northern states. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2010, 4:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-the-after-effects-of-colonialism-to-blame-for-most-african-countries-current-problems/532456/40 "2010-03-15T16:23:33Z")
> [@Chen019](#): > > The problem is that colonialism ended. The various colonial regimes were by no means perfect, but their average quality of government service was far better than either their predecessors, or their successors. > > [http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1713275,00.html](http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1713275,00.html) > > [http://www.nytimes.com/1991/11/15/world/kikwit-journal-once-a-colonial-jewel-a-city-hurtles-backward.html](http://www.nytimes.com/1991/11/15/world/kikwit-journal-once-a-colonial-jewel-a-city-hurtles-backward.html) Your first link sounds like a Russian mourning the death of Communism. The second is pointless. I lived in Leopoldville just over a year after independence. Yes, we had telephones that didn’t work, and running water which had to be boiled. Why was that? It was because the Belgians never bothered to train the Congolese had to maintain this stuff. As I mentioned, they had just started letting the Congolese in to the very modern university just outside of Leopoldville. Political pressures at the time meant that the colonial powers left relatively suddenly, with varying amounts of preparation, and almost no training in how to run a democracy. The Congo, with very little infrastructure, would have been a tough place to administer in the best of times and with the most trained leaders. But they made the entire college class minister level, since they were the best educated people in the place. How do you think you would have done, right out of college, trying to run a country as big as the US? Who colonized the place made a lot of difference. At the time we’d cross the river to Brazzavile in the Congo Republic (French Congo) to pick up rare things like ketchup. They had a strong currency, and were fairly stable. I don’t think Ethiopia was rich back then, but under the monarchy it was in good shape, and it sent a contingent of troops to the UN. Yes, a lot of countries turned into dictatorships, but Europe was hardly immune from that disease. Think of how the US would have turned out if the Founding Fathers had not experience in their state legislatures and a long tradition of democracy. Colonialism isn’t 100% of the problem, but it was pretty major. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-the-after-effects-of-colonialism-to-blame-for-most-african-countries-current-problems/532456.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-the-after-effects-of-colonialism-to-blame-for-most-african-countries-current-problems/532456.md?page=3)