Thing I’ve seen come up time and again in debates about Africa:
some clever wag will come up with the notion that things were “better” under colonialist governments, and really, all Africa needs is a bit of “‘Colonial’ administration”. Latest example here , but it’s happened before.
Well, I say these people have no fucking clue what they’re talking about, and need to shut their ignorant fucking mouths. I say they’re chauvinists of the worst order, and if I never see another neocolonialist advocate, it’ll be too soon. Fuckers.
Yes, wiseasses, Africa has problems, but more of the shit that caused half of them isn’t going to help. Just leave us the fuck alone, OK.
Though FRDE is way over the top in that post, I’m not sure that some of those countries couldn’t use a guiding hand at this point. Some are flat out basket cases, and need to be placed in receivership for a decade or two.
I’ll agree that a guiding hand from the former colonial powers is unacceptable, and a return to colonialism is beyond unacceptable. I know that South Africa is attempting to positively influence the disaster in Zimbabwe, and that’s a good thing and perhaps, in the long run, the solution for Africa - to have the more successful nations show the less successful the path to follow.
Oh, I’m not above, say, UN intervention on a case-by-case basis, strictly temporary and mission-specific.
But I wouldn’t call that colonial administration. Or even “Colonial” administration. Which implies a first-world country completely overriding even the token moves Africa makes towards democracy and self-improvement.
Well I agree with FRDE. Throwing off the yoke of colonialism happened far too soon in Africa.
Everyone seems to look at this issue in terms of black and white. Its very uncomfortable when white people are in charge of a black country’s administration. Granted. Yet the only feasible (not really) way for Africa to have avoided their present predicament would have been to be treated like some huge reservation immune from the influences of a rapidly expanding technological world. An ecological reserve comes to mind. We could have visited the quaint natives and National Geographic would have been the most popular skin rag today. Of course that dog won’t hunt.
The fact is that the most progressive and healthy economy south of the Sahara exists in South Africa which has endured by far the longest colonial (renegade colonial) period of all, (and the shittiest) and the difference is remarkable.
Sure the Europeans exploited the Africans. History is all about exploitation. Sure, they took resources that didn’t mean a damn thing to the natives. And yes they took over land.
Just like the Normans did in England at the beginning of the last millenium. Only thing is they stayed and melded into a unified population that became an empire of such vast proportion that the world had never seen before and will never see again . If I read the news correctly its only in the last few years that the residual privelege for the hereditary lords in the British parliament has been rescinded.
It would have been only a matter of time in Africa with the ongoing European sentiment against racism, that Africa would have eventually evolved into viable countries. What happened though is that the Europeans decided they couldn’t afford to maintain administrations and walked away. That was really unfortunate.
To me, the primary difference is cultural. A country will not have the benefits of a first world society until the vast majority of its citizens behave in first world fashion.
Though I haven’t seriously considered it, I’d be lying if I said I never wondered if Africa would have been better off if colonialism hadn’t come to an end. In large part, this is because the problems of Africa seem almost insurmountable to me, and while I can identify all sorts of problems, such as lack of infrastructure, corruption, etc., I really don’t have any idea how to solve them.
It might not have turned out so badly if most of those newly minted independant countries hadn’t almost immediately become pawns of the US and the Soviets in the whole Cold War thing. I’m sure the CIA’s real happy with the way Mobutu turned out vis a vis Lumumba, for example.
Sweat it not, between additional Chinese and South African (see the box on page 22 of the PDF) investment (added to ongoing Western business investment, aid, and debt relief, of course), most of sub-Saharan Africa will do just fine. Zimbabwe’s ongoing disaster is a distraction that obscures what’s really happening there. The racial component of it makes it a flaming, rather than merely an ordinary, failure, so it’ll capture a lot of attention. The quiet stuff is what counts though.
Consider that a mere 60 years ago Europe was a smoking ruin where tens of millions had lost their lives in a second continent-wide all-out war. In the old USSR, Stalin had exterminated tens of millions merely because their politics were different. In China, Mao was to take over, and repeat the process. In Cambodia, later, the Khmer Rouge were to take over and repeat it again, the only difference being that they didn’t kill tens of millions because they didn’t have that many people available to kill.
The troubles in Africa are merely the troubles of poverty, and they pale in comparison to the bloodthirstiness of the rulers that Eurasia had in the last century. A little perspective is in order.
I have no idea what point you are trying to make. Colonialism certainly sounds distateful and had its bad and horrific points but much of Africa is a genocidal (black on black) hellhole today. Europeans were wrong to engage in violence against native Africans but they upstage that themselves today. Almost everyone acknowledges that African slavery was wrong but, again, there are plenty of African slaves today…in Africa. It is so bad in some regions that almost anything would be better than what exists.
Remember, too, that many, perhaps even most, colonial administations were better than what had preceded them. The local rulers were kings and tyrants, just local ones.
Of course, Belgium’s Congo was one of the worst horrors ever.
I understand you had a history major in university. If so, you have no excuse for providing such an irrelevant cite. May I remind you that King Leopold II’s ownership of the Congo Free State was wrested from him by the Belgian government in 1908 and The Republic of the Congo received independance from Belgium much later in 1960.
If historical atrocities by one man are relevant to this discussion of the African independance spree in the sixties, go at it. I’m sure we can dig up atrocities everywhere especially in America.
My point stands. The Spanish conquest of the new world was particularly brutal, but the Spaniards remained, the population assimulated to a much greater degree than in Africa over the centuries and I’ll venture a guess that every Latin American country is better off than sub Saharan Africa.
Well we could make an exception for Haiti which was the first country in the westerrn hemisphere to receive independance after America in 1804. I don’t think I need to describe the conditions there.
Some? Just about every nation south of the Sahara and north of South Africa is a “basket case”. I don’t nessesarily agree that they were “better off” during colonial times :dubious: , but it’d be hard to be worse off.
That’s a good point. It was irrelevant to either the U.S. or the U.S.S.R. whether the economic and military aid went to useful purposes or merely to shore up the dictator de jure. When you consider that the military aid mostly went to killing of the educated opposition, and the economic aid went to bribing the educated support happy, it set a not very good precendent.
The Flying Dutchman, your analogy to Latin America is not half-bad, but in the end it fails. The Spaniards remaining in Latin America did so because they were committed to their country. They were no longer Spanish, but instead Colombian or Argentinian. Had a considerable number of colonial power citizens in Africa instead remained as citizens of the new country, and felt committed to that country rather than scurrying back to England or France or whereever, things might have been different.
And I feel I must be missing something there. Why did the Spanish in the Western Hemisphere remain, and in fact, revolt against the colonial power while the English and French in Africa didn’t? Is it a matter of time? 300 years in the New World vs. 100 in Africa? A case of not settting down roots? Anyone care to comment?
Geography maybe? According to this website distances between most European cities and southern Africa are about equal to the distances between those cities and South America. However, northern Africa is much closer. Also, travelling to Africa didn’t require a long journey across the Atlantic. Maybe they (Spaniards) stayed and became invested in the New World because going back and forth to the old country was more difficult.
The majority of the population of the Spanish (and Portuguese) colonies of the western hemisphere were no longer Spanish nor indigenous after a few decades - they were a blend of the two cultures. In contrast to the English colonies, the Spanish territories were mostly colonized by single men who took wives or concubines form the native population. Within a short time society was a complex mixture of a small number of whites, a large number of acculturated mestizos who spoke Spanish, and varying numbers of pure Indians. An “American” identity soon emerged even among the native-born white caste. This evolved into an us-vs-them mentality against the colonial rulers sent out from the home country that eventually resulted in independence movements.
In the British colonies the situation was different in that most colonists came as families. Rather than intermarrying, the British pushed aside or wiped out the native societies. But colonial societies eventually evolved their own identities there too.
With the notable exception of South Africa, most of Africa did not have a significant number of Europeans until the nineteenth century. Even after that the number of Europeans was too small to produce mixed-race or mixed culture societies in most places. African societies remained African. When Europe gave up its colonies, most Europeans left.
The argument is that colonialism happened at all, creating artificial, unsupportable countries and sowing chaos in its wake.
South Africa held independent Dominion status from 1910 ( and there was a great deal of internal opposition to it entering WW II on the side of GB ) and has been a free-standing republic since 1961. This in fact makes it the first colony to gain de facto independence in Africa.
The last colonies in Africa ( excluding, perhaps, the odd case of Namibia ) were Portuguese territories like Mozambique and Angola. They gained independence in 1975 after years of rebellion against a stubbornly pro-colonial Portuguese government that fought bittrly every step of the way. When the Portuguese were leaving in 1975, they deliberately and pettily stripped or destroyed every single bit of what little infrastructure they had built.
South Africa can not in any way be compared to most of sub-Saharan Africa. It was a true “colony”, with large settled European populations that the ruling countries treated as biological and cultural equals and afforded every modernization and training opportunity. As P. J. O’Rourke once fairly trenchantly noted in relation to Latin America, the places Europeans settled as farmers and developed turned out to be decent places. The ones they exploited into the ground turned into shitholes. Most of Africa was transformed into shitholes.
Not the Africans haven’t helped it along as well, of course. But they started the race with a right arm tied behind their backs and a left leg lopped off at the knee. The idea that just a little more paternalistic exploitation would have been the cure to all of Africa’s ills rings a tad hollow to me.
I can’t help but wonder if you lot in the US automatically equate Colonialism with Slavery or something like that. As keen as I am on the British Empire, I’m not going to pretend it was all tea and scones (unless you were White), but I still believe things in Africa were a hell of a lot better when the Europeans were running things.
I’ve long made it known that I support Imperialism, albeit in the form which involves treating the residents of the Colony/Overseas Territory as if they were citizens of the Mother Country, with full enfranchisement etc. I’ve been told this is probably closer to “Hegemony” than Imperialism, but Hegemonists don’t get to wear Pith Helmets, hunt Lion, or drink gin & tonic on the verandah at the Colonial Club of an evening.
And yes, I do believe there are countries out there who can’t manage their affairs and shouldn’t be independent. Sierra Leone springs to mind, as does The Sudan, the former Rhodesia, Uganda, and Angola. That doesn’t mean the inhabitants should be sold off to Rich White People to work on Cotton Plantations, it just means that much as Tasmania isn’t a separate country, places like Uganda should (IMHO) really be a state/territory/province of somewhere a bit more stable and “organised”, for want of a better word.
