Most likely Africa wouldn’t be too different from Africa in 1400-small kingdoms and tribes warring and enslaving each other.
The problem with Africa is that with a few exceptions its leadership are petty tyrants. Look at Robert Mugabe or even at Mbeki and Zuma who deny AIDS and the latter has committed rape, is a polygamist, and is not fit to lead a civilized country that once produced men like Jan Smuts and Cecil Rhoades.
Thank you, tomndebb. The Straight Dope is the most civil internet forum I have been a member of. 
If one considers civilization to be preferable to barbarism, one should conclude that the European empires benefited Africa. They brought schools, roads, and hospitals. They ended slavery, cannibalism, and human sacrifice. Unfortunately, they did not end female genital mutilation. This is because they did not last long enough.
After World War II the European colonial masters were exhausted, and demoralized from losing struggles against colonies that were ready for independence. India, Indo China, and Algeria were capable of governing themselves. Sub Saharan Africa was not.
Barbarism must often be suppressed by conquering armies. The Roman Empire brought civilization to much of Europe. The Holy Roman Empire extended civilization to Germany. Outside of Africa the legacy of the British Empire has been representative democracy and well functioning economies.
(Re a comment that there would be no infrastructure worth mentioning)
I’m not aware of a single major infrastructure innovation developed by sub-saharan African peoples, whether we are talking about something as simple as paved roads or as complex as nuclear power plants. This is true whether we are speaking historically or in modern times. The closest “Africa” has come to modernity are pockets of civilization and culture in the northern areas largely influenced by Arabs and the spread of Arab learning. The infrastructure that has been built after colonial rule is because of colonial influence and modern expertise imported directly or indirectly into sub-saharan countries.
Whether such a view is “racist” or not has no bearing on whether or not it is correct. At issue should be whether or not it is an accurate statement Would you be able to advance some examples of sub-saharan patents, innovations, or other infrastructure which you consider to be proof cases that sub-saharan Africa could have accomplished any modernization on its own? Which tribal or ethnic groups would you like to point to as proof cases that sub-saharan Africa is perfectly capable of developing independently?
I don’t think there would have been a lot of Islamic imperialism. The Ottomans were the only ones in a position to conquer Africa and they were more concerned with other areas.
My guess is that most of Africa would have ended up emulating some aspects of western society the same way that places like Japan or Thailand did. You would have had African kings hiring European and American advisors.
One other point about the continent is that is just simply rough country. Humans were hardly the dominant species until the firearm came along. In addition, malaria was–and is–still a constant threat. A hard-scrabble existence is very difficult to overcome when the resources on the surface are not available at a level to improve your life–and there is something waiting to kill you when you step outside.
Maybe there is a reason protohumans kept moving out of Africa to more hospitable lands?
Was this so different from Europe, Asia or the Americas in 1400?
They also didn’t have a lot of heliports and cyber cafes. Paved roads and improved ports are a technology that is usually directly tied to the integration of mass production and global trade. Unindustrialized locally based economy has little need for them except in special circumstances (such as the use of roads in Roman imperial expansion.) Why would they invest in technology that is not relevant to them? Why would they build with stone, when there is abundant and economical adobe and no winter snow that makes stone preferable?
Timbuktu did manage to build a nice medieval stone city, just from the sheer wealth of things. They also developed one of the world’s first universities and great libraries that continue to this very day. It’s not surprising that only areas that developed feudal economies created the infrastructure that goes with feudalism, or that areas that did not develop capitalism did not develop the infrastructure that goes with capitalism.
When European traveller Heinrich Barth explored parts of Africa that were largely unknown to Europeans, he was suitably impressed with the tidy little villages and neatly arranged cities. His drawings are very interesting, and I highly recommend his very readable and often amusing Travels in Africa to anyone with an interest in pre-Colonial africa- he is one of the few writers at the time who truly shows a deep appreciation for the people and the land (well, except for his habit of tagging along on slave-raiding runs.) Pre-colonial Africa was not some backwards hellhole. It was, like most places, some kings, some bandits, some traders and a whole lot of farmers.
This just doesn’t make any sense to me. Human beings have been able to dominate the surface since long before the advent of firearms.
Might have been difficult to end FGM when you are practicing it yourself.
I don’t know why I bother. The Europeans ended slavery in Africa? Well, they certainly didn’t do a good job, since it continues to this day.
While Europeans did build roads, schools and hospitals, during the colonial era that infrastructure was largely reserved for white users (I can dig up some citations if I need to, too lazy right now, but there are scholars who specialize in this exact subject.) Schools were for whites and the handful of blacks selected to act as the European’s chosen oligarchy. The hospitals were for treating white people. The roads were for transporting goods out of the country for white people’s benefit. Blacks gained little benefit from this infrastructure. And indeed, in the years immediately following independence there were massive gains in education and health precisely because blacks now had access to that infrastructure.
I’ll agree that Africa was largely not prepared for independence. This has nothing to do with Africans, but rather with the fact that Europe fought until the very last moment, the very dying breath, the ride out to the airport to be deported…to hand over any small bits of power that might have helped build a functioning leadership and bureaucracy. Unlike India, where they always populated the bureaucracy with educated Indians, in Africa they didn’t make any concessions even when it was apparent that their time had come. Some countries went into independence with less than 10 people holding university degrees. How do you think that came about? Do you really think Europe couldn’t have figured out that somebody at some point was going to need to run that country so maybe they ought to hand out a couple of scholarships?
As for invading armies spreading civilization…sure. The Fulbe did a pretty good job of this during the Fulbe Jihads, where they successfully invaded nearby fiefdoms and imposed their religion and the complex feudal governance system of the Fulbe empire. African history is more than a bunch of dudes throwing spears at each other.
Jeez, you make some bizarre, illogical, fact-devoid claims based on your own ignorance then declare yourself correct until someone proves you wrong; ugh.
Remember, we are not here to spread ignorance.
Who said anything about “Sub-saharan”?
Ever hear of a quaint little country called Sudan?
And rulership going “native” doesn’t make it any less colonialism. All that colonialism requires is that control be vested in another parent country, not that colonists totally replace natives. A Black Francophone West African country was no less of a colony even if all the local bureaucrats were “native” - colonialism is about cultural imposition and rulership, not the genetics of the inhabitants.
Yeah - “small” kingdoms like Ghana, Ethiopia, Egypt…
No, he doesn’t. Call us when the US government has a free anti-retroviral system in place for its own HIV victims…
No, he didn’t. Was accused of, but found not guilty.
…and? What does that have to do with anything
Cecil Rhodes wasn’t African. I have some small respect for Smuts, but Rhodes was a flaming asshole. I’d take a thousand Zumas over one Rhodes, any day.
[quote=“tomndebb, post:40, topic:576386”]
Do not insult other posters with unfounded accusations of racism in this forum.[/quoite]
You have a very special logic, it was an observation, and based on fact. To state as he did there would be no modern infrastructure at all in Africa now if not for white rule is only possible by racism, by the idea black africans would not in any way build infrastructure, since there is modern infrastructure that has been built. It is not just ignorance, because it requires beliefs that not only it would not be built, but it would never be built. I stand by it as observation, it is logical and without passion.
I am not aware that Lithuanians have developed on their own any innovation in infrastruture, and so?
It is not even possible to discuss Africa without this sort of thing. It is tiresome. Quite enough.
Your port facilities were built by Arabs.
Your fortified city was built by Arabs.
Your stone dam was built by Arabs.
Your ships are Arab designs.
All made very clearly so in the very articles you liked to.
My experience of east Africa is that there is LESS infrastructure now then there was in colonial times.
Another point is that Africa has some of the most fertile country on earth, the colonists made huge rises in agriculturaL output, far above the amounts produced pre colonial, and even probably more then post colonial if taken by the equivalence of land use.
There is no reason for the seemingly perpetual famines in Africa.
Farmers are and were historically, more productive in significantly harsher environments like for example Sweden, then todays indigenous Africans.
Africa also is chock full of natural resources, that pre colonial the locals didn’t have the means to even locate, let alone extract and refine .
And IF they had been able to do this they didn’t have the technology to exploit these natural resources.
Its handy to have actually invented the internal combustion engine if you wish to use large quantities of oil, otherwise its about as useful as sewage.
The Europeans are always predictably castigated for robbing the locals of so much .
Well it wasn’t from taking their agricultural produce from the subsistance farming they found when they arrived.
And if they had never gone to Africa in the first place all of that mineral wealth that people get so emotional about, WOULD STILL BE THERE UNDERGROUND ,THIS VERY DAY unused.
It is impossible to prove a negative, & you know it, Bosda Di’Chi of Tricor.
But facts talk, & BS walks.
While it is logically impossible to prove a negative, you could easily disprove my position–you have not read even a single one of the articles I’ve researched/linked to in my last post.
And you never bothered to do a simple Google search yourself to confirm your ignorant claims/ejaculations.
Neither have you bothered to look on wikipedia.
Nor have you explained the key importance of obscure things like “paved roads,” “large stone dams,”
Nor did you even define any of your no true Scotsman-like terms such as “improved harbours.”
The only cite/quotation I’ve ever seen you provide in this thread is…well nothing. Just your own willful ignorance and steely resolve.
You got nothing. 
Leadership is a continual problem.
How did leadership get so bad?
Well, to begin with, at the point of independence very few countries had a well-established bureaucratic class that could take up the mantle of leadership. Poor Niger had less than 10 college-educated Nigerien people in the entire country. Even better-off countries only had at best a couple hundred people with any tertiary education. Since any infrastructure was set up for white benefit, it’d be at least a generation before, even in the best of circumstances, there was enough leadership to run a country. Colonial rule had been so tight that many African countries were in a position where no African had ever taken even a mild leadership role. Any functioning local leadership systems were broken or re-moulded to serve colonial purposes.
Note that this is extremely different than the case in India, where the British were less interested in extracting raw materials, and more interested in developing markets for British goods. Markets need a middle class, and Britain fostered one.
Then after independence, a second and more decisive blow to good leadership happened. A wave of young African leaders emerged, full of ideas for their newly free continent. Exciting ideas like pan-Africanism were in the air while dreamer came streaming back from Paris universities and out of the intellectual circles in local capitals ready to lead their countries.
And we shot them. We shot them in Belgien airports. We blew up their planes. We chopped them up and drove around looking for places to dispose of the pieces. When we could, we funded someone else who we figured would kill them. But when worse came to worse, western intelligence forces had no problem doing the killing themselves.
An entire generation of leadership was killed, as a direct or purposefully secondary result of Western intelligence forces, in the era immediately before and after independence.
We nipped African leadership in the bud.
In there place a group of insecure, easily-manipulated leaders that were weak enough to comply with Cold-War plan for Africa were ushered into place. With very little popular support, they were subject to coup after coup, which western powers usually insulated them from. Even in the 1990s, French forces were directly protecting the Idriss Deby in Chad, a leader too weak to even pretend to control more than a few kilometers out of the capital. Because these Cold-War puppets were so weak, they had to rely on alliances with ethnic leaders to even pretend to control their borders. In a lot of countries, ethnic politics is a very new thing, and has come about as a modern way for leaders with no popular support to maintain control of their territory and break up the opportunity for united opposition.
These are the forces that are still at play in modern Africa. The ramifications of Cold-War meddling never went away. Nearly every leader, and certainly most of the worst, are a direct result of this. There is a lot of hope in Africa right now that the rest of Africa can follow the wave of Middle Easter uprisings- which is exactly the same thing (weak unpopular leaders supported by foreign forces as a legacy of Cold War policy).
The primary problems of Africa as a continent, in competition with other civilization-areas, were the geographic and disease-related barriers which effectively confined and isolated civilization-centers from each other & instead tied them more closely with larger and more powerful civilization-centres elsewhere.
For example, the Sahara isolated north Africa from sub-Saharan Africa, tying north Africa more closely to the (larger) Mediteranian world; Egypt found communications with the middle east and the mediterannian world easier than with sub-saharan Africa (and was thus much more involved, over the last three millenia, as an adjunct to various empires - Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Arab - rather than Africa); the diseases of central Africa kept east and west african nations seperate; the tsetse fly barrier across central africa greatly inhibited north-south communications (not to mention bands of quite different climate), etc.
In contrast (given that humans are a competitive species, all progress is relative), the great empires of eurasia had a much easier time spreading, consolidating their power, and eventually advancing sufficiently in both power and technology to dominate bits of Africa easiest for them to reach.
European colonialism was but the last and largest example of this, corresponding to advances in technology and science which, at long last, reduced those barriers in relative significance (though slavery was practiced by europeans for centuries, actual domination of large bits of Africa - aside from south africa, where the climate suited europeans - had to wait until the disease barriers could be addressed: to quote the old shanty, “the Bight of Benin, one comes out where a hundred go in” being the reason).
In sum - colonialsim/imperialism is mostly the result of geography. Had it not existed, the geography would have remained the same - thus it would be highly unlikely that Africa would have been the site of a powerful competing centre of civilization.
even sven: Fantastic post in #58.