So what went wrong in post-colonial Africa?

[Nice Squirrel]

The imperialist speaks.

 

[LordKiran]

By what metric do you deem late 1700s America to be a shithole? (I assume we're excluding Mexico, Canada, and British Colombia)

lol WHAT? That's like saying "By what metric are you calling The Scorpion King a terrible movie? I assume we're excluding all of the dialog, the plot, and Dwayne Johnson's acting."

You said North America was a shithole when it went independent. Don't get on my case because you failed to clarify.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

1) They weren't anything like utopias before the coming of colonialism.

2) The people had no experience with democracy. They were far more gullible to political promises than even Trump voters.

3) When a power is thrown out by long conflict it's almost always the most ruthless that rise to the top of the resistance and thus the expected result is dictatorship.

The question isn't why Africa turned out badly, but how the US managed not to.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

1) They weren't anything like utopias before the coming of colonialism.

2) The people had no experience with democracy. They were far more gullible to political promises than even Trump voters.

3) When a power is thrown out by long conflict it's almost always the most ruthless that rise to the top of the resistance and thus the expected result is dictatorship.

The question isn't why Africa turned out badly, but how the US managed not to.

Africa was a conquered territory. The US was not.

 

[Tom Sawyer]

Africa was a conquered territory. The US was not.

Right, because murdering everyone who lived there and taking their land doesn't count as conquering. The US was liberated.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Africa was a conquered territory. The US was not.

Right, because murdering everyone who lived there and taking their land doesn't count as conquering. The US was liberated.

The natives were always a second thought in this nation's history. It isn't like they are running the show these days, like the locals in Africa are.

 

[DrZoidberg]

In hindsight USA not turning into a dictatorship (as happened in France) was just down to an incredibly string of lucky coincidences. It could easily have turned to shit at any point up until USA started to become affluent (ca 1870 and onwards). The South American colonies were almost identical in their make-up of USA, and modelled their revolutions on the American model as well as using the American constitution as template. They proved that the US constitution is terrible and wide open to abuse.

Australia (and Canada) didn't turn into dictatorships because they had already a stable parliamentary system in their countries at the time of independence, as well as a well established free press. Also when they became independent the entire administration didn't pack up and leave for Britain. In hindsight, this is how you de-colonise and leave a stable democracy when you leave. You de-colonise step by step. South Africa is a good example.

You're onto something, but off on one key aspect. What makes countries prosper is respect for private property, individual rights, and the rule of law. Northern European countries tend to have it, so colonies inhabited by northern Europeans tend to have more of it. They aren't the only ones as places like Japan and Korea have it. Spanish colonies tend to lack it. Marxist experiments tend to destroy it in places that might otherwise have it like North Korea or China. Certain unnameable religions seem to thwart it. Africa has more than its share of both of the latter.

It doesn't matter what's written in your Constitution if there is not a cultural respect for the private property and the rule of law.

But George III's Britain didn't have any more rule of law than imperial Spain. Property rights? Also, the same. Individual rights weren't respected anywhere at that time. Ok, that George III was less of a shitty ruler than the king of Spain. But that was a pretty marginal difference for the people at large.

Early USA was horrendously corrupt, poor and with a central government only having power in a couple of cities. The government was routinely at the mercy of corrupt governors who acted as little popes in their domains. It didn't help that the Americans who financed the war and help lead it were primarily smugglers and dodgy characters who just wanted to enrich themselves.

The best reason I've seen for USA being so liberal and permitting towards it's citizens is because if they hadn't the people would have just said "no". And it would have become apparent to everyone how powerless the early American government was. That also acted to prevent any single person or group seizing power. There was very little actual power concentrated in Washington DC. If anybody would have tried USA would have just instantly fallen apart.

And the constant threat of European imperial expansion led the Americans to want USA to hold together, and be a strong unified force. That acted against states breaking off. It still happened from time to time. But they were always herded back to the fold with minimal bloodshed. Until the civil war. Which, I'd say, was the point when the modern USA was born, with a centralised state who finally felt strong enough to assert itself.

The south American colonies, by contrast, at the time of the revolution, were well run with effective central administrations. They also had strong economies generating loads of money. A small group of people could easily take a stranglehold of the country. Which is exactly what happened in state after state.

 

[credoconsolans]

The continent was left divided along colonial lines as nations instead of how the natives would have divided it.

People were no longer able to migrate legally when inbreeding started, or the environment/climate turned bad or was poor.

So some nations were left with nearly zero natural resources and nowhere to go but down, while others swam in natural resources.

You also have nations that value people and family connections as a resource, hence the lack of environmental care or conservation and the nepotism and corruption that runs rampant when a leader takes power and brings his family and other close relations with him.

Those are some.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

1) They weren't anything like utopias before the coming of colonialism.

2) The people had no experience with democracy. They were far more gullible to political promises than even Trump voters.

3) When a power is thrown out by long conflict it's almost always the most ruthless that rise to the top of the resistance and thus the expected result is dictatorship.

The question isn't why Africa turned out badly, but how the US managed not to.

Africa was a conquered territory. The US was not.

The Native Americans beg to differ with you.

 

[tupac chopra]

ISIS is a good example of a regime with almost no local support, .

Why do you say it has no local support? I think it had support in Iraq. The country was destroyed and looted. The young men were left with no hope and no jobs. Isis paid the young men salaries if they joined.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

lol WHAT? That's like saying "By what metric are you calling The Scorpion King a terrible movie? I assume we're excluding all of the dialog, the plot, and Dwayne Johnson's acting."

You said North America was a shithole when it went independent. Don't get on my case because you failed to clarify.

Read back to my post and see who I was originally responding to.

 

[LordKiran]

You said North America was a shithole when it went independent. Don't get on my case because you failed to clarify.

Read back to my post and see who I was originally responding to.

Here's the post you responded to

What went wrong? The Colonial part of it. You can't fuck up a continent for centuries and expect Democracy to win out in a couple of decades.

Yeah, this explains why North America and Australia are such shitholes.

This is what you said

Yeah, this explains why North America and Australia are such shitholes.

They WERE shitholes when they went independent. It took them both almost a hundred years to STOP being shitholes, and they both basically did it by enslaving millions of people, fighting dozens of wars, and raping and pillaging indigenous populations and stealing their resources. Same kind of crap that's happening in Africa RIGHT NOW.

To our credit, the United States has ceased to be a shithole and has become, instead, an asshole.

"They" in this case, referring to North America and Australia because you failed to clarify your statement.

 

[LordKiran]

Lets also not forget that when Sub-Saharan Africa was decolonized, there were no schools, no hospitals, no roads or infrastructure of any kind beyond what was needed to keep the spice flowing. So now you have these new nations with no doctors, teachers, lawyers, or anyone remotely trained to govern a nation.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

In hindsight USA not turning into a dictatorship (as happened in France) was just down to an incredibly string of lucky coincidences. It could easily have turned to shit at any point up until USA started to become affluent (ca 1870 and onwards). The South American colonies were almost identical in their make-up of USA, and modelled their revolutions on the American model as well as using the American constitution as template. They proved that the US constitution is terrible and wide open to abuse.

Australia (and Canada) didn't turn into dictatorships because they had already a stable parliamentary system in their countries at the time of independence, as well as a well established free press. Also when they became independent the entire administration didn't pack up and leave for Britain. In hindsight, this is how you de-colonise and leave a stable democracy when you leave. You de-colonise step by step. South Africa is a good example.

You're onto something, but off on one key aspect. What makes countries prosper is respect for private property, individual rights, and the rule of law. Northern European countries tend to have it, so colonies inhabited by northern Europeans tend to have more of it. They aren't the only ones as places like Japan and Korea have it. Spanish colonies tend to lack it. Marxist experiments tend to destroy it in places that might otherwise have it like North Korea or China. Certain unnameable religions seem to thwart it. Africa has more than its share of both of the latter.

It doesn't matter what's written in your Constitution if there is not a cultural respect for the private property and the rule of law.

Wow. I'm agreeing again with dismal. That's twice in one lifetime. A legacy of homegrown law cannot be overstated. This is the key to functioning statehood.

Also, a plethora of resources and room to grow doesn't hurt.

If the land that is now the U.S. was a mixture of indigenous self-governing states it would behave a lot like Africa.

 

[bilby]

A lack of accurate and highly detailed cartography.

Prosperous nations have landowners who can show that they own a particular parcel of land, with clearly defined boundaries that can be accurately measured.

Corrupt shit-holes have vaguely defined land ownership, in which traditional family farms have no clearly defined official boundaries, so disputes are commonplace and hard to resolve.

If you own a piece of real estate in a prosperous nation, you can sell it; rent it out, or use it yourself; and most importantly, you can use it as collateral for loans - and if you have 'spare' cash, you can use it to buy or rent more real estate.

If your family has farmed a piece of land in a shit-hole for as long as anyone can remember, you can continue to do that, or you can give up and let the neighbouring farmers take over. That's the limit of your options. Of course, if someone with an army says he is taking that parcel of land, you can't stop him (unless you have a bigger army), and you can't even prove to any authority that you owned this or that particular bit of ground at any stage, so getting any kind of redress is next to impossible.

Respect for private property is meaningless, unless you can define what your property IS; And most property (at least in pre-industrial nations) is real estate.

The colonial powers in Africa drew lines on the map to carve off nation-state sized chunks of real estate for them to use. And stopped there.

The people who took over North America and Australasia didn't stop - they sent out surveyors and cartographers and kept subdividing the land, into accurately defined and provable parcels, until each parcel was small enough to be practically managed by a single owner (How big the parcels were depended a LOT on the use it was put to, of course; Huge ranges for farming, tiny blocks for the middle of cities. And if there was land left over, the government typically kept ownership of it for themselves, until they were ready to subdivide it further).

Essentially, the reason for this was a difference in mindset; Americans and Australians were settlers, and needed land that they could own. Africans, on the other hand, were livestock. Africans didn't need to own property - they were property. The colonial powers understood that you need to know which farmer owns which fields. But who cares which bit of the field belongs to which cow?

 

[DrZoidberg]

ISIS is a good example of a regime with almost no local support, .

Why do you say it has no local support? I think it had support in Iraq. The country was destroyed and looted. The young men were left with no hope and no jobs. Isis paid the young men salaries if they joined.

They had support initially. Then lost it. It seems pretty clear that everybody living there hates the brutal regime

 

[TV and credit cards]

Control of the media can keep people divided. Not to the point of warring with one another but just ignorant of one another. Keep people from understanding one another and empathy is not possible. Without empathy, people can not unite.
Also, keeping people close to poverty puts them in survival mode and that will be their focus of attention.

 

[Trausti]

The IQ average for sub Saharan Africa is 75 and below. In comparison with other regions where average IQ is 95+ (N. America, Europe, East Asia), Africa is performing as would be expected. The blame colonialism argument seems right on first review, but this forgets that Europe and East Asia also have a long history of war and ethic strife. Yet, these conflicts, some very destructive (e.g. 30 years war; Taiping Rebellion) did not throw these regions into perpetual stagnation. And while colonial masters certainly exploited their colonies for the benefit of the empire, they also brought writing, modern medicine, civil service, schools, cash economies, roads, etc. What did the Romans ever do for us?

 

[LordKiran]

The IQ average for sub Saharan Africa is 75 and below. In comparison with other regions where average IQ is 95+ (N. America, Europe, East Asia), Africa is performing as would be expected. The blame colonialism argument seems right on first review, but this forgets that Europe and East Asia also have a long history of war and ethic strife. Yet, these conflicts, some very destructive (e.g. 30 years war; Taiping Rebellion) did not throw these regions into perpetual stagnation. And while colonial masters certainly exploited their colonies for the benefit of the empire, they also brought writing, modern medicine, civil service, schools, cash economies, roads, etc. What did the Romans ever do for us?

When Africa was decolonized there were no schools. The best education a colonial African subject could expect was whatever superstitious bullshit his local catholic missionary told him. So I'm hardly surprised that Post-Colonial Africa is on average less intelligent than the rest of the world (If that's even true...)

 

[Nice Squirrel]

Also to consider is that much of Africa is outside the temperate zone, so European crops and farming lifestyles did not transfer well. The great powers were more concerned with resource extraction than settlement and development of these colonies.