> The Africans had a choice in matters as well, they chose to cooperate for the most part because they felt that was in their best interest. People always like

> The Africans had a choice in matters as well, they chose to cooperate for the most part because they felt that was in their best interest. People always like to take the agency away from whoever's 'victim' story they are telling. It's demeaning. Do you even know anything about European intervention / influence in Africa? Europeans at first came as explorers, missionaries, enslavers and then as armed soldiers. At what point in the last 2 does choice figure? The only part of history that fits your blissfully idealistic and ignorant narrative is European activities in East Asia / particularly Japan. Japan had a healthy amount of contact with Europeans early on in the Age of Exploration but they kicked them all out (British, Dutch, Spanish, ... etc) convinced that they were up to no good and it was only when Commodore Perry breached Japan's defenses in the mid 19th century that Japan again opened itself up to the west. But even this renewed contact was markedly different as America was under the sway of the Monroe Doctrine & was not interested in making Japan an extension of America. In Africa however, in the late 19th / early 20th century land was being grabbed en masse and native people's rights trampled as a result of European foreign policy which was influenced strongly by the stipulations spelled out in the "Berlin Conference" (1884).