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Come Back, Colonialism, All Is Forgiven (2008)
- yoo1I 10y agoGive a man a fish and he'll be satisfied for a day. Teach a man to fish and he'll not be hungry for the rest of his life. Force a man and his friends to catch fish for you in big fish farms for your cronies back home to enjoy, but don't teach them how to run fish farms, instead make them dependent on your farm destroying their previous way of life, create some wars and kill a couple of millions, then exit leaving behind a vacuum and you get to write smug, pseudo-provocative pieces in time magazine bemoaning the white man's burden.
- tc313 10y agoPrivatize natural resources and make random citizens undeservedly wealthy. Allow the state to own and manage natural resources and make African dictators undeservedly wealthy (and their citizens poor and unproductive).
- jernfrost 10y agoWhile it could all be done better, it would be quite fair to say Africa is in its current predicament exclusively due to whites. Whites might have created a messed up continent with their unnatural borders, abrupt exit etc. However without colonization, Africa today would in large part still be in the iron age. And it is not like whites invented wars. Africa was full of wars before whites came. So you can't pretend war was some sort invention brought to Africa by whites.
- yoo1I 10y agoI am sure there are many great forums on the internet in which to spin the yarn of fictional histories. However, The facts are what they are, and if you're white, no need to feel guilty, but please be more considerate in the present and the future. And please, before you feel the need to explain how the European colonialists civilized the savages, which is all you're saying with that comment about the iron age, consider, in keeping with our fiction theme, the Prime Directive, it's justifications, it's implications and how it applies to our life as human beings on this planet.
- kabouseng 10y agoAbsolutely. For reference interested readers can read up on the Mfecane [1], an African war / genocide in which some 2 million people were killed / genocided. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mfecane https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mfecane
- yoo1I 10y agoWhat you're doing is the global analogy of dragging up a black man's criminal record after he's been shot dead by a white police officer. Crime is bad, war is bad. Sure. But to bring it up in this way, as a way to say "see! it's not just us!" is just a distraction that has very little to do with the fact that a member of the armed police killed a man for no reason, or that the Europeans colonized the entire continent with disastrous consequences for the population.
- bmer 10y agoKeep up the good word: your comments are a joy to read, given the cesspool of stuff they are responding to. I find the "iron age" comments to be especially hilarious given that they completely ignore African civilizations that gave much to Europe: such as the vaunted Ancient Egyptians, to much less well known Malians, famous for their gold routes and libraries, to the Ethiopians, who represented "bastions of Christianity" when Christianity was still being repressed in the Roman Empire.
- kabouseng 10y agoI think you are conflating your own personal troubles with current political affairs into this discussion. Neither the article, parents post or mine had anything to do with the current police shootings in the U.S.A, so why bring it into the discussion. And the point of my reference was to show that Africa was not this idyllic utopia before Europeans came. So I oppose your viewpoint that colonialism have been any more disastrous than the normal state of affairs in Africa would have been.
- yoo1I 10y ago> And the point of my reference was to show that Africa was not this idyllic utopia That's not at all what this discussion is about. The racist charge above was, and let me quote: > Africa today would in large part still be in the iron age. To charge that this racist view about the ability of the inhabitants of the African continent is racist, says nothing about idyllic utopias. That you seem to think that any challenge to that racist view, is aloof and removed from reality, shows that you have no idea what you're talking about. Or you're just really, really sloppy with your argument... And to explain my analogy, as a service to you, I will quote to you from Wikipedia [0] > Analogy [..] is a cognitive process of transferring information or meaning from a particular subject (the analogue or source) to another In this case the "analogue or source" was the fact that whenever there is a well publicized fatal shooting of a black person, there are people in the US media who go and look up if the killed person had a criminal record, and the publish it. This despite the fact, that this has nothing to do with the incident at hand. Someone who has been stopped by police 32 times and has been to jail for a year for theft, can, under the laws that govern the US, not be executed on the street by an officer of the law because their tail-light is out. It's completely and utterly irrelevant, whether the dead person was a criminal or not. That has nothing to do with the fact that the police executed him for having a broken taillight. To bring up his criminal history anyhow, means that the person doing so is looking for other justification for the execution in order to discredit the victim. The "information or meaning" here is: The action of the perpetrator which we are discussing is logically unconnected to the reputation of the victim. Therefore the reputation of the victim is irrelevant, and to bring it up means you have ulterior motives. The other subject we are talking about takes the "information or meaning" and applies it to the subject we are talking about. In out case the action is colonialism, Europeans are the perpetrator,and the victim is the African people. Bringing up any wrongs that happened on the African country to try and justify colonialism is logically incorrect, and thus, hints at a different motive. This is how an analogy works: You take a situation familiar to the addressee, lift the principle governing the situation, and use it to explain a situation less familiar to the addressee. This has very little to do with my personal "troubles", but rather, it's a rhetorical device employed to make a point. If you're gonna be racist on the internet, at least don't fail at simple logic. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analogy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analogy
- carapace 10y ago> However without colonization, Africa today would in large part still be in the iron age. I can't let this pass. This is incredibly, crazily racist. Africa is a vast continent with hundreds of millions of people. There are more middle-class people in Africa than North America, did you know that?
- lostlogin 10y agoTo add to this, I'm not even sure who it's racist against other than non-white coloured people. There is more to the African race spectrum than "black".
- omonra 10y agoI find it rather hilarious that all you can muster is 'that's racist'. It pretty much means 'I can't produce a coherent argument that counters what you said but I don't like it, so I'll call it x-ist'. Your second point might make sense if Africa had middle class before Europeans arrived. The fact that there is civilization there after colonization doesn't in any way refute the original point. I personally don't know whether Africa was on track to have civilization without colonialism (other people commenting that 'people around the world got there' is nonsense as most societies throughout history didn't get civilization on their own). But I detest trying to shut someone up merely because you don't find their thinking agreeable.
- rubberstamp 10y ago>However without colonization, Africa today would in large part still be in the iron age. You know the people there are not a different species. Just like the people, whoever that is, that first came out of iron age, Africans would've came out of "iron age" too. Without the colonization, the world would've been better off. People at that time thought colonization as required or as an easy way to get access to more resources instead of advancing internally with their own limited resources. They couldn't care less if those Africans(or insert any other colonized place/people) lived or died. They were colonizing for the resources.
- jernfrost 10y agoAs with most historical events the truth lies somewhere between the extreme narratives. Conquests have brought suffering and suppression since the dawn of time, but it has also brought new ideas, technologies and development. While Europeans were exploited by the Romans, we also gained a lot of advantages from the Roman empire. Napoleons conquest of Europe also ultimately brought benefits like modern standards for measurement, modern set of laws and administration. Colonial Africa is no different. It is a mixed bag. It was exploitative but it also brought development, not because European necessarily wanted to help Africans but because getting hold of resources required building ports, roads, railroad etc. They could not exploit agricultural resources without actually building farms and hiring locals. And of course there was always people with different ideas. Some wanted to help Africans and brought modern medicine e.g. The chief error the western powers did when they left Africa was to not allow for any transition period. They left countries were whites had managed everything and no African had experience or education in managing operations from the top level. They should have given Africans education in white institutions and let them work with the white administration to learn how things were managed. We see the same disaster in South Africa. Suddenly blacks are put in power but they have no previous experience in having power since they were never given a chance. White rule should not have ended abruptly. There should have been a gradual winding down.
- douche 10y agoThis is self-evidently correct, but is not politically correct... The complete abdication of responsibility of the European colonial powers after WW2 is one of the great tragedies of the 20th century.
- carapace 10y agoIf you find yourself apologizing for conquest, it's fine to just go ahead and stop there. --- To elaborate with less snark: No one is complaining about the good things. It's the violence and exploitation and coercion that are bad. The conquerors don't get "points" for the good stuff that they can redeem against their sins (or crimes if you prefer) to somehow balance the bad stuff out. What a strange idea! If I stab you in the guts and then hand you a free milkshake, does that make it okay?