Most of Africa's nations are younger than 30 years. Several African countries still pay taxes to France. Nearly every African country doesn't have sovereign control over their natural resources. So Ya, not to even mention the millions of people stolen from their countries. Africa is poor purely because of outside influences
The other side of that debate is that .... the outside influence could work with Africa to make the continent self sufficient and capable on its own. Several studies and research has shown that if properly set up and organized, the African continent has more than enough resources to produce its own food supply, clean water supply and energy production.
Unfortunately, instead of the outside world helping Africa to get to this point .... the world instead uses Africa as just another place to exploit and make money out of. In the short sighted vision of the first world ... it's more lucrative to make a bunch of money now by taking advantage of poor dying people than it is to help them become productive members of the global economy.
It's a prime example of how as a civilization we build and maintain our world on exploitation, coercion and death
Unfortunately, instead of the outside world helping Africa to get to this point … the world instead uses Africa as just another place to exploit and make money out of. In the short sighted vision of the first world … it’s more lucrative to make a bunch of money now by taking advantage of poor dying people than it is to help them become productive members of the global economy.
I would argue it's more complex than that. The very conditions created by European colonization have resulted in extreme instability and corruption in the resulting, mostly-arbitrarily drawn states, which heavily discourages investment from rational (though amoral) actors. It's not that the rest of the world market doesn't want Africa to be more "Developing Southeast Asia" than "Place we get raw resources from", it's that the conditions European colonization foisted upon it make getting there from this point very difficult.
Honestly, I'm not sure that there is an optimal solution there. All I'm certain about is that the European powers didn't give a shit about anything other than resolving their own claims in an ideal fashion when releasing their colonial vassals piecemeal.
Honestly, I’m not sure that there is an optimal solution there
Well that's why I'm asking the question. If you look at Goma and Rwanda, for example, tribes were putting a genocide on eachother before the Europeans arrived. They were doing a genocide after the Europeans left. They are doing a genocide on eachother right now when everybody pulled their hands off. At which point can you blame the genocide on the tribes themselves?
Rwandan genocide was very much fueled by Belgian racial policies.
My point isn't that Africa would be a utopia if the European powers hadn't carved it up like a toddler with a birthday cake, my point is only that the borders as formed in most of Subsaharan Africa are completely arbitrary divisions which rely more on conflicting colonial interests than realities of the people on the ground.
Take a look at Nigeria if you want an example of how conflicting ethnic groups artificially forced together by an attempt of colonial powers to maintain some measure of control turns out. There's a reason most countries in Europe were either ethnically dominated empires, or ethnically homogenous nation-states - and likewise, there is a reason why European imperialists put great effort into dividing subject peoples abroad.
The ability to construct and sustain a state, or any community, is based on shared values and cultural memes.
But that's why I'm asking the question. Can you provide a map for how Africa should be divided?
Or do you just want to point out the bad and throw in the towel on the question of how it can be fixed?
This guy, "why can't you articulate how to undo 600 years of exploration and genicide that was done against one continent?!"
Just so you know, yes there was war bs ethnic cleansing before Europeans arrived but the scale was taken to 100 because of the Europeans. And the genicides that happened after were because of the previous occupation. If you want answers to when it's the Africans fault, maybe read many studies, books, and reports on it instead of asking some guy on the internet. Once again, it's very likely you are older than the governments currently in Africa. Governments that had to pick up the pieces after many axis powers collapsed, or when allied powers pulled out during the 2008 economic crisis, or even some today that still are shadow controlled by western nations / China.
Can you support your claim that 'the ethnic cleansing was taken to 100 because of the Europeans' ?
Nation States are just another tool of the powerful to subjugate, a means to keep us divided as if we weren't the same species.
Instead we see being a united species as some evil conspiracy, which is why I'm not really a fan of our species anymore. We'd rather have a chance of beating our fellow man than equitably sharing the fruits of this world. We don't love the person on the other side of the table, we want to screw them and get more. That disgusts me, personally.
Africa is poor purely because of outside influences
This is simplistic and naive to the point it feels like propaganda.
Your view is going to be unpopular with people here. Most on Lemmy would rather blame the outsiders for problems in Africa. However, I don't see anyone mentioning China investing hundreds of millions into infrastructure of African countries and attempting to lift many African countries our of poverty only for these countries to remain where they were. At some point it becomes hard to continue blaming hundreds or dozens of years old events for the current situation when the current people contribute to the presently poor state of things.
You are literally voicing the white nationalist "honorary whites" and the "model minorities" that pits Asian cultures and communities against African cultures and communities. To simplify the African continents experience with colonial exploration to Asias is laughable at best and out right racist at worst.
You must be imagining something because I'm simply stating a fact of a event that has been occuring and observed. If you're projecting some racial issues onto that - that seems like a problem you've gotta deal with yourself.
I don't know what you're on because I've not mentioned whites or Asians at all. It seems you've got some repressed anger you're projecting at my statement of fact.
No the facts you are saying are Historically incorrect, and are an outright white nationalist talking point word for word. You don't just "observe" the "facts" you stated. You either are a white nationalist or heard their arguments and are just parroting their lies.
You are assuming an awful lot, making an ass out of yourself. I am neither, but the fact that China has invested over $300 Billion is very well documented and is a fact. China is also African biggest trade partner with total business investments in Africa totalling over $2 Trillion. The issues causing their current economic situation are also a fact. You might not like facts, but you're welcome to read more and expand your horizon, instead of making an ass of yourself on Lemmy assuming things about strangers.
Lol you should actually look into those China investments. Not exactly high quality infrastructure builds and come with strong Chinese authoritarian controls that treat the locals as slaves. And that still means the African nations still don't have control over their natural resources. Which is vital to build a strong and independent nation.
Similarly, I love when Europeans complain about the Americas having no distinct culture or ancient structures when they kinda killed and burned the ones that existed here for thousands of years.
WTF are you talking about? The Europeans that "killed and burned" the natives mostly stayed, they call themselves Americans now. Look at a map of America at the time of the revolution, and you'll see there was a lot of killing and displacing natives after the USA's independence. Don't blame this on modern day Europeans, blame this on your ancestors (assuming you're american).
Native person here. Europe does not just get to absolve itself from the genocide that happened in North America. By upholding the systems that enacted the colonization in genocide of indigenous folk, the world over, you perpetuate and uphold the harm caused. This is your history, so this is your fault.
I don’t disagree, but I feel like 600 years ago is too close to call them ancestors. Dunno the word, but ancestors makes me think of ancient humans from 7500+ years ago.
Though I do call them European Americans, because just Americans would be the indigenous peoples.
600 years ago is definitely enough to call a people the same people. The sociological, economic and political effects of exploration age barely came to an end even though the empires have been disbanded more than a hundred years ago. Even less of a duration if you consider how late the British Empire quit being an empire in name and somehow still keeps it in some places in practice. Or how French still how heavy sway on a lot of African, South Asian and some island nations.
The first of the new empires, American empire, became a world-dominion just a 2-3 decades ago.
Until the rest of the world get strong enough to worry about having only regional conflicts of interest again, and not at the risk of some global superpower of stolen wealth coming from the other side of the world, peoples will keep being the same people as current ones in the lives of each other.
White people coming in to steal your crates are still the same, only they do through impoverishment and dirt-cheap prices of corporate agency at first, and military later if the former isn't tolerated.
This place was beautiful when we stole it.
We're the ones that turned it into a cesspool of cheeze whiz and strip malls.
Only out of the devil we know. There are better far better countries to be a citizen in, but you have to have an in. They are the happiest in the world according to the world happiness index. We should worship at their ideological altar ror that, instead we villify them as all the right wing curse words that right wingers don't even understand.
I'd think anyone worried about righting the genocide would prioritize getting tfo, not "how can I better myself"
I'm European so I might be biased, but I haven't really heared anyone "complaining about the Americas having no distinct culture or ancient structures".
Well, party because of colonization, slavery, and genocide (because cultural genocide counts as genocide), partly because of geo-political meddling, but also massive corruption, coups and an pan-African oligarchy that installed African protectionism 2.0 (or Afro-Reaganomics 1.0, take your pick), ensuring ordinary Africans can't do any international business without the government holding their dick - as well as the foreign businesses dick. This in turn means only the big boys get to play, like multinationals, because lumps of money gets fed to end up in Cayman island bank accounts.
To blame Europe today is stupid, because it not only serves to deter whatever support common Europeans (I.e not the elite) could give to Africans in diaspora, but it also enables corrupt African officials, who hold speeches about how they criticise the west, only for them to go to some backroom deal with eastern AND western multi-nationals, who really want to exploit Africans, and ofc they'll be allowed - because of the affirmationed Cayman island bank accounts.
Also, the "employment agencies" in Africa have 50/50 chance of being slave operations - because slavery never disappeared, it just got more "official", and it's also been common in Africa for thousands of years.
But yeah, history is cherry picked for the sake of "owning" people in debates and discourse. Again; it only helps to take away the spotlight from African officials, but also: we can't ever ignore what effect colonization, slavery and genocide has on not only nations, but geographical areas.
This has been nuance. You may hate and downvote me now.
My take is that our ancestors definitely fucked up bigtime by leaving several parts of the world with arbitrary borders that have no regard for existing ethnic groups. Just take a look at any ethnic map of africa, eurasia or the middle-east and you'll see.
Turns out that colonizers have little interest in local culture. Who would have guessed?
Adding insult to injury: When colonizing land where people mostly lived in tribal social constructs, you actually force them to adapt to your own developments. Essentially skipping the feudalism and micro-states step that has taken Europe literal centuries to get out of.
So you have all these ethnic groups that should have found their way to modern societies without outside interference, and you subject them to slavery, the introduction of guns, mining operations and you crush any form of revolt by committing various atrocities.
Development of nations is never going to be fair, with the strongest group eventually elbowing out the weaker ones. The current status quo definitely doesn't help in finding stability. Foreign interests are still meddling, financial and food aid is causing ridiculous population numbers that can in no way shape or form be supported by the local economies, and as you said, slavery is not truly gone.
Africa can only be an unstable mess as long as we're still fucking around. Ideal (though not particularly empathetic) solution is to GTFO, use magic to disappear all firearms and modern weaponry from existence, redistribute all wealth truly equally and go from there. The actual way this will play out is that we'll see war, instability, destruction of natural resources and a lot of pain and suffering until everything stabilizes or until the land is no longer habitable, whichever comes first.
Africa can only be an unstable mess as long as we're still fucking around. Ideal (though not particularly empathetic) solution is to GTFO, use magic to disappear all firearms and modern weaponry from existence, redistribute all wealth truly equally and go from there. The actual way this will play out is that we'll see war, instability, destruction of natural resources and a lot of pain and suffering until everything stabilizes or until the land is no longer habitable, whichever comes first
This is that typical defeatist schpiel, used by both "woke" white people in the west, as well as African self-defeatists. You're not helping, and here's why:
Not only are you robbing African people of any agency, but you pretend like they can't actually do anything about their situation, i.e the corruption and exploitation, by blaming some "super powerful foreign force" that itself must give up for Africans to be free.
When in fact, the French presence is almost fully gone, the US military is there at the behest of local governments, and the ones making the most money is not solely multinationals, but the corrupt officials who invite and enable them. These officials are all black and brown, they are all ethnically African.
That's why you should support democratic movements and help to spread awareness of the goings on in Africa, or else you're HELPING the corrupt by providing them a scapegoat. Here's an example, without doxing myself:
In my city, last year, there was a violent protest by certain Africans. People in my city were generally not even informed what the issue was, but gladly speculated. After a day or two it became apparent, that they were citizens in diaspora who were angry that a supposed "youth organization" from their country was given a venue to speak to politicians. This is because this "youth organization" was an astroturfed organization by an authoritarian regime who sought to get more western money.
Now, we can fully pull out all that money, but those despots and oligarchs don't give two fucks about the people they rule over, which would lead to even more famine. But then we'd also have more blood on our hands.
It's therefore important that we either A) talk directly about who, what and where, or B) defer to someone who knows what they are talking about.
Judging by your glib, defeatist and condescending schpiel, I'm guessing you don't know that you're talking about.
Please defer to people who actually know what they are talking about and throw away whatever old school, defeatist, glib talking points - because you're not helping. In fact, you're enabling the talking points of these despots, oligarchs and regimes.
Please do better.
If you're insist on nuanced and gray toned conversation on Lemmy, you're going to have a bad time. You got away with it this time; don't let it become a habit.
Alt caption: "Why do we have so many refugees and economic migrants?"
Beginning to think that if we helped Africa prosper, we wouldn't have whole fleets of boats and dinghies crossing the Mediterranean.
After we killed Gadaffi in 2011 suddenly everyone from Lybia started hopping on boats to Europe. Don't they like their new war-torn country freedom?
Same shit with the American "border crisis"
Oh, why are they fleeing countries we couped and refusing to stay in Mexico, where the cartels dress like the military but with better gear?
"We did nothing but exploit them and let them be exploited by our companies. Why can't they help themselves???"
Lots of people on here who seem to be under the bizarre impression that colonialism ever ended.
Wounded Africa gets up: .... hey Europe, give me a hand
Europe: .... takes a baseball bat to Africa's knees .... why can't Africa stand up for itself?
Subsaharan Africa: "Oh no! These Turkish and Arab invaders are terrible! Surely Europe, which also fights with the Turks and Arabs, will help us?"
Europe: "Actually, we've decided to make it worse."
Africa: "Oh no"
Europe: "MUCH worse."
Some rare exceptions, particularly in the earlier period, aside
Same goes for South America and the US.
Those motherfuckers are plotting to make economies that serve their societies?! We can't have that, have to keep those markets open for our owner's exploitation!
Take em out!
Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, Ukraine, Serbia, Switzerland, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Slovenia, Slovakia, Sweden, Norway, Iceland would like to chime in.
You both must be fun at parties. Of fucking course it is not every european nations but it is way shorter than to write Britain, France, Germany, Portugal, Spain, Belgium, Italy...
Nobody would ever say "Asian" when referring to the south east Asians powers though. Call it European colonial powers or something. It gets tiresome being lumped in with destruction caused by Britain, France, etc... when your own nation was nothing but potato farmers at the time.
I don't go to parties where complete strangers ask me to pay them reparations for what other complete strangers that lived 500 years ago did to some other complete strangers that have no relationship to the strangers at the party.
If your blood isn’t boiling yet from what the west is sponsoring in Gaza, you can have some fun learning of what Belgium (and the US) did in the Congo after they “left”.
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Anyone who wants a good laugh check out how many comments have been removed on this 21 day old account.
talk about "le epic zionist troll" fail.
One can be anti terrorism without being Zionist. They're 2 completely exclusive concepts. You seem to forget that more than 600 teenagers from around the globe and many of no Jewish descent were killed, raped, paraded naked through Gaza streets and taken as hostages or sex slaves from that rave party near the border. Some were friends of my friends. But I am chain reported for being anti-palestine by likes of you. The world we live in...
The world we live in… where you can’t spread misinformation in support of a possible genocide without being called out.
The UNWRA allegations were extracted using torture. Israel tortured UN workers.
🤡 getting its news from alJazeera Arabyia.......
Here's UN Watch warning about UN funding UNRWA's terrorism SINCE 2017. SINCE 2017!!!!! 2017!!!!:
https://unwatch.org/130-page-report-unrwa-teachers-incite-terrorism-antisemitism/
https://unwatch.org/un-teachers-call-to-murder-jews-reveals-new-report/
https://unwatch.org/unrwa-terrorgram/
https://unwatch.org/report-u-n-teachers-celebrated-hamas-massacre/
Now let the downvotes from these internet white knights of the Gazan terrorists begin!
See * The Looting Machine: Warlords, Oligarchs, Corporations, Smugglers, and the Theft of Africa's Wealth*
I read a book about the Congo. One thing that really stood out to me was the Malaysian guy on the UN boat. The only transport in the interior of the Congo is a UN paid gunboat.
He basically said "this country had colonialism my country had colonialism. They can't keep using that excuse forever. This country is shit today because of the locals, they need to make it better instead of acting like they have no control over their own country."
The best sub Saharan countries were the ones that had the most white influence. WW2, America and Russia kinda fucked up the exist though.
"this country had colonialism my country had colonialism. They can't keep using that excuse forever. This country is shit today because of the locals, they need to make it better instead of acting like they have no control over their own country."
I think comparing the colonialism of Malaysia and the Congo is incredibly idiotic. The Belgian Congo under Leopold is arguably one of the most harrowing examples of people in bondage in human history.
They really aren't even similar forms of colonization, which makes sense considering Malaysia was colonized nearly 300 years before Congo. Malaysia was also composed of a more uniform ethnic group, while the Congos borders were invented by colonizer states diving up the continent.
Most of the problems in Africa are a direct result of Europeans creating nation states with no regard to historical ethnic conflicts.
Some Malaysian guy working for the UN in Congo said it not me.
The problem is tribal regions in Africa are so small that the countries would be tiny. Plus there is a lot of aggression between the different tribes, they have been at war forever but luckily when guns got to the country it was with the whites keeping law and order. They stopped a lot of tribal conflicts m. When the whites left all this tribal conflicts resurfaced and genocides happened but now with guns.
It's not like anyone even today and can say what the borders should have been. Sure there are mistakes and there would be an issue with borders however they are divided. But at some point it's what's you got and how you got to deal with it.
Malaysia is a very "divided" country with Chinese, Indians, Maylays but they aren't a divided country.
Some Malaysian guy working for the UN in Congo said it not me.
Yeah, but your arguments have been supportive of his statements.
The problem is tribal regions in Africa are so small that the countries would be tiny.
Maybe small for Africa, but that's not exactly small compared to the rest of the world. Are you arguing that countries like Monaco shouldn't exist?
Plus there is a lot of aggression between the different tribes, they have been at war forever but luckily when guns got to the country it was with the whites keeping law and order.
Lol, what? That's some Rhodesia level copium you're smoking there.....
First of all, in most cases the ethnic conflict is a direct result of European powers elevating certain ethnicities and utilizing them to keep their neighbors in line. Secondly you are ignoring all the systemic violence and outright genocide that Europeans used to keep "law and order".
It's not like anyone even today and can say what the borders should have been.
I'm sure some people who live in Africa will disagree with this sentiment....
Sure there are mistakes and there would be an issue with borders however they are divided. But at some point it's what's you got and how you got to deal with it.
And yet, this is only a problem in parts of the world that were colonized by Europe after the 18th century.
This is the result of countries colluding together to strip territories away from their inhabitants via land marks on a map. The same thing happened in the Middle East after the collapse of the ottoman empire. It's not fucking rocket science my dude.
You want the world to be a certain way and pretend it is.
It just isn't so. Many many places around the world have issues with borders. If africa knew what's borders they should have they can go have them.
Wars have always existed in Africa.
Zimbabwe and South Africa are horrific failures. They aren't the only ones. The progress made in those countries was great for a time, then regressed
You want the world to be a certain way and pretend it is.
Lol, compared to you? I've at least given examples of historical context pertaining to the matter. All you've done is make racist false generalities.
If africa knew what's borders they should have they can go have them.
You mean like they did before the Scramble for Africa?
Zimbabwe and South Africa are horrific failures
You don't think that the whole apartheid and generations of being ruled over by a violent foreign minority has anything to do with that?
The historical revisionism people will undertake to validate their racism is always astounding.
People aren't blaming "the whites", they are blaming the colonialism of Africa in the 18th and 19th century. You are the only person who is falsely equivocating that as all "white people".
You have nothing to do with the achievements or failures of colonizers from the 1800s. Your only fault is that you actually believe that "white" is anything but an outdated classification system, invented to justify things like the Scramble for Africa and slavery.
The only reason you even have a grievance is because racial "science" has told you that you are somehow connected to these historical figures, despite not being the same ethnicity, or sharing any culture, or even speaking the same language.
For the love of God, just read some history about the Scramble for Africa.