> the pre-colonial population maybe didn't have a culture of setting up long running businesses
This assumption of an entire continent as having a single culture is something that I find cringy at best.
This assumption of an entire continent as having a single culture is something that I find cringy at best.
yeah, it is their own fault, lmao.
Often with extreme prejudice, such as when the British destroyed and burned Benin City to the ground, destroyed large parts of its walls, which were once a single fortification threading through the city measuring four times the length of the Great Wall of China, looted it's art, which then for a long time was "explained away" because the bronze sculptures were a lot more advanced than Europeans liked to think Africans were capable of, ignoring the descriptions of Benin City from those who'd been there.
The result was that for a long time the idea of what pre-colonial Africa was like was based on ignoring the things the colonial powers had stolen (the Benin Bronzes were sometimes assumed to have been brought by Portuguese traders, for example; a more comfortable idea than Africans making bronze statues), and looking at the aftermath of colonial destruction as evidence of lack of large structures and cities.
E.g. after the third Anglo-Ashanti war, the conquering British noted how impressive the palace was, and called out the number of books in different languages, and then they promptly burned it... So vast amounts of information about the operation of the Ashanti just went up in smoke.
Similarly they burned the entire capital city of the Benin empire to the ground.
It was not just that these empires ended; they were in many cases close to being erased from history.