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>Unstable governments have been an endemic problem (See "colonialism," above).

That implies other causes (which you yourself mentioned above) are minor by comparison. Surely this was true in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s. But now, 50-60 years later, that explanation alone just doesn't cut it. A lot of places were colonized outside of Africa too, often much more brutally than many parts of Africa (whose colonial legacy is as heterogenous as other things you mention), and are on average doing better (hence the ugly 'poor man Africa' caricature this piece lampoons so well). And yet the onset, length or brutality of colonization doesn't seem to coincide well with stability or quality of governance. Heck, Ethiopia almost got away with not being colonized at all.

Like yourself, I don't know what to prescribe. I do know that it should be Africans themselves doing the prescribing.

I think his broader point was that unstable governments exist today and also existed before with colonialism as one example of many.

Blooming unstable governments on colonialism requires more evidence than is offered. Most people in the Indian subcontinent, where I’m from, perceive British colonialism as positive with respect to government, institutions, and rule of law. Former colonies like Hong Kong and Singapore have developed into thriving civilizations.

Are you asking for evidence that colonialism was damaging to African governance? Or just for evidence that British colonialism was?

I’m asking for evidence that colonialism caused African governments to be unstable. If Africa hasn’t been colonized, what would the continent be full of countries with stable governments today?

I don't know, but I can't help but notice that your examples of colonies considered long-term beneficial are all British, and, obviously, Africa was not colonized exclusively by the British. It wasn't the British who, in the 20th century, chopped off the hands and castrated rubber farmers who couldn't make their quotas.

For that matter, India gained independence in 1947; Singapore in 1959. Africa was colonized into the 1970s.

> It wasn't the British who, in the 20th century, chopped off the hands and castrated rubber farmers who couldn't make their quotas.

So is that the reason governments in African countries are unstable? Castrated rubber farmers?

I know you're being snarky, but the answer is yes. Once a country establishes a norm that the authority is never to be questioned (under pain of castration), subsequent governments will follow the same path and no one will question it - rather, no one can question it and live to tell the tale. It is not uncommon for colonial laws to be preserved for use against political enemies, so now it's not rubber farmers getting castrated, but journalists who show "traitorous behavior" or an opposition leader that "insults the president".

The only authoritarian countries that overcome that hurdle are those lucky to get benevolent dictators who go undertake genuine reform to decentralize power.

Sad this basic history is not known by the taxpayers that actually fund it... If a democratically elected African leader isnt willing to play ball, he is assassinated, usually by ex-colonial powers (Patrice Lumumba and dozens of others come to mind). So even if the locals want something better, mercenaries will be sent in to deliver the opposite.

Similarly, assassinating George Washington and the founding fathers would've affected the trajectory of the US and it would seem silly to ask why...

Lumumba's assassination took place 60 years ago. One would think that's ample time to at least partially recover from its aftermath, since assassinations during civil strife are hardly unique to the Congo, especially as a new state. While Belgians took part in the assassination, it wasn't like it took place in a peaceful country, out of the blue. There was a power struggle over who will be the Congo's strongman, and Lumumba/pro-Soviets lost. So in this case, different groups of locals wanted different kinds of betters, or at least what they thought would be better.

While it's certainly true that a number of new African states fell victim to the twists and turns of the Cold War (both sides having partook quite liberally), your theory fails to explain what happened to the states where there was little to no interference.

The Congo is actually a perfect example of having relatively soft colonial rule (the Belgian state took over from the king in 1910s and gradually made the colonial rule a lot less brutal than the horror of the Congo Free State) being replaced way too suddenly with... something. Since there was nothing that could pass for a semi-coherent national elite to speak of, even compared to most other African colonies, it's no wonder the Congo fell into conflict almost immediately. It would be rather odd if that didn't happen, Cold War or no Cold war.

> ...your theory fails to explain what happened to the states where there was little to no interference

Which ones would those be? If you could name a couple, I'd be willing to research and point out interference in the past 2 generations, if any.

>your theory fails to explain what happened to the states where there was little to no interference.

I'm excited to hear about these African countries that had complete autonomy, please name some.

>While Belgians took part in the assassination, it wasn't like it took place in a peaceful country, out of the blue.

One must have an extremely warped world view to be able to look at Belgium and Congo on a world map and handwave away the assassination of a popular leader due to his antiexploitative economic views.

Some here buy the false narrative that most westerners are in Africa doing charity, I can tell... The reality is Africa is the largest net creditor to western nations and Africans have been forced to send charity TO Europe and the US for a few centuries now. Almost every foreign-funded assassination is tied to resource theft, your framing seems to ignore that Elephant in the Room on purpose.

Just another form of “it’s the white people’s fault.” Doesn’t seem like nearly enough CIA assassinations happening for that to be the reason.

I am also from the Indian subcontinent. A lot of this derives from the fact that the British uprooted a bunch of existing monarchies, replaced them with Governmental institutions run according to Anglo-Saxon norms, and then left rather suddenly in 1947 saying “You run it” to a set of countries with geographical and population size comparable to Europe; with equivalent if not more linguistic and cultural diversity.

I think colonialism gets blamed because it's the closest external thing in time that can be blamed. Counterexamples like Singapore get bandied around, but the difference between a state the size of Singapore and something like India or Bangladesh is staggering enough to make the comparison essentially useless.

It is an interesting thought experiment to imagine what the consequences would have been of a more gradual transition away from British rule in the Indian subcontinent. My imperfect amateur historical study makes me think it would have been a net positive, but potentially would have led to partition into at least 5-6 different independent states before they did leave for good.

My point is that India and Bangladesh were colonies as well, but they are quite a bit more functional than your typical African country.

You have a fair point that African countries have more diversity than Singapore, but that begs the question-what makes diversity a bad thing?

> You have a fair point that African countries have more diversity than Singapore

I don't say anything about African countries in my comment, that must be from upthread.

But I would think that most African countries are also at a scale different from Singapore's; enough to just make Singaporean solutions unworkable. This does not mean that it's a bad thing, just different. If one were to press the point, I'd say that scaling anything up is just harder – this applies to nation states just as it does to websites.

> India and Bangladesh were colonies as well, but they are quite a bit more functional than your typical African country.

I am not entirely sure this is true if you consider the rural parts. Rural India (with 65% of the population) has more in common with most African countries than it does with anywhere in the West. A large part of this is due to the fact that the British never had any interest in settling there in large numbers; and consequently never invested significant efforts into building infrastructure for the rural parts. They preferred to strike deals with existing power structures that allowed them to profiteer off the land. I could reasonably see African countries having similar problems given their relatively low population density in the 19th and 20th centuries.

I remember reading the memoirs of an ICS official (Asok Mitra, not the Marxist economist but the chief census commissioner) around the time of Partition that claimed British leaving was worse for the rural areas at that time because at least they inspected and made sure public services were working.

There are obvious problems with comparing a continent to a country but most African countries have lower poverty rates than India.

Even Lee Kwan Yee the Singaporean PM said that he was grateful that if Sg was colonized, it was the British instead of the French or Belgians for instance. The British established institutions and provided a smooth transition… compared to the French or Belgian colonies.

That's a fair point.

In the main country I lived in, that gave me that PoV (Uganda), colonialism was very much at the root of the problems, there. When the British pulled out, they left a vacuum behind, which was filled by the most brutal strongman (Obote), who was then deposed by an even more brutal strongman (Amin). Amin also brought baggage from tribal conflicts that may have predated the British.

There's also the need for infrastructure to have an environment to grow.

Infrastructure is a lot more than roads and rails; it's also constitutions, laws, education systems, and what I term "social infrastructure."

When you have a succession of warlords and looters, infrastructure never has a chance to layer, so it's entirely possible to remain in crisis for decades.

But also, in my experience, the internecine tribal conflict was deep-rooted, and virulent. The colonial powers, in some cases, exacerbated that, and in others, suppressed it.

Much like Tito, in Yugoslavia. He never fixed the Balkan problem; just held it down. When he died, the tribes went right back to where they started.

>Infrastructure is a lot more than roads and rails; it's also constitutions, laws, education systems, and what I term "social infrastructure."

Colonial powers created infrastructure (physical and social) that fitted their form of government, i.e. a colony controlled from the outside, and then just left. Although colonialism itself is the "original sin", the sudden abdication of all responsibility is almost worse, at least in the case of relatively mildly oppressive colonial systems. But it is what the locals wanted in the 1960s, by all accounts. In fact, they worked to scuttle efforts to have more gradual transitions, because they wanted independence now. Very understandable but very naive.

Here's a great archival BBC documentary[0] from 1972 about the collapse of social infrastructure in action - the expulsion of south Asians from Uganda under Amin. It's instructive to see how enthusiastically the interviewed native Ugandans support this policy, in retrospect clearly more disastrous for them than for people they uprooted and expelled. Not blaming or judging them, just find it quite sad for all involved.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-i0JVip9N4

I remember that clearly. The asian Ugandans (they were born and bred natives), controlled a lot of stuff. It's fairly easy to see why the resentment festered.

The problem was that they controlled a lot of stuff.

When Amin threw them out, he gave their holdings to his cronies, who immediately started to loot them.

The national infrastructure collapsed, almost overnight.

I have no idea if it has fully recovered. When I lived there, Uganda was actually a relatively cosmopolitan country.

Lebanon comes to mind, as a similar nation.

> Although colonialism itself is the "original sin", the sudden abdication of all responsibility is almost worse, at least in the case of relatively mildly oppressive colonial systems.

As another person born in a former British colony (often referred to as the The Jewel in the Crown), I essentially have the same conclusion in a different subthread. [1]

> But it is what the locals wanted in the 1960s, by all accounts. In fact, they worked to scuttle efforts to have more gradual transitions, because they wanted independence now.

This is true, but the impression I get [2] is that the British were also more than happy to have an abrupt transition, because it was becoming rapidly economically infeasible for them to bear the costs of maintaining the Empire after 1945.

----------------------------------------

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29785964

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Empire#Decolonisation_...

As an African, born and bred who "looks like I came from Africa", I really really hate it when a European person writes about Africa. They tend to end up writing things like the energy and enthusiasm of the African people is inspiring as hell with no clue whatsoever how immensely condescending and patronizing that comes across. Let me transliterate that so you have a little bit of an idea: the energy and enthusiasm of European people is inspiring as hell. I know the poster is probably well meaning yet the post comes off ironically in exactly what the essay is describing - as if the poster didn't read that before saying their piece about "Africa"

Hey, thanks for being nasty.

I know exactly what the essay was describing.

Most of the kids I played with, are probably dead. They almost certainly died horribly. Maybe some of them became child soldiers, and killed and raped. I could have gone on about how I had to treat PTSD, from my experiences over there, but I didn't think that would be helpful.

But I really appreciate your "putting me in my place." I guess I needed it.

I've often found, in my experience, that initiating a relationship on a confrontational basis, is not a particularly good idea.

Have a great day.

> Most of the kids I played with, are probably dead. They almost certainly died horribly. Maybe some of them became child soldiers, and killed and raped.

I’m also African and currently live in Ghana, and I fail to see how this is representative of the experiences of African children in general.

I do think the comment you’re replying to went a bit overboard, but I fail to see how your comment is proper rebuttal to it, which is disappointing because I was interested in how you would address his substantive point

I lived in Uganda. It was quite representative of the situation there, at the time (1973).

And...that's exactly why I didn't mention it in the first post.

I am talking about my own life, here, and the experiences that I had, and the points of view that I developed, as a result of the experiences in my life.

I'm not particularly thrilled about being told that my experiences and my life is somehow "invalid."

I wasn't speaking for anyone else. I have had family that were heavily involved in a lot of fairly fundamental African development work, anti-corruption (and anti-communist) stuff, and had to leave two countries, because of horrendous wars (Nigeria, in 1966, and Uganda, in 1973).

These were my experiences, and my words. Feel free to share your own thoughts and experiences.

Maybe their experience wasn’t representative of Ghana, but it was representative of recent history in Rwanda, Nigeria, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Chad, Mali, Angola, Eritrea, Somali, Uganda, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan. Maybe we shouldn’t pile on to people for sharing their life experiences.

Note that even if those countries had brutal wars, in most cases those were quite a while ago. The average child in most of those countries, currently, does not have to worry about being a child soldier.

Otherwise, then are we to lace every piece of writing about Germany with references to child soldiers simply because the Nazis used them 75 years ago?

And it wasn’t even that long ago that we had the war in the Balkans, as brutal as any in Africa, yet people don’t write about Europe as if everything should be seen through the lens of that war, do they?

I agree that Africa is a huge continent, and one person’s experience in one country at one time may differ enormously from others’, yours included. I disagree with your assertion that user scabarott made anything resembling a “substantive point” in his reply, which ignored everything ChrisMashallNY said in their comment about growing up in Africa and seemed to malign them purely on the basis of their European ancestry. You appear to be piling on based on the same sentiment. If I missed the substantive point, could you please explain it to us?

I read through this whole exchange.

If we're being completely fair here, not only did scabarott leave ChrisMashallNY's points unaddressed, but you and ChrisMashallNY seem to leave scabarott's points unaddressed. To me, it seems that entire exchange is largely emotion based lashing out. Yes, these comments make a few points on both sides here and there, but nothing really worth taking the time to address given what appear from the outside to be ingrained and intransigent attitudes toward other viewpoints among all the participating commenters.

I just shared my own experience, enthusiasm, and PoV. I wasn't in this for a fight (and I'm still not).

Of course, this being teh Internets tubes, we can't allow anything to be stated, without being weighed, valued, and judged (wanting, of course).

Don't like what I say? Ignore it. I do that, all the time. The world won't be a better place, because I want to pick a fight with someone. I try to make the world a better place, if possible. I definitely don't want to make it darker, and sincerely regret it, if I have. I won't get into a back-and-forth with someone that simply wants to use me as a foil for their own issues.

I sincerely try to be a force for good, in my Internet transactions. I am a reformed troll. I was a nasty troll, and I have a fair bit of atonement...

"Most of the kids I played with, are probably dead. They almost certainly died horribly. Maybe some of them became child soldiers, and killed and raped. I could have gone on about how I had to treat PTSD, from my experiences over there" Lol. I actually wanted to give you the benefit of the doubt. Now I don't believe you at all. And you have no idea what the essay is talking about - your post and reply could have been the entire inspiration for it.

Take it from me my friend, you know next to nothing about Africa and Africans, or how most Africans live. Your entire comment is representative of the kind of people who think they do.

A little sharp but I think you're onto something. It feels like those writers want to be even-handed when describing Africa: talk about the ills and then extend goodwill. The problem is that, because they don't know what they're talking about, they default to platitudes. Cheap, naive words which to reveal more about them than their audience. The writer implies "I know you" with emphasis on the "know" is rejected by the audience who says "You don't know us" with emphasis on the "you".

When pressed, the writers will often claim they were just "sharing their experience". But experience alone is only one part of knowledge; certainly not enough to support their original, sweeping claims. I think that's why credible writers will carefully caveat their words; they want a real connection with other people, not a fake connection that only serves the self.

Well said. In general there's no winning on boards like this. Most people here are ignorant of most of Africa and Africans in general, but that doesn't stop them from pontificating and being condescending know-it-alls

Heres a reminder of Gel-Mann amnesia, Im seeing alot of speculative comments on colonialism in a broad sense in Africa. Which is fine, but the nuance is that there were many different colonizers, they left all at different times, and their influence is very much still being used to maintain resource rights and extraction. Without a small bit of history and perspective you might assume the dictators are a direct result of their respective people's poor choices. The cold war wasnt easy on Africa. People are still desperate for changes that aren't serving the status quo.

Did anyone do their degree in comparitive politics of Africa?

Political Science is hard because everyone has such a strong bias and a lot to say about it. Dont forget your grains of salt.

What part of Africa are you from?

My wife and I are heading to Africa in a week. This will be our fifth visit. We've been to 18 African countries. This time we are going (back) to South Africa, Kenya, and Tanzania. Absolutely love it there, but I try to remain mindful of the fact that it is often easier to love a place as a tourist than as a resident.

I lived in Nigeria, Morocco, and Uganda.

Uganda is probably one of the most beautiful places on earth. Its political situation is still quite unstable, but the climate, landscape, and wildlife are second to none.