African tribes were the same as any other tribe on earth. They fought each other, they had animus against other, etc. even before Europeans explored Africa, even before Arab colonization too.
The scale of the colonial horrors inflicted on various regions of Africa is poorly told, and was the pregame for the horrors of WW2 in many ways. The British and Germans “innovated” with the concentration camp in the early 20th century, for example.
The most obvious depravity was Leopold’s depredations of the Congo, but many many examples exist. The generational trauma on society is hard to fathom. And of course the arming and covert intervention of Soviet & western proxies during the Cold War fueled unrest and hostility.
Is that not the history of just about every country of consequence? They were conquered and vanquished multiple times with wealth extracted by foreign powers throughout history? Africa, Asia, Europe, Asia Minor, etc? No continent was free from this history. Have you read the history of Asia before the age of exploration or the history of Europe before the age of exploration or the history of the middle east of the Caucasus before the age of exploration? Every one of them experienced things similar to what you mention. Subjugation, atrocities, imposition of culture, etc. and lest you think Europe is free of this behavior I would reference our modern day Balkan region.
If there are guilty parties, we ought to name them, not stay silent out of a misguided sense of justice simply because other guilty parties go unnamed. How is your comment indistinguishable from whataboutism?
I’m not saying your factors aren’t also present either, in addition to the ones I mentioned, but if your factors are present everywhere all the time, what’s the point in bringing them up in this thread?
Upstream someone was saying the problems in Africa are due to conquest, subjugation, colonization, etc. I'm saying just about every country of consequence experienced this over the last half dozen centuries so it's not attributable to that -that is it's too facile a response.
I wasn’t saying that all bad things were attributable to the colonial powers, but those powers orchestrated the spread of propaganda that led to the “mob rule” as a backlash against colonial meddling and empire. I agree it was a sweeping statement, and glosses over a lot of nuance. I don’t mean to minimize man’s inhumanity to man due to local innovations.
That's an argument that's ultimately based on whataboutism.
I'm reasonably acquainted with history in all of those places. What happened in Africa happened. The results are speak for themselves.
In no way did I say that the depredations of past tyrants and conquerers didn't take place or were insignificant. If Ceasar's accounts of Gaul are even partially true, his armies probably butchered a sizable percentage of the human race in that campaign and the years to follow. The Spanish conquest, subjugation and genocide of Latin America utterly obliterated mesoamerican culture and was sweeping in the size and scope of it's brutality.
So why is Africa different? Well, for the most part it took place in the immediate pre-modern and "modern" era. There were coastal outposts previously, but the colonialists really exploded in the latter half of the 19th century. Disease wasn't a factor as it was in the Americas, but technology had a far greater impact -- tribesman vs. machine guns and steam engines ends the way it ends. You also had a different focus, private interests were interested soley in raw material extraction. Cultural imposition wasn't a priority -- it was extract value above all.
I would encourage you to read about the Congo. "The Rest is History" podcast did a series a few months back that is a good introduction. Nasty business.
Japan did some very nasty stuff in the pacific, rivaling leopold in depravity. Do we attribute polpot to the Japanese, or the stuff in Burma to the Japanese? Moreover they really fucked up Manchuria and Korea, yet I don’t see the same legacy of strife due to a foreign powers legacy so reverberating so debilitating…
Sure, but the specific conflicts between Hutus and Tutsis and many others were orchestrated by colonial powers and that is a fact of the matter. I’m not sure what you are referring to, but it doesn’t contradict my statement.
