A more peaceful Africa post decolonisation
- Thread starter The B
- Start date
Organizing the colonies among ethnic lines before independence would lead to bloodshed far surpassing the scale of the Partition of India. What you're looking for is a far slower process of decolonization that builds lasting institutions as well as the physical and social infrastructure required for viable nation states and not the gatekeeper states that we had OTL in a rush to get out. I personally prefer a slow transition to dominionhood. Such a process would have insulated Africa from the Cold War as well as guaranteed the creation of viable nation states. And yes, the dominons would look to London as a principal source of investment so the imperial connection would be maintained.
'Africa' constitutes 54 states and literal thousands of ethnolinguistic groups. Some are in dire straits, others (i.e. Namibia, Ghana) are doing reasonably well. Among the trouble spots, circumstances vary considerably - the DRC's predicament is a whole different kettle of historical, political and geographical fish to, say, Niger's. Due to the very nature of European colonial policy, it would be impossible to realize a situation where post-decolonisation Africa is uniformly peaceful without a multitude of little PODs going centuries back.
The biggest problem with organizing Africa along clear-cut ethnic lines is that there aren't many, so to speak. More often that not, African tribes and nations resemble castes as much as they do distinct cultural blocs, living in the same areas in a state of mutual economic dependence. Partition would not be a viable proposition without spates of ethnic cleansing, the scale of which would make Milosevic blush, and the states that result would be largely arbitrary constructs, hardly a strong foundation for enduring peace and stability.
The biggest problem with organizing Africa along clear-cut ethnic lines is that there aren't many, so to speak. More often that not, African tribes and nations resemble castes as much as they do distinct cultural blocs, living in the same areas in a state of mutual economic dependence. Partition would not be a viable proposition without spates of ethnic cleansing, the scale of which would make Milosevic blush, and the states that result would be largely arbitrary constructs, hardly a strong foundation for enduring peace and stability.
Agreed. Guaranteeing peace to a massive continent just getting out of European colonialism is pretty much impossible, I think.
There are very few states anywhere on Earth that escaped colonialism/imperialism without falling into extreme violence and/or corruption. Very very few, compared to the states that didn't.
Now since a few parts of Africa are still violent today, there are a few things that could be done now, or could've been done years ago, that could reduce violence somewhat and fulfill the OP's request:
What the West Could Do
1) Have the developed states heavily reduce or end their agricultural subsidies. Most African states are heavily dependent on the export of agricultural goods. The developed world, particularly the U.S., European Union, and Japan, provide their farmers massive ag-subsidies that force down the price of agricultural products. Many African states can't match these subsidies to their own farmers, thus African farmers can't compete, weakening Africa's economy (as a whole) and as we know, economic tensions can cause violence. Somehow getting the West to get rid of these subsidies (pretty much everyone not a farmer recognizes them as harmful to everyone but farmers), would be a big boost to Africa.
2) Promote downstream industries in Africa. Mining is a large part of many African economies. Most companies and states that go into Africa build facilities that get the goods out of the ground, but ship them back home to refine. This limits employment to Africans and takes away income to the states. Something has to shift that makes the placing of refining facilities in Africa desirable.
3) Not support dictators and army coups. Obvious, but I honestly don't see this happening so soon after decolonization. Even if the Cold War were butterflied away, the European powers would probably meddle in the area. To this day France treats its former colonies as a playground.
What Africa Could Do
Africa's in a tough spot at the beginning of independence because it's tied so heavily to European markets and does so little trading in its own continent. It's also by far the least industrialized continent and the least "vital" in terms of the Cold War, meaning that while the U.S and U.S.S.R are very willing to support African states, they won't get the same financial and industrial support as say, the Warsaw Pact members, or Japan and South Korea. Still, there are a few things that could be done.
1) Stop the Prestige Projects. This is, I think, the most important. At independence, most African states wanted to pull a Meiji (or a Stalin) and rush into industrialization and great-power status. Ghana's Akosombo Dam, Egypt's Aswan Dam, massive spending in weaponry and highways (when most people couldn't hope to get cars), things like this pushed many states deep into debt for no gain other than prestige. Somehow, you need leaders to take a slower pace in the development of their countries.
2) Support agriculture. Many African nations at the outset were either indifferent to or actively hostile to agriculture and farmers, instead favoring industrialization. Considering that most African economies at independence were heavily agricultural, this was an awful policy that ruined agriculture for the kind of projects in my first point. Getting leaders to see the value in promoting agriculture (again, see point one on taking things slow) would do wonders.
There are many many other things Africa needed to avoid excessive violence, but here's a few. Admittedly this is heavily biased to economic reasons (there are a ton of non-economic ones), but these are the ones I think are pretty important and fairly doable with the right PoDs. I think the most important one within Africa's control was to take things slow and steady instead of trying to to a Soviet Five-Year Plan. The excessive debt and economic turmoil brought on by the "prestige projects" and illogical rushes were a big factor in the dislocations and wars of the 70's and 80's.
GiantMonkeyMan
Banned
I think for decolonisation to be peaceful you need to start earlier to set up some ground-work and create enough of a trained and educated population to handle the strain of governance. One of the major problems was the new governments being thrown independence and left without any staff in place to handle the necessary bureaucracies and, on top of that, European countries largely held the belief that the ex-colonies would pretty much be run exactly as they had been (with resources extracted for European wealth etc) but with native leaders and acted shocked when the natives wanted a fair share of the pie. You're never going to have a perfect situation but no doubt you could make the post-colonial regimes more stable to set a decent precedent.
The problem is Europeans even bothering to lay that groundwork in a fair way, and getting the Africans to accept waiting until the groundwork was laid. And even then questions come up; who decides when the groundwork is finished, to what end, who gets power at independence, etc etc
I honestly think it's impossible for this kind of set up to happen in anything resembling a peaceful way.
Only some colonial powers did this, and only some of the time. That's a fair criticism of the Belgian Congo or Spanish Guinea, but British West Africa had a large African professional and civil service class at independence, and so did many of the French colonies.
It's also far from clear that the countries where gradual decolonization took place did better than the others. Consider Ghana, for instance: limited-suffrage elections and African civil service preferences in the 1920s, a majority-black legislature in 1946, universal suffrage in 1951, effective self-government in 1952 and independence in 1957. In many ways it was a model of what gradual-decolonization proponents advocate. And... it's doing well now, but it had a pretty rough 1960s through 80s. Nigeria followed a similar path, beginning around the same time, and within a decade of independence it had experienced military rule and civil war.
The problem with gradual decolonization is one of good faith. When the colonial powers trained African aristocrats (it was nearly always aristocrats) to be a post-independence ruling class, they did so to protect their interests rather than the Africans'. And they were determined to keep full control over the speed and mechanism of the decolonization process, which meant institutionalizing autocratic patterns of rule and having emergency detention laws for natives who stepped too far out of line. Most of the independence leaders in Ghana and Nigeria saw the inside of British prisons as well as British schools and universities. And the newly independent nations inherited the autocratic mechanisms and class conflicts that were built into colonial rule, leading to problems even in the best cases.
IMO it's not the speed of decolonization that matters so much as the attitude: in order to ensure a peaceful and democratic future, the transition needs to be a genuinely cooperative project. And for that to happen, colonialism would have to be something other than what it is.
FrozenMix
Banned
I would say that the absence of the Cold War would likely make things quite a bit more peaceful. Proxy wars got really nasty at times.
However, this would not get at the root of the systemic problems behind the post Colonial violence.
A British style civil service class that we saw in some colonies would be useful, but not a guarantee of success.
Maybe, not using blatant favoritism of ethnic groups in the Colonial period would have made things easier and certain situations, like the Rwandan Genocide and Civil War, as well as the Biafran War, could have been avoided.
But ultimately, these are just stop gap measures and avoid getting to the core of the problem, which is in my view, poor agricultural practices.
However, this would not get at the root of the systemic problems behind the post Colonial violence.
A British style civil service class that we saw in some colonies would be useful, but not a guarantee of success.
Maybe, not using blatant favoritism of ethnic groups in the Colonial period would have made things easier and certain situations, like the Rwandan Genocide and Civil War, as well as the Biafran War, could have been avoided.
But ultimately, these are just stop gap measures and avoid getting to the core of the problem, which is in my view, poor agricultural practices.
GeographyDude
Gone Fishin'
For example, the French, the British, the Portuguese and other European colonial powers are going to pay lip service to the idea, Oh, yeah, as soon as Africans are ready, we're going to promote them to positions of management in oil and other major industries.
It would take an exceptional leader with skill and matter-of-fact confidence to hold the Europeans to this.
And it would take perhaps exceptional decency on the part of the European country to allow this to happen, as well as perhaps exceptional political skills to push their companies to follow through and do this.
John Fredrick Parker
Donor
I just want to note that the title is "A More Peaceful Africa", and yet by far most of the violence of the continent comes in particular out of the Congo (i.e. the Rwanda Genocide and the Second Congo War) and fairly late at that (i.e. post 1990), so actually I would think a fairly late PoD would do it.
Is there anyway to establish any special economic zones in large or critical portions of colonies, enabling significant development prior to decolonialization?
GeographyDude
Gone Fishin'
If the infrastructure is in place, including such thing as honest tax collection, an honest EPA, etc., I'm not really sure we need to do anything special for African businesses other than perhaps not stack the deck against them.
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And I like some of the above discussion about local agriculture. Don't stack the deck against them. Although with weather, crop prices, insects, floods, etc., there are a lot of random variables. A poker player might describe it as high variance even when you're highly competent.
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And I like some of the above discussion about local agriculture. Don't stack the deck against them. Although with weather, crop prices, insects, floods, etc., there are a lot of random variables. A poker player might describe it as high variance even when you're highly competent.
yourworstnightmare
Banned
Probably not. The main issues were bad infrastructure and incompetent leadership (due to Colonial Powers lacking interest in building infrastructure for anything else than ways to bring resources to Europe, or educating African leaders).
From what I remember, the colonies "worked", as in, didn't devolve into warfare and famine, during colonisation because they were part of a larger system. Cameroun receives rice and rubber from Indochine and sugar from Guyane and sends back cocoa using infrastructure built by the continental French industry.
It worked as a piece in the puzzle. If you take away the rest of the puzzle, it doesn't work anymore. So after colonisation you had a lot of monocultures with no emphasis on finished goods or infrastructures works, which didn't help.
It would be shameful not to add in some measures the intervention of said colonial powers who intervened to topple or maintain unhealthy regimes
It worked as a piece in the puzzle. If you take away the rest of the puzzle, it doesn't work anymore. So after colonisation you had a lot of monocultures with no emphasis on finished goods or infrastructures works, which didn't help.
It would be shameful not to add in some measures the intervention of said colonial powers who intervened to topple or maintain unhealthy regimes
GeographyDude
Gone Fishin'
And I think it's very valuable to talk about how positive examples have worked.
For example, there's the East Asian Miracle from about 1960(?) to about 1990(?). I don't know that much about it, but apparently it's a really big deal. Among other things, some Asian countries experienced a bump in population just at the time they had institutions, infrastructure and perhaps several other factors to ride with a period of prolonged growth.
For example, there's the East Asian Miracle from about 1960(?) to about 1990(?). I don't know that much about it, but apparently it's a really big deal. Among other things, some Asian countries experienced a bump in population just at the time they had institutions, infrastructure and perhaps several other factors to ride with a period of prolonged growth.
A lot of the East Asian countries had factors for their growth that helped them as compared to Africa. Longer standing periods of national unity, strategic location for trade (Singapore specifically), some cases like Hong Kong that don't exist anywhere in Africa since it was still part of the British Empire and had a sustained economic base already… Yeah they started off from a base that wasn't much better than some of the African economies for some of them, ie. very poor, but they had a lot of advantages for growth the African ones didn't enjoy.
Make the French decolonization politics a bit different so that AOF remains in existence in 1960. With the right leadership the federation could remain more or less unified and could thus form a basis for West African regional cooperation, acting as an example for rest of the continent.
Japhy
Banned
Please tell me more about how Imperial political and economic domination is the solution to the problems caused by Imperial political and economic domination.
What he is proposing is not ideal, but it is the most realistic in the sense of maintaining the peace. Basically political infastructure would be built for use by colonial authorities, but this could then be slowly devolved to a developing and growing class of native systems who would develop their own system of government in tandem with decolonization, rather than trying to build everything from scratch. By remaining linked for a longer period of time with the Colonial Power whilst also gaining increasing measures of independence, they can also independently foster economic links with other nations or colonies while also still receiving direct support from the Colonial Power in question in further developing the economy, again preferable than doing it all from scratch.
Still, this all is dependent on both the Colonial Power wishing to do this, and the native population willing to wait a decade or two to become fully independent. Its conceivable, but its hard to imagine that even this process would not have its share of difficulties, with successes and failures.
Still, this all is dependent on both the Colonial Power wishing to do this, and the native population willing to wait a decade or two to become fully independent. Its conceivable, but its hard to imagine that even this process would not have its share of difficulties, with successes and failures.