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Yeah ethnic cleansing and genocide is an extremely common historical occurrence. Still going on today, a la Darfur, among other places. Only difference today is some people in some parts of the world (besides the victims) care about it and want to stop it. The European imperial powers...

Impossible. Way too many freedman to move out, and eventually whites would want the lands. Would would probably happen is, if the US was ever crazy enough to do it, blacks would be forced onto worse and worse lands, until you get a Bantustan situation like South Africa did. Or, whites...

I've read quite a few things, by legit scholars, saying that Mali reached the Americas (I don't believe it was modern-day USA, but the Americas). However all agree that any contact between the two wasn't continuous: ie the Emperor that initiated the voyage knew it was gonna be a one-shot trip...

Nah. They'd literally be hitting their own country; the radiation/poison winds would end up hitting them in the face. They were racist, not stupid.

I don't know about the Portuguese keeping any of their colonial holdings in Africa. They got utterly wrecked by the revolutionaries in Guinea and Capo Verde, and that's the war that put the most strain on the war effort and hastened the end of their empire. All of their colonies had long borders...

Getting all of the European powers to agree to work with each other on this, and all of the African powers to honor it, and then getting all of the newly settled people to play ball, I think it's too much to work. There's a reason the EIC was run by one company based out of one country. This...

But the Greeks established colonies all over Italy, until Rome kicked them out. Besides that I'm not sure that's a suitable comparison since Greek colonization was very different from the later European colonization of Africa, where the metropole ruled the colonies. I'm just going by OTL...

I'm looking at 1600-1900, here. I don't see how gunpowder can reverse that, but maybe it could.

Even with gunpowder and more advanced weapons Africa still has a host of problems in any conflict with Europe. Number one being that Europe can project power into Africa while Africa can't do the same to Europe. This means that even when African forces can win battles against Europeans (as...

Ethiopia wouldn't exactly wipe the floor with Eritrea, but it could definitely beat Eritrea in a limited war, as it did in 2000. In a total war Ethiopia would simply outlast Eritrea; though the fighting would be very brutal it would also likely take place mostly on Eritrean soil. Eritrea...

I agree. Even with guns Africa is just too weak to compete with Europe at this time. Although it would be interesting to see what kind of states emerge in the meantime.

If the Tuareg in Mali and Niger can break off and form a state it's fairly likely they'd become all irredentist and want to claim all Tuareg lands. But really, I'm just throwing out possibilities. It's not impossible or even improbable given the right conditions, so I threw it in. Not like I...

East Africa Tanzania could not have unified, leaving Zanzibar and Tanganyika instead of Tanzania. Ethiopia could lose the Ogaden to Somali rebels, creating a pro-Somalia Ogaden state. Somaliland could be recognized as fully independent by the world, splitting Somalia. Kenyan...

I think the issue is less one of modernization/reform and more of an issue of nationalism. By the 20th century the Han Chinese hated the Qing and used them as a scapegoat for everything wrong with the country. Not modernizing fast enough? Blame the Qing. Speedy modernization causing...

If you read a lot of newspapers from the war-era, as the war dragged on Northern opinion turned steadily to extremely harsh treatment of the Southern rebels, talks of turning the South into a "desert" was fairly common by 1864. Military command was never as harsh as civilian opinion, but as the...

The President will be married to a woman when he comes out... that will be another issue. :eek:

OP raises a really interesting question. I hope I'm not repeating anyone. I think a big factor in answering what states stay and go is the slave population. Many of the states are going to have very large, or even majority, slave populations, and now they find themselves with very few resources...

This is ethnocentric, implying that Africa had to reach similar, European standards of tech, governance, and human rights in order to be considered advanced. Pre-colonial African civs were very advanced and no better or worse in terms of governance and human rights than other human societies...

You'd get a while lot of Uganda's. Or Zimbabwe's. It can't be overstated how much of a miracle it was for South Africa to transition peacefully. I think everyone expected it to be a Zimbabwe 2.0 at some point in the future. Generally, the natives aren't going to take kindly to seeing a whole...

Not necessarily. East Asia is an unusual case. Japan started out the post-WW2 era as a bombed out ruin, but the technical knowledge, education, and bureaucratic skills of its people survived and were eventually boosted by the Americans. It's colonies Korea and Taiwan were also heavily...