You have no evidence to back up this statement.
But to be fair, we all know that all darkies like doing is eating and fucking and fighting![]()
Do you have evidence he's racist?
You have no evidence to back up this statement.
But to be fair, we all know that all darkies like doing is eating and fucking and fighting![]()
I agree that lack of capital would be a problem, and may lead the weaker states to a situation of chronic indebtedness and ultimately economic vassalization to the European powers (something like Latin America vis-à-vis the US). But the incentive to modernize would be there all right: any state that didn't may risk falling behind its neighbors.
Unlikely. The Boer population was too small to have feasible colonies stretching that far. They only had a tenuous hold over parts of the Transvaal. And the Rhodesias were settled more for business reasons by the British than any variation of "manifest destiny". You may have seen some Boer expansion into what would become Southern Rhodesia, and possibly Mozambique, but you wouldn't see formal republics there.
That said some Boer trekkers did make it as far as Kenya and Tanzania, but they were a very small minority.
I am not sure Africa would be in a better position, we'd see African Vassal Empires getting guns from their European allies and then ruthlessly expand and crush their neighbours. We'd still end up with multi- cultural nightmares.
Would they not risk social upheaval if they pushed for major reforms, though? Most regimes go out of their way to avoid that. That might of course depend on the particular polity, but changes would in most cases need to be quite substantial for them to be upgraded to new levels of competitiveness (they'd need to basically build up everything from scratch - infrastructure, educational facilities, effectivised agriculture etc etc).
Wouldn't Africa be way more primitive if there wasn't a colonial administration that built up roads, infrastructure etc? The local governments wouldn't be very interested in modernisations that upset the status quo, and likely wouldn't have the capital for major improvements. Were there even functioning states in many parts?
Would they not risk social upheaval if they pushed for major reforms, though? Most regimes go out of their way to avoid that. That might of course depend on the particular polity, but changes would in most cases need to be quite substantial for them to be upgraded to new levels of competitiveness (they'd need to basically build up everything from scratch - infrastructure, educational facilities, effectivised agriculture etc etc).
The big changes of modernisation have the advantage of being practically automatic (if you want to call that an advantage). In the nineteenth century, all over the world millions of people experienced the (often violent) disruption of their social fabric, the loss of their livelihood, the destruction of traditional patterns of life, poverty, famine and sudden deprivation of rights and dignity once believed secure. The agents of change more often than not were European colonialists, but the difference whether it was done directly or not really was gradual - the real force behind it was what we like to call 'progress'. Africa can not escape this, and this development has winners as well as losers. The Victorians believed differently, but men like Shaka Zulu and Tippu Tip were exponents of African modernity. KwaZulu would not have had too much trouble surviving as a state. Some of its neighbours - different story. But that's not unprecedented, either.