AHC: Balkanize Africa before WWII

Create a TL with a POD(s) that can take place before 1900 which leads to various areas of Africa riggleing free of European control and forming various free and perhaps waring states and countries. Also see if you can try to keep the European influences of the cultures of those areas intact.
 
There's a very large volcanic caldera sitting beneath Yellowstone National Park that's about due for eruption (give or take a couple thousand years). If it were to blow, the sheer amount of ash (we're talking millions of tons) thrown up into the atmosphere would be absolutely devastating by blocking out the sun for years and causing massive climatic cooling, thus ruining agriculture in the northern hemisphere for decades.

It's a common Vlad Tepes-style excuse to bring up when someone wants to create massive social dislocation in any pre- Green Revolution era when agriculture is way more susceptible to that kind of catastrophe.
 

scholar

Banned
Create a TL with a POD(s) that can take place before 1900 which leads to various areas of Africa riggleing free of European control and forming various free and perhaps waring states and countries. Also see if you can try to keep the European influences of the cultures of those areas intact.
Have the Europeans make more ethno-linguistically accurate territorial divisions. That alone would make Africa far more diverse and numerous in countries. However I am left to remind you that Africa already is the most nation diverse region in the world. All you need to do is have a more devastating first world war for the Europeans to loose control of Africa by choice or by force. The natives, lacking even the cohesion that the Europeans were able to carry on until well after WW2, would disintegrate into bitter and incessant wars over the scraps and perceived legitimacy. You'll get twice as many states as OTL, but the price will be an entire world war in levels of blood.
 
this would probably require a greater metallurgical capacity among the native africans or drive for independence among the europeans: with the former, native empires like songhai, ethiopia, and the ashanti could have enough local power to earn diplomatic recognition from one or more western powers; with the latter, the european colonists (and arabic settlers via the old caliphates) could take a page out of america's book and fight for independence, or fight on the side in WWI (or a previous war) and gain independence as a condition of victory (either being cut off from their former colonial rulers if theyre on the losing side, or as a reward for helping the winners), even if theyre just puppet states to the europeans or americans
 
Have the Europeans make more ethno-linguistically accurate territorial divisions. That alone would make Africa far more diverse and numerous in countries. However I am left to remind you that Africa already is the most nation diverse region in the world. All you need to do is have a more devastating first world war for the Europeans to loose control of Africa by choice or by force. The natives, lacking even the cohesion that the Europeans were able to carry on until well after WW2, would disintegrate into bitter and incessant wars over the scraps and perceived legitimacy. You'll get twice as many states as OTL, but the price will be an entire world war in levels of blood.

Thats a recipe for hundreds of microstates and mssive ethnic cleansing.
 
It doesn't involve wriggling free of anybody's control and I can't think of
any good POD to cause it right now, but the obvious answer would be
along the lines of "remove the scramble for Africa".

Make Europe uninterested in/unable to colonise Africa or pick a point in
time (pretty much any time before the Berlin Conference, I suppose) for
Europe to lose interest and you get lots and lots of free, and often quite
small and warring, countries.
 
It doesn't involve wriggling free of anybody's control and I can't think of
any good POD to cause it right now, but the obvious answer would be
along the lines of "remove the scramble for Africa".

Make Europe uninterested in/unable to colonise Africa or pick a point in
time (pretty much any time before the Berlin Conference, I suppose) for
Europe to lose interest and you get lots and lots of free, and often quite
small and warring, countries.
An early development of quinine-resistant malaria?
 
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