This is true but the cost was very, very high. Rubber planation worked by slave labor is development but not the kind that helps the locals.
Non-colonial Africa 1950-2000
- Thread starter N7Buck
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This is true but the cost was very, very high. Rubber planation worked by slave labor is development but not the kind that helps the locals.
What many towns like Benin Zanzibar ect ect pre dates conquest by Europeans by centuries.
You seem to have misread what he was saying, because he didn't say that.
This would have huge implications for what the whole world looks like. Europe especially. A large amount of blood and treasure was sunk into conquering parts of Africa by European states, and the political repercussions of European imperialism on the continent had important effects on the politics of Europe.
That said, let's imagine that magically things do go mostly the same in the rest of the world, there's no way they would of course, but if we try and figure out how the whole world is changed we'll go way into the weeds here.
So, what would Africa look like? Well, things won't stand still without direct imperialism extending over almost the whole continent. For a start, the slave kingdoms (who had grown rich by depopulating their neighbours and selling them to European and Arabic traders) are still likely to go through a period of turbulence as the British do their best to shut down the transatlantic and Indian Ocean slave trade. Some will fall, some will survive. The new kingdoms that rise to replace them and the renewed survivors will be as plugged into trade with the European and Middle Eastern worlds as they were before, so likely we will still see the rise of palm oil plantations in what would in OTL be Nigeria, other cash crops like rubber, cocao, coffee, cotton etc also are still likely to rise. Only in this TL, it will be local elites forcing people into serfdom or outright slavery to grow more cash crops, and it will be local armies buying European guns to conquer their neighbours and force them to grow more cash crops. There will still be energetic European missionary activity, there will still be increasing technological flows and economic ties.
So comparing the situation to OTL South America isn't too far off I think. Local elites exploiting peasants who mostly grow cash crops and occasionally mine things to feed into an increasingly globalized world economy. I have a hard time imagining any of these African kingdoms avoiding heavy European influence. This won't be a utopia and this won't completely avoid the positive and negative changes that happened to Africa in OTL.
On balance I'd say that by 1950, Africa would be dominated by a patchwork of large and small African kingdoms and a few European colonies from the first wave of colonialism (Cape Colony, Algeria, Mozambique and Angola - which in TTL are likely even larger than OTL, the various French, British and Spanish trade outposts). Some of the African empires may actually face decolonization movements of their own over the course of the alt-Cold War period (the idea that there'd even BE a Soviet Union, let alone a Cold War is of course absurd, but we're just going with it for the sake of argument here). I suspect that the economy and level of infrastructure development in this alt-Africa would be higher - the rulers of the African kingdoms are likely to be an unpleasant a lot as you got with any gunpowder warlord states (see the history of Persia under the Safavids and India under the Mughals and of course the Ashanti kingdom from the earlier phase of African history), but unlike the British or the French colonialists, they need to live much closer to the people they're exploiting. So likely there would be some glittering capitals which could form the nuclei of industrial cities, a few more roads and railways built, more Africans (likely members of whatever tribal group was dominant in a given cash-crop serf kingdom) have world-class educations since it is hard to see the local kingdoms paying many French and British bureaucrats to come in and do all the paperwork (though there would be SOME of that going on).
I don't think that the spread of vaccination and Christianity would be significantly slowed compared to OTL, and either may even be faster.
Oh, and probably there's more slavery within Africa, or at least there is more open slavery (as opposed to situations where people are treated as slaves but were called by some euphemism). In OTL, a major driver of the expansion of the British empire in Africa was the effort to end slavery. So if there is no second wave of colonial expansion in Africa, that seems to imply that the British have decided that what the Africans do to each-other isn't their business (except where they can profit off of it in the form of cheap slave-grown rubber, for example).
And in Europe, I think things would be a little better also. European investment and unequal "alliances" will mean that Europe will get the benefits it got in OTL, but without the diverted talent, wasted money, deaths to tropical diseases and African resistance of OTL. Chances to avoid something like WW1 are better. The continent is probably at least a bit more developed and wealthy than it is in OTL and possibly (if there is nothing like WW1 or WW2) alot better off.
fasquardon
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Wrong. Africa has a long, precolonial history of urban living - Kumasi in Ghana, for example, or the trading ports on the Indian ocean coast. Then there's the Great Zimbabwe, of course, and Mbanza Kongo, capital of the Kongo kingdom:
M'banza-Kongo - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
The scenario we seem to be painting here is that somehow the myriads of African tribes all manage to Westernise at roughly the same time as happened in the extraordinarily short period of European colonisation of Africa, which leads to these immensely stable political entities pursuing massive projects to increase their populations' health as happened with European colonisation. Apart from this being a fantasy on its face, let's examine this theory a bit more closely.
There was a tribe which had pretty close contact with Europeans, both the Boers and the British, and adopted some of their tactics and technology in the mid-19th century. This would be the Zulu tribe. What did they do with this? They proceeded to go on a rampage through the Lowveld which would make Leopold of Belgium blush. Between 1-2 million people died in the Difaqane, the Sesotho word for "crushing", in South Africa, as the Zulu pursued a policy of outright extermination of the tribes they conquered. Proportionally as a percentage of population, this is a much, much higher death rate than the monstrous activities we saw in Europe in the mid-20th century. This depopulation of the South African lowveld is actually what allowed the Voortrekkers to establish such dominance in the area in the 1840s.
When the Zulu crossed the Limpopo into Zimbabwe, the people we now call the Ndebele ("Matabele"), they conquered the previous Shona tribes and installed a system of mass slavery of the population. The name Bulawayo (the capital of the Ndebele kingdom) means "place of slaughter". The area now called Mashonaland was essentially used as a place to go on periodic raids to steal cattle and gather slaves to transport back to Matabeleland.
Notice how I didn't mention any hospitals or schools in this story. No research laboratories churning out smallpox vaccines either.
No, European colonisation was not undertaken primarily to benefit Africans.
The African population in an uncolonised Africa would still be lower.
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Wrong. Africa has a long, precolonial history of urban living - Kumasi in Ghana, for example, or the trading ports on the Indian ocean coast. Then there's the Great Zimbabwe, of course, and Mbanza Kongo, capital of the Kongo kingdom:
M'banza-Kongo - Wikipedia
Great Zimbabwe was a ruin when the Portuguese first saw it in the 1500s. Pretty much irrelevant to the period we're discussing.
Sure, if you like suicidal death cults who use biological warfare on villages who don't happen to be completely behind your programme of burning churches and impaling doctors.
He's talking about "biological warfare" attacks on cattle, by the way, in case anyone is wondering.
As for "suicidal death cults", not many join a war they don't expect to win (even in Ireland), and using rituals to enhance unit cohesion and ensure operational security measures are observed was a perfectly common thing in the peasant secret societies through which anti-imperialist activity was carried on in Ireland.
The Mau Mau hacked women, children, and the elderly to bits in villages which did not send out their young men to take their suicidal blood oath (in a literal sense, they drank blood, sometimes human blood, drained from their enemies). The IRA were pretty monstrous, but I'm not aware of such instances taking place in 1920s Cork.
The IRA wandered the backroads of 1920s Cork, collecting butterflies, painting watercolours of the Cork scenery, and handing out candy to children.
As stated, they were and are monstrous. Just not quite to the level of murdering the entire population of Bandon to drink their blood.
There is a reason Great Zimbabwe captivated the imaginations of Europeans who saw it for centuries. There was nothing else like it anywhere remotely near to it.
True, but I was talking about the 1950s-2000 period that OP said. What I meant is that if you go to Thimpu or Khatmandu, you can still find modern technology, medicine, education, and to an extent military technology, as well as tourists. And Nepal also had political changes instead of staying isolated. My point was is that if those countries who are often considered isolated and far from world affairs did eventually change, there is no reason to think Africa would stay isolated forever.
What the hell are you talking about? There were cities and towns all over Africa; the Sahelian sultanates, the Swahili coast, the kingdoms and confederations of what is now Nigeria, Ethiopia, the Great Lakes... And remember, we are talking about the 1950s onwards, and the states that became independent after that and were relatively stable DID build hospitals, schools and made vaccination efforts. There is no reason to think that similarly stable African states who want to improve the situation of their population and their standing in the world wouldn't do the same. There is no reason to think that there wouldn't be vaccination programs or agriculture modernization -probably backed by international insititutions- like it happened OTL.
You seem to have a pretty big axe to grind for some reason, bringing up the Mau Mau and the Zulu as examples of "bad" "modernized" Africans (conveniently ignoring all the examples of other pre-colonial African states given) when literally nobody, and I mean nobody in this thread has said that Africa would be a utopia free of war and conflict without colonization. In fact, most posts assume that there will be conflict.
You really have a very odd perspective.
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Timbuktu - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
Stone Town - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
Sokoto - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
Kumasi - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
Benin City - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
Addis Ababa - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
Do I need to go on, or...
Yes cities existed that were greater than it Zanzibar Mbanza Kongo Timbuktu Edo ect. Early European accounts of said cities described the people has prosperous. Edo was decribe has bigger than Lisbon with large houses and straight streets. You seem to be opprating under the assumption that Africans are incapable of doing complex things without a White overseer.
No, there weren't. I'll admit I'm not very familiar with West Africa, especially before the colonial period. It's possible that there could be some of these fantasy Westernised states in that region, as a result of centuries of contact between them and Arabs and Europeans. But to say there were cities and towns all over Africa is just a lie. The Arabs may have stablished some ports on the Swahili Coast for the purposes of transporting slaves, but the interior of Africa was completely devoid of anything which can be called a city. The Zulu did establish some settlements of some size in the 19th century, but please show me examples of precolonial cities in Zambia, for instance.
First of all, most of Africa is still dependent on colonial-era infrastructure. Second of all, those postcolonial states are...postcolonial states. Third of all, I'd be interested to see what "not relatively stable" looks like to you.
I wasn't the one who brought up the Mau Mau, I just took up the point because I have particular knowledge of the Mau Mau uprising and with colonial and postcolonial Kenyan history. Ditto for the Zulu and South Africa.
My point was, is, and remains, that Africa's population explosion in the past century happened because of intense European involvement in Africa since the 1880s. The only good counterpoint made here, which doesn't involve dredging up ruins of sites built in the 1200s and abandoned by the 1500s, is Ethiopia. I doubt that the Russians would have been building Ethiopia's first hospital in 1909 had there been no European colonisation of Africa.
These humanitarian efforts by Europeans in Africa were specifically done to provide a moral basis for European imperialism in Africa. Without French West Africa, the French aren't going to be aiming to vaccinate the entire population of West Africa in the early 1900s.
It appears that most of you here would like to preserve your black-and-white view of African history. Most Africans would not share this view, because they walk down the streets lined with colonial-era buildings every day. No, European imperialism was not by any means an unadulterated good. But, yes, the fact that Europeans met in Berlin in 1884 does mean that there are more Africans alive today.
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And I say you are wrong, and have provided no evidence to back it up. Meanwhile, we have pointed out nations that were NOT divided up European powers which built hospitals, have vaccines and had growing populations. It seems clear other paths to development existed then being colonies of European powers. Thailand, Ethiopia, Nepal and many others prove it.
What evidence do you have for your claim that Africa would someone be different?
Yes, Africa without empires would be a very different place. yes, in some ways it might not have the same networks or infrastructure. And yes, in some places violence and destruction might have been worse. No one is denying that.
What I am denying is that, on the whole, empires were better then the alternatives (which did exist, whatever old history books try to tell us).