WI: African Decolonisation much more thorough and 'normal'

Lusitania

Donor
Here’s the thing; something like what I described definitely wouldn’t lead to something better, that’s why I put “better” into quotation marks, because I don’t believe it would. At the same time, I think it would certainly mean the total “death” of colonial empires, as the OP has outlined. If we were talking about what the best way to handle decolonization would have been, I agree with you 100%.
But pride, nationalism and racism led many countries to delay or be against decolonization.
 
But pride, nationalism and racism led many countries to delay or be against decolonization.

I’m only saying that it would delay decolonization and make it much more brutal, at the same time, the new regimes would hav head to win their independence, instead of being backed by the former metropolis. That would probably make them hostile to European nations, so probably not keen to be dependent on them or cooperate with them, much harder to create things like the Commonwealth or the Francafrique then. That was my reasoning, could be wrong though, what you say is definitely true.
 
I just finished reading an NBER paper about this. Colonialism was pretty much uniformly negative for Africa, but a country's postcolonial success is largely based on its history of precolonial state formation. Countries like Rwanda, Botswana, and Ghana that are doing well today are pretty much all places that had centralized states in the late 19th century/precolonial period.

Countries like South Sudan and Somalia that have seen the most chaos today are also places that had no centralized states before the colonial period. DRC and the Central African republic fall into this category as well. There's generally a vast, sparsely populated area that's largely inaccessible by a navigable water way, and no clear demographic center of gravity or ethnic homogeneity.

The third category is places that saw extensive european settlement. South Africa, Zimbabwe, Angola and Mozambique, and to a lesser extent Kenya fit this description. Generally there are land reform problems similar to eastern europe and Latin America before WW2, often with conflict between remaining whites and an african majority, or between different African peoples.

There are some edge cases as well where some countries are on the edge between 2 categories, or different regions of what is now 1 country fit different categories (ex. maybe Northern vs. Southern Nigeria).

Colonialism and Economic Development in Africa
Leander Heldring, James A. Robinson
NBER Working Paper No. 18566
Issued in November 2012
NBER Program(s):Development of the American Economy


In this paper we evaluate the impact of colonialism on development in Sub-Saharan Africa. In the world context, colonialism had very heterogeneous effects, operating through many mechanisms, sometimes encouraging development sometimes retarding it. In the African case, however, this heterogeneity is muted, making an assessment of the average effect more interesting. We emphasize that to draw conclusions it is necessary not just to know what actually happened to development during the colonial period, but also to take a view on what might have happened without colonialism and also to take into account the legacy of colonialism. We argue that in the light of plausible counter-factuals, colonialism probably had a uniformly negative effect on development in Africa. To develop this claim we distinguish between three sorts of colonies: (1) those which coincided with a pre-colonial centralized state, (2) those of white settlement, (3) the rest. Each have distinct performance within the colonial period, different counter-factuals and varied legacies.
 
Maybe you need it to get worse before it gets “better”: have European nations fight for every colony they have, Europe and Africa at war, Algeria style, while at the same time have a weaker/less interested USSR and a US that doesn’t want to get involved, that should do the trick. Eventually, decolonization should happen(with a fair bit of oppressive, Rhodesia & Apartheid Style regimes), but the rest of Africa would probably be completely opposed to anything European.
That runs into the problem that France had militarily won in Algeria.
It just lost the political will to keep going and keep owning colonies.
The French decolonisation of Algeria is just a more bloody version of the French decolonisation of the AOF and AEF.
 
I've often wondered the argument anyway. How many "pure" nations both ethnically and religion-wise are there in the world anyway?
I doubt you can find one, anywhere in the modern world, actually. Well, maybe Tuvalu. It is also very hard to find ethnically "pure" polities in the past, though of course there's alo the matter of how identity works in different contexts (it is a very flexible thing).
 
In a way, the British, French, Belgian and Portuguese Empires in Africa died the strangest deaths in all of Empire-breakup history. In many ways it was a non-death.

Compare it to the earlier 20th century deaths of the Ottoman, Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires, where you saw actual borders being redrawn, imperial languages of government being replaced and new ethnic-based nation-states being born; in Africa, virtually none of this happened.

Also, I find the survival of Post-colonial 'Commonwealth/Francophonie' type organisations really strange - there's no 'Ottoman Commonwealth', 'Austro-Hungarian Commonwealth' or 'Mongol Commonwealth'.

So this begs the obvious question. What if the end of Empire in Africa had been as thorough and as 'normal' as the break up of most Empires in human history, in particular, those that took place earlier in the twentieth century. By that I mean:
  • Boundaries are redrawn so that ethnic based nation-states are created. You'd have a Yoruba state created out of southern Benin and Nigeria and a Hausa state created out of Northern Nigeria and Niger, for example. Unfortunately for smaller groups, just like in Eastern Europe, these would become minorities.
  • Colonial languages disappear completely from officialdom and their use as Lingua Francas likewise goes out the window - just as German has in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, Turkish in the former Ottoman Empire or as Russian is doing in Eastern Europe.
  • Post-colonial organisations like the Commonwealth and the Francophonie just don't exist, anymore than there is a post-Ottoman Commonwealth
So the obvious question is, how would this affect international relations?

Let's look at the break up of the other examples you mentioned.

Ottoman - mostly broken up into artificial mandates where European rule was preeminent for up to 30 years. Lingua franca was arabic in the mandates even in the Ottoman days. Arab League
Russian - retained "artificial" Soviet borders. Russian remains a high profile language in trade and engineering. Commonwealth of Independent States.
Austria-Hungary - artificial creation of Yugoslavia. Austria and Hungary were already a dual empire so the split there is not surprising.

There is a tendency for post colonial states to adopt the colonial administrative divisions. Rarely these correspond to ethnic or linguistic divisions

So if we tried to revert to weak tribal leadership structures across Africa post colonialism without any "Commonwealth" assistance from the colonial era occupiers - welcome to a continental version of the Yugoslavian wars.
 
The biggest problem is human nature. People think ‘emotionally’ and not factually. Unfortunately it is easier to ‘hate’ than to ‘love’. The colonised will ‘hate’ the colonist. Even if the colonisers biting some Levels of wealth, education, hygiene etc, the colonised would rather destroy those institutions, rather than build upon them.

It’s easier to blame ‘others’ because their skin is a different colour, their eyes are a different shape etc.

A friend who lives in an African country told me of the civil strife there. The indigenous population would rather cling to their ancient tribal traditions’ and detest others, whose ancestors were stolen from there, taken to the USA, eventually after many generations they got ‘educated’ by western standards. Many returned to the land of there nativity with the knowledge fo how to build a sustainable, economic, well educated, society with good health care and all round higher standard of living. They are ‘hated’ by their own kith and kin because they are ‘different.

Sad to say from fall outs at a family level to national level humans will always find a reason to ‘hate’ one another.
 
The biggest problem is human nature. People think ‘emotionally’ and not factually. Unfortunately it is easier to ‘hate’ than to ‘love’. The colonised will ‘hate’ the colonist. Even if the colonisers biting some Levels of wealth, education, hygiene etc, the colonised would rather destroy those institutions, rather than build upon them.

It’s easier to blame ‘others’ because their skin is a different colour, their eyes are a different shape etc.

A friend who lives in an African country told me of the civil strife there. The indigenous population would rather cling to their ancient tribal traditions’ and detest others, whose ancestors were stolen from there, taken to the USA, eventually after many generations they got ‘educated’ by western standards. Many returned to the land of there nativity with the knowledge fo how to build a sustainable, economic, well educated, society with good health care and all round higher standard of living. They are ‘hated’ by their own kith and kin because they are ‘different.

Sad to say from fall outs at a family level to national level humans will always find a reason to ‘hate’ one another.

In what African country is there this mythical conflict between the superstitious natives and the educated and advanced foreigners from across the sea?

And I'm not sure you can say that people living in, say, Nigeria, are the kith-and-kin of African-Americans. That would be like saying the Dutch are my kith-and-kin.
 
In what African country is there this mythical conflict between the superstitious natives and the educated and advanced foreigners from across the sea?
Sounds somewhat like Liberia. IIRC the returned former slaves and 'westernised' Africans used their advantages to effectively come to dominate the country economically and politically, becoming a distinct self-identifying group from the inland locals.
 
In what African country is there this mythical conflict between the superstitious natives and the educated and advanced foreigners from across the sea?.
Sounds somewhat like Liberia. IIRC the returned former slaves and 'westernised' Africans used their advantages to effectively come to dominate the country economically and politically, becoming a distinct self-identifying group from the inland locals.

Liberia is indeed the country where my friends live.
 
Liberia is indeed the country where my friends live.

The way you described it sounded like it was something that happened recently, not 150 years ago.

And the Americo-Liberians did treat the 'natives' pretty badly, so it's not a surprise there were issues.
 
Now that I got that off my chest I think we need to review your premise. I believe you do not understand the situation in Africa. There are examples outside of Africa where multi-ethnic countries were formed, look at India or Indonesia which are multi-ethnic countries. The major difference is that in both cases you had a well established educated and upper class that took over the administration of the countries but more importantly they had a dominant ethnic group that dwarf the other ethnic groups. In Inda the Hindi group makes up the largest ethnic group and provided India with somewhat stable government. But it did not eliminate resentment by other groups but they did not have the numbers and political / military power to challenge the majority group. But today the other ethnic groups will learn English to communicate amongst themselves but not Hindi. This is same with Indonesia to some extent who relied on the Java group.
.

That is not very true, as Hindi speakers don't even make up that much of a plurality in India, and even then there are regional identities that most people associate with than a large panethnicity. Same in Indonesia with the Javanese, where Bahasa Melayu is still the language of choice. Hindi was used as a lingua franca and probably resulted as an official language because of that. India and Indonesia have always been multi-ethnic, and a multi-ethnic society can work in Africa. It just requires cultural similarities and more sensible borders.
 
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