Teach a man to fish and he'll not be hungry for the rest of his life.
Force a man and his friends to catch fish for you in big fish farms for your cronies back home to enjoy, but don't teach them how to run fish farms, instead make them dependent on your farm destroying their previous way of life, create some wars and kill a couple of millions, then exit leaving behind a vacuum and you get to write smug, pseudo-provocative pieces in time magazine bemoaning the white man's burden.
And it is not like whites invented wars. Africa was full of wars before whites came. So you can't pretend war was some sort invention brought to Africa by whites.
You know the people there are not a different species. Just like the people, whoever that is, that first came out of iron age, Africans would've came out of "iron age" too. Without the colonization, the world would've been better off. People at that time thought colonization as required or as an easy way to get access to more resources instead of advancing internally with their own limited resources. They couldn't care less if those Africans(or insert any other colonized place/people) lived or died. They were colonizing for the resources.
However, The facts are what they are, and if you're white, no need to feel guilty, but please be more considerate in the present and the future.
And please, before you feel the need to explain how the European colonialists civilized the savages, which is all you're saying with that comment about the iron age, consider, in keeping with our fiction theme, the Prime Directive, it's justifications, it's implications and how it applies to our life as human beings on this planet.
I can't let this pass. This is incredibly, crazily racist.
Africa is a vast continent with hundreds of millions of people. There are more middle-class people in Africa than North America, did you know that?
Allow the state to own and manage natural resources and make African dictators undeservedly wealthy (and their citizens poor and unproductive).
Colonial Africa is no different. It is a mixed bag. It was exploitative but it also brought development, not because European necessarily wanted to help Africans but because getting hold of resources required building ports, roads, railroad etc. They could not exploit agricultural resources without actually building farms and hiring locals. And of course there was always people with different ideas. Some wanted to help Africans and brought modern medicine e.g.
The chief error the western powers did when they left Africa was to not allow for any transition period. They left countries were whites had managed everything and no African had experience or education in managing operations from the top level. They should have given Africans education in white institutions and let them work with the white administration to learn how things were managed.
We see the same disaster in South Africa. Suddenly blacks are put in power but they have no previous experience in having power since they were never given a chance. White rule should not have ended abruptly. There should have been a gradual winding down.
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To elaborate with less snark: No one is complaining about the good things. It's the violence and exploitation and coercion that are bad. The conquerors don't get "points" for the good stuff that they can redeem against their sins (or crimes if you prefer) to somehow balance the bad stuff out. What a strange idea!
If I stab you in the guts and then hand you a free milkshake, does that make it okay?
