Africa's Poverty

You don't seem to be responding to my thread. I partially supported yours, but I felt that you were overemphasizing colonialiam in today's Africa (considering it has been gone for 40 years).

By what objective measures was Africa better in the 19th century? And with 53 countries there, are you sure it's wise to generalize? Is it all the same?

Zimbabwe is worse off for instance- essentially because of removing white settlers. Would it be fairer if land was distributed more evenly? Only if it worked, whit it didn't, because you need time to transition from one economic and social situation to another. It is a microcosm of the change from colonial governance to independance in Africa. Was western interfearance wrong in Africa? Probably. But once one reasonably good economic situation has been acheived (not in the dutch bits I will admit), it is foolish to act too quickly in changing it.

Zimbabwe isn't worse because of the removal of white citizens (NOT "settlers"). It's worse because of the manner in which this policy was effected, which was basically army-enforced intimidation and government-promoted pogroms and violence. If Mugabe weren't an insane megalomaniac, he could have returned Zimbabwean land by purchasing it from the white population, or creating term-leases, which is what had been suggested all along. But because he chose to do this through violence (and at the same time through political repression), the country's foreign investors left, they became diplomatically isolated, and they suffered agricultural and economic collapse. Mugabe also turned away foreign food aid. So I think it's naive to blame Zimbabwe's problems on "removing white settlers". And considering that 30-40 years ago those white settlers in (then) Rhodesia had a brutal apartheid regime, it's hard to argue that they were better off at the time.

I agree with you that social and economic transitions take time. But because of growing populations, because of recent unrest and political change in nearby countries, and because of AIDS, Zimbabwe would be in a time of transition anyway as is all of the developing world. It is therefore not a microcosm of this change from colonial governance, which I might add was not uniformly applied in Africa. How can you compare the brutal scorched-earth colonialism (and genocide) of the Belgians in Central Africa with the much longer term colonial "investments" of the French in Cote d'Ivoire and Senegal (not without its crimes, but far more "stabilizing in the end").

I think I recognised that there was, obviously relativly malign and malevolant forms of colonialism, and that I mentioned the dutch ran their colonies in Africa in a hideous way- anyone who's read Heart of Darkness could hardly think otherwise. But that is aside from the point- I was focusing on British colonies.
Morevover you fall into the same logical trap that you claim I did by using the phrase 'devoloping world'. That suggests an economic and technological situation that is getting better universally, a ridiculous generalisation. While this is true in some parts of Africa, such as South Africa and used to be true in Zimbabwe, this is not the case in most of Africa.

The British, French, Portugese, Belgians, and Germans ALL ran their colonies in hideous ways. The British get no pass on their murderous plunder in Ghana, Nigeria, Gambia, and Sierra Leone.

Whatever, I'm using a commonly recognized term rather than offering some hairsplitting neologism that wouldn't mean anything. I agree that the term is problematic by virtue of its lack of specificity, but at least we generally understand each other if we use it. And there's nothing about the word "developing" that suggests "getting better", nor does it suggest that all aspects of a society progress in the same direction simultaneously or at the same rate.