this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2024
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My take is that our ancestors definitely fucked up bigtime by leaving several parts of the world with arbitrary borders that have no regard for existing ethnic groups. Just take a look at any ethnic map of africa, eurasia or the middle-east and you'll see.
Turns out that colonizers have little interest in local culture. Who would have guessed?
Adding insult to injury: When colonizing land where people mostly lived in tribal social constructs, you actually force them to adapt to your own developments. Essentially skipping the feudalism and micro-states step that has taken Europe literal centuries to get out of.
So you have all these ethnic groups that should have found their way to modern societies without outside interference, and you subject them to slavery, the introduction of guns, mining operations and you crush any form of revolt by committing various atrocities.
Development of nations is never going to be fair, with the strongest group eventually elbowing out the weaker ones. The current status quo definitely doesn't help in finding stability. Foreign interests are still meddling, financial and food aid is causing ridiculous population numbers that can in no way shape or form be supported by the local economies, and as you said, slavery is not truly gone.
Africa can only be an unstable mess as long as we're still fucking around. Ideal (though not particularly empathetic) solution is to GTFO, use magic to disappear all firearms and modern weaponry from existence, redistribute all wealth truly equally and go from there. The actual way this will play out is that we'll see war, instability, destruction of natural resources and a lot of pain and suffering until everything stabilizes or until the land is no longer habitable, whichever comes first.
This is that typical defeatist schpiel, used by both "woke" white people in the west, as well as African self-defeatists. You're not helping, and here's why:
Not only are you robbing African people of any agency, but you pretend like they can't actually do anything about their situation, i.e the corruption and exploitation, by blaming some "super powerful foreign force" that itself must give up for Africans to be free.
When in fact, the French presence is almost fully gone, the US military is there at the behest of local governments, and the ones making the most money is not solely multinationals, but the corrupt officials who invite and enable them. These officials are all black and brown, they are all ethnically African.
That's why you should support democratic movements and help to spread awareness of the goings on in Africa, or else you're HELPING the corrupt by providing them a scapegoat. Here's an example, without doxing myself:
In my city, last year, there was a violent protest by certain Africans. People in my city were generally not even informed what the issue was, but gladly speculated. After a day or two it became apparent, that they were citizens in diaspora who were angry that a supposed "youth organization" from their country was given a venue to speak to politicians. This is because this "youth organization" was an astroturfed organization by an authoritarian regime who sought to get more western money.
Now, we can fully pull out all that money, but those despots and oligarchs don't give two fucks about the people they rule over, which would lead to even more famine. But then we'd also have more blood on our hands.
It's therefore important that we either A) talk directly about who, what and where, or B) defer to someone who knows what they are talking about.
Judging by your glib, defeatist and condescending schpiel, I'm guessing you don't know that you're talking about.
Please defer to people who actually know what they are talking about and throw away whatever old school, defeatist, glib talking points - because you're not helping. In fact, you're enabling the talking points of these despots, oligarchs and regimes.
Please do better.