Africa is a paradox which illustrates and highlights neo-colonialism . Her earth is rich, yet the products that come from above and below the soil continue to enrich, not Africans predominantly, but groups and individuals who operate to Africa’s impoverishment."
Kwame Nkrumah (1965). “Neo-colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism”
Other urls found in this thread:
independent.co.uk
naomiklein.org
theguardian.com
theconversation.com
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
nation.co.ke
twitter.com
>True to his electoral promises, Nkrumah went to work putting the economic and social fundamentals in place. This encouraged the people to work even harder. Nkrumah firmly believed that political independence was meaningless without economic independence. [7]
>Thus, by the time he was overthrown in the CIA-inspired coup, Ghana had 68 sprawling state-owned factories producing every need of the population—from shoes, to textiles, to furniture, to lorry tires, to canned fruits, vegetables and beef; to glass, to radio and TV; to books, to steel, to educated manpower, virtually everything![8]
>Nkrumah wanted to industrialize Ghana within a generation, and everything was on course until the Americans and their British cousins (according to their own declassified documents) used some disgruntled and self-serving Ghanaian soldiers, staged that terrible coup on 24 February 1966 that truncated Ghana’s progress. It was a major setback, not only for Ghana but the whole of Africa.
>But Nkrumah was overthrown, and we are now left with nostalgia and what might have been. After the coup, the IMF rubbed salt into our injuries by sending a delegation to Accra to tell the military junta to discontinue Nkrumah’s industrialization programme. And they did! And, as a reward, some of them got airports named after them!
Because Africans are too stupid to exploit their resources themselves so they have to hire others to do it for them.
What about East Europe? It have been colonized by the Ottomans, Germany and Russia.
What about Ethiopia? It never was colonized.
...
>“Humankind does not submit passively to the power of nature. It takes control over this power. This process is not an internal or subjective one. It takes place objectively in practice, once women cease to be viewed as mere sexual beings, once we look beyond their biological functions and become conscious of their weight as an active social force. What's more, woman's consciousness of herself is not only a product of her sexuality. It reflects her position as determined by the economic structure of society, which in turn expresses the level reached by humankind in technological development and the relations between classes.
The importance of dialectical materialism lies in going beyond the inherent limits of biology, rejecting simplistic theories about our being slaves to the nature of our species, and, instead, placing facts in their social and economic context.”
Thomas Sankara
>the perfidious albion strikes again
>US President Barack Obama has given South Africa 60 days to remove barriers to US farm produce or face sanctions in a long-running row over chicken exports.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-34744729
>Victims of the EU’s shockingly immoral approach to trade in poultry include, to date, Cameroon, Senegal, Ghana and, more recently, South Africa. As a consequence of a flood of imports, 70% of broiler operations in Senegal closed. In Cameroon, 120000 people lost their jobs. In Ghana, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, poultry processing plants were reduced to operating at 25% of capacity, and feed mills were reduced to 42% of capacity.
>At the 2016 UN General Assembly, Ghana’s President John Mahama claimed that the imported chicken crisis was a key factor for many people migrating from Africa to Europe. Ghanaians who embark on the risky journey to Europe are poultry farmers or entrepreneurs who “sell their shops and undertake the journey because they can no longer compete with the tonnes of frozen chicken dumped on African markets annually”.
>Africa ‘subsidises’ the rest of the world to the tune of $41bn (£32bn) a year, according to a new analysis of the amount of money flowing in and out of the continent.
>The Honest Accounts 2017 report by Global Justice Now, the Jubilee Debt Campaign and other groups estimated the total amount going into sub-Saharan Africa at $161.6bn, while the total amount going out was put at $202.9bn.
>The outflows included debt repayments by governments and the private sector, multinational company profits, the ‘brain drain’ effect, illegal logging, fishing and poaching, and costs associated with climate change, a problem largely caused by Europe, America and other developed countries.
>“Africa is rich – in potential mineral wealth, skilled workers, booming new businesses and biodiversity. Its people should thrive, its economies prosper,” the report said.
>Yet many people living in Africa’s 47 countries remain trapped in poverty, while much of the continent’s wealth is being extracted by those outside it”
>From the 1980s, a different discourse emerged, pushing for financial globalization including international financial liberalization. Three main arguments were offered. First, a net flow of funds from capital-rich countries to capital-poor countries would ensue. This did not happen, but the contrary happened instead, as capital flowed from the capital-poor to the capital-rich. Mainstream economists could not account for this phenomenon and described it as “capital flowing uphill,” instead of revising their economic analysis in light of empirical realities. Meanwhile, the impoverishment of poor countries has actually been worsened by international financial liberalization.
>Jomo Kwame Sundaram (2014) Globalization, imperialism and its discontents,
Inter-Asia Cultural Studies
>Padayachee faxed the paper in the morning and didn’t hear back for weeks. "Then, when we asked what happened, we were told, ‘Well, we gave that one up.’" Not only would the central bank be run as an autonomous entity within the South African state, with its independence enshrined in the new constitution, but it would be headed by the same man who ran it under apartheid, Chris Stals. It wasn’t just the central bank that the ANC had given up: in another major concession, Derek Keyes, the white finance minister under apartheid, would also remain in his post—much as the finance ministers and central bank heads from Argentina’s dictatorship somehow managed to get their jobs back under democracy. The New York Times praised Keyes as "the country’s ranking apostle of low-spending business-friendly government."11
>Until that point, Padayachee said, "we were still buoyant, because, my God, this was a revolutionary struggle; at least there’d be something to come out of it." When he learned that the central bank and the treasury would be run by their old apartheid bosses, it meant "everything would be lost in terms of economic transformation." When I asked him whether he thought the negotiators realized how much they had lost, after some hesitation, he replied, "Frankly, no." It was simple horse-trading: "In the negotiations, something had to be given, and our side gave those things—I’ll give you this, you give me that."
>From Padayachee’s point of view, none of this happened because of some grand betrayal on the part of ANC leaders but simply because they were outmanoeuvred on a series of issues that seemed less than crucial at the time—but turned out to hold South Africa’s lasting liberation in the balance.
naomiklein.org
>Corporations-foreign and domestic alike- report false prices on their trade invoices in order to spirit money out of developing countries directly into tax havens and secrecy jurisdictions. Developing countries lose $875 billion through trade misinvoicing a year.
>A similarly large amount flows out annually through " abusive transfer pricing", a mechanism that multinational companies use to steal money from developing countries by shifting profits illegally between their own subsidiaries in different countries.
>Jason Hickel, The Divide, 2017, Heinnemann, London
>the ‘brain drain’ effect
>company profits
>climate change
Only a nigger would be stupid enough to believe this shit
...
>What about Ethiopia?
Haile Selaissie was retarded and set up his country for civil war. He set the groundwork for the Eritrean rebellion and the very coup that overthrew him, and when the commies took over in 1974, the country descended into civil war. Somalia invaded, and, although the Soviets jumped in to prop up the Ethiopians, they ended up dumping their resources into a failing military that only served to devastate the country with nearly 20 years of civil war.
nigger what
all of those things are well documented realities.
African immigrants to the US are significantly more educated on average than the US population - something like a quarter of African adults immigrating to the US have postgrad degrees IIRC.
>Debt repayment
You should take the initial money into the equation, then, and not just the interest.
>Brain drain
What brains do we drain from Africa?
From African universities. Does it worth Polytechnique? What about the thousand of students who leave the west to go to Africa every year at the end of their studies? Is that taken into account?
Pretty much this. Every step of the proccess except for the most crude manual labor has to be done by foreigners. They won't build their factories and rent out their mining equipment without a fee after all.
africa was a useless shithole money-drain for anything but the slave and sugar trade
africa subsidises the rest of the world? in what universe?
It's all so tiresome.
>africa subsidises the rest of the world? in what universe?
the one where people read economic reports. I know that it is hard to believe, given that the entire narrative you've been told says that can't possibly be true, but it is. see alsoand:
>We have long been told a compelling story about the relationship between rich countries and poor countries. The story holds that the rich nations of the OECD give generously of their wealth to the poorer nations of the global south, to help them eradicate poverty and push them up the development ladder. Yes, during colonialism western powers may have enriched themselves by extracting resources and slave labour from their colonies – but that’s all in the past. These days, they give more than $125bn (£102bn) in aid each year – solid evidence of their benevolent goodwill.
>The US-based Global Financial Integrity (GFI) and the Centre for Applied Research at the Norwegian School of Economics recently published some fascinating data. They tallied up all of the financial resources that get transferred between rich countries and poor countries each year: not just aid, foreign investment and trade flows (as previous studies have done) but also non-financial transfers such as debt cancellation, unrequited transfers like workers’ remittances, and unrecorded capital flight (more of this later). As far as I am aware, it is the most comprehensive assessment of resource transfers ever undertaken.
>What they discovered is that the flow of money from rich countries to poor countries pales in comparison to the flow that runs in the other direction.
theguardian.com
I'm interested in this map, what is it based on? trade deals?
their postgrad degrees are from the US
Investment and weapons sales
>all of Africa exports less every year than the GDP of Israel
it's not just measuring exports though. Capital flows in many different ways, read the articles and you'll find out.
>start a legit business in Africa
>build factories, roads and infrastructure the corrupt government never did
>employ 100s of people
>take home the profits of your investment which is probably like 5% a year and the only reason you bothered to go half way across the planet and risk all that money
>"wait that's our profit and you stole it"
Africa hasn't been remotely exploited by extracontinentals since the USSR flooded them with ak 47s, their problems now are domestic
I swear, if you leftist sophists saw a bunch of Mugabe's men gang raping a 13 year old girl in the belief it will cure them of AIDs you'd proudly proclaim "at least she isn't picking coffee beans for the white man, I'm such a god damn motherfucking hero"
Never forget that the average IQ of a subsaharan nigger is 70.
so you response to the cited article written by a guy who just published an entire book with citations is to dismiss it without reading and then make up a story about how you feel things are?
where are you getting your info about africa from?
Yeah, nothing biased about that account. Totally objective.
>$37 billion from "climate change" which somehow steals money from Africa and gives to the ebil white man
>Africa losing money in remittances
>Literally the only thing going in is aid, no foreign investment at all
>companies still manage to take out $50bn a year and not invest any of it in Africa
Why are leftists so retarded?
Uganda trained 30 urologists and all but 2 left.
Many developed nation poach skilled peopel form poorer nations to make up for their own labor needs like healthcare workers and professionals. needs.
educating people only to lose them is a waste of your limited resources.
They are too deep into their own world to understand anything.
So is every instance of retarded Africans getting duped by foreigners going to be called something-colonialism?
Wait a minute, only 30 urologists in ALL OF UGANDA? Jesus Christ what a shithole.
I've long said that if you want Africa to really recover you need to shut off all aid to it. Food and other material aid is just sabotaging their local economies. African farmers cannot make a living because how can they when westerners are giving away food for free? How can any African entrepreneur start a business or open a factory when America and Europe send boxes of free clothes and shit every month? How can reform happen when every time a bright start emerges with a shred of talent he's scooped up by some first world university and then he never comes home?
How are multinationals able to make nearly 50 billion dollars in profits without Africans benefiting at all? That makes no sense. If they're operating in Africa then they have overhead expenses being sunk into the continent that aren't being reflected in that graphic. They would need to pay for premises to work out of as well as local employees to, you know, do the actual work. Plus to maintain their capital there. To be making 50 billion dollars in profit suggests billions of dollars' worth of infrastructure and investment into the continent by multinational corporations. It costs money to make money. Richest man on Earth right now heads a business that plows nearly all its profit back into its business, literally hundreds of billions of dollars reinvested every year.
And commies think being rich is about swimming pools full of gold like scrooge mcduck.
If you want Africa to flourish you need to kick out the fucking Europeans and the Chinese, the people actually eating up their natural resources and making all the profit.
You kick out the foreign businesses and they just take their capital with them. Both the physical kind, and the intellectual kind. But let's say there's no peaceful transition and you get a Mugabe-type who kicks whitey and chinky out by force, seizes all their capital at gunpoint. Well if history has taught us anything, it's that this always ends very well for whatever industry the revolution has decided to nationalize. Just look at Zimbabwe!
You're on the right track, but aid does still have its place.
One of the more successful charities I've heard of involved direct cash transfers of a few hundred dollars or so. The communities targeted were these unique ones in Kenya where people lived in the stereotypical tribal african village but had access to mobile phones with which they did online banking. An applicant, once approved, would have the money wired into their account with no stipulations on its use. Of course there were those who blew the money, but most used it on something productive - be it getting some work done on their house or investing it into a local business, for example.
That generally should be the standard for aid in my opinion. Aid should benefit not just the direct recipients, but the community as a whole. That means focusing less on traditional aid programs, which often tend to serve as a humanitarian facade for dumping goods, and more on what amounts to investment in the local community. Building infrastructure, investing in local businesses, and direct cash transfers into impoverished communities (but not enough to fuck them with inflation) are the way to go.
But that sounds like welfare, and welfare is bad-wrong anti-capitalist commie shit.
But that doesn't solve anything, you're just subsidizing their entire lifestyle. That's not a tenable solution. Like all welfare programs it just assumes there will always be enough of other people's money to pay for their lifestyle. That's foolishness. You're not only thinking in the very short term but you're completely robbing them of agency.
Idiots the food dumping is not through AID at all . you think they just gibe food for free? Aid is just used as something to hide the fact of how fucked up subsides and trade is for poorer nations.
they did that to Korea. Look at them
Aid is used as scapegoat I mean.
Yet there's countless evidence showing that giving people loans or cash transfers helps them start businesses up or pay for fuckign schooling.
Zanzibar has old age pension for $9 usd (they just did this recently) and it's helping people a fuckton since those elderly reinvest into their families and businesses.
>theconversation.com
We have this shitty mindset that what works everyelse in the world won't work for the poor in the developing world or in Africa because we are still have mindset from the past of western/white exceptionalism in regards to policy.
.
>Like all welfare programs it just assumes there will always be enough of other people's money to pay for their lifestyle
Isn't capitalism's whole bag the idea of potentially unlimited wealth generation? Doesn't that inherently contradict what you just said?
Also welfare always gets distributed around ina cycle because people still buy food and use utilities and do stuff.
some folks have this weird idea that welfare just disappears, like the poor just burn money for fuel or something, and doesn't end up getting put directly back into the economy through buying shit and paying rent.
RIP black Robespierre
>all money, if spent, contributes to the economy equally
Rent is always a poor contributor to a growing economy and basics like food exist purely to perpetuate existence, in the case of welfare recipients, a net-loss existence.
But that's wrong, you fucking retard.
Aid like I described to communities in extreme poverty addresses the things keeping the community poor in the first place - poor infrastructure and a lack of substantial capital beyond subsistence. Infrastructure improvements are straightforward. Improved roads allow local economies to function more efficiently and, if we're talking about creating paved roads, make it so the local economy isn't completely shutting down during the rainy season. Digging wells closer to town mean that people aren't having to waste their entire day fetching water from the nearest water hole. Such improvements, however, tend to require a greater investment than extremely impoverished communities can realistically muster, and thus are going to require outside help from somewhere.
Direct cash transfers like that one charity did are supposed to provide recipients with something to get them beyond bare subsistence so they can actually contribute to the economy. That can mean giving them a leg up out of a hole (things like a leaky roof gradually fucking your entire house because you can't afford to fix it, or not being able to afford to fix your car so you can't get to work, meaning you can't get the money to fix your car). It could mean just giving them money to spend on things that aren't food and housing, which means they can finally contribute to keeping local businesses alive.
Obviously it's far more complicated in an industrialized economy like America, but in small-scale rural communities in Africa, it's far easier to do right. What I'm describing is less of a
>hey let's unfuck the entire continent
and more of
>let's try to lift a community out of extreme poverty
>in the case of welfare recipients, a net-loss existence.
Not really. Welfare helps people not have to spend a higher proportion of income on food. That money going to them in welfare would have already been spent on something else.
You mean well, but you're really off the mark here.
Food aid is mostly only for times of famine.
What we're talking about here is free trade.
The WTO tells african countries not to subsidise their farmers, while the WB and IMF also force through measures that makes the governments of these country's poor.
Along comes the USA (or EU) who for some reason are allowed to pay money to their farmers (I'm still not clear why this is the case), which means the price is low, even lower than african grown chickens
So the USA sends it's cheap chickens over to Africa and the people buy them cause their cheap. However the local chicken farmers are now going out of business because they can't compete with the cheap USA chickens. This is known as dumping.
The user that posted this map is a retarded fuck with no fucking knowledge of africa or common sense to restrain himself from posting this shit ever again. If you do think this map is interesting you shouldn't even consider the idea of sharing your opinion about african politics or politics in general.
Neo-Colonism is an too easy answer for the state of Africa.
...
Now look at the average South Korean IQ (106) and the average subsaharan niggers IQ (equatorial guinea has an average IQ of 59).
good thing then that IQ doesn't mean anything
...
shocker, i know
>people who consume without producing add value to the economy
This is what modern leftists actually believe.
Nobody needs to add value to an abstraction. The sheer majority of work done by people today is a hideous waste of time and resources, and we're even neglecting useful work for it.
I read the OP quote and I precisely wondered when he got CIA’d almost immediately heh
>Isn't capitalism's whole bag the idea of potentially unlimited wealth generation?
what the hell gave you that impression?
Oh yeah, that must be why Subsaharans are doing so well, even when compared to Koreans? You IQ/evolution-deniers crack me up. Let me guess, you think God created man 6000 years ago, too?
every neo-capitalist /pol/ memer that shits all over Veeky Forums.
...
Korean IQ was actually pretty low in the 50's.
The current reconstruction bill for Iraq is now $100 billion dollars.
Africans are genetically primitive form of homo sapiens.
Human society is a collective machine. If you have 70 good machines and 30 that don't work, your factory can still function. If you have 30 good machines and 70 bad ones, everything grinds to a halt.
While there are many talented, intelligent and moral Africans, the majority are none of these things and they weigh down the rest.
>Korean IQ was actually pretty low in the 50's.
no, no it wasnt
If leftists understood basic economics they wouldn't be leftists.
Nice job misconstruing everything lol.
>Haile Selaissie was retarded and set up his country for civil war. He set the groundwork for the Eritrean rebellion and the very coup that overthrew him,
Can you expand on this it sounds interesting, I normaly hear nothing but gushing praise for HS.
The problem really boils down to the fact that Haile Selaissie wanted both a totalitarian imperial autocracy and a modern, liberal state.
From the minute his country was liberated in WW2, he was trying to leverage territorial gains out of the Allies. Selaissie was pushing hard for the annexation of the whole Horn of Africa, with a special eye on Somalia. The Brits meanwhile were thinking just the opposite, in fact - they were hoping to keep some of Italy's territorial divisions they had created to break off regions like Somali-dominated Ogaden into more ethnically centered states in Eritrea and Somalia. Fortunately for Selaissie, US pressure forced the British to relent to a degree, and he was awarded Eritrea - but only on the condition that it be governed as an autonomous province with its own democratic institutions.
Meanwhile, he tried to set up a minority rule state. Christian Amharic traditions would dominate government and society down to things like street signs. This alone would have been pretty bad, given that Christains and Amharic Ethiopians are actually a minority in the country overall - think of the kind of shitstorm you'd have if Quebec suddenly got to dictate everything for the rest of Canada. With his push for modernization, he established modern, Western-styled universities in the country, and countless civilians and military officers were sent abroad for schooling and training. The Ethiopian Air Force, for example, ended up becoming the best trained force in Black Africa thanks to regular training with the USAF.
But while he went out of his way to get his country educated in the Western liberal manner, he continued to run the country as an autocrat, even when his mind and health started to fail. There was to be no form of elections, no accountability, and not a very well formalized government. Everything answered to him and him alone, and he was allowed to change laws or appointments on a whim.
>cont
Apparently not seeing the problem with everything he was doing, Selaissie would renege on the Eritrean agreement in 1960, incorporating it as a regular province and dissolving all of its elected assemblies. Not too surprisingly, a rebellion broke out, although the Ethiopian military was able to keep it mostly under control for the time being.
At the end of 1960, liberal sentiment hit a boiling point and a coup was launched by liberal-leaning Army officers. They didn't intend to overthrow the imperial system entirely, but rather hoped to install Selaissie's heir and enact some liberal reforms to create more of a constitutional monarchy. This coup was accompanied by massive demonstrations at Haile Selaissie University in the capital in support of these proposed reforms. Despite this, loyalist units defeated the coup and Selaissie returned to power.
Following the coup, rather than recognizing how volatile the situation was, Selaissie merely doubled down. He neither made any liberal reforms nor did he crack down on any liberal sentiment. As such, anti-monarchist sentiment grew and became more left-leaning as Selaissie proved himself more and more incapable of effectively leading the country.
Finally, in 1974, a new coup was launched. Unfortunately, this time, the military council that took control (the Derg) had no intention of preserving the Monarchy. They began espousing Marxist ideals, abolished the monarchy, and imprisoned all members of the royal family they could get their hands on. But the ethnic tensions Selaissie had worsened would shine through, and the communists would splinter. Ethnically-focused communist rebels sprung up all over the country in the form of the TPLF (Tigrays) EPLF (Eritreans) WSLF (Somalis) and OLF (Oromos). Purges took place as the Derg tried to consolidate power, and, long story short, 15 years of war followed.
>Following the coup, rather than recognizing how volatile the situation was, Selaissie merely doubled down
I've never known an autocrat that didn't.
Thanks for sharing user Didnt realize how fragile and diverse Ethiopia was.
Yeah it's a weird thing nobody really recognizes. Ethiopia as we know it today came into existence because their Emperor during the scramble for Africa (Menelik) was just as interested in conquest and colonization as the Europeans.
Huge swaths of southern and eastern Ethiopia (mainly Ogaden) only became Ethiopian territory because of the treaty that ended the Italo-Ethiopian War marked out those borders for them. Ethiopia had been fighting for decades to expand into those regions, and IIRC it was some time before those outer regions came under real control of Ethiopia.
>about how you feel things are?
Except he cited how the infrastructure of Africa came from colonization and thus Africans benefitted off of their "oppressors".
I think the worst part of your left leaning types who consider Africa oppresses is that your project eurocentric values onto their culture unintentionally.
>What makes a culture significant
>What makes a person rich
>Material, industry, competition etc
You are essentially telling Africans to follow in the footsteps of their oppressors without knowing it
They didn't "cite" anything. That's the point.
Also, you do realise that Mandela was not a marxist when he was president of SA right? Quite the opposite in fact.
Their economies aren't built to support self sufficiency though, they were designed by imperialists to further commodity production and the centralization of power.
Cheap chicken, what a tragedy.
When it comes to Africa, it is easy to see the negatives. Still the most untouched continent, Most of Africa remains poor and destitute. However, there are some glimmers of hope.
en.wikipedia.org
>The current plan is to establish an African Economic Community with a single currency by 2023.
en.wikipedia.org
>As of 2017, six states have expressed support for the union, but negotiations continue concerning issues such as the extent of members' sovereignty and timing of implementation.
nation.co.ke
>Six countries in central and western Africa have breathed life into long-running plans to allow visa-free movement of people among their nations.
We can hope that with further economic integration and development, Africa becomes a continent where its people can live in prosperity and dignity.
It is when it drives every local out of business. It's not just chicken, it's every possible product. The West makes sure to destroy any African attempt to create local production. And then retards on the internet say Durr this niggers can't do nothing".
>41bn
Whoa, the GDP of a mid-sized US city. How will Earth ever recover without muh Africa?
Also, the continent gets this disparity because it mostly exports cheap raw materials and imports more expensive industrial goods. Maybe you should try to produce your own shit and add value to it, past the virtue of digging it out, instead of bitching.
>africans can't compete on the global market
>"it's whitey's fault we're uncompetitive"
>meanwhile cheap raw material from Africa dumps the prices and destroys the primary sector in Europe and North America but nobody complains then
>Climate change is a capital outflow
>Loans made by their government is the whyte mans fault
OH NONONONONONO
You'd notice how all the outflows are actually the fault of the complete lack of the rule of law and the permanent quasi-failed state status of half the countries on the continent. Who is responsible for this- Africans. Maybe try to fix your institutions.
>because it mostly exports cheap raw materials and imports more expensive industrial goods
No shit, son. Think they never thought of that? The problem is is that it is actually really hard to be competitive against entrenched industries which can depend on their economy of scale to keep prices low.
>destroys the primary sector in Europe and North America
What primary sector? It's all second and tertiary sector from the second world war out basically. Only significant primary sector industry left in the west is farming, which Europe and America dominate on the world scene.
>why can’t blacks make their own shit
>well Europeans make sure to destroy African industries while extracting tons of raw material for their own.
>hur dur niggers
Gods sake fuck off you pol brainlet. He answered your question and you can’t see past you uninspired racism. Hating blacks won’t make Stacy love you,
It's actually pretty interesting how sub-saharan Africa got the short end of the deal when it came to decolonisation. An important thing to note is that under colonial regimes almost all African colonies had certain political and economic characteristics which heavily defined their economic character post-independence.
Basically almost all African colonies could be seen as extractive states; almost all political power was focused on securing the extraction of natural resources with comparatively less importance placed on the control of civil society in the colonies. As long as there was control over important ports, resource extraction sites, political centres and enough colonial police or allies to stamp down if the natives got too uppity, then things were generally seen as ticking over nicely in the colonial centres back in Europe.
What this led to, then, was colonial states where the economy was almost entirely reliant on the export of raw materials, which are notoriously volatile and vulnerable to market fluctuations. The problem with this was that when independence movements began to emerge, they sought to seize the state but without proposing significant structural changes to what was essentially a state apparatus designed for a colonial project. In Nkrumah's own words, "Seek ye first the political kingdom, and all things shall follow".
Koreans were useing their own shit as fertilizer by the time of the Americans sat their foot down in their region.
>is actually really hard to be competitive against entrenched industries
So do they expect the world to pretend to be retarded for several hunderd years until they industrialize? It's a doggy dog world and nobody is going to wait for you or give you advantages.
>destroy African industries
With free trade comes global competition. Cry me a river. If they hate free trade so much, either put NTMs, specialize or leave the WTO
>extracting tons of raw material for their own
>who gave them the resource concessions- the very same africans that now bitch about it
>who sell their resources for cheap- the very same africans that now bitch about it
Looks like someone is blaming their problems on everyone else but themselves again.
>muh /pol/
Whatever, brainlet.
(cont.) So basically after independence, you have loads of newly-made African states largely based around the old colonial borders (the actual borders themselves didn't matter so much under the colonial extractive state as sites of resource extraction) and with state apparatus almost entirely centred around ensuring that raw material exports continue. That said, there were attempts to diversify many African economies in the 1960s and 1970s as any postcolonial governments recognised that total economic dependence on raw material exports probably wasn't a good thing.
At this point, the IMF and World Bank came in and kind of fucked things over in a big way, surprised there hasn't been much stuff about them already in this thread. These international financial organisations evidently got it into their heads that what Africa needed to "develop" was market liberalisation, and lots of it. As a result, so-called conditionalities were attached to the loans given to African governments by these organisations, on which the former were pretty reliant for short-term development projects. These conditionalities reimposed an emphasis on raw material exports while at the same time mandating the privatisation and defunding of huge swathes of the economy, particularly public services and agriculture.
As you can imagine, combining near-total reliance on the export of economically volatile goods with a dessicated social welfare system does not create ideal conditions for the average person whenever a slump in the resource market comes around. Combined with this, as mentioned already, the destruction of local agriculture by flooding the market with cheap western produce creates conditions of starvation as huge swathes of fertile rural communities are rendered destitute.
It's then that these financial organisations had to pause and think somewhat; African economies were stagnating and famines broke out whenever there was a crash in the resource market.
(cont.) Eventually these financial organisations got it into their heads that the reason these initiatives were failing was because of local political corruption and authoritarianism, and thus came up with their next bright idea: the Structural Adjustment Program.
This program created new conditionalities for IMF and World Bank loans which, along with continued market liberalisation, required recipient governments to make significant political changes to their countries along more liberal, democratic lines. What this failed to realise, however, was that there was no significant correlation or "special link" between political corruption and mass poverty in Africa compared to the conditions caused by earlier IMF conditionalities. There have been plenty of African governments, such as Paul Kagame's in Rwanda, that have experienced economic booms despite being far more authoritarian than the guidelines of the Structural Adjustment program, and there are plenty which have conformed to the demands of the program and remain mired in corruption and economic destitution.
Tl;dr: western financial institutions tried to be clever and paternalistic and as well as effectively preventing economic diversification post-independence from gaining traction they also set about fucking up African economies for most of the last 40 years, from which they're only now beginning to recover.
Heads of government that try to escape the WTO or the ridiculous amounts of debt they're saddled with by these organisations tend to get kicked out or assassinated, look at Thomas Sankara
>fix the institutions that are created via an endless cycle of western backed coups
>everyone is always responsible for my problems but me
It's not like the complete moral bankruptcy, lack of national identity and honor are responsible for the constant money-fueled coups.
I didn't say he was, but he was a marxist when he bombing schools
I'm talking about industrialization as a whole, user. The fact that you value people based solely on their ability to acquire wealth regardless of how it's distributed is the issue.
The value of African cultures doesn't come from it trying to mimic that of Europe or Asia or whoever is investing in it's economies to extract resources from it.