Neocolonialism In Africa

From the 1950s through the early 1990s, nations across Africa broke through the barriers that colonial powers had placed to become nation-states: groups of people in a region who share both common cultural characteristics and self-determination. This was the result of many decades of work by nationalists and citizens to earn one freedom after another. The nation-states of Africa were rewards that were worth the lives and time spent by these brave people. In a way, the prize of independence for African nationalists is similar to the prize of a bouquet of roses, in that having self-determination and sovereignty over your own land is beautiful, no matter the troubles that poke from underneath. For some nation-states in Africa, these thorns of trouble have gone so far as to

However, most of these issues can be rooted in the troubles that come with the colonial legacy European powers left. From the Scramble for Africa in the late 1800s to their scrambling from Africa mainly in the 1960s and 1970s, European powers actively failed to give Africans the education and training they needed to become self-governing, self-sustaining entities. Guinean independence leader Sekou Toure loathed the fact that “the education dispensed in Africa was deliberately inferior and limited to those disciplines which would allow the better exploitation of the population.” According to Martin Meredith, in pre-independence Congo “The sum total of university graduates was thirty.” This lack of preparation may have been driven by a racist superiority complex or a lack of knowledge on African affairs, the latter of which is most evident in Basil Davidson’s reference to an official British report from 1945, which stated, “Somewhere … within a century, within half a century, a new African state will be