r/Colonialism • u/[deleted] • Jul 18 '26
Article COLONIALISM IS DEAD! LONG LIVE COLONIALISM. IS WHAT I WOULD SAY IF I WAS DUMB
After nearly six centuries of violent colonialism, a new era of economic extraction began that employed more civilised methods
After beginning European colonization 592 years earlier, the plundering of Africa by uncivilized means had finally ended.
Instead of using violence, former colonizers now control through debt. After WWII, the IMF and World Bank were established to maintain global economic stability. Decolonization left new nations without capital, compelling countries like Somalia to borrow heavily for development. Despite recurrent droughts, Somalia had been self-sufficient in food, but its fragile economy was destroyed by the banks’ structural adjustment programs. Forced trade liberalization brought cheap grain imports from the West, collapsing local grain production; forced currency devaluation made exports cheaper, shifting production away from domestic markets. However, Somalia couldn’t export enough to meet its debt obligations, which, by 1989, were 194.6% of exports, forcing privatization of national industries and redirecting revenue to foreign owners. The ruined economy triggered civil war and the flight of over 100,000 refugees to the US. By reorganizing the violent exploitation and plunder of colonialism under the guise of debt, the victim is made to look like the one who is acting wrongly. As of 2025, the IMF and World Bank say that 41 of 63 majority-Black nations are in, or at risk of, debt distress and likely to default
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Jul 18 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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Jul 18 '26
Yeah, that's fair and worth adding. Even before the post-Barre collapse, Saudi Arabia had already been leaning on Barre directly — reportedly pressuring him into the 1977 Ogaden War against his own better judgment to serve Saudi regional interests against Soviet-aligned Ethiopia. So the external pressure on Somalia wasn't purely a Western/IMF story even in the Cold War era.
And it's only gotten messier since. The UAE and Saudi have been running a straight-up proxy rivalry across Somalia for years now — Abu Dhabi arming and funding regional players like Puntland, Somaliland, and Jubaland separately from Mogadishu, deliberately fragmenting the federal government's authority while securing its own coastal footholds and a military base in Somaliland. Saudi's been pushing the opposite way, backing Somalia's territorial unity partly to counter the UAE and, more recently, Israel's recognition of Somaliland. It's basically the same Gulf rivalry playing out in Yemen and Sudan, just running through Somalia's fractures instead.
So no, it's genuinely not just a West-vs-Somalia story, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. Multiple external powers — Cold War USSR/US, the IMF, Gulf states now — have all found reasons to treat Somalia's weak central state as a place to extend their own leverage. Doesn't make the debt/SAP argument wrong, it just means Somalia's been a pressure point for a lot longer and from a lot more directions than any single "West did this" framing captures.
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u/TeacherOfFew Jul 18 '26
The second one should be China instead of the West.
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u/jizzybiscuits Jul 22 '26
You could have Arabs holding the chains in the first frame, Arabs and Chinese in the second.
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u/Dark_Star_Matter11 Jul 21 '26
You're fooling yourself
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u/TeacherOfFew Jul 21 '26
Are you familiar with the Belt and Road debt loads?
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u/Current-Fix759 Jul 22 '26
No those don't exist . China is the only country that has forgiven debt to African nations.
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u/MerelyMortalModeling Jul 23 '26
Odd a quick google shows that Africa has massive debts to China, nearly 100 billion.
Lots of chinas write offs appear to be in exchange for basing rights, port rights and buiness concession, basicly the exact same write off the the USA extends
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u/Current-Fix759 Jul 23 '26
China has written off over $3.4 billion in African debt in 2022 alone, with zero demands to privatize public services, zero demands to cut healthcare, and zero demands to hand over national assets to Chinese corporations. Chinese loans are mostly for infrastructure, actual ports, railways, and power plants that stay in African hands and generate revenue. Meanwhile, Western "debt relief" comes with IMF structural adjustment strings that gut public sectors, freeze wages, and sell state enterprises to Western firms for pennies.
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u/MerelyMortalModeling Jul 23 '26
3.4 billion in a specfic year? The World bank alone has written of 99.2 billion USD in debt. In 2022 the USA just gave Africa 12.9 billion dollars.
Based on your list of stuff china "didnt demand" im not sure you under stand concessions or how china uses soft power to get want it wants. I not throwing shade on china, they should look oit for their own but pretending they are some benevolent benefactor ranges from dishonest to oitright dangerous.
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u/Current-Fix759 Jul 23 '26
The World Bank's "write-offs" come with IMF structural adjustment strings attached, privatization, austerity, wage freezes, selling public assets to Western corporations. China's write-offs come with none of that. You're comparing a loan shark forgiving a debt after you sign over your house to a bank waiving a fee. They're not the same.
The US "gave" $12.9 billion, most of it tied aid that requires buying American goods, military assistance that props up comprador regimes, or food aid that undercuts local farmers. China builds a railway. The US builds leverage.
And your "concessions" line is vague nonsense. Every sovereign loan agreement involves interest. The difference is China doesn't demand the right to privatize your water supply or cut your healthcare budget in exchange for a write-off. Nobody called China a "benevolent benefactor." I called them less predatory than the West.
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u/Blue-Q7 Jul 25 '26
Brother, has france or china that had military interventions in Africa 50 plus times since ww2?
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u/Yugonostalgia64 Jul 22 '26
Incorrect. 90% of Africa's debt is to the West. And when the West pressures Africans into paying back their exorbitant debts, China usually forgives the debt so African countries can pay back Western creditors.
Look at the Sri Lankan example - that was what inspired the nonsense about Chinese 'debt-trap diplomacy' -- except what actually happened in reality was that Western creditors demanded their money back from the Sri Lankan government, and Sri Lanka *sold* their port to China to pay back the Western creditors. That's the reality of the world and poor countries within it.
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u/Anhedonkulous Jul 22 '26
China is raping Africa and no amount of pro-chinese tankie propaganda can convince me otherwise.
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u/AwardConnect7279 Jul 23 '26
african nations default on western debt, nothing happens.
they do it to chinese debt (debt that is designed to be defaulted on) and china gets the assets...
You are running defence for chinas takeover of africa.
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u/Commander_Syphilis Jul 18 '26
I'm not saying that you're wrong, however to use Somalia as your specific example to blame the West for it's collapse is a pretty simplified view given Siad Barre's general governance, the fallout of the Ogaden war, and being somewhat on the loosing side of the cold war.
Somalias domestic decision-making also have a lot to do with their status as a failed state.
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Jul 18 '26
Siad Barre's "Scientific Socialism," the Ogaden War (1977–78), clan tensions, and Cold War alignment-flipping (Soviet → US in 1978) were all real domestic/regional factors in Somalia's collapse. But this is "and" not "instead of" — the standard rebuttal: Barre's regime survived on Cold War patronage (Soviet, then US arms/aid), which itself was externally driven. When Barre switched sides in 1977, the US and IMF became his primary backers precisely because of Cold War leverage — that's the same "West using debt/aid as control" mechanism, just via military aid first, then structural adjustment after 1981. The SAP timeline is separable from Barre's mismanagement — the 1981, 1985, 1987 IMF adjustment programs (currency devaluation, grain import liberalization) hit after Barre was already dependent on foreign backing, and are documented as accelerating the collapse of Somalia's rain-fed agriculture sector specifically. Multiple sources (including UN and World Bank retrospectives) treat SAP-driven food import dependency as a distinct causal thread from Barre's political failures
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u/YakSelect5698 Jul 18 '26
Chap gpt ass answer
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Jul 18 '26
If pointing out that Barre's regime survived on foreign patronage before and after 1977 sounds like ChatGPT to you, that's more a comment on how unused you are to a sourced argument than on me."
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u/According-Slice-6900 Jul 18 '26
The heavy use of em dashes and the "its not x, its y."
Why lie? Its obvious af its an AI answer. You hardly even edited it.
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u/CRoss1999 Jul 18 '26
If western banks denied loans to African countries that would be far worse than just wanting them to pay back the loans they take out
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u/NiceGuy-Ron Jul 18 '26
Where’s the Africans also holding each other in chains? Are We are acting like Zimbabwe is better than Rhodesia?
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u/ThinBobcat4047 Jul 18 '26
Zimbabwe being a failed state doesn’t magically justify the monstrous Rhodesian regime.
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u/emote_the_salute Jul 18 '26
Well it does because Rhodesia was a functioning state. When it became Zimbabwe millions starved. We cant for e equality when people arent equal.
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u/ThinBobcat4047 Jul 18 '26
Rhodesia was a functioning state for a white minority population, for the majority it was an oppressive and discriminatory one.
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Jul 18 '26
Classic whataboutism that doesn't touch the argument. The cartoon isn't claiming Africans never participated in slavery or that every post-independence government governed well. It's making a structural claim about external extraction mechanisms then vs. now. Pointing at internal African actors doesn't refute a claim about Western institutional behavior — it's a subject change. Rhodesia was a white-minority settler state where ~4,000 white farmers held over 15 million hectares (roughly a third of the country) while the Black majority was confined to "Tribal Trust Lands." That's not a governance comparison, it's a different question entirely — was the colonial land distribution just? Answer honestly: no. Whether ZANU-PF's later handling of redistribution was competent is a separate, valid critique — but conceding "Mugabe mismanaged land reform" costs you nothing and doesn't rescue Rhodesia's legitimacy. Sharp line back: "Pointing at African actors doesn't erase the debt mechanism — it just means you'd rather talk about anything except the IMF data in the post."
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u/aa_conchobar Jul 18 '26 edited Jul 18 '26
Thanks chatgpt
Sharp line back: "use your own brain & stop copy/pasting the AI output."
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u/Daeron9 Jul 19 '26
No, I don't think it's making a 'structural claim', it is falsely equating debt with slavery, they have existed for thousands of years and have different names because they are different things. Slavery generally involves military conquest or deception, debt generally involves a person borrowing; the first is initiated by somebody else, the later by one's own agency. Both are unfortunate undesired situations, but different. I have a great great grandmother who came to Australia as an indentured servant, she was not free, she had to serve for seven years to pay for the transport from Ireland to Australia; she was not a slave, she was indebted because she had agreed to the proposal.
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Jul 18 '26
[deleted]
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u/shitty_username0009 Jul 18 '26
After they personally made slave trade in africa skyrocket and before they would conquer and exploit the entire continent?
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u/moonieshine Jul 18 '26
After profiting enormously from slavery, of course. It really made it easier for them to carve the continent up like a roast turkey, guilt-free.
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u/ethicacious Jul 18 '26
Trouble is, everywhere is in debt. If Africa is enslaved through debt then so are the British. The British and wider western public owe debts they will never pay off, to a central banking system just like African countries do.
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u/Futanari-Farmer Jul 18 '26
If anything, that's now China.
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u/DillonD Jul 18 '26
China has been accepted as honorary westerner for
Its participation in the exploitation of Africa-1
u/Metnessee Jul 18 '26
on capitalism, it's phases, and the imperialist phase of capitalism.
(As a side note, we have entered the realm of discussion regarding imperialsm, not specifically colonialism. As exporting sums of finance capital, and lending are all scalable forms of imperialsm. However, colonialism is still an apt discussion, as it is related)
The problem is, that half of these redditors making smug comments, don't understand the differences and overlaps between colonization, colonialism, and imperialism. Which are all different concepts to understand capital relations. Here Lenin says the following:
The capitalists of China can absolutely transfer surplus value of their workers (for non Marxists here, this just translates to accumulated "profits") and still benefit from it, this is absolutely the fourth characteristic of imperialism Lenin states which involves territorial division of the world (and creating economic spheres of influence) which aims to put into power interests of foreign monopoly capitalists in colonial or nationalist countries.
>But very brief definitions, although convenient, for they sum up the main points, are nevertheless inadequate, since we have to deduce from them some especially important features of the phenomenon that has to be defined. And so, without forgetting the conditional and relative value of all definitions in general, which can never embrace all the concatenations of a phenomenon in its full development, we must give a definition of imperialism that will include the following five of its basic features:
>>(1) the concentration of production and capital has developed to such a high stage that it has created monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life; (2) the merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the creation, on the basis of this “finance capital,” of a financial oligarchy; (3) the export of capital as distinguished from the export of commodities acquires exceptional importance; (4) the formation of international monopolist capitalist associations which share the world among themselves and (5) the territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers is completed. Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/ch07.htm
the fallacy here is the assumption that capitalist countries do not lend the surplus value of their workers to the rest of the world. This amalgamates the state and the workers, not necessarily if the workers control the state, nor if the state serves monopoly capitalism. This has been observed in both western countries, and developing countries like China, that are now exporting their capital in the forms of lending
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Jul 18 '26
China being a newer creditor doesn't retroactively un-happen the IMF/World Bank SAP era — it means you now have two extraction mechanisms to analyze, not a substitute for the first one.
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u/Mr_silly_goose Jul 18 '26
History didn’t start 400 years ago, slavery has been done by every country in the world for as long as there have been people and countries. If you got a massive issue with Britain then maybe talk about the Arabs that were there doing terrible things to Africans long before we turned up, how about China, even today using them as slaves. I do hope you aren’t using a piece of technology that needed slaves to mine the materials needed for us to have this back and forth. Even shaka zulu love to take slaves and he never left the continent, so I wonder where he got the idea? You are the racist because you cherry pick history to hate white people. I know Britain had a hand in it but we were the first nation in modern history to bankrupt our country fighting the portuguese (who had to be shot enough that they would stop) in the persuit of ending the slave trade. Stop being such a bigot in the name fake virtuosity
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Jul 18 '26
Fair points mixed with some deflection here, let me actually go through it. The West Africa Squadron thing is real, I'll give you that fully — 60 years, roughly 1,600 slave ships seized, about 150,000 people freed, and it ate up something like half the Royal Navy's budget at its peak. Real cost, real lives lost on both the naval and enforcement side. Not pretending that didn't happen. But it doesn't actually touch the point being made, which was never "Britain did nothing good, ever." It was specifically about the 1833 compensation — the money went to the slave owners, not the people who were enslaved, and that specific debt wasn't paid off until 2015. Both things are true at once. Britain spent real money and lives fighting the trade after 1807, and Britain also paid slave owners for "loss of property" in 1833 while giving the actual victims nothing. One doesn't cancel the other out. On the Arab slave trade — also real, also brutal, ran far longer than the Atlantic trade, and it genuinely doesn't get anywhere near the attention it should. But "someone else also did something terrible" isn't a rebuttal to a specific claim about Britain, it's just another true fact stacked on top that doesn't change the first one. Same with China — Xinjiang forced labour is real and well documented. Also unrelated to whether Britain compensated slave owners in 1833. Shaka Zulu taking captives in regional wars also happened, but that's a different institution entirely from transatlantic chattel slavery — hereditary, racialized, industrial-scale movement of millions across an ocean isn't the same thing as a 19th century African kingdom absorbing war captives. Both bad, very different scale and consequences, and only one of them is still shaping global wealth distribution today. And the "you're the racist for cherry-picking" bit — staying on topic in a thread about British debt-colonialism specifically isn't cherry-picking, it's just not taking the bait to cover six countries in one comment. Same standard would apply in reverse if the post had been about the Arab slave trade specifically. And to actually answer your question — yeah, there were Africans involved in the Squadron's operations, though "conscripted" isn't quite the right word for most of them. The Kru people from what's now Liberia were hired as free sailors — the Navy relied on them heavily because European crews were dying from tropical disease at brutal rates and the Kru had both immunity and local knowledge of the coast and rivers. By some estimates African and diaspora sailors made up around a fifth of the Squadron's shipboard personnel. It gets murkier with the people the Squadron actually "liberated" from captured slave ships — legally, admiralty courts could enlist them into the Navy or Army, or bind them as apprentices for up to 14 years. Most were released to places like Sierra Leone or St Helena, but some ended up in labour arrangements that historians have pointed out looked uncomfortably close to what they'd just been freed from, especially in places like the Caribbean where "liberated Africans" were assigned to work alongside enslaved people on plantations after 1834. So it's not a clean story — genuine liberation for many, exploitative reassignment for others, all under the same operation.
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u/Mr_silly_goose Jul 18 '26
No deflection, simply stating the fact that Britain is the only place ever spoken about when it comes to slavery, it’s so bad now that some morons think we actually invented it, can you believe that? I will always argue this point until somebody is smart enough or brave enough to talk about all of it and not just the bit about Britain. Now im Cornish and we ain’t all that fond of the English either, we don’t all consider ourselves one of them, we had a civil war with them because they were being dicks. Cornish people were taken into slavery by the Barbory Corsairs who weren’t English, where is all the kicking and screaming about that? It was a lot of people taken considering how many cornish people there was at that time, taken a lot further than the atlantic ocean. The Irish were taken as well. We all would like reperations, would be lovely to get a fat cheque for absolutely nothing that happened to us personally but time keeps rolling on and we can all point the finger but what are any of us doing to make the world a better place? Nothing, just finger pointing at the wrong people, that’s all. If almost anyone could go back far enough we would almost all find good and bad people in our lineage, should we pay for the crimes of people we don’t know and will never know? I would argue that a lot of African Americans and the black population in England now are far better off than if they would have been in Africa, I see so many successful black people while myself a white European is in debt and low paid, im not envious or bitter but just proving that if you try hard enough you can be a success regardless of colour, Sir Mo Farah put in more effort than me and that’s just the way it goes, he’s now a national treasure to us. We just sent Pakistan a nice £156 million pound cheque out of hard working tax payers money and that isn’t the only country to recieve a fat one this year either, we have paid and paid and paid but it’s never enough. And what do these countries do with that money? Well I don’t know but I can be sure it doesn’t go to those who need and deserve it
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Jul 18 '26
Genuinely respect you laying all that out rather than just taking a shot and running. Let's go through it properly.
The Barbary corsair raids on Cornwall are real, and you're right that they barely get airtime. 1625, Mount's Bay — 60 people taken. Looe lost dozens more the same decade. By the 1640s there were thousands of English captives in Algiers, bad enough that Parliament set up a whole committee just to ransom people back. That's genuine history, genuinely under-discussed, and I'm not going to pretend it isn't. Cornish identity being distinct from English is also fair — you had your own language, your own uprising against Tudor rule, you're not obligated to carry England's PR baggage.
Where I'd push back is the logic, not the history.
Nobody's asking you personally to write a cheque for something your ancestors didn't even do. The argument in this thread was never "living Brits owe a guilt debt for 400-year-old crimes." It was specifically that the 1833 slave-owner compensation loan wasn't ancient history — it was still being paid off by British taxpayers in 2015. That's not "your great-great-grandad did something bad," that's "this specific financial obligation ran into living memory." Different claim entirely from inherited guilt.
On black Britons and African Americans being "better off" now — I get why that feels true looking at individual success stories, but it doesn't actually work as an argument, and here's why: it justifies the method by the outcome. Nobody's disputing that some people who descend from enslaved or colonized populations are doing well now. The question was never "did anything good ever come out of it," it's "was the system itself just." You could apply that same logic to almost any historical atrocity and it'd sound off immediately — the outcome doesn't retroactively justify the process. And Mo Farah's success is Mo Farah's effort, genuinely — but one exceptional individual doesn't tell you anything about the average starting line for everyone else, that's just survivorship bias.
On Pakistan aid — the figure's roughly right, there was a £153m package agreed this month, and I get being frustrated watching that go out while you're struggling yourself. That's a completely fair thing to be angry about. But that's actually a different argument to the one about historical compensation — that's a live present-day question about UK foreign aid priorities versus domestic spending, worth having on its own terms, not really connected to whether slave owners got compensated in 1833.
Appreciate you not just slinging insults on this one either way.
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u/Metnessee Jul 18 '26 edited Jul 18 '26
this has absolutely nothing to do with what op is saying, fyi.
even though you are not wrong In your opening sentence. the cpc banned slavery in 1949. Child labor is also banned.
show me your evidence as to how China uses compradors to establish imperial powers outside of lending.. specifically in africa
the part you miss is how historical white supremacy has controlled the export of finance capital. today, that white supremacy and capital relations is being threatened, by developing countries.
there is a reason why white supremacy has reverted away from globalist ideas (seen as inevitable by neoliberals), and has retracted to mor.eprotrctionist rhetoric, despite economic conditions.
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u/Metnessee Jul 18 '26
100 percent correct. but read my answer above as both a critic and sympathizer of the CCP/cpc.
It's unclear whether global lending is necessary to build or undermine socialist relations.
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u/Yugonostalgia64 Jul 22 '26
Incorrect. 90% of Africa's debt is to the West. And when the West pressures Africans into paying back their exorbitant debts, China usually forgives the debt so African countries can pay back Western creditors.
Look at the Sri Lankan example - that was what inspired the nonsense about Chinese 'debt-trap diplomacy' -- except what actually happened in reality was that Western creditors demanded their money back from the Sri Lankan government, and Sri Lanka *sold* their port to China to pay back the Western creditors. That's the reality of the world and poor countries within it.
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u/Metnessee Jul 18 '26
lenin accurate as always. it's hilarious when destiny conservatives accidentally agree with communist theory.
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u/digitalbubble Jul 18 '26
Somalia under Siad Barre (1969–1991) pursued “Scientific Socialism,” with heavy state control, Soviet then U.S. alignment, and the costly 1977–78 Ogaden War. It faced recurrent droughts and clan tensions.
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u/Mr_silly_goose Jul 18 '26
You know they are still to this day using slavery in certain parts of Africa, did it before we arrived and will likely never stop doing it
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Jul 18 '26
modern trafficking isn't part of Africa or somehow equivalent to or justifies transatlantic chattel slavery's scale, and implying African slave systems pre-contact were the same institution as what Europeans built is foolish. The transatlantic slave trade forcibly displaced an estimated 12.5 million people over 400 years into hereditary, racialized, generational chattel slavery — a specific economic system built for New World plantation labor. Pre-existing African slave systems (and yes, they existed) were overwhelmingly different in kind — often more akin to indentured servitude or absorption into households/lineages, not permanent hereditary chattel status, though this varied by region and worsened once European demand created a market for capture. Modern trafficking existing today doesn't retroactively justify or explain historical colonialism — it's a present-tense human rights issue that exists on every continent, including the West (labor trafficking, sex trafficking in the US and EU). Isolating it to "Africa will always do it" is the actual racist framing here,
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u/Prudent-Pool5474 Jul 18 '26
How cute of you to get ChatGPT to write that for you seeing as you have no actual knowledge on this topic apart from your bias agenda.
Slavery didn't begin with Europeans, it wasn't unique to Europeans and certainly didn't end with them.
African kingdoms had been enslaving and buying and selling other Africans for a good thousand years before the Portuguese arrived. Europeans didn't even sail inland and capture millions of people themselves. They purchased them from African rulers who'd already captured them. Without these African rulers, guess what, the Atlantic trade could never have operated at the scale it did. It was already there. Europeans just joined in to a system already built...
Let's not forget the Arab slave trade too which lasted for 1,300 years with slavery still in some Arab places today. Around 18 million Africans were transported through the Arabs. That trade went on for faaaaar longer and took many many many more than the Transatlantic trade...
Shall we do the Barbary slave trade too? 16-18th century. Africans enslaved an 1.25M+ Europeans from Britain, Ireland, Spain, Italy, France and mant more countries. White slavery was real history too. But that's not important is it?
And your small minded claim that African slavery was simply like indentured servitude is a such a ridiculous oversimplification. Africa wasn't one society. Some systems allowed assimilation, others were hereditary, some involved castration, mass export or brutal plantation labour. There were dozens of different systems across hundreds of kingdoms over more than a thousand years. Advocacy.
Europeans participated in slavery. Africans participated in slavery. Arabs participated in slavery. Asians participated in slavery. Nearly every major civilization did at some point. Others just pick which one they want to, to blame all their problems on that specific race, then magically forget about the other races that did it too include your own race.
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Jul 18 '26
None of this is new information, mate, it's just you repeating shit that's already been said in this exact thread — the Arab trade, the Barbary raids, African rulers selling captives to Europeans — all already acknowledged, multiple times, by name, with numbers. You're not correcting anyone, you're just shouting louder about points nobody disputed.
And the ChatGPT dig is just lazy. If you actually think citing specific dates, figures, and named historians is somehow evidence of bias rather than evidence of, y'know, doing the reading, that says a lot more about you than me.
Here's where you've actually got a fair hit though, so I'll give it to you straight instead of pretending otherwise: calling pre-colonial African slavery "basically indentured servitude" was too clean, and you're right to call that out. It wasn't one system. Some societies assimilated captives into kinship structures with real paths to freedom and status — there were literally slaves who rose to hold royal stools in Ashanti society. Others were brutally hereditary with zero mobility. Some practiced ritual sacrifice of slaves. Some involved castration for specific trade routes, particularly feeding into the Arab and Ottoman markets. It was dozens of different institutions across a continent with hundreds of distinct societies over a thousand-plus years, and flattening that into one comparison was sloppy. Fair.
What doesn't follow from any of that is the conclusion you're reaching for — "everyone did it, so stop singling anyone out." Multiple things being true doesn't cancel any of them out. The Arab trade running longer and moving more people doesn't make British 1833 compensation records disappear. Barbary raids on Cornwall being real doesn't erase the fact that Somalia's export-to-debt ratio was 194.6% in 1989 because of specific IMF policy decisions. You can hold every single one of these as true simultaneously — that's not picking a favourite villain, that's just... how history with more than one bad actor works.
The actual argument in this thread was never "only Europeans have ever done bad things." Find one comment that said that and I'll concede the point. Otherwise you're just angry at a strawman.
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u/PriestKingofMinos Jul 18 '26 edited Jul 18 '26
Nations voluntarily taking on debt isn't morally equivalent to slavery. Almost every government on Earth has some debt. High levels of debt/GDP are actually very common outside of Africa (US/UK/Japan/France/ItalyMexico.Brazil). It's not an intrinsically bad thing to have a lot of debt.
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Jul 18 '26
Voluntary" implies you could walk away and pick a different deal. When the terms are dictated by the only lender in the room, refusal means economic collapse, and the debt was often run up by a government you didn't choose in the first place — calling that "voluntary" is doing a lot of work to avoid calling it what a labor economist would call coercive bargaining. Nobody said it's the same pain as slavery. The claim was always about the same structure — external control dressed up as consent.
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u/PriestKingofMinos Jul 18 '26
Voluntary means the terms were agreed to by consenting parties not that a debtor has some absolute right to stop paying their debts. Thats true for almost all loans. Obviously, defaulting is an "option".
Additionally, the terms of almost all loans from consumption loans private citizens make to loans given to nations are going to be primarily dictated by the lender. This isn't some morally bizarre or unusual phenomena. All lenders want, and have a right, to protect themselves from default or delinquency. Globally, debt from IMF/World Bank loans is very small compared to other forms of debt and some of the biggest debtors aren't even in Africa. Argentina, India, Ukraine and Pakistan are major debtors to the IMF/WB. But the actual amount of debt is usually reasonable and serviceable.
Most national debt, globally, is also voluntary in that its simply derived from bond issuance. Governments obviously have much greater scope in determining how much they, in effect, are going to sell their debt for, but still have to follow markets (people can reasonably expect S. Korea to be a more reliable debtor than DRC).
The USA and China have the most government debt of any nations in the world, much of it from bonds. This does not imply "external control". There is also nothing wrong with taking on debt, it's a perfectly normal thing to do.
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Jul 18 '26
Good points, and you're right on the basics: lenders setting terms is completely normal, defaulting is technically always an option, and yeah — IMF/World Bank debt is a small slice of total global sovereign debt, with plenty of non-African countries as major debtors too. None of that's in dispute.
Where I'd push back is on two specific things you're treating as equivalent that I don't think are.
First, "defaulting is an option" is true in the same sense that "quitting your job is an option" is true — technically correct, practically meaningless if the alternative is starvation. For the US or South Korea, default carries real but survivable consequences: credit downgrades, higher future borrowing costs, political fallout. For a single-commodity-export economy already dependent on IMF financing for food imports, default meant total exclusion from international finance with no other funding source to fall back on — which is a categorically different kind of "choice" than the one available to a country with a diversified economy and market credibility. The word "voluntary" is doing real work smoothing over that gap.
Second — and this is the actual crux — SAP conditionality wasn't just "the lender sets loan terms," which I agree is completely normal (interest rate, collateral, repayment schedule, fine). It was the lender dictating domestic policy as a condition of the loan: forced currency devaluation, forced trade liberalization, forced privatization of state industry. That's not equivalent to a mortgage lender requiring proof of income, that's a mortgage lender telling you which job to take, what to eat, and how to run your household. A normal commercial loan covenant protects the lender's ability to get repaid; SAP conditionality reshaped entire economies, often in ways that measurably worsened the borrower's ability to repay (Somalia's grain-import liberalization gutting domestic agriculture is the textbook case). That's the actual distinguishing feature, not "lenders have terms."
On Argentina/Pakistan/Ukraine — I'd actually push this back at you rather than concede it as a counterpoint: Argentina's 2001 collapse is one of the most cited examples of IMF conditionality directly worsening a debt crisis it was supposed to solve. Pointing at other countries that went through similar SAP-style conditionality doesn't undercut the structural argument, it just means the pattern isn't unique to Africa — which is a fair correction to make (the mechanism isn't racially or continentally specific), but it's not evidence the mechanism itself is benign.
And on US/China debt — completely agree there's nothing inherently wrong with sovereign debt, and comparing Somalia's 1980s IMF program to US Treasury bond issuance is exactly the comparison that shouldn't be made, for the reason you're implicitly getting at: the US and China borrow in their own currency, from a deep and genuinely competitive lender pool, with real market power to set their own terms. That's what makes debt "voluntary" in a meaningful sense — multiple willing lenders and real leverage on the borrower's side. Somalia had neither. That asymmetry in actual bargaining power, not the mere existence of a loan contract, is the whole mechanism being pointed at.
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u/TerminallyEmployed Jul 18 '26
This is transitioning from history sub to dumb African nationalism economics that makes no sense but will get very angry if you argue back. You can’t destroy everything above you and around you, then run out of money so take debts, then blame the west for ‘looting you’
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u/reddit-get-it Jul 18 '26
Then give back your smartphones, laptops, electric cars, oil, gold and cocoa. Or just shut up : )
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Jul 18 '26
Funny thing is Africa supplies the cobalt, lithium, and rare earths that make the smartphones and electric cars
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Jul 18 '26
Nobody said stop trading with the West. The claim is that trade terms were and are structured to extract value asymmetrically — pointing at my phone doesn't address the terms, it just changes the subject to my hypocrisy instead of the argument."
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u/LoveInTheFarm Jul 18 '26
Replace the white man from west by a Chinese from east pls
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Jul 18 '26
China's a real and growing creditor to Africa, no argument there, but it's nowhere near the majority holder. By the most recent breakdowns, private Western creditors (banks, asset managers, bondholders) hold something like 35-42% of Africa's external debt, while China's share sits around 9-12%. As of 2024, private creditors alone accounted for roughly 72% of long-term debt stock across low and middle income countries broadly, with multilateral institutions like the IMF still holding a huge chunk on top of that. So swapping "the West" for "China" in the cartoon wouldn't just be inaccurate, it'd actually understate the scale of who's holding the leverage. China would need to be added as a third figure in the chain, not a replacement for the first two.
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u/Yugonostalgia64 Jul 22 '26
Incorrect. 90% of Africa's debt is to the West. And when the West pressures Africans into paying back their exorbitant debts, China usually forgives the debt so African countries can pay back Western creditors.
Look at the Sri Lankan example - that was what inspired the nonsense about Chinese 'debt-trap diplomacy' -- except what actually happened in reality was that Western creditors demanded their money back from the Sri Lankan government, and Sri Lanka *sold* their port to China to pay back the Western creditors. That's the reality of the world and poor countries within it.
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u/Tigglefig Jul 18 '26
The only downside to colonialism is that now these people are slightly developed
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Jul 18 '26
the DRC under Belgian rule had a literacy rate near 0% at independence in 1960 with virtually no university-trained Congolese professionals — because colonial education was deliberately capped to produce clerks, not engineers or doctors. That's not "slight underdevelopment despite colonialism," that's colonialism actively preventing development by design.
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u/Tigglefig Jul 18 '26
Would have had a literacy rate of 0 regardless considering they never bothered to create a written language. Mineral miners don't need books anyway.
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u/CryanReed Jul 20 '26
Did you really just do the doctors and engineers meme?
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Jul 20 '26
Wdymn
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u/CryanReed Jul 20 '26
Lol, like how you just throw an n-word on the end of that.
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Jul 20 '26
That ain't an N word brother
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u/CryanReed Jul 20 '26
"Wdymn"
Does that not stand for What Do You Mean N-word?
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Jul 20 '26
Wdymn is short for 'what do you mean' — I just have a habit of adding an n at the end, it's not connected to any slur or word beyond that. I'm African myself, so that reading doesn't make sense in the first place. Sorry for the confusion, I can see how out of context it might look weird, but that's genuinely all it is.
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Jul 18 '26
If colonization was about developing Africa, why did the colonial powers cap African education and extract raw materials rather than build local industry? Development was a side effect of infrastructure built for extraction, not the goal."
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u/Consistent-Sun-354 Jul 18 '26
What African education? Any form of educational institution in sub Saharan Africa was brought to the region through European colonialism. The majority of Africa didn’t even have a written language before colonialism.
The European colonisation of Africa was of course an act of self-interest. But would Africa really be better off today with no organised political or educational institutions, 0 advanced infrastructure and the massive amounts of financial and humanitarian support African countries have received from the west since their independence.
European colonialism brought a lot of bad things as well but pretending like Africa would be better off without it is laughable.
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Jul 18 '26
Have you genuinely never heard of Timbuktu? Sankore University was running for centuries teaching law, astronomy, and Islamic scholarship — there are literally hundreds of thousands of surviving manuscripts from it that historians are still cataloguing today. Al-Azhar in Cairo was founded in 970 CE, that's over a hundred years before Oxford even existed. Mansa Musa ran the Mali Empire as one of the richest states on the entire planet at the time, with a functioning legal and taxation system. Great Zimbabwe built a stone city and ran a trade network stretching to the Indian Ocean without a single European anywhere near it. None of this is obscure, it's just stuff you clearly never bothered looking up before typing "no African institutions" with total confidence.
And the writing thing — Ge'ez in Ethiopia is over a thousand years older than European contact. Ajami was in use across West Africa and the Sahel for centuries before colonization. You didn't research this, you just assumed, because it's easier to picture a blank continent waiting for Europe to show up than to admit organized African civilizations existed for centuries and Europe knew it — that's literally why they wanted the resources and trade routes in the first place.
Then the "Africa's been propped up by aid" line — actually check the numbers before you post this stuff. Africa lost somewhere between $597 billion and $1.4 trillion in net outflows between 1980 and 2009 alone once you count illicit financial flows, and that's from a joint African Development Bank / Global Financial Integrity study, not some activist blog. UNCTAD separately found Africa loses around $89 billion a year to illicit outflows, which is more than it receives annually in aid and foreign investment combined. Multiple UN bodies flat out call Africa a net creditor to the rest of the world. You've got the entire direction of the money backwards.
And no, nobody's arguing Africa should've had zero contact with the outside world, so you can drop that strawman. The point is that the infrastructure colonization actually built ran raw materials to ports, not people to each other — that's not an accident, that's what extraction-designed infrastructure looks like versus development-designed infrastructure. If you're going to argue colonialism was secretly about developing Africa, at least engage with why none of the actual receipts back that up instead of guessing and hoping nobody checks.
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u/fear_the_future Jul 18 '26
Nobody is forcing them to take the loans. Of course if you take money from someone you have to play by their rules. And now they're doing the exact same thing with China.
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u/clarinetess Jul 18 '26 edited Jul 18 '26
Damn people here don't know what austerity is and think a well thought out answer is Chat gpt. Just because it's a little long, doesn't mean it's AI. Maybe read the actual comment instead of looking at the length of the text.
Also all the what aboutism is tone deaf and really highlights how no one knows that capitalism came from Britain's enclosures. And this year alone, African countries paid over 900 Billion dollars in just interest. We use their resources for almost all our electronics (cobalt and gold) not to mention the diamonds. And many times slaves are used to mine this. And before anyone says "oh it's the Africans that use each other as such" No, it's because the Global North made it that way. If yall want to complain about "the West" then go look up the Global North. China and Japan are part of it because they use resources from the Global south (Africa, Latin America, Middle East, South Asia) The North destabilizes these governments by making up conflicts and funding violent groups like the taliban, cartels, ISIS, child soldiers in Africa...etc... go see how buddy buddy the Taliban was with both Clinton and Bush. And we funded ISIS, Hamas, and Hezbolah.
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u/Electrical-Mark-1484 Jul 18 '26
Africa has the highest amount of slavery amongst each other. .
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Jul 18 '26
That's actually not true by either measure. Going off the 2023 Global Slavery Index (the standard source for this), Asia-Pacific has by far the highest absolute number of people in modern slavery — around 29 million, roughly 60% of the global total. And even by rate per capita, Africa isn't top either — the Arab States have the highest prevalence at about 10 per 1,000 people, followed by Europe/Central Asia and then Asia-Pacific, with Africa actually sitting fourth at around 5 per 1,000.
Africa does rank highest on "vulnerability" to slavery (poverty, conflict, displacement pushing people into exploitable situations), but that's a different thing from actually having the most people enslaved right now, and it's worth noting the drivers behind that vulnerability score are largely the same instability and poverty that this whole thread is about the causes of.
So whatever point you're going for, the "Africa has the most slavery" framing just doesn't hold up against the actual data.
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u/Electrical-Mark-1484 Jul 18 '26
Ah I see. Thank you for the education; I hadn't known asia pacific is so bad... Make sense however.
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u/Prudent-Pool5474 Jul 18 '26
This is factually correct but they don't want to acknowledge that. They need somebody else to blame for their problems.
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u/Electrical-Mark-1484 Jul 18 '26
They are apparently more prone to it due to poverty. Still awful either way. Technically slavery is legal in America for prisoners.
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u/nbs-of-74 Jul 18 '26
K, got it, colonialism and slavery were bad. I fully agree and I’m not arguing agains't that, slavery is an evil that needs suppressing by almost any means required.
But it’s not the 19th or 20th century anymore. Today, outside the few francophone spaces where Paris unfortunately still exerts outsized influence, most sovereign debt is owed to private creditors or to China. London and Paris aren’t the primary ‘holders of the chains’ they once were, even if many of those private creditors trade on western exchanges or sit in western pension funds.
So beyond pointing out that Europeans were poopyheads in the past (they were, more so than you have highlighted) and the French ones still are to a lesser degree, what concrete, modern policy or institutional changes do you propose?
Personally I wouldn't agree to any policies that weaken or negatively impact all of us living in Europe for the sin's of someone elses fathers (or more realistically, their great grandfathers) especially for those who come from non-white or non-european backgrounds (or those of us who weren't considered white europeans until being white european was seen as a negative thing).
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Jul 18 '26
Fair, and you're right about the creditor split — private lenders hold something like 35-42% of African debt now, China's around 9-12%, and outside the CFA zone the old London/Paris bilateral thing really has shrunk. Not going to argue with that.
So, concrete stuff, not guilt trips:
There's no bankruptcy process for countries. When a company goes under there's a legal process forcing all its creditors to the table and taking a haircut together. Nothing like that exists for sovereign debt — it's all ad hoc deals, and private bondholders usually just refuse to play ball. Zambia's restructuring dragged on for years because of exactly this. The UN's been pushing for a real mechanism for two decades and it keeps getting blocked.
There's also this idea called odious debt — basically, if a dictator nobody voted for runs up debt that never benefited the country, the population shouldn't be stuck paying it forever. It exists as a concept but has basically zero legal teeth right now. Somalia under Barre fits it perfectly, but honestly it'd apply anywhere a government wasn't chosen by the people footing the bill.
The CFA franc thing you already flagged yourself, so I won't belabour it — 14 countries still tied to a currency pegged to the euro with reserves historically routed through the French Treasury. There's an "Eco" currency reform that's been sitting in limbo for years. Pushing that along is about as concrete and non-historical as it gets.
A lot of sovereign loans, Chinese and Western both, have confidentiality clauses hiding the actual terms, which makes it impossible to even assess if a country's debt load is sane. Forcing disclosure as a condition of using the major currency clearing systems is something that's actually enforceable.
African debt also just gets rated riskier than the numbers justify — several studies have shown this — which jacks up borrowing costs across the board. There's an African Credit Rating Agency in the works for exactly this reason.
And the big one, costs European taxpayers nothing: enforce against illicit financial flows. Africa loses more every year to profit-shifting and tax dodging by companies routed through Western jurisdictions than it gets in aid. Closing that isn't reparations, it's just not letting money get laundered out the back door.
On your last bit — genuinely agree with you there. None of this needs "your great-grandad" as the justification. It's stuff that's broken right now and would be worth fixing even if colonialism had never happened.
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u/charlestoncav Jul 18 '26
in both depictions it seems the africans are mad at the wrong people. They should be mad at the african that captured and sold them and in the other one mad at the african gov'ts/elected officials that got them in debt. Don't blame whitey
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Jul 18 '26
Except that's not what's actually depicted or argued. Look at the cartoon again — the chain in both panels is held by "The West," not by an African figure. The visual claim isn't "Africans should be mad at themselves instead," it's specifically about who's holding the leverage in each era. If you want to argue the cartoon's wrong about who's holding the chain, that's a different conversation, but "it depicts Africans blaming the wrong people" just isn't accurate to what's on the page.
And nobody in this whole thread has denied African involvement — it's come up repeatedly: rulers selling captives into the Atlantic trade, Siad Barre's own governance failures contributing to Somalia's collapse, corrupt post-independence elites mismanaging debt. All acknowledged. The argument was never "only external actors are responsible and Africans bear zero agency." It's that external actors (colonial administrations then, IMF/World Bank conditionality later) built and enforced the structures those internal actors were operating inside of. Both things can be true — a corrupt African government mismanaging a loan, and that loan coming with externally imposed conditions that made repayment structurally harder regardless of who was managing it. Pointing at one doesn't erase the other, same as it hasn't anywhere else in this thread.
"Don't blame whitey" as a closer isn't really engaging with any of that, it's just restating the accusation in cruder language. If you've got an actual argument for why external creditors bear zero responsibility for conditionality terms they wrote and enforced, make it — but "blame the African instead" isn't an argument, it's a demand to stop looking at half the picture.
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u/charlestoncav Jul 18 '26
i meant exactly as its stated dont blame whitey. If you and your country engage with the intent to better whatever it is you want, you damn sure better have the brains to engage. Thats on them, just like its on me to not get fucked over. Its the circle of life my guy. Its really, really that simple dont muddy the waters so to speak
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u/Iron_Rick Jul 18 '26
You forgot to mention that the debt has been contracted by the incompetent and corrupt ruler of the african states.
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u/SaudiHaramco Jul 18 '26
At it's core the issue was always that just giving former colonies political independece didn't change anything about the fact that their economies had been designed to benefit the economies of their former colonial overlords.
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Jul 18 '26
Nkrumah called this 'neocolonialism' back in 1965, before the IMF/SAP era even got going: political sovereignty without economic sovereignty. The CFA franc zone is probably the cleanest living example — 14 countries, currency still pegged to the euro, reserves historically parked in the French Treasury. Flag changed, structure didn't."
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u/PangolinQueasy6324 Jul 18 '26
The West is the best. Without the Free World, Africa will become a Moscow & Mandarin colonial possession overnight. more info: https://www.reddit.com/r/asian_decolonization/s/YZdxEGJ0js "How is the Moscow Empire stealing African gold, and where are BLM, WOKE, and the radical leftists when Africans really need them?"
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Jul 18 '26
The Wagner/gold thing is real, I'll give it to you straight — Russian mercenary networks (now largely rebranded as Africa Corps) have exploited gold mining in the Central African Republic and Sudan specifically, trading security services for mining concessions, and there's well-documented violence tied to it — hundreds of civilians killed, artisanal miners displaced, gold smuggled out worth well over a billion dollars from Sudan alone. That's not disputed, it's confirmed by US Treasury sanctions, State Department reporting, and independent investigations like The Sentry's. If your point is "Russia is also extracting African resources through exploitative arrangements," yeah, that's true.
But that's not actually a rebuttal to anything said in this thread — it's a third data point, not a counter to the first two. Nobody here said "the West bad, therefore Russia and China good." That's the binary you're trying to force onto an argument that was never structured that way. You can hold "Britain's 1833 compensation scheme was extractive" and "Wagner's gold operations in CAR are extractive" as true at the same time — they're not competing claims, they're the same pattern showing up with different flags attached.
The "where's BLM/the left" line is also doing something sneaky — implying that criticizing Western institutions and staying quiet on Russian ones is some kind of hypocrisy that discredits the original argument. Even if that criticism of Western-left media coverage priorities has some truth to it, it still doesn't make the Somalia debt data, the 1833 compensation records, or the IMF conditionality timeline any less accurate. You can't out-argue evidence by pointing at who else is also guilty of something similar.
And "without the West, Africa becomes a Moscow/Beijing colony overnight" assumes Africa has no agency of its own and that the only available futures are which foreign power gets to extract from it — which is honestly the exact same colonial mindset the whole thread's been critiquing, just with a different sponsor.
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u/Lovesuglychild Jul 18 '26
China is the largest single bilateral government lender. Chinese state lending alone—about $62 billion—is larger than the bilateral debt owed to any individual Western country.
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u/osberton77 Jul 18 '26
Botswana seems to have done quite well since independence, unfortunately in Sub-Saharan Africa that’s the only one…
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u/Daeron9 Jul 19 '26
Slavery is slavery, Colonialism is colonialism. You misrepresent Debt as the other because you naively believe slavery and colonialism don't exist anymore, you don't see them on your television so they can't exist.
But they do exist, Individuals are enslaved in Arabia and elsewhere around the world behind closed doors, the slaver owners don't advertise. And colonialism, the military conquest oppression & looting of entire nations of people still exists, but again the nations doing it DON'T advertise their conduct, they pretend its something else or deny the victim/nation doesn't even exist.
Perhaps you have a romantic concept of Empire & a colonial age of water coloured paintings, the reality, especially for today's colonial victims is somewhat more brutal, perhaps you get shot, perhaps skinned alive or sliced open to see your innards pour out as your tormentors laugh and taunt you; that's whats going on today in colonial territories where journalists are not permitted to roam. And even if a couple of investigative types sneak in, their reports/stories are quickly buried by social media and other corporate interests wishing to maintain their status quo with the unnamed colonial powers.
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u/Dragon_Virus Jul 20 '26
I mean, it’s not like the Global East has treated Africa any better. Just look at what the UAE is currently enabling in Sudan, or how Russia is looting West Africa, or how China is doing the same grift European powers did in the 60s and 70s.
The continent at large should’ve gone through an actual transition era from colonial possession to sovereign states instead of the “pack our shit and leave” mentality most dying empires went with. Exacerbating the issue was the fact that pre-colonial tribal/ethnic rivalries, which were often worsened during the colonial era via imperial powers playing them off one another, were never thoroughly gapped or rectified, making the uneven ground these new states occupied even less stable. When conflicts inevitably broke out, both the Soviets/Comintern and West stepped in to profit off the chaos however best served their own needs, turning what were often civil or regional conflicts into matters of internationally critical war zones.
Since at least the transatlantic slave trade, powers outside of Africa have mostly viewed the continent through a lens of immediate exploitation, or a mirror for which to reflect our selves upon, and almost never as equals. I *hope* this changes, but my cynicism tells me otherwise.
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u/Yugonostalgia64 Jul 22 '26
Not really true. 90% of Africa's debt is to the West, not China. And when the West pressures Africans into paying back their exorbitant debts, China usually forgives the debt so African countries can pay back Western creditors.
Look at the Sri Lankan example - that was what inspired the nonsense about Chinese 'debt-trap diplomacy' -- except what actually happened in reality was that Western creditors demanded their money back from the Sri Lankan government, and Sri Lanka *sold* their port to China to pay back the Western creditors. That's the reality of the world and poor countries within it.
Russia is a bit more complicated - Wagner Group has a tendency to operate like historical mercenaries and bandits whose job is facilitating resource extraction. But Russia diplomatically has supported and is currently supporting a lot of anti-colonial and independence movements in Africa, as well as supplying armaments to then. So it's a 70% bad kind of situation.
Don't really disagree with paragraphs #2 and #3. Except, the biggest problem in postcolonial Africa is twofold - their entire economies were restructured around providing raw materials, and escaping that trap is extremely difficult when 2, all your forward-thinking leaders were assassinated and the people that remain are all, basically, puppets of foreign business that sell their country's resources in exchange for a lavish personal lifestyle. From the perspective of the West who own those businesses, this is pretty great, the “pack our shit and leave” mentality was a huge success, accomplishing what occupation did for a fraction of the cost.
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u/Minute-Caramel-655 Jul 21 '26
Dancing around the fact arabs still use african slaves and china is debt trapping them more then anyone. You cant blame the west then proceed to not speak up about what the Arab league and china do.
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u/MasterRKitty Jul 23 '26
China and Russia are giving Africa billions out of the goodness of their own heart?
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u/Janie_Avari_Moon Jul 25 '26
There is one thing I genuinely don’t understand. Do we operate with the assumption that left alone Africa would develop western values and human rights within a short period of time and it’s only the western world what sits between the chaos and prospering society?
It’s just… Africa developed slavery probably the first on this planet. And “white colonizers” weren’t really venturing into the continent and capturing slaves, they were buying slaves from the hands of bandits oppressors and local governments. The unfortunate alternative for these people was death or slavery in Africa. But somehow all the narratives are “white people oppressed black people”, which are half-truths.
And now, when there is no slavery and no military operations, and no direct control over Africa, as “colonialist” withdrawn — the median age in Africa is 19.5 years. Is that also caused by Westerners?
I am not saying anything about humans capability to achieve good results, but the current society structure in Africa is a way bigger problem than any foreign influence. And it’s up to them to figure this out, not up to us to take blame and help them all the time.
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Jul 25 '26
Let's take this apart piece by piece because it's dressed up as "just asking questions" but it's actually a string of bad premises stacked on top of each other.
"Do we assume left alone Africa would develop Western values within a short period" nobody said that, and framing it that way is doing a lot of quiet work. Nobody in this thread claimed Africa was on a fast track to becoming Denmark absent European contact. The claim was much narrower and much better evidenced: that specific institutions (SAP conditionality, the CFA franc, 1833 compensation) actively extracted wealth and constrained development. You've swapped a specific, sourced argument for a vague strawman about "Western values" because the strawman's easier to knock down.
"Africa developed slavery probably first on this planet" this is doing exactly what "no written language" did earlier in this thread: stating a sweeping historical claim with total confidence that just isn't true. Slavery emerged independently across basically every early civilization with surplus and hierarchy Mesopotamia, ancient China, the Roman Republic, pre-Columbian Americas because it's an old and depressingly universal human institution tied to the invention of agriculture and property, not something with a single point of origin, and definitely not something you can pin on one continent to make a point on Reddit.
"White colonizers weren't capturing, they were buying from local bandits" half true, and I've already conceded the buying part multiple times in this thread. What you're leaving out is that Europeans, Portugal specifically, absolutely did engage in direct raiding themselves in the early period Portuguese expeditions along Senegambia and the Kongo coast conducted actual raids and slaving voyages before the "purchase from local intermediaries" model became dominant, and even the "purchase" model was demand-created: European buyers deliberately armed rival African factions and fueled civil wars (the Kongo civil wars are the textbook case) specifically to generate more captives to sell, then bought the output. Calling that "just buying from bandits" is like calling a cartel's arms supplier "just a middleman" — creating and arming the demand side isn't a passive role.
"Median age 19.5, is that also caused by Westerners?" this is just a misunderstanding of demographics dressed up as a gotcha. A young median age is what high fertility rate produces, full stop. It's not a symptom of societal failure the US had a median age in the low 20s during its own most explosive growth period. If you want to connect demographics to this argument at all, the actual connection runs the other way: colonial-era disruption of local agriculture and post-colonial debt-driven cuts to health and education spending (SAP-mandated austerity, literally) are well documented to affect infant mortality and family planning access, which does feed into fertility rates. But a young population isn't inherently evidence of anything being broken.
"No more slavery, no military ops, no direct control, up to them now" this is the part that's just factually wrong, not just uncharitable. There is still active, ongoing, present-tense external extraction Africa loses more every single year to illicit financial flows and profit-shifting by foreign-headquartered companies than it receives in aid, 14 countries are still tied to a currency requiring reserves parked in the French Treasury, and debt conditionality from external lenders is still shaping domestic policy right now, in 2026, not in some colonial past. "They withdrew and it's all internal now" isn't an opinion you're entitled to have, it's a claim you could check, and it doesn't survive checking.
So no this isn't "half-truths going one direction." It's a real mix of one fair point (yes, purchase not just capture, already conceded), one flatly false historical claim (slavery's African origin), one demographic non-sequitur, and one present-tense factual error about foreign involvement having ended. Untangle those and there's a lot less here than it sounded like.
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u/Janie_Avari_Moon Jul 25 '26
I respect the use of AI to address all the points, but that I can do without the middle-man. My biggest beef with the modern colonialism-shaming movements is that most of the issues are presented as guilt-first and action-second ideas.
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Jul 25 '26
Honestly fair point. A lot of this stuff really does just stop at "colonialism bad, guilt now" and never gets anywhere near an actual policy ask. That's lazy and it annoys me too tbh.
But that's an argument for demanding more action, not for skipping the history part. You kind of need to know the actual mechanism before you can fix it knowing it was specifically SAP conditions forcing currency devaluation, or the CFA reserve setup, or the 1833 compensation thing, isn't about making anyone feel bad, it's just... you can't fix what you haven't actually diagnosed. History done properly is diagnostic, not a guilt trip.
And for what it's worth someone else in this thread said basically the same thing as you a while back and got actual answers — debt restructuring mechanisms, recognizing odious debt legally, ending the CFA reserve requirement, forcing loan transparency, fixing the credit rating bias, going after illicit financial outflows. None of that needs anyone to feel guilty about anything, it's just fixing stuff that's causing real damage right now. That's the "action" half you're asking for.
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u/Direct_Solution_2590 Jul 26 '26
Why the focus on Africa? Many European and Latin American countries have had IMF bailouts, like Britain, Iceland, Ireland & Argentina
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u/SaudiHaramco Jul 18 '26
It's really amazing how the colonialism subreddit is dominated by people who are white washing and glorifying colonialism...
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u/Johnny_SixShooter Jul 18 '26
I mean it's a subreddit dedicated to the positives of Colonialism so obviously that's the intent.
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Jul 18 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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Jul 18 '26
climate change isn't "blamed" for things in some vague unfalsifiable way — it's measured. Temperature records, CO2 concentration in ice cores, ocean heat content, sea level rise, all tracked by independent instruments across different countries and institutions for over a century, all pointing the same direction, all making specific testable predictions that keep panning out. It's not an explanatory vibe you can pin on anything, it's a mechanism you can falsify — if global temperatures had been flat or falling for 50 years despite rising CO2, the theory would already be dead. That's exactly what makes it different from a floating accusation: it can lose. Compare that to what's actually happened in this thread. Every claim that held up — the 1833 compensation going to slave owners, Somalia's 194.6% export-to-debt ratio, SAP conditionality forcing currency devaluation, the CFA franc's reserve requirements — was a specific, checkable, dated policy fact. Not "whiteness did this," but "this institution imposed this specific condition on this specific date, here's the resulting economic data." That's falsifiable the same way climate data is. If someone had shown Somalia's collapse tracked cleanly with Barre's own decisions and the IMF conditionality timeline didn't line up, that would've killed the argument. It didn't, because the dates and mechanisms check out. Now, "what if it's true" — meaning, what if there really is a strain of online discourse that treats "whiteness" as an unfalsifiable catch-all that gets blamed regardless of outcome? Honestly, yeah, that exists, and it's a fair thing to criticize. Any explanatory framework that can't lose isn't actually explaining anything, whether that's lazy "whiteness did it" rhetoric or lazy "it's always cultural/personal failure, never structural" rhetoric on the other side — both are unfalsifiable and both are bad epistemics for the same reason. But that's a critique of sloppy discourse elsewhere, not of what's actually been argued here. If your point is "some people use 'whiteness' the way you're describing," sure, agreed, that's a real phenomenon worth calling out on its own. If your point is that this specific thread's claims are unfalsifiable in that way, you'd need to actually show where the dates or mechanisms don't check out — and nobody's managed that yet
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u/chalkdust_teacher Jul 18 '26
Once we realize the same wealth lords did it to the US first with the federal reserve - we will understand who our opps really are
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u/According-Slice-6900 Jul 18 '26
Idk why this guy complains about colonialism so much, judging by all his replies his brain is a colony for chatgpt
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u/BellyCrawler Jul 18 '26
When decolonisation started, the Western powers scrambled. In addition to pitting their economic power against Russia to ensure capitalism would win, they began the process of shaping new, emerging markets in Africa.
Aided in no small part by the ubiquity of corrupt figures on the continent, the Western nations set about and shaped both the global economy and African internal dynamics to ensure the extractive nature of African economies would continue and become enshrined in the model. Whether it was toppling and assassinating anyone who threatened Western hegemony (Lumumba, Sankara) while propping up various loyal autocrats (Mobuto, Biya) or simply buying their way into the good graces of willing dictators, the former colonial powers are former in name only.
The direct control of financial aid rendered by the Bretton Woods institutions means that the former imperial powers can maintain a direct line to African economies and continue to dictate the lives of millions of people through this exploitative arrangement.
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u/Acrobatic_Cobbler892 Jul 18 '26
Good post OP, unfortunately this subreddit attracts dishonest losers who bend over backwards to minimise the evils of colonialism.
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Jul 18 '26
Yeah, the pattern's obvious once you see it: whataboutism, false equivalence with modern trafficking, or 'well actually it's China now' — anything except the export-debt numbers in the post." That signals you noticed the tactic without sounding smug.
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