The Sahel is being terrorized by Russia and the UAE, central/equatorial Africa extending to the south is exploited by Chinese companies and destabilized by Kagame, west Africa is a nightmare mix of domestic interests, Western powers (US and France), and their own emigres, the horn of Africa is again a retarded nightmare of multipolar power mostly to do with Gulf states, the US, and their own inability to manage separatism, the Rift Valley/Great Lakes has some Kagame-borne illnesses but mostly does alright by playing well with China. South Africa is shitting itself and may soon need to officially pivot away from blaming apartheid to blaming immigration. The west coast is generally wildly corrupt and unequal with little sense of national solidarity and many opportunities for sea trade. If the country was colonized by Britain it is also being puppeted by Indians both foreign and domestic.
Where am I going with this? Africa has been recolonized. That’s a bad term for it and “colonized” should probably be used only to refer to a period of history, not really a state of being. Africa is being raped for resources by any country that can manage to, including some of its own. There are a few dozen Leopolds spread across the globe- Chinese, American, Indonesian, Emirati, Saudi, Russian, Indian, French. The best case scenario looks something like Botswana or Kenya, where the dream is still leaving the country and coming back with enough money to be your own little Leopold. The only lesson learned from the capital-C Colonial era was to not do it under your national flag, because then you have to take responsibility when the bottom falls out. There is no fucking model for a decolonized Africa- it didn’t happen and it doesn’t work. It exists in bursts of war, stability, and reexploitation under different circumstances. China will pave some roads, then they’ll retreat domestically and India will move in after a few wars. The Gulf states will fund militias until they’re satisfied, which will be never. Nigeria is fucking busted and might as well be a vassal state of Houston, Texas. The best case scenario for an African nation is the Botswana model where you sell enough diamonds and safaris to have, well, disastrous unemployment and no internal market but at least nobody is getting their head chopped off.
I have a burning hatred for the misuse of the term colonialism. In the case of Africa at present I think the word should be ceded to people who think it’s colonialism for a white person to live in Harlem, and when we talk about Africa we should say “predatory interference and resource extraction”. Colonialism and decolonization were, imo, a period of time in which European and Middle Eastern powers administered territory while understanding themselves as colonial powers. Decolonization was a political process, not a cultural one. Retards who want to decolonize their fucking bathroom or whatever are weakening a term for an extremely important era of modern history and as a consequence the furthest the topic of a postcolonial world gets is some navel gazing crap written by the children of the former domestic elite.
