Best outcome for Africa?
- Thread starter Sirius
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John Fredrick Parker
Donor
Seems the biggest calamities in Africa stem from the Belgian Congo -- the Free State, Rwanda Genocide, Second Congo War, etc. So perhaps that should be our PoD focus.
My general response whenever this question comes up is a longer de-colonisation process starting after the Second World War and running for 20-30 years depending on the starting state of the colony in question. Gives you enough time to properly train up and educate the locals to take over the various jobs, allow a phased hand-over, and create and firmly ground in the institutions and civil society needed for good governance to function. The two main problems with this however are on the one side funding and on the other getting the local populations to trust and buy into the whole process, they're going to be potentially worried that it's simply the colonial governments trying to cling on to power and push for things much sooner with all the attendant risks.
The US didn't view the UK's empire all that favourably all were rather keen to see it be disposed of as soon as possible. Perhaps the British are able to make their case about not cutting and running from their responsibilities, plus play up the threat of communism once the Red Scare kicks off, and convince the Americans to back them? To try and reassure the locals perhaps have the UN involved in some sort of observer capacity, the trick will be getting them involved enough to keep the locals on-board whilst removed enough so as to not annoy the colonial power. Since a lot of African colonies didn't gain their independence until the mid-1960s and some of the Asian ones the 1970s IIRC even at most it wouldn't be a massive delay and if you can scare up some extra funding from the US could be even more effective.
The US didn't view the UK's empire all that favourably all were rather keen to see it be disposed of as soon as possible. Perhaps the British are able to make their case about not cutting and running from their responsibilities, plus play up the threat of communism once the Red Scare kicks off, and convince the Americans to back them? To try and reassure the locals perhaps have the UN involved in some sort of observer capacity, the trick will be getting them involved enough to keep the locals on-board whilst removed enough so as to not annoy the colonial power. Since a lot of African colonies didn't gain their independence until the mid-1960s and some of the Asian ones the 1970s IIRC even at most it wouldn't be a massive delay and if you can scare up some extra funding from the US could be even more effective.
I think decolonization could have been handled better. Probably the best thing would have been redrawing nations completely so they had more homogeneous populations. Doing so eliminates a major source of internal conflict, sectarian conflict.
The problem is that if you look at an ethno-linguistic map of Africa this is what you get:
Realpolitik
Banned
The Congo is going to really, really need some changes if we want a remotely better timeline. The DRC is probably as hard as it gets for a happy ending. It's not a much discussed subject for a reason-when I made a thread on it, it got bleak, quick.
Could it be done though? There are so many tribes, ethnicities and linguistic groups in Africa that you'd end up with seemingly a hundred and one new states many of which just wouldn't be viable, or economically marginal at best. If you can get decent governments in place and the supporting structures that go with them then a lot of the sectarian conflict could hopefully be avoided or at least reduced a fair bit.
Edit: Napoleon IV got in before me.
Yeah, I suppose I should have been more specific. Obviously Africa is too diverse to solve all sectarian problems, but there are definitely cases were border adjustments could help mitigate things, such as Somalis in Ethiopia, etc.
John Fredrick Parker
Donor
Given it's history by this point, that difficulty is hardly surprising. Maybe the focus should really be on improving the situation just enough to prevent genocides or mass wars like those in the 1990's OTL (including not just Rwanda and the Second Congo War, but preferably also the Second Sudanese Civil War).
Or perhaps you do as I did (and David Bar Elias did long before me) and throw a massive Jewish population into Africa. This falls easily enough into a 20th Century POD
What one could also do is make nations that are large enough that no one tribe is able to dominate. As Simon and Napoleon pointed out, a nation for each of Africa's various tribal groups is lunacy, but perhaps a few larger nations each with several different tribes, home to many but large enough that they cannot be governed or dominated by one in particular.
True, but a sizable number of Africa's civil conflict problems stem from tribal divisions, and while it hasn't always worked out well, in cases like South Africa and Tanzania it has worked better than perhaps an alternative would.
No world wars. Britain can then focus on a long drawn out transition to dominionhood rather than the dash to hand over the keys as soon as possible which resulted in Gatekeeper states.
Britain isn't the only one in Africa, why do the responses only refer to Britain most of the time?
I'm something of an overdeterminist, but I really think that Africa was as good as it was going to get. A post-1900 PoD isn't gonna solve anything. Now before you all beat me up for speaking against alternate history on AH.com, let me defend myself. 
Let's talk about borders to start. We already know that Africa's borders don't make sense form an ethnic standpoint. But what about from a literal survival sense? There are tons of African countries that are literally stuck in "death borders." Niger. Mali. Chad is I think the most horrific example. These countries are mostly desert, and in Chad's case is literally turning to dust because it's lake is evaporating. If you look at pre-Colonial African states like Mali or Songhai, they were based around rivers and trade routes. The landlocked states of the Sahel are based on madness; there is no way to look at a lot of those borders and think "man this country is gonna be a real heavy hitter some day". And Africa is full of countries with these death borders, struck with awful (mostly landlocked) lands that can barely sustain their population. And even those countries that aren't landlocked, a lot of them are just insane, border-wise. The Gambia, anyone?
And lets move on to the trials of being landlocked. As is well known, being a landlocked country is pretty much being set up to fail in most cases. Once independence was reach continent-wide, Africa found itself with a record-breaking fourteen landlocked states (which would become 16 when Eritrea and then South Sudan won independence later). As if that weren't bad enough, European colonialism absolutely destroyed Africa's internal trade routes by erecting barriers between colonies and forcibly reorienting trade towards the coasts, which impoverished once thriving internal regions. So not only was Africa saddled with desperately poor landlocked (and non-landlocked) countries, it could not hope to uplift them through trade since Africa's economy was so completely orientated to exporting out instead of trade within. To this day, many if not most African countries still list non-African countries as their biggest trading partners, while those same non-African countries do not count the African ones in the same way.
Africa is a continent that rather than hitting the ground running, it broke both its legs and had its hands tied together. And once you add in the Cold War, well, the rest is history.
So, PoD's. If you want to change the borders, the question is how. Do you draw borders along ethnic lines? Then you get hundreds of economically impotent micro-states fighting it out for land and resources. Do you make the states big enough to balance out the ethnic groups and absorb the nonviable states like Chad? Then you get Africa's OTL problems, but bigger, and with zero infrastructure to hold them together.
How about a slower decolonization? I get what some of you are saying, that if only it was taken slower, things could've been better. But that is impossible. One: most of the pro-independence Africans would not have consented to a "slow" approach; they wanted it asap, which is reasonable. Two: I highly doubt the European countries would seriously have spent the time and money to ensure stable, well-off regimes were in place. More likely they'd put "big men" in who would follow orders from the metropole.
Now, I fully believe that PoD's can be made to butterfly away this or that war. But I do not believe that Africa post 1900 could have been made substantially (thus not just cosmetically) better without changing the European conquest to something other than, well, conquest. There's no way, I think, to have the calamity that was colonization end in a good way unless you seriously change Europe's goals and policies towards Africa from the beginning, and I can't see a PoD for that post-1900.
Africa isn't even unusual in its responses to decolonization. It took Europe like what, 1200+ years to achieve serious stability after the fall of Rome? It took Latin America from independence until the end of the Cold War to achieve some sort of lasting, not dictator-induced peace. To be optimistic, relative to the absolute shellacking Africa got it's recovering fairly quickly.
tl;dr: I'm a wet-blanket who doesn't think any PoD is viable for this situation.
Let's talk about borders to start. We already know that Africa's borders don't make sense form an ethnic standpoint. But what about from a literal survival sense? There are tons of African countries that are literally stuck in "death borders." Niger. Mali. Chad is I think the most horrific example. These countries are mostly desert, and in Chad's case is literally turning to dust because it's lake is evaporating. If you look at pre-Colonial African states like Mali or Songhai, they were based around rivers and trade routes. The landlocked states of the Sahel are based on madness; there is no way to look at a lot of those borders and think "man this country is gonna be a real heavy hitter some day". And Africa is full of countries with these death borders, struck with awful (mostly landlocked) lands that can barely sustain their population. And even those countries that aren't landlocked, a lot of them are just insane, border-wise. The Gambia, anyone?
And lets move on to the trials of being landlocked. As is well known, being a landlocked country is pretty much being set up to fail in most cases. Once independence was reach continent-wide, Africa found itself with a record-breaking fourteen landlocked states (which would become 16 when Eritrea and then South Sudan won independence later). As if that weren't bad enough, European colonialism absolutely destroyed Africa's internal trade routes by erecting barriers between colonies and forcibly reorienting trade towards the coasts, which impoverished once thriving internal regions. So not only was Africa saddled with desperately poor landlocked (and non-landlocked) countries, it could not hope to uplift them through trade since Africa's economy was so completely orientated to exporting out instead of trade within. To this day, many if not most African countries still list non-African countries as their biggest trading partners, while those same non-African countries do not count the African ones in the same way.
Africa is a continent that rather than hitting the ground running, it broke both its legs and had its hands tied together. And once you add in the Cold War, well, the rest is history.
So, PoD's. If you want to change the borders, the question is how. Do you draw borders along ethnic lines? Then you get hundreds of economically impotent micro-states fighting it out for land and resources. Do you make the states big enough to balance out the ethnic groups and absorb the nonviable states like Chad? Then you get Africa's OTL problems, but bigger, and with zero infrastructure to hold them together.
How about a slower decolonization? I get what some of you are saying, that if only it was taken slower, things could've been better. But that is impossible. One: most of the pro-independence Africans would not have consented to a "slow" approach; they wanted it asap, which is reasonable. Two: I highly doubt the European countries would seriously have spent the time and money to ensure stable, well-off regimes were in place. More likely they'd put "big men" in who would follow orders from the metropole.
Now, I fully believe that PoD's can be made to butterfly away this or that war. But I do not believe that Africa post 1900 could have been made substantially (thus not just cosmetically) better without changing the European conquest to something other than, well, conquest. There's no way, I think, to have the calamity that was colonization end in a good way unless you seriously change Europe's goals and policies towards Africa from the beginning, and I can't see a PoD for that post-1900.
Africa isn't even unusual in its responses to decolonization. It took Europe like what, 1200+ years to achieve serious stability after the fall of Rome? It took Latin America from independence until the end of the Cold War to achieve some sort of lasting, not dictator-induced peace. To be optimistic, relative to the absolute shellacking Africa got it's recovering fairly quickly.
tl;dr: I'm a wet-blanket who doesn't think any PoD is viable for this situation.
The solution is to unite and federalize
This flies in the face of history. In every single former colony, Britain left behind the Westminster style of government.
I agree. The colonial economies were purposed exclusively for resource extraction. Only lip service was paid to the "White man's burden."
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That would lead to ethnic cleansing and bloodshed on the same scale or even worse than the Indian Partition.
A huge part of the reason for underdevelopment was the lack of a native bourgeouisie. This could be solved by "importing" monied immigrants. That's sort of what happened with the Indians in Uganda. They owned most of the businesses there before Amin kicked them out.
The continent lacks the infrastructure and economic unity for this to be realistic even now, not to mention post-independence.
First, Britain was not the sole colonizer of Africa.
Second, this is literally wrong. Nearly all of Britain's former colonies in Africa fell to dictatorship and instability. Nigeria, Uganda, and Sierra Leone are the most obvious examples, but even the best cases like Kenya and Ghana were victims. Hell, the Sudan has been slow-motion collapsing since what, independence?
The only one on the continent of Africa to escape this trend I believe is Botswana, which was off all British African colonies governed with the lightest touch possible. And let's not even touch South Africa or Rhodesia.
When speaking of a longer decolonization process, everybody focuses on the end being rushed. But this is only half the equation. If the colonial powers had resolved to begin preparing African colonies for independence earlier, then the thing is less rushed even with the same chronological endpoint.
So rather than just gripe about how the ending was rushed (which does have the seductive quality of casting blame on everybody other than the colonial powers), perhaps we should also consider why the beginning didn't come earlier, and think of ways to make that happen.
So rather than just gripe about how the ending was rushed (which does have the seductive quality of casting blame on everybody other than the colonial powers), perhaps we should also consider why the beginning didn't come earlier, and think of ways to make that happen.