On Africa

There is a lot of apologia for colonialism going around lately, and so I've decided to compile some history and human geography regarding these regions of the world. Now, to be clear before we start because I know there's inevitably going to be some butthurt reactionary bitching in the comments, I am not assigning the blame for past Imperialism on present-day white people; nor am I asking you to feel guilt or responsibility for the sins of your Fathers, because that would be fucking moronic. Instead, I want to help clear up some historical misconceptions, urge you to do further research on your own, and get you to stop embarassing yourselves by praising [colonial power]. Okay? Okay.

Africa (Oh Boy.)

So, this is probably going to be a long one, and thus split up into sub-sections. The reason for this is that the history and human geography of Africa is much lesser known in the west, and the worst colonial apologism is for the European rule in Africa. That said, I will try to keep it as brief as possible so that I don't get a horde of idiots strawmanning in the comments because tl;dr.

Geography and Environment

So, these are probably the factors most often ignored by the average person in history. So, I'm going to lay out some of the basic geography and discuss its ramifications on the development of African societies.

First, it should be noted that for the purposes of geography, Africa is often divided into a few basic regions. You have the Berber coast, also known as the Maghreb, which has fertile valleys that are suitable for agriculture and the high Atlas Mountains, home of the Berber peoples. Surprising, I know. It is also home to a large number of Arab settlers and a handful of French speakers descended from "Moroccan Jews" and the Pied-Noir. Also I heard that some Minoan dude called Herakles did some shit here.

As you go to the east, you reach Libya. Libya is often fought over, in the past mainly so that empires could link their Maghrebi and Egyptian territories. Nowadays, it's because of oil. Demographically, the indigenous population of Libya is Berber and Tuareg, though nowadays most of the population is Arab.

Finally, in the far East of Northern Africa is Egypt. Egypt has been one of the most coveted places on the face of the planet for Millennia. This is due to the lush farmland around the Nile, and especially the Mouth of the Nile. Additionally, for the last few centuries Egypt has been the controlled of the Suez Canal, one of the most vital trade-routes in the world. This, combined with a decent petrol reserve, makes Egypt a prime piece of real-estate indeed. Demographically, the indigenous peoples are the Copts and Nubians, though the majority of the population identifies as Arab nowadays.

Moving on to the South, you have the (in)famous Sahara. Perhaps the greatest barrier to communication between North-Africa and Sub-Sahara, it is the largest hot desert on earth. It is incredibly sparsely populated and a deadly place to the stupid or careless. It is the homeland of Tuareg and Sahrawi peoples. Also, Tintin did some shit here.

Immediately South of the Sahara is the Sahel. Also known as the Soudan, This land is more hospitable than the Sahara, but is constantly in flux and arable land is sparse. What is suitable for grazing one years could be sand-swept next year. This region is the source of Niger river, and home to the Fulani, Toukaleur, Hausa, and Malinké peoples, among others. This region is also famous for its great trading empires that sold Salt to the Morroccans, and later Europeans. These included Timbouktou, Songhay, Mali, Sokoto, and Ghana.

South of this is a region that includes the Pepper, Slave, Ivory, and Gold Coasts. For the sake of readability and my own fucking sanity these shall henceforth be referred to as the WA Coastland. This area is suitable for Agriculture, and is famous for its (rather ethically dubious), Cocoa and Spice exports. It is one of the most densely populated areas of sub-saharan African, and is home to Nigeria, which is one of the most populous countries in the world. Pre-colonial civilizations include the slaver-kingdoms of Lagos, Benin, Ashanti, and Dahomey. Most Slaves in the United States came from here. Ethnic groups include the Igbo, Yoruba, Cameroons, Akan, and Kpelle. On a side note, it is home to La Côte d'Ivoire, whose name is possibly the most fun to say out of any country. Position currently contested by Oman, Ozbekistan, Tonga, Tuvalu, Vanautu, and Fiji.

Going south, we have the Congo Basin. This region may be the Urheimat of the Bantu peoples, and has possibly seen the worst strife out of all of Africa. Here occurred the Rwandan Civil War, Mau-Mau rebellion,First Congo War, Second Congo War/ Great War in Africa, the ongoing insurgencies in South Sudan, Uganda, and the DRC. It has also been haunted by the legacies of such destructive regimes as the Congo "Free State", Jean Bokassa, Mobutu's Zaïre, la Parti congolais du travail, and so on. Here the the arteries of this region are rivers like the Congo and Luabala. Ethnic groups include the Kongo, Luba, Mongo, Fang, and various indigenous "pygmy" groups. Perhaps the most famous ancient state in this region was the catholic Kongo kingdom, though it only controlled the mouth of the river it had an enormous influence on its neighbours.

To the east and significantly overlapping with the Congo is the African Great Lakes Region, or simply East Africa. This area is famous for its beautiful Savannahs, awe-inspiring coastlines, and ghastly genocides. It is home to the Hutu-Tutsi, Chewa, Swahili Super-ethnicity, and Somalis. Also home to the ancient kingdoms of Zanzibar, Kilwa, Rwanda, Buganda, and Burundi among others.

To the North East, we have the Horn of Africa. Here the region is currently struggling with drought and instability in Somalia and Ethiopia, while Eritrea and Djibouti languish in dictatorship. Home to the Abyssinian Empire, which famously kicked the Italians' shit in during the 1890s, and was also the only indigenous African State to survive the Scramble for Africa. Home to the Oromo, Somali, Amharic, Semien, Kaffan, Tigrayan, and various Nilotic peoples.

Finally, we arrive at the Southern African region. This area hosts a wide array of biomes, such as the Karoo Desert, the Savannahs of Bostwana and Zimbabwe, forests of Angola and Moçambique, and the Moutains of the Transvaal. This area was home to the Zimbabwe and Zulu empires, the latter of which famously kicked the shit out of the British in the battle for Isandlwana. Ethnic groups in this region include the Zulu, Xhosa, indigenous Khoisan peoples, Germans, Shona, Herero, Boers, Bastaars, and Namaqua.

Ramifications

Now, as you can see, Africa is fucking huge. What's more, communication is extremely difficult between the various regions, due to the multitude of natural barriers. The Sahara, the Horn's Mountains, the Karoo, the Congo rainforest, and the sheer vastness of the savannahs made it difficult for various kingdoms to interact with each other beyond trading. Additionally, much of the continent is unsuited for agriculture, making a sedentary society difficult to establish many regions. Combined with often unpredictable weather, this meant that much of the population was dependent on nomadic pastoralism until the 20th century saw increased urbanization in some areas.

This means that settled societies were often separated by natural obstacles or hundreds of leagues-worth of tribal and nomadic steppe-land that effectively isolated them in their own cultural spheres. This means that when, for example, the Zimbabweans develop advanced iron-working, their invention stays fairly localized instead of spreading throughout the continent. This severely slowed the technological development of sub-saharan africa in comparison to Europe, East Asia, or Mesoamerica.

Colonial History

So, since this post is quickly becoming a novella, I am regrettable going to need to fast-forward through the extremely long pre-colonial history of the region. We're going to start in 1884 with the Berlin Conference. This regulated the European colonization of Africa, as well as establishing the Congo Freestate as the private property of Belgian king Leopold (everyone involved would come to regret that particular clause in about twenty years...); and essentially institutionalized the era of New Imperialism. This saw the British and Germans commit horrible atrocities against the Boers and Namibian natives, the start of Belgium's infamous hand fetish, and also the British trading part of Hannover for Zanzibar.

Now, in the succeeding years there are two specific cases I want to draw attention to. German East Africa Federation, specifically the Rwanda-Burundi region, and the British Cape colony, later Federated into the South African Federation.

Starting with the Rwanda-Burundi case, as I find it particularly tragic and unnecessary, let's examine German colonial policy, which was fairly typical of the European regime and you can find analogues for in most colonies.

In these two countries, the Germans discovered three main groups, called by the natives the "Tutsi" nobility, "Hutu" peasants, and the indigenous Twa "Pygmies". The Germans got the notion in their head that the Tutsi and Hutu must be separate peoples, and that the Tutsi, with their fair skin and tall stature, must be from a superior conquering race. DNA and archaeological evidence does not really support this theory; but the Germans couldn't really know that at the time and went straight to work setting up a racial hierarchy because that's just what the Germans do in a new environment. This hierarchy went something like German > Tutsi > Hutu> Literal excrement >Twa. When the Germans were kindly told to fuck off by the Belgians post-WW1, the new colonists decided to essentially double down on the German caste system.

The Tutsi and Hutu had separate schools, separate villages, etc. Meanwhile the Twa got almost nothing, because they seem to be the African equivalent of the Jews. Their entire recorded history is suffering. A regime of segregation was strictly enforced by Belgians and race-mixing was essentially verboten.

When naked colonialism fell out of fashion and the world asked the Belgians to fuck off, they hastily gave temporal powers back to he traditional kings, proceeded to essentially take a dump on the living-room floor, and got the fuck out of dodge. Now, raise your hands if you think you know what happened next. Now put them down because I can't fucking see you. If you answered "unrelenting horror" then you win. Your prize is depression. Enjoy.

So, you can see that when the Europeans arrived, they aggravated an already shitty situation by convincing everyone involved that their status was racial, rather than social in nature. They convinced them that their situation was unchangeable because it was biological. You can see how when one groups is persistently fucking over the other that would lead to some issues when the group getting fucked over has descendants who gain power over the group doing the fucking-over's descendants.

Now, as for South Africa, I'm going to be discussing the Boers. To briefly summarize, Dutch discover Cape of Good Hope, Dutch East India Company (VOC) employees settle Cape, VOC brutalizes both natives and settlers, settlers develop non-Dutch, "African" identity, Dutch lose war and Britain confiscates the Cape. When they did this, they proceeded to piss off the rural portion of the dutch-speaking settlers, called Boers. They did this by restricting slavery and not being Boers. The boers promptly decided to fuck off to greener pastures and began the "groote trek", wherin they migrated to areas like the Natal, and later the Oranje Vrystaat and Zuid-Afrikaanische Republik (ZAR, or Transvaal). One Boer War later and the Boers are independent again (under British suzerainty and sans-Slavery, which royally pissed off the Boers). Then, near the turn of the century, precious minerals are discovered in the Vrystaat and ZAR. This made them incredibly rich, but it also meant they were fucked because now the British would be begging for an excuse to invade and annex them. That came in 1899 when a dispute over the ZAR's treatment of "uitlanders"(British immigrants) sparked the Second Boer War which was an unpleasant affair for all involved, but especially the Natives. Both sides engaged in naked and shameless terrorism against the other side's civilians, and the British created "concentration camps", in which thousands of Boer and Black civilians were interred under squalid conditions with little food, and many died.

After the war, conditions improved for the Boers, but they were still haunted by bitter memories of the war and continued to feel sleighted by British reign. After independence, the 1948 elections saw the electoral victory of the boer-dominated Nasionale Party, and the beginning of the brutal regime of apartheid and repeated massacres of the indigenous population.

Neocolonialism

While things have slowly started to improve, Africa is still plagued by the legacy of the imperial era. In much of Francophone Africa, the government and much of political life is dominated by French and Belgian businesses. Many regimes also engage in a kind of internal-colonialism, in which the central government engages in the repression and extraction of resources from the population and land to sell on the international market. Many countries, such as zimbabwe or South Africa are engaging in or appear to be on the cusp of engaging in Revanchist policies agains their white populations in "retribution" for their ancestors crimes during the colonial era.

This is the legacy of imperialism, and it is a ghost we will have to face for a long time.