My roommate brought up a discussion she saw on Tumblr where someone just kept screaming “White people ruin everything!”  I wanted to sit down and talk about this shit from a historical perspective. Please bear with the jumps, my brains hops topic to topic, but I swear it ties together in the end. 

       The scramble for Africa happened between 1881 and 1914, it was basically a bunch of European powers going in and going ‘I want a piece of that’ and claiming it. 

      They wanted the resources, the countries that did this (Spain, Portugal, Belgian, Italy, England, France,Germany) the most prevalent of these being the french followed by the British, and then a tie between the German and the Portuguese. 

This was in 1913, 96 years ago.

     In contrast, the US was able to grow extremely quickly. The US was founded in 1776, and the US was able to become a thriving economy very quickly because it had international support. It had tons of people moving there, it had large European support (England, once they calmed down, France, Ireland)

 (Mind you all of this happened after everyone fucked the Native Americans, not going to ignore that that happened, cause it did.) \

   You have the US with funds, support and active immigration, before it was even established as a country.

         Now we’re gonna talk about Africa- Africa was comprised of tribes of people, kingdoms, and just general groups. There were ‘governing bodies’ so to speak but they didn’t have the massively extensive system that the US did, and for good reason, Africa is ENORMOUS and very difficult to travel. 

Anyhow, Africa didn’t have a ton of exporting or shipping with Europe, because they were more closely intertwined with the near East. It was easier to get to, so they had trade routes; spices, clothes, general goods.

        So y’know they’re doing their thing, and doing alright for themselves- then Europeans come in and go ‘hey we can enslave these people’ and YES, tribes would sell their prisoners of war as goods to the Europeans. That was a thing that existed. Some tribes would capture members of other tribes to sell for money, goods and guns. 

    Europeans went ‘oh, hah this is fine. This is fine’ because they saw Africans as less than human, not capable of forming a complete society. Obviously this isn’t true because Egypt existed. 

         Egypt is in Africa, they were super sophisticated before white people were. Medicine, religion was highly organized, construction was fucking crazy.

Now back to it,  just like any other place- Africa was constantly in conflict because people were trying to take over each other, they wanted to take control. Europeans saw this and essentially used it as a tool to deem them less than human. 

     Now, looping back to the technology and advancement side of things, since they were in contact with the near East and not Europe, they weren’t introduced to steam power, and other European technologies aside from firearms.

     One of the reasons that the US and England and other Western powers were able to develop steam power because they had access to coal. There aren’t a lot of large coal deposits in Africa, they exist but weren’t accessible until the past 100 years or so.

           So to loop back to my statement about European control over Africa in 1914, they saw that these resources were available and weren’t being accessed. So they went ‘hi this is mine now and you’re gonna deal with it’.

         Its called the rape of Africa for a reason. They killed people, they forced them into labor, move them around, created random-ass borders, didn’t take into account the culture at all. They just went ‘I want that, you get this’ and that was how they left it. 

     Because of all of this, Africa was at a stand still between 1881 and 1914. All the while the rest of the western world was making enormous scientific steps forward, medical, stuff. So afterwards, when the European powers left, Africa had nothing. Europe was like ‘we’re gonna make your countries the way we want them to be’ and then left. They left behind a group of people that had been demoralized, dehumanized, and stripped of their ‘value’. 

        Europeans didn’t help Africa, the way that they helped America. So basically, the Europeans just abandoned Africa after they destroyed it. It wasn’t able to progress. 

          Now my point in explaining all of this. While Europeans did this, I would like you to take note that everyday people were NOT the ones making the decisions that happened over there. This is the cause of governments. 

        If you wanna be mad at someone for what happened in Africa, you blame the government who made the laws and orders to destroy this continent, the governments and military systems that allowed the blatant and systematic oppression of a group of people take place under their watch.