Quote:
Originally Posted by AlexMack
Actually, I'm not wrong. I'm more than aware that there were cultures, villages, societies if you will before the Colonial period. However, they managed to live basically in peace side by side. But they weren't 'tribes' as we know them today at all. Not even close to.
As I said, if I had explained myself further, this would have turned into a gigantic essay of a post. History of pre-colonized African society, the system used by the colonials to group these people together, the instability within these new tribes, etc. etc. I was totally trying to avoid that because it just gets out of hand.
See...your post got ridiculously long. I tried to simplify mine down for the general public who haven't studied political science and history extensively. As in...what you see today is kinda what we helped to create, go us!
Enough discussion, just thank you for not insisting that the hostile tribal war we see today is just a historical fact we had nothing to do with. Oh, and apparently, 'How Europe Underdeveloped Africa' doesn't count as a good citable source because it was written by a socialist. I had no idea, but there's a big movement for a lot of nations to switch to socialism in Africa. They feel it'll break the coup-corruption cycles and lift poverty boundaries.
Okay, end of hijack. Thanks for knowing what's up and realizing I'm not an idiot pulling this stuff out of my ass. This is hardly something to go down in the history books for British Schoolkids. 'And this one time, we started shipping out the negroes for our plantations in the Caribbean. Then we began stripping the land of its natural resources and organized those heathen pygmies. It was a good time had by all. They were grateful for us.' /end tongue-in-cheek
I'd love to PM about this so as not to continue the hijack. Or we can start a new thread in Politics.
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The part in bold is the part I'm disputing with you. Pre-contact Africans were not a peaceful, idyllic people. Neither were Native Americans. Such ideas are perpetuated by a type of ethnocentrism that claims 'undeveloped' peoples don't experience and perpetuate violence.
Besides, in Western African before contact there were significant state systems and political wars going on. We don't have to call them tribes if you don't want to. As I mentioned before that terminology is in dispute. But there certainly were cultural and political groupings that went to war together.
I certainly agree with you on your main point that European colonialism created many problems in Africa that persist to this day.
I recommend
John Thornton's African and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800, if anyone is interested in these issues.