Colonization did a number on Africa, but it wasn’t all bad (look at me trying to justify the actions of our tormentors). But joking aside colonization was responsible for one of humanity’s worst atrocities slavery... you know what, let me use a pros and cons list coz I just might end up rambling
"Cons"
Plundering of Africa’s natural resources. When European colonialists came to Africa, they came looking for raw materials for their industries (African countries started to be colonized right around the time the industrial revolution had taken root and spread all over Europe). There were also other economic and political reasons for invading Africa.
Slavery. When the colonialists came and found our great grandparents (yes it wasn’t that long ago), they found that we hadn’t developed to anything close their level. Africans were living in simple communities, we had just gone beyond hunters and gatherers and had begun adopting farming, animal keeping and participating in barter trade. We had what you would consider a rudimentary government and hierarchical leadership structures. And in terms of weaponry we had machetes, spears and shields made from dried animal hides. So when the Colonialists rolled up on our shores and saw this they thought, why trade while we can just point our guns at them and take whatever we want and kill whoever would try and stop us. Turns out it’s pretty easy to get someone to do your bidding after threatening to kill them and their whole community. So one after the other Africans were loaded onto ships, literally stockpiled to be used and sold.
Colonialists became vastly wealthy. I mean they were getting natural resources for next to nothing (okay the whips, chains, guns and boats big enough to carry as much stuff as possible weren’t free) and to top it all off free slave labour, then selling their products for a hefty profit. They were raking it in big at our expense.
Erosion of our culture. Communities were split up and others erased from existence all together. During the scramble and partition of Africa, colonialists paid no mind to the people that lived there. Clans were destroyed, communities split up and missionaries had us abandon practices that they considered backward. Communities that resisted, in some instances, had their entire villages burnt down. In West Africa, however, the French adopted the indirect method of rule, which involved assimilating Africans. This meant abandoning their language, beliefs, culture and adopting the ways of the French, but this seemed better than the alternative.
Africans were displaced from their land and concentrated into small settlements. This led to terrible living conditions and spread of diseases. White colonialist settlers accumulated huge tracts of land which after independence resulted to one of the worst land inequalities in the world, and lets not forget about apartheid.
We were dragged into a war that didn’t concern us. Hundreds of thousands of Africans were asked to “volunteer” to fight in WW2 and those that didn’t “volunteer” were forced to fight, as if they had a choice.
They forever altered our course of development. Europeans had the opportunity to go through the agrarian revolution then the industrial revolution and then proceed into the modern age. Some African communities were just beginning their agrarian revolution; we had started keeping animals, and adopted farming. We had even just started transitioning from barter trade to using our simple currencies (shells, beads, gold). I mean this was a burgeoning economy in its infancy when the Europeans decided to mess all that up.
Neo-colonialism. After colonization, the Europeans could no longer take whatever they wanted, we could now trade with Europeans. However there was a catch, we could only trade with our colonial masters. This eliminated competition (so how much you wanna bet we were getting a raw deal?). Another stipulation was that, we could only export raw materials thereby inhibiting the rate at which our local African industries could develop. Furthermore, there was to be preferential treatment to the colonialist settlers who chose to remain in the former colonies, from tax exemptions to allowing them to keep the huge tracts of land they had acquired for themselves.
