...and from Numidia and Egypt southward

[winterbadger]

Ian Smith died last week, which made me ponder once again the struggle between colonialism and majority-rule nationalism. Smith was a particularly fascinating figure to me because he continued to live in his native land after majority rule and was even active in politics and critical of the government for some time thereafter.

Some day I could compose a more coherent essay on this topic, perhaps when the time I'm using to do so is my own. :-) But I am made to wonder by events in Zimbabwe, the Congos, in Africa in general in fact, as well as in former colonial areas like the Middle East and South Asia, whether the result of colonial retreat has been better or worse lives for the peoples of those areas. Greg Costikyan, in the designer's notes for his excellent game Pax Britannica presented a rather advocatus diaboli defence of colonialism that I have always found interesting and debated with several friends over the years.

Of course it was terrifically wrong of European powers to invade and impose their will on other nations. And few enough of them did much to try to spread the wealth that they generated from their colonies back to the inhabitants of those lands. The French rather cynically maintained that they were out to civilise the native peoples of their domains, while the British were almost as cynical in their claims but (IMO) did a good deal more to actually benefit the people of their colonial possessions.

But have matters gotten *better* in many of those countries? I know a good many arguments are made that "even if our native rulers are dictators, better a native one than a foreigner" but does anyone who actually has to live under the rule of a dictator feel that way? Yes, colonial governments were brutal and frequently racist. But how often did that racism lead to genocides like that in Rwanda in 1994, in Burundi in 1972 and 1993, the slaughter in India during Partition, the Killing Fields of the Khmer Rouge, the Red Terror under Haile Mengistu? even without resorting to genocide as an example, are the people of Zimbabwe happier and better off than the people of Rhodesia? Colonialism was wicked and wrong, but was it the worst of all possible evils?

I've really come to no conclusions. I just struggle with this question from time to time.

Comments

[wcg.livejournal.com]

The question has some philosophical merit, but in practicality it is moot. The colonial system is now history, and the world has to go forward from where we are.

I do think the Commonwealth countries generally realize that they benefited more by Britannia than other former colonies of other European powers did from their mother countries. Still, Britannia is a much better aunt than she was ever a mother.

[winterbadger]

The world does have to go forward from where we are, but go forward in what direction? Neta is fond of saying (without really meaning much malice by it) that as a political scientist I like to know a very little about everything and that as a historian I like to know absolutely everything about a very little. But the one discipline tells me that we're making important choices all the time based mostly on theory and what we have experienced in the past, while the latter tells me that in the past we've made a lot of choices that have had serious consequences for good or ill. The US is embarked on a classic colonial endeavour right now in Iraq, and we are elsewhere engaged in the region and the wider world with people in empire:client-like relationships that closely model those of the British before us, who drew on the experience of the Romans, who themselves learned from the Greeks.

So I figure questions like this still have some practical value.