Wouldn't Africa be better off fending for themselves? Bringing European civilization to Africa has been a complete failure. Clearly they were not sufficiently advanced technologically or philosophically to be able to accept the European enlightenment.
European enlightenment? You mean like the reign of King Leopold of Belgium in the
Congo Free State? That enlightenment?
Or maybe you're referring to
Apartheid in the Republic of South Africa?
Maybe you're thinking of the Germans'
virtual extermination of the Herero and Namaqua peoples of Africa?
Or maybe you're thinking of the
destruction of the Kingdom of Benin by Great Britain?
Maybe you're thinking of
those bigass wars that Europe started and dragged everyone else into? Or the
attempted genocides against their fellow Europeans?
Oh, wait, I know, you're talking about! You're talking about European
imperialism in Africa!
Yeah, those Europeans were
real enlightened, weren't they, what with the murder and conquest and war crimes and genocides. Real enlightened, that. Surely a sign of the superiority of European culture over others.
Their birth rate is the highest in the world even though they do not possess the capabilities of maintaining and preserving life.
Perhaps the AIDS virus is the invisible hand of nature at work attempting to curb population growth and prevent the entire African species from being wiped out.
That is
astonishingly racist, and you ought to be ashamed of yourself.
For one thing, Africans aren't a
species, they're a collection of thousands of different socially-defined ethnic groups.
For another thing, show me a single culture that recovers from centuries of conquest and oppression quickly or without problem, and I'll show you a culture that
doesn't exist.
Is it fair to say that the ideals of the
Enlightenment are not ones that had achieved widespread status in the various cultures of Africa through their own local efforts at the time that the Europeans conquered them? Sure, and as such it's fair to say that their political cultures are in a state of flux, learning to adopt those aspects of the Enlightenment that have served Europe and America well and adapt it to their own cultures. Is it fair to say that they're "primitive" or incapable of living according to those principles? No, it is not, because, as I just demonstrated above,
Europeans didn't even live up to their own Enlightenment principles -- not amongst themselves (witness the World Wars and the Holocaust), and certainly not towards cultures they defined as being somehow inferior simply because they did not possess industrial technology.
Would the world, and Africa, have been much better if Europe had adopted a "prime directive" of sorts --
respecting other cultures and
refraining from seeking to interfere with their internal affairs or, y'know, conquer and exploit them for the Europeans' economic benefit? Without question. Hell, had Europe sought to peacefully and non-coercively persuade other cultures to adopt Enlightenment principles
without using force, conquest, or economic exploitation at the same time, but had instead treated those other cultures as
equals and as
partners, then the principles of the Enlightenment would probably have been spread the world over and we might today have been living in a world of peaceful and prosperous liberal democracies.
But they didn't -- and one of the reasons they didn't is that they decided that other cultures were primitive, or inferior, or incapable of achieving anything on their own, or somehow deserved to die. (And make no mistake,
social Darwinism, a perversion of real evolutionary theory, of the sort you just espoused, was one of the prime justifications for the horrific crimes against humanity committed by the colonial powers in Africa.)
And keep in mind that it wasn't that many centuries ago that Europe was identical in every meaningful measure to Africa today. It's only been sixty years since European cultures stopped trying to kill each other all the damn time the way so many African cultures do -- and even
that didn't stop in every part of Europe
until recently.
ETA:
It has, for the record, been scientifically demonstrated that different racial and ethnic groups
do not constitute separate subspecies or species, and that, in fact, "race" is a socially-defined concept rather than a biological one. There is
no validity to your claim that Africans constitute a separate species from Europeans
at all.
And, by the way, you're insulting my friends, supervisors, co-workers, women I've loved, and my President-elect when you make these claims. And, hell, you're also insulting
me, since I'm 1/8th Cherokee in addition to being English, Irish, Welsh, Scottish, French, German, and Finnish. Am I the same "species" as you?
