Colonialism in Africa

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Colonialism: The One-Armed Bandit In every essay that we have read over the past few weeks, all of the authors talk about how colonialism has ultimately destroyed Africa and their hopes of ever being as great as the other leader nations. Authors like Maria Mies, Walter Rodney, and Jerry Kloby all contribute different explanations as to how the European colonizers have basically destroyed Africa. Mies explains how Africa has no chance of “catching-up” to the other developed countries because of European colonialism. Rodney disputes the claims that colonialism has modernized Africa and how the new advancements being brought in by the colonizers were being more used against Africans than to help them. Then Kloby helps us look at real examples of different times in which colonialism has hurt Africans more than helped them. All of these authors have come to one clear consensus: colonialism has ultimately destroyed Africa’s chances of becoming a great and powerful continent. In Mies’ essay, she tends to be very pessimistic about the Africa being able to “catch-up” to other already developed countries. Mies says that, “the poverty of the underdeveloped nations is not as a result of ‘natural’ lagging behind but the direct consequence of the overdevelopment of the rich industrial countries who exploit the so-called periphery in Africa” (151). She denies that possibility that Africa can catch up by following the same path of industrialization, technological progress, and capital accumulation as the more developed countries have used. She explains that the peak of evolution has already been reached by industrial countries and white men, and that black people still have more developing to do themselves with a little more effort and more education. One of the points that Mies exemplifies is that even if one of these colonies was to reach what they thought was the “ultimate
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