World Influence On The Modernization Of Africa Essays -

World Influence on the Modernization of Africa World Influence on the Modernization of Africa Developing Political Systems The way countries, nations or states act and base their policies on many times reflect what their past was like. This is very true in the case of Africa. The only problem is that Africa is said to have no history. This just means that Africa's many cultures did not affect the way imperialists and other influences acted towards the huge continent. Everything was based on their interests and consequently this meant that the way of dealing with Africa in every way was based on Western traditionalists. To this we must answer the question how has the Western World affected Africa's present stage and what must be done to undo what is wrong and hopefully correct this situation. Africa first played a role in Europe's and the America's history when the U.S. and Great Britain needed labor. They needed a lot of it and they needed it cheap. There was nothing cheaper than free labor. It would require an initial investment to African "leaders" but it paid off almost instantaneously. This is what we used to call slave trading. In around the 1860's this became an illegal act. However, like any other crime, this trading could not be stopped entirely. British Naval ships were set up as blockades but sometimes Slaves were stored in spaces that were no higher than 12 inches so not all slave carrying boats could be stopped. In fact while the Navy stopped approximately 103,000 slaves from entering the slave force about 1.7 million entered it. Since this trade was illegal it was even more profitable than before. The slaves that were stopped from being shipped all the way west were being sent to Freetown, Sierra Leone and Monrovia, Liberia and they were called recaptives. These were towns set up by the British and some liberal Americans to send former slaves and recaptives back to their home continent. It wasn't their home but it certainly was a lot closer than before. These recaptives were not welcome with open arms because they had renounced their religions and African names and replaced them with Christianity and English names. They did this because they felt they had been betrayed when they were sold in the first place. There was even more hostility to these recaptives because they spoke English and the British, along with the rest of Europe, were the ones starting to take over Africa politically. When Europe came into power they took their English speaking, Christian modernizers and put them in charge of the newly colonized countries. Africa was colonized by Europe by countries such as Great Britain and France, which one can still see evidence of today. This was done at the Berlin Conference. The only two countries not directly colonized where Ethiopia for somewhat religious and Biblical reasons and Liberia, which had a legitimate government and this way the West would not have to directly imperialists the country but could just tell the leaders what, they wanted. The leaders obliged in return for not being colonized. When first colonized the many cultures languages and religions were not considered. Consequentially many opposing people came to live in the same state and this resulted in bloody hatred and eventually civil wars in many of these countries. Europe did not realize how many different nations there were in Africa when they were dividing it up amongst themselves. They just wanted to colonize and wanted equal shares for each other. Possible tension did not enter the minds of these colonizers and even if did it did not severely alter any decisions. In fact it was better for them if no group had a majority in a region because this would lessen the chance of a revolution. The peripheral countries of these new African boundaries usually did what the European core countries did. They wanted to enhance their status quo. The peripheral countries were heavily exploited. Their raw materials were taken from them relatively cheaply made into sellable products and sold to the world and back to Africa at high prices. At this rate Africa's economy would never go up and would probably even go down. Since agriculture was its only source of income not much more could be done. Many people question why Africa did not use its raw materials to make its own processed finished products. The answer is that there was heavy discrimination against this idea by the West. If Africa tried to use their cocoa to make their own chocolate the Swiss, for example, would say