Article 3: Colonialism as Starting Condition, Not Continuing Destiny

Colonial rule was a major factor in the starting conditions of most present-day African states. It created the borders, the centralised administrative and coercive apparatus, the limited African professional and clerical class, and the extractive fiscal and marketing systems that independent governments inherited. In many territories the transfer of power was abrupt. The same central tools—the army, police, treasury, marketing boards, and state corporations—passed to small nationalist elites. Countervailing institutions were thin or absent: independent courts with reach, competitive parties possessing real resources, organised groups of taxpayers, or a broad private sector capable of checking the executive. That design made capture by narrow coalitions easier than it would have been under a more gradual handover of already constrained power. External actors further shaped the early decades through Cold War clientelism, selective support for particular regimes, and the terms on which trade and credit were available. These are documented historical facts.

They do not make post-independence outcomes the automatic or permanent consequence of colonialism alone. Once colonial powers departed, the new rulers and the coalitions around them made repeated choices. They decided whether to expand or limit the centre’s discretion, whether to finance themselves through broad taxation and accountability or through rents and patronage, and whether to permit organised opposition and independent economic activity or to suppress them. Some countries inherited comparable colonial institutions yet produced more constrained executives and stronger long-term results. Botswana is the clearest early case; Mauritius followed a different but equally non-determined path. Others moved toward greater concentration of power, one-party dominance, or military rule. Sixty years later, variation across the continent tracks those post-independence trajectories—elite bargains, resource management, human-capital investment, and the predictability of rules—more closely than it tracks the length or intensity of colonial occupation.

The pattern in which external powers helped create concentrated authority and later dealt primarily with whoever controlled the capital is real. It reflects incomplete external responsibility. Colonial administrations left many states with weak checks. Subsequent Western policy often prioritised stability, contracts, or geopolitical alignment over institutional quality, thereby reducing pressure for change. At the same time, the primary agents who maintained, enlarged, or failed to reform the extractive arrangements after independence were the local rulers and elites who controlled armies, treasuries, and patronage networks. Citizens’ difficulty in shifting power is itself the product of those ongoing arrangements: repression capacity, fragmented organisation, and the material stakes of intermediate groups who benefit from the status quo. It is not solely the residue of the original colonial departure.

Colonialism therefore remains a major cause of the initial institutional weakness and the difficult point of departure. It does not erase the decades of subsequent decisions, the demonstrated possibility of divergent paths under similar colonial legacies, or the present incentives that keep some systems extractive. Treating it as the exclusive or permanent explanation understates both historical agency after 1960 and the practical levers that still determine whether economies improve: clearer use rights, higher learning outcomes, reliable energy, and lower discretionary costs of ordinary business. Responsibility for current performance continues to be assigned on the basis of results. The assignment is not always historically complete; it is the operating condition under which domestic actors either prioritise the changes that raise surplus or leave the inherited concentration of power intact.