When it comes to Sub-Saharan Africa it's really not that simple as “Europeans created a culture of at least one civil war before breakfast” or whatever dystopia you like. South Africa is the only state that didn't at one point become a total failure, mainly because the people who actually had a clue how to run a state weren't forced out of office as a result of the country being “independent”. That's what the independence meant in most of those African countries: let's boot out the state employees of the former colonists and replace one with people with less experience and sometimes without any clue whatsoever. Watch the corruption and mismanagement go rampant.

Oh and why not bring up the Apartheid and I'll raise you a Pentagon. In fact the USA was the one staunch supporter of that particular regime.


Whatever the Europeans did in those years, the Africans went on to make it a thousand times worse for themselves, and that was if they had any sense to stop before needless civil wars and military coups. There are few leaders from Africa which are seen as good, let alone great, and there are even fewer examples of thriving African economies. A major problem is the rampant corruption, for one thing. Africa used to feed itself in the 60's and export surplus food. Now it can barely manage to import enough to stave off the next famine.

So yeah the practical reality is that for a lot of Africans they were better off under the European yoke than they have been since under their own leadership. And that is saying something about how utterly appalling the African leadership has been, since we all know the European ones were no angels either.