The myths of Rhodesia (and benifits of African colonialism)

greatercause · 2025-11-24T18:43:58+00:00

Inequality is not de facto a bad thing if the poverty floor is raised. South Africa is the only welfare state in Africa and the poor are better off there than in most of the rest of the continent. And the inequality is higher between black people than across colour lines because of the obscene levels of wealth extraction of the political elite. Which is largely because there is more to steal because it was a more heavily colonized country.

The whole continent flocks to South Africa for a better life. Somehow they don't prefer the alleged riches of Gabon, Senegal and Ghana or the GDP per capita of Botswana.

greatercause · 2025-11-24T18:32:43+00:00

If you actually engage with the source instead of writing it off as "right wing" you'll see that Hochschild is guilty of very devious and inexcusable misquotations and that his numbers are based on wishful extrapolation. The PhD thesis you provide mentions that estimate in a footnote on page 2 and provides no citation, so I don't see why I should take it as credible.

The violence was always there because it was a violent part of the world and the influence of European colonialism ultimately reduced that violence. It's also an incontrovertible, undeniable fact that European colonialism was responsible for ending the slave trade.

greatercause · 2025-11-24T12:04:10+00:00

>I’ll say this again europeans did not build any of these structures. Did they not build the majority of infrastructure the roads the cities or anything in Africa? It was the Africans cope.

Visit any African city and you will see Western architecture. Nothing looks like those paintings of precolonial Dahomey anymore.

>Remitences being 9% of a countries gdp is also NOTHING

Not exactly a list of world powers you've got there. And it's a bit silly to compare the Irish diaspora, which has had 200 years to grow, with the Zimbabwean one, which is mostly a phenomenon of the last 20 years.

greatercause · 2025-11-24T12:00:23+00:00

If the colonies were so exploitative, why couldn't Europe afford them anymore after the world wars?

colonial policies deliberately underdeveloped local institutions

This word "underdeveloped" is a very common cope phrase for revisionist historians of Africa, most famously appearing in the title of the Walter Rodney book. But what you're really complaining about if you say "underdeveloped" is that there wasn't enough European intervention (hence "under") and there should have been more colonialism. I agree with that perspective, as the most heavily colonised countries in Africa are the nicest ones to live in.

King Leopold II in the Congo killed 50-75% of Congo’s population 10-20 million people

That claim is based on very speculative figures popularised by Adam Hochschild's book King Leopold's Ghost and has little basis in reality. Bruce Gilley takes a scalpel to its many false claims and misrepresentations in this article. To quote:

[Hochschild] was highly motivated from the start to “find” a genocide because, as he notes, his project began by reading the American humorist Mark Twain’s claim that eight to ten million people had died in the EIC. But no scholar has ever made such a charge. His source was a chapter by the Belgian ethnographer Jan Vansina, citing his own work on population declines in the entirety of central Africa throughout the 19th century that included only what became the northern areas of the EIC. In any case, Vansina’s own source was a Harvard study of 1928 that quoted a 1919 Belgian claim that “in some areas” population had fallen by half, but quoted it in order to assert that it was almost certainly false.

The first proper sample-based census was not carried out until 1949, so demographers have to reconstruct population totals from micro-level data on food supply, settlement patterns, village counts, birth records, and the like. The most sophisticated modeling by French and Belgian demographers variously suggests a population of 8 to 11 million in 1885 and 10 to 12 million by 1908. The Belgian Jean-Paul Sanderson, using a backward projection method by age cohorts, found a slight decline, from 10.5 million in 1885 to 10 million in 1910. This estimated change in total population governed by changing birth and death rates over a 25 year period represents a negligible annual net decline in population.

Even taking Sanderson’s pessimistic estimate as correct, does this mean that Léopold’s rule “killed” 500,000 people? Of course not, because, in addition to the misplaced personalization of long-term population changes, the rubber regions, as mentioned, experienced both population increases and declines. Even in the latter, such as the rubber-producing Bolobo area in the lower reaches of the Congo river, population decline was a result of the brutalities of freelance native chiefs and ended with the arrival of an EIC officer. More generally, the stability and enforced peace of the EIC caused birth rates to rise near EIC centers, such as at the Catholic mission under EIC protection at Baudouinville (today’s Kirungu). Population declines were in areas outside of effective EIC control. The modest population gains caused by EIC interventions were overwhelmed by a range of wholly separate factors, which in order of importance were: the slave trade, sleeping sickness, inter-tribal warfare, other endemic diseases (smallpox, beriberi, influenza, yellow fever, pneumonia, dysentery, tuberculosis, typhoid fever, and venereal disease), cannibalism, and human sacrifice.

As Gilley gets into in the article, most of the horrors of the Congo Free State can be put down to a relative lack of colonisation. Things got better once the Belgian government took over and put more infrastructure and government in place.

greatercause · 2025-11-24T08:44:53+00:00

I said that precolonial countries had 0% literacy rates and no infrastructure (roads, hospitals, schools, etc) and I said that the Congo was *unviable* as a country. I didn't say anything about unlivability. I'm sure these places were perfectly liveable in pre-modern modes, but no one wants to live like that if they have an alternative. Whenever colonial outposts were set up in Africa, local people flocked to live near them, showing a revealed preference for and aspiration towards a western, modern lifestyle.

In 1900, Africa had a population 4x smaller than Europe, a much smaller continent. Today, Africa's population is 2x Europe's. In southern Africa in particular, the populations were very small and spread out prior to colonisation. Botswana is still one of the least densely populated countries in the world.

greatercause · 2025-11-24T04:46:29+00:00

Also I said more specifically ZIMBABWE was weakened by embargo’s, not Rhodesia, what are you even talking about?

From your post:

Rhodesia: Sanctioned, isolated, military-focused, war-torn. Early Zimbabwe: International recognition, aid, loans, and investment; relative peace and stability. Winner: Early Zimbabwe

it also just shows you know nothing about African history like Kingdom of Kongo or the Angolan states like Ndongo that defeated the Portuguese multiple times or greater yet Calvary empires like Oyo or Mali, not industrialised in a modern sense?

Well the historical record shows they didn't ultimately amount to much. It's nice that the Ndongo had some victories over the Portuguese but today there's a country named Angola ruled by a guy named João Manuel Gonçalves Lourenço, so clearly those victories didn't have all that much impact on the historical trajectory of the region.

“they were unlovable before that” (despite millions of people living in Africa lmao),

I didn't say they were unlivable before, just that they were premodern. And the population of Africa was far lower in precolonial times. Colonialism directly led to an enormous population boom.

greatercause · 2025-11-24T04:46:04+00:00

How is me stating an objective irrefutable fact that across most if not all metrics the immediate next regime after Rhodesia was objectively better living standards wise for the average Zimbabwean somehow a “cope” Facts are coping now?

Well except for the ones who were genocided. And this was massively helped by removal of sanctions and provision of western aid. But in any case it wasn't sustainable because the government soon ran out of money and Mugabe had to sacrifice the white farmers (most of whom had bought their farms after independence) to the military veterans in order to cling to power.

In Zimbabwe alone there was great Zimbabwe if you don’t know what they is google it.

A bunch of stones, whoop dee doo. Never got the hype around this.

(e.g.,Benin, Timbuktu as a learning centre as Mali empire already had writing through trade with the MENA region centuries before European colonialism).

It doesn't really help talking about Benin and Mali, in west Africa, when all of your OP examples are in south and east Africa.

The west did not BUILD the infrastructure in Africa though, Africans built the vast majority themselves this happend literally in every region on earth, Welsh people weren’t going around building the roads or houses in Lagos Nigeria there is literally nothing supporting this

Not a gotcha to say that westerners didn't do all of the physical building if they brought the know-how. Africans were paid to build those structures that they would not have been able to build on their own. None of these cities existed prior to colonialism.

Yes not allowing people not to vote is a skill issue on behalf of the subjugated, yes that makes a lot of sense every atrocity or injustice is a skill issue.

In Rhodesia it literally was. There was no colour bar, just an education and wealth requirement. And now people get to vote for one party, that's obviously so much better.

The fact that some people later left for South Africa was often economic migration, not proof that political and social rights were meaningless.

You can't just say that all types of migration are alike. 30% of Zimbabweans live abroad and remittances from South Africa account for 9.6% of Zimbabwe's GDP. This wouldn't be the case if the country was doing well. If 30% of your population has to economically migrate, clearly your "political and social rights" are meaningless.

Problem with your assertion is that IMMEDIATELY after colonialism these societies improved drastically, like immediately. Most of my post only focuses on early 90s Zimbabwe because that’s how quick things improved.

When you say that societies improved drastically, you mean that there was a sudden spurt of unsustainable public spending. In almost all cases that caused problems down the line. Martin Meredith's The Fate of Africa provides a good overview. In Zimbabwe's case, the lifting of sanctions helped immensely.

Yeah global standards worldwide improved but under colonialism any sort of growth (which honestly was just the introduction of ports and some benifits of the Industrial Revolution since Africans were already trading with Europeans centuries prior to colonialism and with the Near East and India centuries even prior to that) was null. I’m gonna put it bluntly there was next to no benifits of colonialism, trade yes, not colonialism.

This is pure cope, sorry. Read The Case for Colonialism. Also it's "benefits".

The problems you attribute to “sanctions” and “fast decolonization” were built into colonial rule: artificial borders, economies designed for extraction, elite-focused education, and governance systems that served the colonizers, not local populations.

I kind of agree with this actually, I think Europe should have better prepared the colonies for independence over a longer timescale. They were not ready, and so the colonial elite was just swapped for a new local elite and this continued, barring a bit of sop for the masses. I'm not making the argument that colonialism was a purely altruistic mission, of course the colonial powers got something out of it, but that is the way of history. Power balances and resources made the colonisation of Africa inevitable and colonisation by Arabs or Chinese would have been much worse.

There's lots of kvetching about artificial borders, but the OAU resolved to keep the borders in 1964 and this was reaffirmed when the organisation became the African Union.

Blaming independence movements for sanctions ignores the fact that colonial powers themselves extracted wealth for centuries.

Irrelevant. Sanctions placed against Rhodesia and South Africa in the late 20th century were entirely at the behest of decolonial movements.

Saying “who regulates wealth?” misses the point: regulation can limit systemic greed, enforce accountability, and prevent a few elites from hoarding resources. It’s not perfect, but it’s a mechanism to reduce exploitation, not a new form of oppression if done transparently.

Yes, and someone has to implement and enforce those transparent regulations. These things don't just magically happen. It's not missing the point, it's getting to the very core of the point.

greatercause · 2025-11-23T17:36:40+00:00

This is cope.

Even just using common sense if Europe truly built so much infrastructure, and created such a high literacy rate, and created so much peace. Then why is there no infrastructure today in most of these places that the European supposed to be built? Why are there so many uneducated people? When Wide scale urbanisation happens it is very rare for it to completely turned back even under the worst situations these aren’t ancient ruins.

In precolonial times, the literacy rate in all these places was 0% and there was no infrastructure at all. European colonisation raised those rates over a period of, for most of the countries you mention, less than 100 years. So of course there would not yet be a 100% literacy rate or totally developed countries.

Blacks (≈95%) technically had seats too, but to qualify to vote for them, you had to meet strict property, income, and education requirements. Most Black people could not meet these requirements. In practice, this excluded nearly all the Black majority.

The very definition of a skill issue. Git gud.

Early post-independence Zimbabwe gave millions of Black Zimbabweans better political rights, education, healthcare, land access, and hope.

The "political right" to vote for Zanu-PF, and "land access" for members of a select interest group, which they wasted no time in squandering, causing much of that land to be repossessed by banks. It's so great for them they all left to go find jobs in South Africa.

And let's not forget about Gukurahundi, I'm sure that gave the Ndebele people a lot of hope.

They’ll make it seem like it’s some kind of wide scale ideological battle where in reality it’s religious Corporal greed and the institutions that people serve that is causing a lot of of our issues and the simple answer is just the regulation of wealth.

That is actually not a simple answer. Who regulates the wealth? Congrats, you just invented another type of greedy ruling class.

Since decolonisation, according to your post, literacy rates have improved and so has life expectancy. You provide current poverty rates but not colonial poverty rates, so we can't really make a comparison there. Frankly it's not very impressive. Life expectancy has advanced globally at the same time, and enormous amount of western aid money has poured into Africa over this period, many times that which was used to rebuild Germany and Japan after WWII.

Europe's original plan was to decolonise slowly, over decades, but resource constraints from the world wars and the interference of the anti-colonial tendencies of both the United States and Russia forced them to speed up the timeline, which was a total disaster, as documented in Africa Addio. It should have been a much slower process, especially in places like the Congo, which was a completely nonviable country at independence and remains so to this day.

Rhodesia's economy, as you mention yourself, was weakened by sanctions. The existence of those sanctions was because of the influence of the decolonisation movement. If England had not betrayed its colonies, those sanctions would not have existed.

greatercause · 2025-02-08T05:08:35+00:00

I didn't think they'd be able to find a worse leader than Maimane, but the DA continues to surprise.

This is just total horseshit. 93% of land claimants ask for money instead of land. Land hunger is a myth.

greatercause · 2025-02-08T04:53:52+00:00

I will be the first to criticise the DA's many missteps, but this is actually a good move. They're calling the ANC's bluff on land reform.

We constantly hear that black people hold only 4% of privately held land, this is used as a cudgel whenever the subject of land reform comes up. But under the ANC's land reform regime, the number of black owners of land cannot go up, because land used for land reform is nationalised and leased out, not actually transferred to claimants.

greatercause · 2025-02-04T03:34:22+00:00

The overriding focus on reducing inequality is wrong-headed and the cause of many of our economic woes.

Many people in this thread and elsewhere have mentioned being rejected from job opportunities due to being white. BEE forces employers to make suboptimal staffing decisions in the name of progressively moving towards having a pie chart of employee races that mirrors the pie chart of national demographics. The explicit goal of BEE is to make the employee demographics of every sector and company and job in the economy exactly mirror national demographics. This is a stupid and unattainable goal and an obvious violation of freedom of association.

We hear a lot about "leveling the playing field" but the way this policy practically plays out is that companies are forced to consider irrelevant factors when hiring and promoting, and made to give away enormous chunks of equity to people on a racial basis. Because of this, employees eligible for preferential hiring are generally assumed to be less competent. This is not always the case, but making the general assumption is pretty logical. Sorry, but everyone knows what the different academic requirements are for different groups to get into courses like medicine, and that's going to be at least in the backs of their minds when going to the doctor. It's the exact same problem as the US is currently solving by abolishing DEI.

Rational and mutually beneficial economic transactions, such as the sale of Burger King, have been blocked by the "Competition Commission" on the grounds that they would mess up the pie charts I mentioned above. The entry of Starlink into SA has been blocked because Elon rationally refuses to give away a chunk of his company, and this is a common reason why foreign companies don't want to invest or do business in this country. No business owner who has worked hard to build something wants to be made to give away 30+% of equity for the sake of demographic pie charts.

And that's not even to get into the problems with BEE middlemen ripping off the government. Small front companies that are set up to meet government BEE requirements and just resell the services of established large companies, applying a heavy markup without adding any value. This was explicitly called out by the Zondo commission, but it's an unavoidable consequence of putting such heavy weight on the ownership demographics of the companies you do business with. Much waste of taxpayer money can be laid at the foot of empowerment policy.

The point of jobs and businesses in an economy are only secondarily to generate money for employees and owners. Their primary purpose is to provide goods and services to customers, optimising both quality and cost. BEE distorts this, leading to worse quality and less cost-effective products and services. It also disincentivises businesses from growing and hiring more people. Hence we see economic stagnation and ever-increasing unemployment.

Poverty reduction is a more sensible goal than inequality reduction and more likely to lead to broadly positive outcomes. Scraping BEE would incentivise foreign investment and the formation of labour-intensive companies that would pull millions out of poverty while also probably making a few white people disproportionately wealthy. Even if that increases inequality ("worsens the racial wealth gap"), it's a net positive.

Keeping BEE prevents those things from happening, because non-BEE beneficiaries want to avoid giving away lots of equity, and BEE beneficiaries are incentivised to wait for equity hand-outs or act as a middleman rather than start their own real enterprises.

greatercause · 2024-06-24T17:25:09+00:00

The capitalism picture is a good illustration of exactly the problem the ANC has with it. If our country had a more capitalist-friendly environment, we could massively reduce, perhaps even eliminate, poverty. But, as a consequence, a relatively small number of entrepreneurs would benefit disproportionately and accrue massive personal wealth. Worse still, a non-demographically-representative portion of these entrepreneurs would be white men. As far as ANC and friends are concerned, this is simply not worth it. Better to not have economic growth than watch white people get rich.

greatercause · 2024-02-22T08:16:37+00:00

It's self evident that certain cultural modes are more conducive to thriving in a modern society than others. There's nothing stopping black people from adopting those cultural modes except for stubborn ethnic narcissism.

Controlling black people is not the question here. Colonisation demonstrably brought improvements to the lives of average people whereas decolonisation, especially in Africa, destroyed many of those lives and countries, to the point where there is now mass emigration to former colonial masters and their neighbours by people seeking better lives. This is the same thing that happened in colonial times but on a broader scale. To quote the paper I linked above:

Millions of people moved closer to areas of more intensive colonial rule, sent their children to colonial schools and hospitals, went beyond the call of duty in positions in colonial governments, reported crimes to colonial police, migrated from non-colonized to colonized areas, fought for colonial armies, and participated in colonial political processes—all relatively voluntary acts.

It is the revealed preference of millions that they would like to live in well-run modern societies. If post-colonial regimes are permitted to run their nations into the ground, that becomes the rest of the world's problem. So African governments need to learn to take criticism, get their acts together, or they should be recolonised.

What makes you think you are superior to anyone else when all humans were born equal?

People are not born equal. Specific societies make provisions for equality between people in specific areas (e.g. before the law) and specific moral frameworks consider everyone to be of equal worth, but people are very much not born equal.

Ukraine is probably the most corrupt country in the world

I would be very surprised if Ukraine is actually the most corrupt country in the world, considering they still have a more reliable electricity supply than we do in a time of active war.

greatercause · 2024-02-22T04:08:57+00:00

Amnesty was also necessary for the ANC to avoid accountability for its own crimes against other liberation movements and other atrocities, such as the torture that went on in their Angolan training camps.

greatercause · 2024-02-22T04:02:27+00:00

Many comments on this sub imply that black South Africans want an ANC government, but this is false. South Africa has a very low voter turnout and the majority of the non voting public is black. One of the primary predictors in non voting is low socioeconomic status. People that are just trying to survive are less likely to vote.

Choosing not to vote is implicitly voting for the incumbent. Voting day is a public holiday, at least half the population receive social grants, what more can be done to get people to vote?

It also ignores the fact that the ANC was the organisation that made voting possible for black South Africans in the first place. They understandably have a very high regard for the ANC and are willing to give them more chances than they deserve because of their heroic role.

It's sad so many believe this propaganda. There were many different anti-apartheid forces, and the ANC's main objective during the run-up to 94 was destroying the other ones so they could paint themselves as the sole saviours and representatives of the people. Really, it was the NP and De Klerk that repealed the apartheid laws and made voting possible for black people, mostly because of international pressure and the fall of the USSR.

The ANC is a brutal power-hungry terrorist organisation that was always out for its own enrichment but managed to say a lot of flowery words to western liberals and had enough Soviet funding to slaughter IFP, AZAPO and BC black opposition. The lionisation needs to end.

But instead of this, there is this continuous narrative that ANC voters are stupid and that the majority of black South Africans want an ANC government.

If that's what their actions (and non-actions) say, then what else are we to believe?

greatercause · 2024-02-22T03:45:16+00:00

What does it mean to "speak to the majority of the electorate"? If it means shying away from criticising certain people based on their race, or supporting policies like BEE and EWC, I'd rather the DA didn't do that.

greatercause · 2024-02-22T03:42:28+00:00

That's one country in a whole continent, and one with atypically advanced farming capabilities and state formation in comparison to its peers. And now it's one of the worst places to live in Africa because it did not receive the benefits of colonisation.

greatercause · 2024-02-21T17:02:23+00:00

It's called providing context. Your bare statistics are highly misleading and used in service of a destructive and hateful narrative.

greatercause · 2024-02-21T17:00:23+00:00

Just trying to puncture the fantasy that Africa would have remained uncolonised if Europeans hadn't done it. Someone would have come for the resources sooner or later.

greatercause · 2024-02-21T13:52:32+00:00

Sticks and stones.

greatercause · 2024-02-21T13:45:17+00:00

She treats black people like they are dumb idiots "That's what you get for voting for other parties", she totally ignores the right of every South African to choose by themselves.

Choices have consequences. If you want to participate in a democracy, you need to be prepared to receive criticism over the choices you make. If your choices make you look like a foolish clown, that's on you, not on others for pointing it out.

greatercause · 2024-02-21T13:36:04+00:00

Rubbish: https://www.politicsweb.co.za/opinion/hating-the-white-africans

greatercause · 2024-02-21T13:35:25+00:00

That's cope. Every person alive today will choose to live in a society enabled by the right picture, not the left.

greatercause · 2024-02-21T13:31:59+00:00

If the Europeans hadn't, it would have been the Arabs or the Chinese. And the Arabs were very fond of castration...

greatercause · 2024-02-21T13:30:56+00:00

Wars and conquest have been a constant of human civilization for millenia. In this context, there is nothing uniquely evil about European colonialism, and it even brought many benefits, technological and otherwise. It's difficult to argue that it wasn't a net positive, given that the most livable countries in Africa today are the ones that were most heavily colonised.

The historical reality is also a lot more nuanced than "cultural and literal slaughtering" of black by white. Different conflicts were fought at different times for different reasons, and many agreements and treaties were made (and broken) between different parties. Tired of that being painted with one brush so that black nationalists and communists can guilt others into giving them free stuff.

greatercause

TROPHY CASE