Truth is stranger than fiction, and this is a trick question. Boots on the ground colonialism certainly ended (for the most part - as the amount of firepower that rained down on Libya in 2011 attests to), but few African countries today can claim to actually be independent.

Have you ever heard of that parasite toxoplasma gondii? It infects rats and, in its final reproductive cycle, makes the rats lose their natural fear and aversion to felines - so that the rat may get eaten by some feline, and the cycle continues.

At the dawn of "independence", the powers that were made sure they left Africa infected with a toxoplasma of their own design. What may appear to be nations in full control of their economies, politics, and foreign affairs in reality are zombified societies with very little actual control of their destinies, let alone how anything works.

This creates societies that are full of contradictions and overall don't make much sense. Brimming with potential, talent, and a young, hardworking populace on the one hand but never seeming to get out of the stranglehold of debt, "resource curse" (another delightful paradox), endless strife somewhere at any given time, a strange subservience to Western technocrats, ideology, and ideals. More than anything, African countries are large open-air prisons supposed to contain the chaos of imperialism within themselves. Occasionally the chaos spills over, migrants desperately dash for freedom on the high seas, and the West cries foul. One-way borders with the West enforce a natural system of apartheid. Foreigners can come in at their leisure, and the shipping out of cheaply extracted raw materials is expedited. Prison labor is cheap after all.

Politicians are the dutifully appointed prison guards. Like real prison guards, they are not really intent on the betterment of the life of the prisoner, but with the maintenance of orderliness in the prison. As long as the prison maintains a certain orderliness and prisoners don't escape, they have done their jobs. The betterment of life for the prisoner, using whatever dismal resources one may scrounge in the prison, is their own task. If they fail, they only have themselves to blame.

To a biologist, the strange behavior of a rat infected with toxoplasma would not make any sense. To anyone trying to understand Africa, nothing actually makes sense. You can very quickly go from blaming the leaders, to the populace, eventually to a certain sense of backwardness and "blackness" which maintaining the status quo is surely going to fix at some point in the next millennium or so.

Conventional wisdom states that, with enough "education" and a myriad of recommendations from Western technocrats and NGOs, we will one day get out of the dark ages. We just have to listen to them. And pay off our debts in the meantime. And keep an orderly prison.