Africa today is often cast as the global case study in post-colonial failure − plagued by fragile institutions, economic stagnation, and political instability.
This has led to two persistently misguided narratives: first, that Africa’s problems reflect some intrinsic African defect; and, second, that Africa is uniquely the victim of external forces and historical injustice. Both rest on a deeper misconception that, elsewhere in the world, the collapse or retreat of empire led swiftly and smoothly to stability and national success.
This belief is not supported by history. It reflects selective memory. It treats African dysfunction as innate, while forgetting that disorder, regression, and institutional collapse are typical consequences of imperial disintegration across all civilisations.
The terms “imperial” and “colonial” must be understood in their full historical scope. They refer not to a specific era or region, but to recurring systems of conquest, control, and administration across centuries. They have shaped every continent. Empire has never been the domain of one race, nor has collapse spared any people. The aftermath is always costly.
What Africa is experiencing is not uniquely chaotic – it is historically a normal level of chaos. It fits the pattern of what might be called the collapse curve: a sequence of political fragmentation, elite competition, foreign interference, and prolonged institutional drift that follows the withdrawal of empire. This pattern has played out repeatedly across history. Africa is not an outlier – it is part of a well-documented almost-universal process.
The earliest examples come from the ancient Middle East. The Akkadian Empire, the world’s first large territorial state, collapsed around 2150 BC, ushering in two centuries of decentralisation and decline. The fall of the Hittite Empire around 1200 BC contributed to the wider Late Bronze Age collapse that levelled much of the eastern Mediterranean world. The Neo-Assyrian Empire, a formidable military and administrative system, collapsed in 609 BC, followed by years of instability in Mesopotamia. The Neo-Babylonian Empire succeeded it briefly but fell to the Persians by 539 BC. That Persian Achaemenid Empire in turn was destroyed by Alexander the Great in 330 BC – whose empire fragmented immediately after his death, spawning competing Hellenistic kingdoms that waged war for generations.
State failure
In all these cases, imperial collapse was followed not by renewal, but by political turmoil, economic contraction, and state failure. These were not failures of culture or race. They were structural and systemic features of the collapse curve.
This sequence continued into the classical Mediterranean world. After the fall of Rome in 476 AD, the western empire’s territories disintegrated into warring successor states. Italy, France, and Germany fractured into feudal polities. Institutional memory weakened. No centralised constitutional system emerged for centuries. England’s parliamentary system took shape only after repeated convulsions, culminating in 1688. Germany remained fragmented until its 19th-century unification, and only became a stable liberal democracy after reunification in 1990. These were not anomalies – they were the European experience of the collapse curve. Yet, today, no-one could seriously look at these century-long failures to establish sophisticated, stable institutions and deduce some inference of racial or ethnic inferiority.
China’s imperial record shows the same pattern. After the fall of the Han Dynasty in AD 220, the country splintered for nearly four centuries. The bureaucratic order associated with Chinese civilisation vanished. Stability was only restored after extended warfare and consolidation under the Sui and Tang dynasties. Even then, the pattern was repeated: the collapse of the Tang, Yuan, and Qing dynasties brought renewed disorder, often followed by lengthy periods of war and decentralisation. The variable was not race – it was imperial succession and political organisation.
India likewise experienced multiple waves of fragmentation and reconstitution. After the fall of the Mauryan Empire in 185 BC, regional kingdoms and foreign invasions filled the vacuum. The Gupta Empire’s decline around AD 550 led to another prolonged phase of disunity. The disintegration of the Mughal Empire after 1707 did not lead to national coherence, but instead to chaos, eventually quelled by the imposition of British colonial rule. These were not failures of identity. They were typical of collapsed imperial systems.
Pattern persisted
In the post-Roman Middle East, the pattern persisted. The fall of the Abbasid Caliphate in 1258 and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1924 triggered renewed fragmentation and conflict. A century later, many successor states, like Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon, still struggle to consolidate authority and deliver stable governance. This is hardly a deviation from the historical norm. It is the norm.
Whether those with a touch of anti-African racism or those with a victim mentality of unique African afflictions want to admit it or not, Africa’s post-colonial trajectory fits the same historical arc of conquest and collapse. Neither Africa’s stumbles nor her endured hardships merit any special categorisation. Perhaps the most distinguishing aspect of the African post-imperial conquest age is its recency. Decolonisation came rapidly, less than a century ago, and left few stable institutional foundations. Countries like Nigeria, Angola, and the Congo inherited externally imposed borders, thin and uninformed administrations, and extractive political systems.
Some might argue that African states inherited functional infrastructure and institutional frameworks from colonial powers, and that these could have formed the basis for immediate effective governance. In some cases, that is partly true. But it is a mistake of historical chauvinism to assume that the systems left behind by the colonial Scramble for Africa were unusually sophisticated and up to scratch, and that Africa uniquely failed to develop them. The truth is that the remnants of empire, even when technically functional, are rarely institutionally adaptable.
Post-imperial Russia inherited a vast administrative and industrial structure from the Tsarist regime, yet still descended into civil war, famine, and repression under the Bolsheviks. The Austro-Hungarian Empire left behind one of the most extensive bureaucratic and legal frameworks in Europe, but successor states like Hungary, Romania, and Yugoslavia were soon engulfed by nationalism, dictatorship, and conflict. After the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1912, China retained some modernised ministries, railways, and judicial reforms. But these proved brittle in the face of warlordism, external aggression, and internal revolution.
Stable political centre
The lesson is clear: whatever the location or skin colour of the population, the presence of roads, laws, or offices on paper means little without a stable political centre, legitimate authority, and internal accountability. Post-imperial collapses rarely suffer from a context of immediate institutional infrastructure. They suffer from a vacuum of coherence. Africa’s struggle to build states after colonialism is no more a case of institutional squandering than what befell much of Europe, Asia, or the Middle East in the same circumstances. This is by no means an excuse for failing to build on imperial institutional legacies, merely an observation that this is a common post-imperial failure.
Africa’s characteristic failures (military coups, authoritarianism, ethnic barbarity, resource exploitation and corruption, and economic mismanagement) are serious and should not be waved away or pardoned. Mobutu Sese Seko looted Zaire over three decades, using state institutions for personal enrichment while hollowing out every mechanism of governance. But this pattern is not uniquely African. It closely mirrors what happened in post-Habsburg Romania under Nicolae Ceaușescu, a ruler who built a vast personality cult, siphoned state resources, and left his country bankrupt and institutionally ruined. Mengistu Haile Mariam’s Marxist regime in Ethiopia pursued ideological purges, crushed dissent, and triggered famine in the name of revolutionary transformation. His path reminds one of that of Pol Pot in Cambodia, another revolutionary who emerged after the collapse of imperial and colonial control, turned dogma into tyranny, and oversaw the mass killing of his own people. Idi Amin’s reign in Uganda, marked by ethnic expulsions, political repression, and the militarisation of everyday life, has a clear parallel in Turkey under the Young Turks following the collapse of the Ottoman order, particularly during the Armenian genocide, when the state turned inward to assert control through violence.
None of these African leaders were outliers in human history – or committing uniquely African atrocities. They were horrific products of a broader, global pattern. When empires fall and institutional authority weakens, charismatic strongmen often rise by exploiting fear, ideology, or ethnic division. Their destructiveness, like their historical clones, lies not in their race or geographical position, but in the fragile contexts from which they emerged with grasped power.
Genuine institutional progress
Yet, importantly, Africa has not been without genuine institutional progress – limited, yes, but real, and consistent with the early-stage consolidation seen elsewhere after a period of empire. Botswana’s record since independence in 1966, marked by relative political stability, low levels of debt, and long-standing democratic institutions, is frequently rightly acknowledged. But its significance lies not in representing some African exception or the patronising meeting of low expectations, but in echoing patterns found elsewhere. 19th-century Norway, newly separated from Denmark and later Sweden, was a poor, agrarian country with weak executive structures, building political stability over time rather than inheriting it. Switzerland, before the 1848 federal constitution, was marked by deep cantonal fragmentation, limited central authority, and localised elite power. These were not early models of sophistication. They were fragile states that consolidated slowly through legal restraint and consensus. Botswana’s trajectory, incremental, restrained, and institutionally cautious, fits squarely within that same historical mould.
Ghana’s transition from military rule to constitutional democracy by the early 1990s, and its record of seven peaceful elections since, is neither a miracle nor a sign of exceptionalism. It more closely resembles states like post-Salazar Portugal or post-Franco Spain: nations that emerged from authoritarianism through negotiated pacts, institutional experimentation, and party system consolidation over time, not by overnight transformation.
Senegal, with its record of electoral competition and sustained civilian governance since independence, shares characteristics with states such as Uruguay in the interwar period: being small, geopolitically marginal, and largely spared the regional authoritarian waves that engulfed neighbours. Like Uruguay then, Senegal has used that relative insulation to develop credible, if limited, institutional expertise.
Namibia, having emerged from South African rule in 1990, has developed a functioning constitutional order in under a generation. Its trajectory is comparable to that of the Czech Republic after the break-up of Czechoslovakia: a state born from imperial and ideological rupture, cautiously consolidating independent political institutions in a transitional zone between colonial legacy and domestic self-rule.
None of these cases represent final success. But nor are they superficial exceptions. They are footholds in the long arc of post-imperial state-building. Their significance is not that they compensate for broader failures, but that they demonstrate what history repeatedly confirms: the road to institutional maturity after empire is slow, uneven, and comes in stages. Africa is no different.
Post-imperial collapse and reconstruction
It is also worth considering the technological context in which post-imperial collapse and reconstruction have unfolded. When Rome fell, the most advanced communication technology was manuscript-copying in monasteries. Europe’s long descent into feudal fragmentation, war, and religious turmoil happened with little contemporaneous global scrutiny. China’s centuries of division following the Han were recorded by local scribes, not global broadcasters. The fall of the Mughal and Ottoman empires was documented in slow-moving dispatches and diplomatic memos. Even 20th-century state collapses often occurred far from sustained international public attention.
Africa’s post-colonial journey, by contrast, has unfolded in the full glare of the information age. Satellite television, 24-hour news, mobile phones, and social media have turned every failure, every riot, every act of corruption into a global spectacle. Post-imperial states elsewhere experienced their turbulence in partial obscurity. Africa has had no such privacy. Its stumbles have been recorded, circulated, and judged in real time.
Again, we should not entertain for a moment special pleading or excuse-making for Africa’s stumbles – and noting Africa’s unique post-colonial scrutiny is not an excuse. It is a fact of timing. And it explains why Africa’s normal post-imperial hardships are so often misunderstood as exceptional and intrinsic dysfunction. It is not that the arc of post-imperial history has changed in Africa to be more brutal and tragic. It is that we are watching it all unfold under more sustained scrutiny than ever before.
This is good, because it offers Africa the unique advantage of coming of age with the entirety of historical information at its disposal – a factor that goes some way to explain the compressed timeframe of genuine institutional progress within less than a century of imperial collapse.
But this is also for ill, in a sense, because it documents Africa’s failures more vividly than any previous post-imperial era has known. If Africa’s post-imperial failures are historically unique, it is perhaps only in the detail in which modern media technology has captured each murderous warlord, emaciated child, and lurking vulture. Many more of Africa’s post-imperial villains are known by face and name than their historical counterparts and predecessors.
Self-inflicted
Africa’s post-colonial failures are real, consequential, and in many cases self-inflicted. And for us Africans, historical context and fairness in judgement might bring little comfort. But it is vital to understand and explain that our continent’s post-imperial, post-colonial failures are not racial in nature, and they are not, as white supremacy might assert, historically unique. The belief that Africa’s condition reflects some inherent racial or cultural deficiency is not only false – it is historically illiterate. Every civilisation that has emerged from the collapse of empire has faced long periods of instability, regression, and contested state-building. There is no racial exception to this rule.
At the same time, the idea that Africa’s condition can be entirely blamed on external actors or historical injustice is equally hollow. It obscures the agency of Africa’s post-colonial elites, absolves catastrophic domestic decisions, and encourages a politics of grievance rather than accountability.
Historically uncouth
Both positions, racial determinism and perpetual victimhood, are intellectually bankrupt and historically uncouth.
They fail to explain Africa’s present and offer nothing for its future. What history shows, repeatedly and across all continents, is that post-imperial recovery is slow, painful, and never guaranteed.
Success is, in the end, not inherited. It is built by those who take the trouble to build. That, more than any other factor, is the difference between shitholes and success.
[Image: https://itoldya420.getarchive.net/amp/media/afrika-map-1660-5464e9]
If you like what you have just read, support the Daily Friend