Explanation: It is sometimes supposed that colonialism made Africa poor because of the looting done by colonial powers. While this certainly did not help matters, the vast majority of wealth that is appreciated in the modern day has been created since ~1800, not inherited or garnered interest on. Colonialism screwed over Africa not so much because of what it took out (valuable artifacts and natural resources) so much as what it poured in to Africa - artificial divisions created to keep locals from making anti-colonial alliances with each other, borders made without the least amount of concern for local cultural boundaries, colonial institutions normalizing governance-by-violence and corruption, and an extraction-based economy that would hamper attempts of the colonized to move away from the colonizer’s economic ‘needs’.

Pre-colonial Africa was not a paradise, but neither was it a continent in chaos. Colonial structures were made in order to make the local population reliant on those brutal structures to avert chaos - and when the backlash against colonial empires became too strong to ignore, the colonial empires simply removed said structures, taking no responsibility for what inevitably occurred afterwards as African countries attempted to reconcile ~100 years of misrule with the upheavals of bourgeois, democratic, and industrial revolutions all-at-once. Some tossed in attempted socialist revolution for good measure.

The continent is less tumultuous than it was at the end of formal colonialism in the 1950s, but many African countries are still struggling with the scars carved into them by European colonial empires.