The other side of that debate is that .... the outside influence could work with Africa to make the continent self sufficient and capable on its own. Several studies and research has shown that if properly set up and organized, the African continent has more than enough resources to produce its own food supply, clean water supply and energy production.

Unfortunately, instead of the outside world helping Africa to get to this point .... the world instead uses Africa as just another place to exploit and make money out of. In the short sighted vision of the first world ... it's more lucrative to make a bunch of money now by taking advantage of poor dying people than it is to help them become productive members of the global economy.

It's a prime example of how as a civilization we build and maintain our world on exploitation, coercion and death

Africa is poor purely because of outside influences

This is simplistic and naive to the point it feels like propaganda.

WTF are you talking about? The Europeans that "killed and burned" the natives mostly stayed, they call themselves Americans now. Look at a map of America at the time of the revolution, and you'll see there was a lot of killing and displacing natives after the USA's independence. Don't blame this on modern day Europeans, blame this on your ancestors (assuming you're american).

This place was beautiful when we stole it.

We're the ones that turned it into a cesspool of cheeze whiz and strip malls.

I'm European so I might be biased, but I haven't really heared anyone "complaining about the Americas having no distinct culture or ancient structures".

My take is that our ancestors definitely fucked up bigtime by leaving several parts of the world with arbitrary borders that have no regard for existing ethnic groups. Just take a look at any ethnic map of africa, eurasia or the middle-east and you'll see.

Turns out that colonizers have little interest in local culture. Who would have guessed?

Adding insult to injury: When colonizing land where people mostly lived in tribal social constructs, you actually force them to adapt to your own developments. Essentially skipping the feudalism and micro-states step that has taken Europe literal centuries to get out of.

So you have all these ethnic groups that should have found their way to modern societies without outside interference, and you subject them to slavery, the introduction of guns, mining operations and you crush any form of revolt by committing various atrocities.

Development of nations is never going to be fair, with the strongest group eventually elbowing out the weaker ones. The current status quo definitely doesn't help in finding stability. Foreign interests are still meddling, financial and food aid is causing ridiculous population numbers that can in no way shape or form be supported by the local economies, and as you said, slavery is not truly gone.

Africa can only be an unstable mess as long as we're still fucking around. Ideal (though not particularly empathetic) solution is to GTFO, use magic to disappear all firearms and modern weaponry from existence, redistribute all wealth truly equally and go from there. The actual way this will play out is that we'll see war, instability, destruction of natural resources and a lot of pain and suffering until everything stabilizes or until the land is no longer habitable, whichever comes first.

After we killed Gadaffi in 2011 suddenly everyone from Lybia started hopping on boats to Europe. Don't they like their new ~~war-torn country~~ freedom?

Subsaharan Africa: "Oh no! These Turkish and Arab invaders are terrible! Surely Europe, which also fights with the Turks and Arabs, will help us?"

Europe: "Actually, we've decided to make it worse."

Africa: "Oh no"

Europe: "MUCH worse."

Some rare exceptions, particularly in the earlier period, aside