I know this topic is a bit old. But I would like to post a message about this because for the last days I've been thinking about how was the colonial rule compared to what came after independance. While my views were strongly anti-colonialism and very critical of the West, like everyone else's, I could not stop looking at the state of Africa with dictatorships, famine, civil war, boat people and ask myself if it was like that when these countries were colonies. My intuition was confirmed when I heard a panafrican militant that back in the 50's africa didn't had that image of a poverty-stricken land again months later I saw a documentary about Kinshasha-Congo where the speaker said that the capital lost its "colonial prosperity" due to years of tyranny and civil war. In an interview a togolese politician said during his campaign he went to every village of Togo and always talked the elders who told him: "It was better under white rule. There were schools, medical care, roads. Now it's all gone" the guy said such confessions made him want to cry. Well we can cry even more when we're reading that many africans in South Africa and Zimbabwe are saying that life was better under Ian Smith and under the apartheid. We need to take our responsibilities and say we have done more harm to ourselves than the white man ever did.