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04/19/2008: "Modern imperialism in Africa will be less benign than the old colonialism"

Fifty years ago the decolonisation of Africa began. The next half-century may see the continent recolonised. But the new imperialism will be less benign. Great powers aren't interested in administering wild places any more, still less in settling them: just raping them. Black gangster governments sponsored by self-interested Asian or Western powers could become the central story in 21st-century African history.

But a solution beckons: buy your own gang. You hardly need visit and are certainly not required to administer the gang's territory. You simply give it support, munitions, bribes and protection to keep the roads and airports open; and it pays you with access to resources. You dress up the arrangement as helping Africans to help themselves. The French, who have been doing this in their former African possessions for years, lead the way. But it is when China, then America, and perhaps even Russia or India follow, that the scramble for Africa will truly be resumed.

Hypocrisy, they say, is the homage that vice pays to virtue. During the last scramble for Africa, colonial administration was the homage greed paid to responsibility. But greed may be less sentimental during the next. From a resource-starved industrialised world in the 21st Century, reponsibility for Africa will get no more than a passing nod.

[ Europe gave up Africa and colonisation because of a political change of heart which involved a switch from the masculine outward movement, to the feminine absorption and taking in (ie taking in immigrants) as a way to relate to the world. This has suited globalist commercial forces, creating low wage workforces in Europe. Now, as resources in Africa are required by these same commercial forces they are all for going back there to take them. ]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/matthew_parris/article3775299.ece