I put it to you that most African tribes are in their current homelands due to superior military power and overcoming their neighbours

of course... it's not because we were "very nice" people... BUT NOW... while the mzung still has superior military strength and gun power... he has a system of democracy that checks his ambition! That's why we can cry and shout... not targeting the top mzungu in power - but rather the kawaida mzungu on the street. Why? because the system of government they have is that which the kawaida mzungu can determine whether the current crop of leaders stay or go! That is why it's pointless to shout to the Arabs or the Chinese... So we can get back more of the stuff we lost this way.
What most people don't remember/know is that it's this type of agitation that brought us independence not the fighting! After 1958 the Mau-Mau resistance had been quashed by Evelyn Baring's government but when news of what the settlers and the colonial government had leaked to the public and parliament especially matters such as the Hola massacre - the government was taken to task

A question!!!!From the little history that I remember with regard to colonization, Ethiopia was never colonized. Is Ethiopia's population therefore much richer or more economically empowered just because it was never colonised and their land was never taken by the whites?

After the conversion of the Aksumite king Ezana to Christianity, the Ethiopians remained Christian, and by the fourteenth century they had become the focus of the myth of King Prester John. Prester John was a Christian king who had been cut off from Europe by the rise of Islam in the Middle East.
Initially his kingdom was thought to be located in India. However, as European knowledge of India increased, people realized that this was not true. The king of Ethiopia, since he was a Christian, then became a natural target for the myth. Ethiopian kings in fact tried hard to forge alliances with European monarchs against Arab invasions, sending diplomatic missions to Europe from at least 1300 onward, even persuading the Portuguese king to send soldiers.

These soldiers, along with diplomats, Jesuits, and travelers wishing to meet Prester John, left many accounts of Ethiopia. Some of the most interesting from an economic point of view are by Francisco Alvares, a chaplain accompanying a Portuguese diplomatic mission, who was in Ethiopia from 1520 to 1527. In addition, there are accounts by Jesuit Manoel de Almeida, who lived in Ethiopia from 1624, and by John Bruce, a traveler who was in the country between 1768 and 1773. The writings of these people give a rich account of political and economic institutions at the time in Ethiopia and leave no doubt that Ethiopia was a perfect specimen of absolutism. There were no pluralistic institutions of any kind, nor any checks and constraints on the power of the emperor, who claimed the right to rule on the basis of supposed descent from the legendary King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba.

The consequence of absolutism was great insecurity of property rights driven by the political strategy of the emperor. Bruce, for example, noted that all the land is the king's; he gives it to whom he pleases during pleasure, and resumes it when it is his will. As soon as he dies the whole land in the kingdom is at the disposal of the Crown; and not only so, but, by death of the present owner, his possessions however long enjoyed, revert to the king, and do not fall to the eldest son.

Alvares claimed there would be much more "fruit and tillage if the great men did not ill-treat the people." Alameida's account of how the society worked is very consistent. He observed:


These descriptions suggest major similarities between the political and economic structures of Ethiopia and those of European absolutism, though they also make it clear that absolutism was more intense in Ethiopia, and economic institutions even more extractive. Moreover, Ethiopia was not subject to the same critical junctures that helped undermine the absolutist regime in England (you need to read the book for these ). It was cut off from many of the processes that shaped the modern world. Even if
this had not been the case, the intensity of its absolutism would probably have led the absolutism to strengthen even more. For example, as in Spain, international trade in Ethiopia, including the lucrative slave trade, was controlled by the monarch. Ethiopia was not completely isolated: Europeans did search for Prester John, and it did have to fight wars against surrounding Islamic polities.

Nevertheless, the historian Edward Gibbon noted with some accuracy that

As the European colonization of Africa began in the nineteenth century, Ethiopia was an independent kingdom under Ras (Duke) Kassa, who was crowned Emperor Tewodros II in 1855. Tewodros embarked on a modernization of the state, creating a more centralized bureaucracy and judiciary, and a military capable of controlling the country and possibly fighting the Europeans. He placed military governors, responsible for collecting taxes and remitting them to him, in charge of all the provinces.

His negotiations with European powers were difficult, and in exasperation he imprisoned the English consul. In 1868 the English sent an expeditionary force, which sacked his capital. Tewodros committed suicide.

All the same, Tewodros's reconstructed government did manage to pull off one of the great anticolonial triumphs of the nineteenth century, against the Italians. In 1889 the throne went to Menelik II, who was immediately faced with the interest of Italy in establishing a colony there. In 1885 the German chancellor Bismarck had convened a conference in Berlin where the European powers hatched the "Scramble for Africa "--that is, they decided how to divide up Africa into different spheres of interest. At the conference, Italy secured its rights to colonies in Eritrea, along the coast of Ethiopia, and Somalia. Ethiopia, though not represented at the conference, somehow managed to survive intact. But the Italians still kept designs, and in 1896 they marched an army south from Eritrea. Menelik's response was similar to that of a European medieval king; he formed an army by getting the nobility to call up their armed men. This approach could not put an army in the field for long, but it could put a huge one together for a short time. This short time was just enough to defeat the Italians, whose fifteen thousand men were overwhelmed by Menelik's one hundred thousand in the Battle of Adowa in 1896.

It was the most serious military defeat a precolonial African country was able to inflict on a European power, and secured Ethiopia's independence for another forty years. The last emperor of Ethiopia, Ras Tafari, was crowned Haile Selassie in 1930. Haile Selassie ruled until he was overthrown by a second Italian invasion, which began in 1935, but he returned from exile with the help of the English in 1941. He then ruled until he was overthrown in a 1974 coup by the Derg, "the Committee," a group of Marxist army officers, who then proceeded to further impoverish and ravage the country. The basic extractive economic institutions of the absolutist Ethiopian empire, such as gull , and the feudalism created after the decline of Aksum, lasted until they were abolished after the 1974 revolution.

Today Ethiopia is one of the poorest countries in the world. The income of an average Ethiopian is about one-fortieth that of an average citizen of England. Most people live in rural areas and practice subsistence agriculture. They lack clean water, electricity, and access to proper schools or health care. Life expectancy is about fifty-five years and only one-third of adults are literate. A comparison between England and Ethiopia spans world inequality. The reason Ethiopia is where it is today is that, unlike in England, in Ethiopia absolutism persisted until the recent past. With absolutism came extractive economic institutions and poverty for the mass of Ethiopians, though of course the emperors and nobility benefited hugely. But the most enduring implication of the absolutism was that Ethiopian society failed to take advantage of industrialization opportunities during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, underpinning the abject poverty of its citizens today.

So we agree upon one thing...taking Ethiopia as a classic model for multitribe nation, if were never colonized, we would not be better off than we are now.
Even if somehow all the land belonging to the whites was taken away we still would not be any different.

So hii upuzi ya at I we are poor simply because we were colonised is just nonsense. What have we done 55 years after independence?

^^from 'Why Nations Fail'?

Then we should not cry over what has happened to Africa over the last 150 years when your land was being taken.

It's not true that if the African had superior war capabilities he'd do what the wakoloni did.

To say that would imply a law of necessity but history has examples of the opposite of such a law.

What we have here is a justification of a pro-western propaganda.

The chinese reached the coasts of Africa way before the Europeans - they were on a touristy expedition. The chinese were not competing with anyone, they were just focused on internal matters. The kingdoms of Europe on the other hand were in conflict and were competing with each other - when they came they came to take and build their homes so that they could trump their neighbours. They were not here to see what the Sultan of Malindi had!! they came to take! Let's assume africans developed big boats and sailed around the world, we would only have done to others what was done to us if the competitive spirit was around.