By Selwyn Duke
It’s hard to forget meeting a man who hated Mahatma Gandhi. I once did, though. No, he wasn’t some erstwhile viceroy lamenting lost glory days, but an Indian born and raised in the land of sati and saris. The reason for his ire? He said that when Gandhi drove the British out, India lost everything: technicians, engineers, expertise, bureaucratic integrity, etc. In the same vein, I have a Zambian friend who has argued that colonialism had a positive impact, in that it brought civilization to the lands — such as his — it touched.
And, in fact, even that Kenyan Obama agrees. The president’s half-brother George Obama, that is. He once told social commentator Dinesh D’Souza that it would have been better “if the whites had stayed longer” in Kenya, as their premature expulsion caused his nation to descend into poverty.
But what of the conventional narrative that colonialism is responsible for Third World poverty? Economist Dr. Walter Williams addressed this in 2011, writing:
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