Colonial legacies and their impact on Africa’s economic system

Abstract

There has been a tremendous amount of information flooding from academia on the devastating impact of colonialism in Africa. Colonialism has had devastating impacts on African people and their communities. Infrastructure was developed to benefit the needs of the colonial powers, and not the societies that were being dominated. Health, education, and social services were given careful attention by the colonialists only if they benefited their own goals. In addition, inappropriate setups were founded in the market industry, based on the perceptions of the African communal tradition. European trading and trade were protected, equating the concept of the "free" market with colonial discrepancies. The definition of the changes is indeed substantial. Therefore, rather than supporting a free market, colonialism obstructed the free and competitive trade policies in both the interior and exterior of our land. Notwithstanding the extensive amount of knowledge being generated, the body of this literature remains uncoordinated. Studies are fragmented, mitigating the need to integrate them for a multidisciplinary and multidimensional understanding of colonial retrospectives and the community issues they have been entrapped in. There is, therefore, an unmet need for the compilation and consolidation of studies of colonialism from multidisciplinary and international sources. This paper examines the impact of colonial legacies on African economic system. Examining the impact of the colonial legacies, the paper adopts descriptive analysis method to qualitative approach. Finally, the paper concludes that neither neo-colonialist economic policies nor 'African development' have always been uniformly successful in bringing about local economic empowerment or increasing human and social welfare in material and non-material terms.