Much of what we are is a product of the colonial era, and many of our ills can be traced directly to the impact of imperialism and the policies of colonial rulers.
Colonialism remains a relevant factor in understanding the problems and the dangers of the world in which we live.
Still in stalemate
To begin with, residual problems from the end of the earlier era of colonisation, usually the result of untidy departures by the colonial power, still remain dangerously stalemated.
EUROPEAN COLONIES IN THIRD WORLD
The dramatic events in East Timor in 1999are no longer fresh in the memory, and the more recent woes of neither Afghanistan nor Myanmar, can be attributed to colonialism.
But no closure seems in sight in western Sahara, Jammu and Kashmir or in those old standbys of Cyprus and Palestine, all legacies of colonialism.
Fuses lit in the colonial era could ignite again, as they did in the Horn of Africa, between Ethiopia and Eritrea, where war broke out over a colonial border that the Italians of an earlier era of occupation had failed to define with enough precision, and, more recently still, between the government of Ethiopia and its Tigrayan minority.
