[Type R]

Any benefits that colonialism conferred on Africans were incidental, probably accidental.

The main objective of colonialism was not the advancement of Africans but the population of the African continent with white people - English, French, Dutch and Portuguese. The Germans under Hitler had their "lebensraum" plans too.

Africans would have been reduced to perpetual slaves or restricted to reserves, just like the Aborigines in Australia and the much more advanced Aztecs, Incas and all the suffering native "Indians" of the Americas and West Indies. We would have become drunkards, layabouts, depression patients, gangsters, gambling addicts, etc.

The spread of Western knowledge and institutions does not require military conquest, and political domination.