Portugal or France in Africa? - Case Studies on Angola and Algeria

Research Paper (postgraduate) from the year 2006 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Region: Africa, grade: A-, The American University in Cairo, language: English, abstract: One of the main characteristics of Africa is European colonization, that affected all African nations, except Ethiopia. The European nations divided the African continent among themselves, into different colonies. In each colony, the colonizer imposed different rules, ideas and ideologies. As a result, studying how different colonizers performed in their different colonies is important and interesting. Another main characteristic is the degrading economic situation of the African states. The economic performance of the African states is known to be among the worst in the world, with very low annual growth and annual gross domestic product (GDP). This paper is designed to study two African countries, Algeria and Angola, which were colonized by two different colonizers, France and Portugal respectively, in order to understand the various kinds of impact that different colonizers had on their former African colonies.