If there are only 6 or so major European powers that had territory

>>3209769
Because Africa has more than 6 ethnies and cultures, just maybe ?
Retarded question

>>3209834
No I mean why split their territories into even smaller colonies? You know damn well they weren't based on ethnic lines. For example French West Africa, why didn't they just keep it one big colony instead of subdividing it over and over?

>>3209873
These places were all dirt poor. The small amount of developed infrastructure was not designed to maintain a whole country, just to facilitate the extraction of resources. There are also massive linguistic differences region to region. It would simply be impossible for these young, untested regimes to control areas so big. If they were released based on purely colonial lines, the new government's would immediately devolve into huge civil wars, ones even bigger and more confusing than the ones that happened IRL.

Besides, what would the European powers gain from releasing them as one big state? They had already divided them into sub-regions for administrative purposes, why would they go to the trouble of rearranging everything just to create a country that has a 90% chance of being a perpetual hellish warzone, or a 10% chance of staying together, and being powerful enough to resist soft control?