How would you go about portraying the decolonization of Africa

>>52848336
Read that comic that came out last year. about aliens leaving new york and a cop.

>>52848336
read the foundation trilogy.

>>52848336
Define sci-fi. Do you mean, like, a space opera setting with planets and stuff?

Basically you need a region of space that was fully of star systems with a variety of resources but relatively primitive civilizations, many of which hadn't even achieved FTL travel yet. Bonus points if Earth is actually one of these planets and was the conquered rather than the conqueror.

Much of the area of space needs to have been fought or contested by two major powers, with a host of less powerful ones also having a piece of the pie. However all of them have had declining influence in the region for years due to the expense of maintaining control beginning to outweigh the profit of doing so - most African colonies were actually unprofitable, and held largely to deny them to other major powers and/or for the prestige of having colonies and/or as "stepping stones" to get to the actual colonies of profit. For example, the only parts of Africa that Britain actually cared about was Egypt and South Africa, as they formed "stepping stones" to the actual valuable colonies in India. The remaining colonies were mostly bulwarks against the odious French.

Now, here's the big trick. This region of space had to be heading towards decolonization anyway, with a gradual phase-out planned by the various Great Powers, in order to assure stable transition of power (i.e., the plan for Africa was for decolonization to occur in the 70s and 80s). However, due to events back in the more advanced area of space (Europe) and fighting against a retard (Hitler) and his somewhat less retarded but easily amused and provoked friends (Mussolini, Tojo), the money simply doesn't exist to maintain the colonies. Coupled with vastly weakened control, many of the colonies took the opportunity to declare and seize their own independence, with the Great Powers too exhausted and bankrupt from the war back home to put up much more than a token resistance.

(cont'd)

>>52849011
With decolonization happening about two decades before it was planned to, the result is that a lot of the infrastructure isn't in place to allow these new nations to exist independently. Most of the unity they have is entirely artificial, the result of their former colonial masters drawing lines on star charts that don't match up to "natural" boundaries. Power was seized by warlords or charlatans rather than appointed or prepared rulers. And education is lacking (there was less than 1 college graduate per 50,000 people in Africa at the time of independence).

Oh, on top of everything else - add in a dash of a NEW superpower (the USSR), which previously had almost no stake in the region, actively fermenting various coups and revolutions in order to bring the region into its sphere of influence, not actively colonizing the place (due to a lack of manpower and means to deploy forces en masse to the region), but trying to move them towards favorable trading status and the like.

They're opposed by yet another new superpower (the USA), which likewise has never had much of a stake in the region of space itself but which once benefited greatly from the ruthless exploitation of parts of it (i.e., African slave trade), and which has a disturbing tendency to prefer to oppose their rival's expansion rather than promote their own ideologies (i.e., it's more important to stop Communism's spread than it is to spread democracy and capitalism), leading to the superpower being unfortunately willing to prop up horrible dictators as long as those horrible dictators are their allies.

That's how you do it.

>>52848725
Foundation is more the fall of the Roman Empire, given that it was actually based on Gibbon's "History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire".

>>52849011
>>52849090
Basically this.
Only thing that was missed was that the elites in each of the planets/systems should be heavily influenced by the culture and societies of the dominating powers.

>>52849266
So where would you stick Earth in this, incidentally? Like I said, I think that it'd be more interesting if Earth was a conquered planet rather than a conquering one.

Since the goal was exploitation of the system for resources, but which will necessarily require building up at least some, let's say that Venus and Mars were terraformed, too, so Earth has those to play with. But the Sol system doesn't, as near as we can tell, have anything in it that can't be found in any other star system, so Earth would be one of those "for the sake of having it" colonies.

Hmm. Let's hope we're Tanzania. That's a former colony that's largely managed to avoid any human rights violations or unnecessary wars that I'm aware of (it fought a war against Idi Amin's Uganda, but that's a good thing as far as I'm concerned; it also participated in the Mozambican Civil War and the 2008 invasion of Anjouan, though again, both times it seemed to do so with solid intentions), though there is notable corruption in the government (in the "I'm gonna take a cut of money" sense rather than a "I'm going to kill my enemies" sense)). And poverty. Lots of poverty. But that's Africa for you.

Hey, if we're Tanzania then maybe Space Faroukh Bulsara can be born on Mars (our Zanzibar) and go on to move to Space Britain and rename himself Space Freddie Mercury and become the lead singer of Space Queen before dying of AIDS.

Just regular AIDS. It's a bitch.

It's 3:20 AM where I am, people, can you tell?

>>52849362
Well the reasoning for conquering any planet is always a bit iffy if people treat it realistically. I suppose the best solution would be to go full space opera and pretend that things like slavery and on planet mining make sense for an interstellar empire to do. I can still think of a couple of reasons outside of map painting prestige that Earth might be appealing though.
Earth has a prebuilt biosphere and a preexisting workforce, so the planet could conceivably be re-purposed as a plantation by the Aliens. Growing the space equivalent of tea and rubber. Maybe Earth is a better biosphere to grow them in than many of the other colonized planets.
It also has various resources that are formed through a combination of geological and biological processes. I don't know what a space faring race would want with oil, but they might find things like fossilized amber an appealing luxury. They wouldn't be able to get those things from any asteroid though.
If we're modelling this closely after old European empires they'd probably spend a lot of time collecting Earths antiquities, but doing that was more of side project for imperial powers rather than a reason to conquer a place.
I suppose you could place in the vicinity of a important wormhole or similar - make it operate as one of those gateways to more valuable regions you talked about.
Finally they might want to spread some sort of religion to us. But as I understand it that was a secondary motivation at best by the time African colonialism came around.

It's almost too easy; the archetypal image of modern mercenaries comes from the decolonization conflicts of central, western, and southern Africa, so a decolonization-of-Africa-in-space setting lends itself naturally to mercenary stories.

In short, make a bunch of stand-ins for the various colonies and their colonial overlords, then read up on how decolonization affected the countries and mostly just copy that.

File: giphy.gif (1000KB, 500x215px) Image search: [Google]

1000KB, 500x215px

>>52848336
Krogan?

>>52849362
Earth is in kind of an odd spot being able to traverse space and the human race having a decent amount of development.
I'm thinking it would be a nice strategic point for said imperial great powers depending on where these nations fall on the galactic map.