Vietnam fought the French for nine years.
Then fought the Americans for twenty years.
Then fought the Chinese.
Then fought the Khmer Rouge.
Forty years of continuous warfare, against the most powerful military forces of the twentieth century, on Vietnamese soil, destroying Vietnamese infrastructure, killing Vietnamese people.
And then rebuilt.
This is not an argument that empire is not harmful.
This is an argument that resistance, real resistance, sustained resistance, resistance that controls its own political destiny at the end of the gun, is the variable that determines outcomes.
Africa's problem was never civilization.
It was that its most effective resisters kept ending up dead.
With Western fingerprints on the gun.