Abstract

Gunboat criminology discusses how the oppressive and exploitative nature of European colonial and control policies permeated and corroded the African cultural, political, and socio-economic space, resulting in stunted growth and under development of Africa. The evidential aftermath of such systemic entrapment encapsulated in post-colonial Western-engineered repetitive coup d’états and endemic internecine civil wars persists in all African post-colonial “Bantustans” called independent African countries. The evidence is more pronounced in the African countries like Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo, endowed with rich natural and mineral resources like liquid gold and similarly precious stones, which accruing revenue would have helped lift Africa out of colonial-induced poverty. Evidence abounds, as with impact of the transatlantic slave trade, the implication of the U.S. and the UN in the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in Congo, and the British conquest and colonization of Nigeria. Such are typical examples of Western conspiracy to undercut African Renaissance; the rebirth of colonialism through neocolonialism; and perpetuation of impoverishment, which holds Africa’s development in check, vis à vis the diaspora.