The D.R.C.’s is a typical story—albeit an extreme version—for the nations that were created in the Scramble for Africa at the end of the nineteenth century and won their independence in the second half of the twentieth. The ten poorest countries in the world are all former colonies in sub-Saharan Africa. It is not unreasonable to conclude that these societies would have been better off if Europeans had never discovered a moderately effective treatment for malaria and the region had remained a white man’s grave.
