What African country was most negatively impacted by colonialism?

Answer 1

Colonialism - which surprisingly lasted for no more than 70 years in most parts of Africa - has been made the scapegoat for many of the ills that plague (especially) African societies and they are of course a wonderful excuse for many of today's African politicians to move any blame away from themselves. Plus, it creates for them a moral claim vis-a-vis the West on the trillions of dollars in aid that have been given since the 1960's and the many billions still being handed out each year today. The fact however remains that around 1960, many Asian countries like South Korea and China were poorer than most African countries in terms of per capita income, and both China and Korea had recently been ravaged and even largely destroyed by (civil) war. Both - and especially Communist China) had to pull themselves out of misery and poverty mostly by their own efforts and without trillions in development aid, and did.

There was one general negative aspect of colonialism in Africa. Sub-Saharan Africa had no nations like the ones you find there now. There were only a great number of tribal lands with tribes that often had been quarreling or warring with each other for centuries. Colonial rule created in a way 'artificial' boundaries, throwing together these tribes and religions in one nation without much thought of how these tribal relations might work out in a distant post-colonial future. Today, this throwing together of tribes and religion has worked out especially bad in two countries: the Sudan, where the Muslim north and the Christian south have ruined the country by constant and decades-long warring and political infighting and which country now has been formally split in two. In Rwanda, the throwing together by colonization of two hostile tribes (the Hutu's and the Tutsi's) led to massive genocide of Tutsi citizens by the Hutu's in the 90's.