In colonial America, "liberty" came to mean rights one possessed outside of government approval. In revolutionary France (and in modern Canada) it has come to mean participation in a political system.
Like all other places, Africa has a more nuanced history than what people previously have believed. The continent was not devoid of technology before the advent of colonialism, as there were pockets of inventiveness and small-scale manufacturing.
If the situation were reversed and protestors had invaded the Capitol to support a left-wing candidate, we can be sure that the vocabulary used to describe the event would be quite different.
National divorce does happen, and debts are not necessarily repudiated as a result. We can look to examples from Latin America, Eastern Europe, and the Czech-Slovak split.
Mention Rastafarianism and most likely reggae, dreadlocks, and Bob Marley come to mind. However, Rastafarianism helped downtrodden Jamaicans resist the oppressions of colonialism.
It’s impossible to simply declare nationalism itself to be good or bad. Its goodness or badness depends primarily on its effect on existing regimes and state institutions.
Modern socialists claim that Hitler's Nazi regime was the antithesis of socialism. Hitler would have disagreed, as he saw himself and his movement as being primarily socialist.
The fact that the idea of national groups and nation-states seems so natural and so self-evident—in spite of being novel, recent, and modern—illustrates just how much nationalism has influenced our thinking.
