Joe Smith, I'm afraid you live in a fantasy land if you believe that French and British rule uplifted Africans living under that rule.  You should read up on how King Leopold "Uplifted" the population of the Congo, for example.  The colonial powers were there to EXPLOIT Africans, and any "uplifting" that went on was by and large a side effect of needing a functioning local civil service so that the exploitation could proceed apace.  The biggest tragedy is that when the colonial era ended, many countries just kept doing what they had always been doing, under the same colonial era  laws and civil service (i.e., exploit Africans), but now mostly for the benefit of kleptocratic local rulers.