British and French forces have returned to their former West African colonies in the 21st-century to enforce peace in the nation-states that were created over the course of the past two centuries. Similarly, American forces and military aid are present in the region to help with "stabilizing" processes in an area ravaged by "wars of revenge and greed."

In The Black Man's Burden, Basil Davidson traces the history of Africa to the time colonization began through the time of the "transfer of power" from the European empires to the African peoples. The empires had left a legacy though, which is apparent in the conflicts between the original tribal communities and trading structures of Africans, and the new imposition of governments within mostly arbitrary borders.

The empires decided that relinquishing power to newly created nation-states would "civilize" the continent and organize the people into more easily self-governed structures, despite their pre-colonial success with ethnic, tribal groups and chiefly leadership, but also without foresight or interest in the problems that would inevitably arise. The interests of empires were, of course, the purpose for African colonialism, sometimes disguised as the "White Man's burden" of saving the Africans from "primitiveness."

But decolonization itself was in the interests of empires. Later, in more progressive times, decolonization became a slow process to allow Africans to return to independence and to continue the "civilizing" interaction with Africa. The structures used to release Africa from British and French control allowed the British and French to keep their access to strategic locations and African resources, as well as the elite classes left as the nation-state's new leaders, classes that were themselves results of, or even creations of, their respective empires.

Sierra Leone was one of the last British colonies to become an independent nation-state. Today Sierra Leone exists between the Atlantic Ocean, Guinea, and Liberia. Sierra Leone's many different ethnic groups were historically tied with peoples that stretched through routes deeper into Africa. Both the ethnic and trading ties of the peoples within the Sierra Leone of the past were disrupted by the bordering of territories, as were the people related to them in areas that are now their own nation-states as well.

In his New York Times article "A Post Colonial Storm, and America's Blind Spot", Somini Sengupta notes that Liberia's history reveals that it has long possessed characteristics of an American colony. The Liberian settlers arrived in what was then part of Britain's Sierra Leone. Even before the Civil War, the United States government, assuming that the former slaves would be comfortable in any part of Africa, placed them among an already ethnically diverse area. Previously, Britain's colonization of Sierra Leone followed its own return of freed slaves to Africa. Britain's relocation of its formers slaves to Sierra Leone was used to anchor its power on the continent that it would go on to attempt to conquer in its entirety. The borders of all of Africa's nation-states were carved by 19th-century imperial powers as a way of "dividing the spoils" among themselves as they relegated each area to "independence." In the process of "parceling out the continents riches", the people's involved were parceled out as well, into regions that were meant to define them as nations, against their long-held notions of their own ethnic groups and nations.

On the Northwest coast of Africa, Liberia is a unique nation-state in the warring region, as it has never carried the moniker of colony, since freed American slaves founded it as an independent state. Both Liberians and the people of Sierra Leone were at conflict internally. Surely the former slaves of Britain and America did not feel very British or American, even after their emancipation, but as descendents of Africans who had only ever experienced the culture of Britain or America from the perspective of enslavement, divisive feelings of difference were bound to manifest themselves. Political and military disputes were quick to erupt between the newly arrived blacks and the native ethnic groups, because of the European and American superiority the former slaves believed they possessed over the "savages" who were not removed from Africa. The former slaves who arrived in Liberia and Sierra Leone used their European and American influenced cultures to create societal structures that were themselves influenced by Europe and America. Inevitably, these elements would conflict with the West African ethnic groups' already existing systems. The returning blacks had become their own ethnic group. Slavery had prevented African descendants from passing the whole of their various ethnic cultures through the generations. Blacks in Britain and America developed a new culture there, which aided in their survival of the oppression and dehumanization of being enslaved.

The noted distinction between their identity and that of the Africans made them a "nation" in Walker Connor's use of the term. Likewise, the African ethnic groups awareness of their own uniqueness from the British and American blacks, as well as from other ethnic groups was sparked, creating African "nations" or "tribes" from the ethnic groups. The United States and Britain acted in ways to appease both the new settlers and the long-time ethnic residents of the areas, and thus Davidson's "curse of the nation-state" continued on its long history in West Africa. The creoles, as the group descended from the former slaves would become known, helped control the colonies in which they now lived, for the Empires.

Davidson writes that the "merging" of tribes in the history of Africa was a move that would gain political clout in the African's perspectives and that made governance of regions easier from the British and French perspectives. African movements towards becoming nation-states were made in hopes of independence from their empires-however, influenced by their empires for decades, many Africans themselves began to think of the tribalism of Africa as the "savage backwoods". In the context of West Africa, particularly Sierra Leone and Liberia, where the "merging" of ethnic groups come nations manifested itself in their becoming states, the creoles and the "savages" were transformed into "nation-states" where the concept would not hold; the many nations of the region could not become a solitary one with the simple measure of making one government to rule them in a neatly drawn territory. The terms "tribe" and "nation" are interchangeable, but the term "nation-state", as Connor suggests, is contested precisely because of misuse it suffers when applied to places like West African countries.

Sengupta writes that "today, Sierra Leone makes a strong case for international intervention." Indeed, there is much international involvement in Sierra Leone, as the article points out, but the area within its borders has a long history of "intervention" on behalf of colonial companies. The nation who formerly ran them, Britain, has "a mixture of self-interest and historic ties" involved in their decisions and activities there. The French, too, are "re-engaged in their former colonies," but the United State's "virtual colony" of Liberia "gets scant international attention," as American interests do not put Liberia at the "top of Washington's priority list."

Unlike the British and French relationships with their former colonies, the United States does not have "a sense of strategic interest or a sense of historic responsibility that makes us take a more forceful stance," as put by a former Regan administration advisor on Africa. The United States "interests" have lead it to be "reluctant to endorse peacekeeping missions in Africa" in general. "The Liberian war's backdrop," Sengupta contends, "is international neglect." However, he also notes that the United States gives military support to Guinea, who allies itself with Liberian rebels-who have overtaken more than half of Liberia from the government the United Nations condemns-as well as lends its support to the Sierra Leone war crimes court which, with the help of the United Nations peacekeeping forces, hopes to indict the president of Liberia for his "role" in the ongoing war.

Despite the present neglect, the actual "backdrop" of the war-ravaged country-"the 'epicenter' of the human crisis"-goes back much further, through 150 of years of the United State's focus on strategically supporting Liberia. Additionally, the present of the entire West African region is the culmination of hundreds of years of British and French influence on the colonies, and turning them into "nation-states" where the belonging to the "nation" became contested by the dozens of ethnic groups, even those who previously may have agreed on the "merger" or the "joining up" for the sake of independence. Sengupta suggests that the former foreign powers in the region "sit down to bargain again to bring a measure of peace to this ravaged place." Indeed, international attention and intervention will be required to stop the multitude of wars, especially since history has brought it to a point where everyone seems to be a "mercenary, in search of new conflicts and attendant looting opportunities."