What you call “exploiting”, most people call providing a value-added service.
The africans get roads and schools in trade, so it’s a quid pro quo deal, but no, they won’t see the wealth as their commodity isn’t worth final cost because of the value-added input by others you somehow confuse as “exploitation”.
The africans get roads and schools in trade, so it’s a quid pro quo deal,
To the Africans, were the roads and schools worth the value of the material being exploited? I very much doubt it. There is probably a great disparity in the value of one thing versus the value of the other.
In addition to that, it is more like the Roads and Schools were ideas which came from the the exploiters who were deciding for themselves what was best for the Africans.
If you are saying the North East was providing a "value-added" service, I'm fine with that so long as it's voluntary. If Southerners had attempted to provide such services to themselves, and it had turned out to be uneconomical for them to do so, they they could have sought those services from whomever could have provided them most efficiently.
But Shouldn't the choice of services be up to the people who were paying for it, rather than being imposed on them by others for reasons of their own self interest?