For a long time I didn't really understand what the word "Mandate" meant in British Palestinian Mandate and then recently I encountered it again while reading about Cameroon and there being a "French Cameroon Mandate" and "British Cameroon Mandate" and so I got curious and looked into it. Apparently after WWI all the old German colonies and territories were relinquished to the League of Nations, who decided that some territories could self-govern while others were too "uncivilized" to self-govern and needed to be "guided" and stewarded by a "large developed nation" (which just so happened to always be one of the empires that won WWI). The "mandates" weren't technically colonies that belonged to the empire "caretaking" them... but they functionally were just colonies won in war.

In theory, they were supposed to be building the mandates towards the ability to self-sufficiently independent, but instead they actively intertwined the economies of the mandates with their "caretaker" empire as much as possible. After WWII, the UN grandfathered in the mandates as "trust territories" and was like, no really you guys, you need to build these colonies up to being independent nations you can't keep them. And, eventually, they did all become independent nations... but their economies had been deeply intertwined with their own "caretakers" and so neocolonialism continued after colonialism had ended.

IDK. Just thinking about this puts some sorts of things into perspective for me. It gives some insight into the mentality and ideology used to justify colonialism and how, again, clearly nobody genuinely believed what they were saying. They weren't setting up these mandates to be self-sufficient at all. They set them up to be inherently dependent without needing to be forced via the military to comply. It was simply a transition from military occupation to economic coercion. The countries they produced from these efforts even speak the languages of their "caretakers" as official languages. Yeah it's "totally not Colonialism" that Cameroon is a Francophone nation even though France was never her "colonizer" but her "caretaker."

The goal was to "civilize" the "uncivilized" mandate territories, so they could flourish without being a colony. And "civilizing" the people of Cameroon meant making them speak French? Dress like French people? Eat French foods? It says something about what is meant by "civilized."