[JumpCrisscross]

> Can you cite a reference for this assertion?

It's not. The current vogue in the American social sciences is projecting America's Black-White / colonist-colonised dualism onto the world regardless of the facts on the ground.

Malawi was hunting and gathering until the 10th century [1] and colonised by Europeans in the late 19th century. That makes it simultaneously one of the last places in the contiguous old world to be settled and one of the last in Africa to have been European colonised. If the standard outliers to any macroeconomic theory are Japan and Argentina, then Malawi occupies a similar niche in theories of history and development.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bantu_expansion