Top Quotes: “The Fortunes of Africa: A 5000-Year History of Wealth, Greed, and Endeavor” — Martin Meredith

Ancient History

“Land was another prize. The Romans relied on their colonies in north Africa for vital grain shipments to feed the burgeoning population of Rome; they named one of their coastal provinces Africa after a Berber tribe known as the Afri who lived in the region of modern Tunisia. Arab invaders followed in the wake of the Romans, the first wave arriving in the seventh century, eventually supplanting indigenous chiefdoms across most of north Africa; they used the Arabic name ‘Ifrigiya’ to cover the same coastal region.

When European mariners began their exploration of the Atlantic coastline of Africa in the fifteenth century, they applied the name to encompass the whole continent. Their aim initially was to find a sea route to the goldfields of west Africa which they had learned was the location from where camel caravans carrying gold set out to cross the Sahara desert to reach commercial ports on Africa’s Mediterranean coast. Their interest in the west African goldfields had been stimulated as the result of a visit that the ruler of the Mali empire, Mansa Musa, paid to Cairo in 1324 while making a pilgrimage to Mecca. He was so generous in distributing gold that he ruined the money markets there for more than ten years. European cartographers duly took note. A picture of Mansa Musa decorates the Catalan Atlas of 1375, one of the first sets of European maps to provide valid information about Africa. A caption on the map reads: ‘So abundant is the gold that is found in his country that he is the richest and most noble king in all the land.’ Modern estimates suggest that Mansa Musa was the richest man the world has ever seen, richer even than today’s billionaires.

Another commodity in high demand from Africa was slaves. Slavery was a common feature in many African societies. Slaves were often war-captives, acquired by African leaders as they sought to build fiefdoms and empires and used as laborers and soldiers. But the long-distance trade in slaves, lasting for more than a thousand years, added a fearful new dimension. From the ninth century onwards, slaves from black Africa were regularly marched across the Sahara desert, shipped over the Red Sea and taken from the east coast region and sold into markets in the Levant, Mesopotamia, the Arabian peninsula and the Persian Gulf, In the sixteenth century, European merchants initiated the transAtlantic trade to the Americas. Most of the inland trade in slaves for sale abroad was handled by African traders and warlords. Fortunes were made at both ends of the trade. By the end of the nineteenth century, the traffic in African slaves amounted in all to about 24 million men, women and children.

Africa was also valued as the world’s main supplier of ivory.”

“In the nineteenth century, as the industrial revolution in Europe and North America gathered momentum, the use of ivory for piano keys, billiard balls, scientific instruments and a vast range of household items made it one of the most profitable commodities on earth.

A greedy and devious European monarch, Leopold Il of Belgium, set out to amass a personal fortune from ivory, declaring himself ‘King-Sovereign’ of a million square miles of the Congo Basin. When profits from the ivory trade began to dwindle, Leopold turned to another commodity — wild rubber — to make his money. Several million Africans died as a result of the rubber regime that Leopold enforced, but Leopold himself succeeded in becoming one of the richest men in the world.

In turn, Leopold’s ambition to acquire what he called ‘a slice of this magnifique gâteau africain’ was largely responsible for igniting the ‘scramble’ for African territory among European powers at the end of the nineteenth century. Hitherto, European activity in Africa had been confined mainly to small, isolated enclaves on the coast used for trading purposes. Only along the Mediterranean coast of Algeria and at the foot of southern Africa had European settlement taken root. But now Africa became the target of fierce European competition.

In the space of twenty years, mainly in the hope of gaining economic benefit and for reasons of national prestige, European powers claimed possession of virtually the entire continent. Europe’s occupation precipitated wars of resistance in almost every part of the continent. Scores of African rulers who opposed colonial rule died in battle or were executed or sent into exile after defeat. In the concluding act of partition, Britain, at the height of its imperial power, provoked a war with two Boer republics in southern Africa, determined to get its hands on the richest goldfield ever discovered, leaving a legacy of bitterness and hatred among Afrikaners that lasted for generations.

By the end of the scramble, European powers had merged some 10,000 African polities into just forty colonies. The new territories were almost all arlificial entities, with boundaries that paid scant attention to the myriad of monarchies, chiefdoms and other societies on the ground. Most encompassed scores of diverse groups that shared no common history, culture, language or religion. Some were formed across the great divide between the desert regions of the Sahara and the belt of tropical forests to the south, throwing together Muslim and non-Muslim peoples in latent hostility. But all endured to form the basis of the modern states of Africa.

Colonial rule brought a myriad of change. Colonial governments built roads and railways in an attempt to stimulate economic growth and make their territories self-supporting. New patterns of economic activity were established. African colonies became significant exporters of agricultural commodities such as cotton, cocoa and coffee. In the highlands of eastern and south-er Africa, European settlers acquired huge landholdings, laying the foundations for large-scale commercial agriculture.”

“The colonial legacy included a framework of schools, medical services and transport infrastructure. Western education and literacy transformed African societies in tropical Africa. But only a few islands of modern economic development emerged, most of them confined to coastal areas or to mining enterprises in areas such as Katanga and the Zambian copper belt. Much of the interior remained undeveloped, remote, cut off from contact with the modern world. Moreover, while European governments departed, European companies retained their hold over business empires built up over half a century. Almost all modern manufacturing, banking, import-export trade, shipping, mining, plantations and timber enterprises remained largely in the hands of foreign corporations. As the end of colonial rule approached, Europeans followed the old adage: Give them parliament and keep the banks.”

“To secure food supplies, foreign corporations have acquired huge landholdings in Africa, just as the Romans did.

But much of the wealth generated by foreign activity flows out of Africa to destinations abroad. Africa’s ruling elites further drain their countries of funds, stashing huge sums in bank accounts and property overseas. The World Bank estimates that 40 per cent of Africa’s private wealth is held offshore. Africa thus remains a continent of huge potential, but limited prospects.”

“The peak of pyramid building came a century later during the Fourth Dynasty — about 4,500 years ago. Shortly after ascending to the throne, King Khufu ordered the construction of a burial place grander than any of the tombs built for his predecessors. The site he chose was the Giza plateau, further downstream from Saggara. Over a period of twenty years, a labour force numbering tens of thousands — stonemasons, toolmakers, craftsmen, quarry workers and haulage crews, many of them peasant conscripts — worked relentlessly to complete the monument before the pharaoh’s death. The scale of the endeavour was extraordinary. By the time Khufu’s Great Pyramid was complete, it consisted of 2.3 million blocks of stone, each weighing on average more than a ton, reaching a height of 480 feet; the slopes of the outer surface were covered by a layer of polished white casing stone that glittered in the sun. The entire edifice was engineered with remarkable precision. The base, extending over more than thirteen acres, was a near-perfect square closely aligned to the four cardinal points of the compass, with a precise orientation to true north. In later ages, the Great Pyramid was regarded as one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. It remained the tallest building in the world for the next thirty-eight centuries.”

“A notable feature of Egyptian society was the status accorded to women. A few women, such as Hatshepsut, ruled as pharaohs. Several queens served with their husbands as partners in power, wielding extraordinary influence. But in every walk of life, women possessed rights and privileges not seen elsewhere in the world at the time. Women were employed in a variety of occupations. They owned and controlled property, and were entitled to write their own wills.”

“The defendant’s heart was weighed on a pair of scales set before the image of Maat, the goddess of truth. If the scales balanced, then the defendant was allowed to pass into the afterlife. If the heart was out of balance, then a fearsome monster known as Ammit, the Devourer of the Dead, would eat it, annihilating all chances of an afterlife. This concept of a final day of judgment ending with the hope of a glorious resurrection was taken up by later religious traditions, notably Christianity.”

“In the early fifth century BCE, a Carthaginian commander named Hanno led a large naval expedition through the Pillars of Hercules — the Strait of Gibraltar — with instructions to found colonies along the west coast of Africa. According to a brief account of his voyage, copied from an inscription on a temple wall in Carthage, Hanno reached Soloeis (modern Cape Cantin) and then sailed further down the coast, establishing seven settlements there.”

“As Rome grew from a small city-state in central Italy into a regional power, the Carthaginians took a pragmatic approach, encouraging trade and signing a series of treaties that set out their separate zones of influence, first in 509 BCE, then in 348 and again in 278. But their ambitions collided over the divided island of Sicily, part of which was occupied by Carthaginians. The first Punic war, as it was called — a Latin name used by the Romans to describe the Carthaginians and their language — lasted for twenty-four years. As part of the expeditionary army they sent to Sicily, the Carthaginians deployed nearly a hundred elephants which had been trained at their base in Carthage to launch cavalry charges, intimidate infantry and tear down fortifications — the tanks of the ancient world. In their north African domain, the Carthaginians had ready access to large herds of elephants which populated the coastal plains of modern Tunisia and Morocco and the forests and swamps at the foot of the Atlas Mountains. Known as ‘forest’ elephants, they belonged to a smaller breed than the African savanna species and were easier to control. The use of elephants as war machines had some success. The outcome of the war, however, was finally decided in 241 when the Carthaginian navy suffered a crushing defeat. The Carthaginians sued for peace and were forced to evacuate Sicily.”

“In 149 BCE a Roman army sailed for north Africa and laid siege to Carthage. For nearly three years, the Carthaginians held out, sealed off from food supplies, half-starving and subject to repeated attacks. The final assault came in 146. Breaking through the last pockets of resistance, Roman soldiers went from house to house slaughtering men, women and children. The carnage went on for six days and nights. Some 50,000 survivors were sold into slavery. Carthage was then set on fire.”

“When Herodotus travelled around Egypt in about 450 BCE, visiting Memphis and Thebes and venturing as far south as Elephantine, he was struck by the many indigenous peculiarities of Egypt, everything from its climate to its customs to the workings of the Nile. The Egyptians, he wrote, ‘seem to have reversed the ordinary practices of mankind’.

For instance, women attend market and are employed in trade, while men stay at home and do the weaving. In weaving the normal way is to work the threads of the weft upwards, but the Egyptians work them downwards. Men in Egypt carry loads on their head, women on their shoulders; women urinate standing up, men sitting down. To ease themselves they go indoors, but eat outside in the streets . .. Elsewhere priests grow their hair long; in Egypt, they shave their heads. In other nations the relatives of the deceased in the time of mourning cut their hair but the Egyptians, who shave at all other times, mark a death by letting the hair grow on both head and chin. They live with their animals — unlike the rest of the world, who live apart from them. Other men live on wheat and barley, but any Egyptian who does so is blamed for it … Dough they knead with their feet, but clay with their hands — and even handle dung. They practise circumcision while men of other nations — except those who have learned from Egypt — leave their private parts as nature made them. Men in Egypt have two garments, women only one. The ordinary practice at sea is to make sheets fast to ring-bolts fitted outboard; the Egyptians fit them inboard. In writing or calculating, instead of going, like the Greeks, from left to right, the Egyptians go from right to left — and obstinately maintain that theirs is the dexterous method, ours being left-handed and awkward.”

“She was the first and only Ptolemy to learn the Egyptian language of the seven million people she ruled. Brought up as a goddess, she had a commanding presence but by appearance she was not especially attractive. Her coin portraits depict her with a hooked nose and prominent chin. It was rather her personality and manner which, according to the historian Plutarch, were ‘bewitching’. She seemed to possess an irresistible charm; her conversation captivated her audience. She was also incomparably richer than anyone else in the Mediterranean.

Her career as queen, however, soon encountered turbulence. Low Nile floods in 51 and 50 brought widespread distress and hardship. Ambitious to rule alone, she fell into a protracted feud with her brother, Ptolemy XIII. She also became caught up in the struggle between two military strongmen in Rome’s civil war: Julius Caesar, and his former ally and son-in-law, Pompey. When Pompey called on her for support, Cleopatra decided to side with him, as her father had done. Her brother, however, favoured Caesar. Facing a hostile public, Cleopatra was forced to flee to the Levant. After raising an army there, she returned in 48 to face Ptolemy’s forces in the eastern Delta.

At this crucial juncture, Pompey, having suffered a crushing defeat by Caesar, arrived on the Egyptian coast seeking refuge. Ptolemy sent him a welcoming message, but then watched calmly as an officer in his pay stabbed Pompey to death as he was ferried ashore and then severed his head.

When Caesar sailed into Alexandria three days later and was presented with Pompey’s severed head, he was appalled. He installed himself in a pavilion in the grounds of the Ptolemys’ palace adjoining the royal dockyard and summoned both Ptolemy and Cleopatra, intending to settle their dispute. Outside the palace, however, riots broke out in protest against the unwanted arrival of a Roman general. Determined to plead her case but blocked by Ptolemy’s army in the eastern Delta, Cleopatra devised a bold scheme to take a circuitous route to Alexandria and to have herself smuggled into her own palace to see Caesar, setting the scene for one of the most dramatic encounters in history, seized upon by playwrights, poets and filmmakers down the centuries. Arriving by boat after dark in Alexandria’s eastern harbour, she was taken to Caesar’s quarters wrapped up in an oversize sack carried on the shoulders of a faithful servant.

Caesar was fifty-two years old at the time, the most powerful figure in the Mediterranean world; Cleopatra was twenty-one, a deposed and helpless queen, with only her wits to defend herself. But she managed to win him over. To the fury of Ptolemy and his advisers, Caesar sided with Cleopatra. Ptolemy’s army duly laid siege to the palace. The siege lasted for six months during which Caesar and Cleopatra became lovers. A battle west of the Nile in 47 decided the outcome. Ptolemy was drowned, his body never recovered, Caesar returned to Alexandria victorious. In place of Ptolemy XIII, Cleopatra installed her remaining, eleven-year-old brother as Ptolemy XIV. To celebrate their triumph, Caesar and Cleopatra made a magisterial journey up the Nile Valley. Later that summer, shortly after Caesar left Egypt to resume his military campaigns, Cleopatra gave birth to their son, Caesarion.

The following year, taking Caesarion with her, she travelled to Rome to stay as Caesar’s guest, but his assassination in March 44 ended her sojourn there. Returning to Alexandria, she arranged for the murder of her young brother, suspecting him of disloyalty, and proclaimed three-year-old Caesarion as Ptolemy XV. Now in supreme control, Cleopatra identified herself with the ancient Egyptian god Horus, the paramount symbol of divine kingship: ‘The female Horus, the great one, the mistress of perfection, brilliant in counsel, the mistress of the Two Lands, Cleopatra, the goddess who loves her father.’

Her undoing came as a result of her involvement with another Roman general. After the assassination of Caesar and the civil war that followed, Rome’s empire was divided between two rival commanders: Octavian, his great-nephew and legal heir, and Mark Antony, his protégé, an audacious but wayward soldier married to Octavian’s sister, who assumed charge of Rome’s affairs in the eastern Mediterranean. Cleopatra forged a partnership with Antony, became his lover and bore him three children. But as the rivalry between the two Roman factions intensified, she was directly caught up in the hostilities. In Rome, Octavian branded her a public enemy. Routed in battle at Actium in September 31, Antony and Cleopatra fled back to Alexandria. In the summer of 30, Octavian’s forces pursued them there. As they entered the city, Cleopatra retreated into a fortified building in the royal quarter. Having wrongly heard that she had taken her own life, Antony fell on his sword. Mortally wounded, he was brought to Cleopatra, dying in her arms. Fearful of being held a prisoner, Cleopatra too committed suicide, probably by swallowing poison, aged thirty-nine. She had ruled for nearly twenty-two years.

With her death, the Ptolemaic dynasty came to an end and independent Egypt was reduced to the status of a province of Rome. It did not regain its autonomy until the twentieth century CE.”

“The Arab momentum carried on into Europe. In 711, Tariq in Ziyad led an invasion force composed largely of Berber cavalry across the Mediterranean to the Iberian peninsula. He landed on the southern coast of Spain near the Rock of Gibraltar, a name derived from the term the Arabs gave to it: Jebel al Tariq, the mountain of Tariq. Tariq’s foray into Spain marked the start of an Islamic occupation that lasted until the fifteenth century.

Arab hegemony in the Maghreb now stretched from the Atlantic coast of Morocco, through Ifriqiya, to the cities of Tripolitania. Independent emirs, based in the Arab citadel at Kairouan, wielded wide powers to levy taxes and to trade in slaves captured during raids on the Berber population. Arabic soon became the main medium of communication for the inhabitants of coastal cities, many of whom had previously been Christian and spoke Latin. A new Arab city was founded at Tunis, near Carthage, in 705.”

“The Aghlabids were ousted from Kairouan in 910 by an army of Kutama Berbers from the Kabyle mountains. Their leader, Ubaydalla Said, belonged to the Ismaili branch of Shi’ism, claimed descent from Fatima, the daughter of the Prophet Muhammad, and announced himself as the Mahdi, a figure sent by God to prepare the world for Judgement Day. He duly established the Fatimid Dynasty at a new capital on the Tunisian coast called Mahdia.

The ultimate ambition of the Fatimids was to gain control not just of the Maghreb but of all the lands of Islam. In 969, Fatimid rulers marched their Berber armies eastwards from Ifrigiya into Egypt and set up the headquarters of a caliphate in a new palace-city on the Nile that they called al-Kahira, the Victorious, known in the English-speaking world as Cairo. Under Fatimid rule, Egypt entered a memorable age of prosperity, profiting from a trade network that extended across the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. It was also notable as a place of religious tolerance. Christians and Jews as well as Muslims were allowed to hold high posts in government. Jewish merchants described Fatimid Egypt as ‘the land of life’. Cairo flourished both as a centre of commerce and religious study.”

“The first urban societies in the Niger Delta such as Jenne-jeno emerged as far back as the third century BCE. The surpluses of cereal crops and dried fish they produced were traded for salt and copper brought from mines deep in the Sahara. By the eighth century, Jenne-jeno had grown into a substantial town of mud-brick buildings, housing its own specialist groups of potters, metalworkers and rice-growers and playing a vital role in an extensive west African trading network.”

“Amid the turmoil, the trans-Sahara highways continued to thrive. By the twelfth century, caravans as large as 12,000 camels were making the crossing. At the southern terminus, following the demise of Wagadu, a new Sudanic empire — Mali — came to dominate the gold trade. Its origins lay among the Mande-speaking people of the Upper Niger region where new goldfields in the Bure district were opened in the thirteenth century. The Mali empire stretched for more than a thousand miles from the Atlantic coast of the Gambia and Senegal in the west to the trading centres of Timbuktu and Gao in the east.”

“Another commodity traded at Timbuktu was the kola nut, which grew in the forests of west Africa and fetched a high price throughout the Sahara and the Maghreb. When chewed, it provides a mild narcotic, acceptable to Islam, and forms part of the etiquette of everyday hospitality. Modern consumers know it as an ingredient of the soft drink Coca-Cola.”

“The demand for black slaves remained high. Eunuchs were the most highly prized and gained the highest price. Their value was enhanced all the more by the casualty rate from castration: as many as nine out of every ten boys did not survive the operation. Some slaves served in the military forces of Muslim rulers; some worked in mines or agriculture. The majority were female slaves who were bought by prosperous urban households for use as servants and concubines. The average ‘service life of a slave — the time between final purchase and manumission or death — was no more than about seven years, so the need for replacements kept demand high.”

“Zanj was the homeland of Bantu-speaking coastal peoples who formed an integral part of the commercial world of the Indian Ocean, controlling trade between the African interior and ports on the coast. Arab merchants gave it its name, meaning ‘Land of the Blacks’, an east African equivalent to the Sudanic Bilad as-Sudan. Some Arabs settled there and intermarried, adding to the trading culture. A merchant class emerged as the ruling elite of an archipelago of independent coastal towns and islands — Mogadishu, Shanga, Manda, Malindi, Mombasa, Pemba, Zanzibar, Kilwa Kisiwani, and Sofala, a port south of the Zambezi River — which traded with each other and with visiting sea captains from Arabia and Persia. Through international trade, the towns became increasingly prosperous. The merchant elite used their wealth to construct grand houses built from coral stone and to purchase luxury items — pottery, glass, porcelain, cloth, beads and hardware such as cooking pots and brass oil-lamps — imported from Arabia, Persia and India and from producers as far distant as China and Indonesia. Among the plants introduced to the coast from southeast Asia was the banana, which became a staple food in many parts of Africa.

Over several centuries, the peoples of Zanj developed a distinctive character. They became known as Swahili — ‘the people of the coast’ — a name taken from the Arabic word used for shore: sahel. Their language, KiSwahili, with roots that could be traced. back to the Niger-Congo family, became the lingua franca of the coast, used by trading networks across the region. They were also increasingly influenced by the southward flow of Islam, conveyed by Arab traders.”

The Era of “Discovery”

“The slave trade operated by the Portuguese added an entirely new dimension. During the 1500s, the Portuguese required an increasing supply of slaves to work on sugar plantations that they had established on São Tome, an island in the Gulf of Guinea. Slave traders initially acquired slaves from the Benin coast, but then turned their attention to Kongo, some 600 miles away. Kongo’s domestic slavery thus became part of an international traffic in slaves. The demand grew ever stronger, Kongo slaves were sent to São Tome not just to work on plantations there but to transit camps to await shipment to other destinations: the Gold Coast, Madeira, the Cape Verde Islands and Portugal. A Portuguese account noted that in 1507, in addition to some 2,000 slaves working on plantations, the island held 5–6,000 slaves awaiting re-export. Between 1510 and 1540, four to six slaving ships per year were kept busy hauling slaves from São Tomé to the Gold Coast alone. During that period, Akan traders brought about 10,000 slaves from the Portuguese for use as porters and agricultural labourers.”

“Most slaves were war captives, but others were condemned criminals, kidnap victims, political prisoners or family members sold for debt or for food in time of famine. Enslavement became a common method for disposing of troublesome individuals of every kind.”

“One modern estimate is that for every hundred Africans enslaved for export from Angola in the last decades of the eighteenth century, ten may have died through capture, twenty-two on the way to the coast, ten in coastal towns, six at sea, and three in the Americas before starting work, leaving less than half to work as slaves. In all, during the three and a half centuries that the transAtlantic slave trade lasted, some 2.8 million slaves were dispatched from Luanda and 764,000 from Benguela, about a quarter of the entire total.

A stretch of coast along the Bight of Benin produced the second highest number of slaves. The supply of slaves was so prolific in the seventeenth century that European traders there named it the Slave Coast. Encouraged by local rulers, keen to trade, Portuguese, Dutch, French and English ships made regular calls at the lagoon ports of Popo, Ouidah [Whydah], Offra, Jakin, Porto Novo, Badagry and Lagos. Rising from 2,000 slaves in the mid-seventeenth cen-tury, export numbers from the Slave Coast reached 12,000 a year by 1700.

The lead was taken by the lagoon port of Ouidah, part of the kingdom of Hueda, whose ruler made frequent raids inland to satisfy European demand. ‘The King is an absolute Boar,’ wrote John Atkins, a naval surgeon, about Ouidah in 1721, ‘making sometimes fair agreements with his country neighbours . . . but if he cannot obtain a sufficient number of slaves that way, he marches an army, and depopulates. He, and the King of Ardra [Allada], adjoining, commit great depredations inland.’

In the 1720s, Ouidah and several other ports along the Slave Coast were taken over by the inland kingdom of Dahomey, an Aja state adjacent to the Yoruba Oyo empire. At their capital at Abomey, seventy miles inland from Ouidah, the kings of Dahomey were soon heavily involved in the slave trade on their own account. The annual income of King Tegbesu, a ruthless monarch who executed rival merchants to enforce a royal monopoly on the slave trade, was estimated to be £250,000. Dahomey’s kings also made regular sacrifices of war captives at gruesome ceremonies known as the Annual Customs which European visitors were invited to attend. The Dahomey kingdom, in turn, was invaded by Oyo armies in the eighteenth century. Business along the Slave Coast, however, continued to thrive. In the eighteenth century as a whole, some 1.2 million slaves were dispatched from the Bight of Benin, most of them through the port of Ouidah.”

“During a period of revolutionary upheaval in Europe, the Netherlands was invaded by France. To prevent the Cape Colony from falling into the hands of the French, Britain, the dominant sea power in Europe, dispatched an expedition to seize control there. In 1795, the colony came under British rule. In 1803, it was returned to the Dutch. But in 1806 the British took possession again, with dramatic consequences.”

“The white slave population needed continual replenishment. Some were ransomed, some converted; thousands died from disease and ill-treatment. New arrivals destined for the slave auctions of Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli numbered on average about 5,000 a year during the boom years of the trade. Modern historians estimate that in all, between 1530 and 1780, at least a million European captives were enslaved on the Barbary coast.”

“In Morocco, the Sa dian dynasty eventually collapsed, fragmenting into a hotchpotch of emirates and warlord territories. One of the most notorious was the ‘Republic of Bou Regreg’ set up by slave-trading corsairs at Sale, a port on the Atlantic coast with a commanding position on the Bou Regreg estuary. Many of the corsairs based there were Muslim refugees expelled by Spain in 1610 who took up piracy as a way of exacting revenge on Christendom. They began by attacking European ships, capturing their crews, holding them in underground dungeons in Sale, then selling them at slave auctions to merchants and dealers across the Islamic world. But they soon extended their raids to coastal areas of Spain and Portugal and parts of northern Europe, seizing men, women and children for sale as slaves. Known in England as the Sallee Rovers, they became a common threat to the fishing communities on the south coast. In 1626, Trinity House, a maritime guild, estimated that there were about 1,200 English captives at Sale, mostly taken in the English Channel.”

“Navy captains were given an incentive to arrest slave ships, bring them to shore and help convict their owners by being paid a bounty for each liberated slave — £60 per male, £30 per female and £10 per child.

The outpost of Sierra Leone formed a key part of Britain’s anti-slavery strategy. The harbour there with its adjacent settlement provided an ideal base for Royal Navy ships. The private company set up by London philanthropists to run the Sierra Leone colony had become insolvent and was only too relieved to hand direct control to the British government. Captured slave ships and their crews were taken to Freetown to face proceedings before an Admiralty court. Freetown also served as a haven for liberated slaves — ‘recaptives,’ as they were called. Instead of trying to retum slaves to their original homeland, the British government decided to set them free in Sierra Leone. Every year, hundreds of recaptives were brought in, fitted out with cotton clothes and lodged in the King’s Yard; many went on to found their own settlements on the peninsula. By 1815, more than 6,000 had landed in Freetown.”

The 19th Century

“By 1870, southern Africa was still regarded as a troublesome region with few prospects, much as it had been for fifty years. Then in 1871, prospectors exploring a remote area of scrubland in Griqualand, just outside the Cape’s borders, discovered the world’s richest deposits of diamonds. Fifteen years later, an itinerant English digger stumbled across the rocky outcrop of a gold-bearing reef on a ridge named by Transvaal farmers as the Witwatersrand. Beneath the reef lay the richest deposits of gold ever discovered.”

“As well as benefiting from the growing traffic in slaves and ivory, Zanzibar began experiments with clove production. Cloves originated in the Maluku Islands of Indonesia. For centuries they grew nowhere else. In about 1770, clove seeds were carried to the Mascarene Islands. According to Zanzibari accounts, cloves were introduced to Zanzibar by a prominent Omani merchant with links to the Mascarenes in about 1812. By the 1820s, cloves were being harvested on several Omani-owned plantations on Zanzibar with the use of slave labour. The crop was lucrative. Profits were as high as 1,000 per cent. As the plantations expanded, so the demand for slave labour increased, providing another stimulus for traffic from the mainland.

The growing prosperity of Zanzibar prompted Oman’s ruler, Seyyid Said, to take a personal interest. In 1828, accompanied by a flotilla of warships and dhows, he paid his first visit to the island and set out to transform it from a minor outpost of his empire into a commercial hub. An enterprising businessman in his own right, he took a direct lead in promoting the clove industry, acquired several plantations for himself and developed dozens of others using slave labour. By 1840, two-thirds of clove production came from his estates. He found Zanzibar such an attractive base, compared to the barren coastlands of the Persian Gulf, that in 1840, he decided to forsake Muscat and transfer his government to the island.

Omani Arabs followed him in increasing numbers, gaining a dominant hold over clove production and the world market in cloves. Clove ‘mania’, as it was called, spread to the neighbouring island of Pemba. The Omani population rose from a thousand in 1820 to five thousand in the 1840s. They became, in effect, a landowning aristocracy, headed by Seyyid Said’s Busaidi dynasty. A prominent role in mercantile trade was also played by Indian merchants — ‘banians’, as they were known. The first few adventurers had arrived in the early nineteenth century; by 1850, their numbers had reached 2,500. On the adjacent mainland, Swahili and Arab landlords opened up other plantations, using slave labour to produce grain and coconut crops.”

“In May 1899, the railhead reached mile 327 on a marshy flatland bisected by a small stream known to the Maasai as Uaso Nairobi cold water. The railhead boss, Ronald Preston, described it as ‘a bleak, swampy stretch of soppy landscape, devoid of human habitation of any sort,’ not a single tree grew there, he said, it was the resort only of thousands of wild animals of every species. However unappealing the site was, it was the last stretch of level ground that the rail route crossed before it wound its way upwards to the summit of the Kikuyu escarpment, climbing 2,000 feet over a distance of twenty-seven miles, and then plunged in steep falls more than 1,500 feet to the floor of the Rift Valley. The barren patch of land at Uaso Nairobi was consequently chosen as the nerve centre of the entire railway. It was soon covered with rows of weather-beaten tents, corrugated-iron huts and a random collection of Indian shops. Medical officers warned that it was an unhealthy locality swarming with mosquitoes. But it was eventually named as the headquarters of Britain’s East Africa Protectorate, the future Kenya.”

“The opulence of the Asante dazzled European visitors. In 1817, Thomas Bowdich, an official of the African Company of Merchants, set out from Cape Coast Castle on a mission to make contact with Osei Bonsu. After crossing the coastal plain of Fante, he entered the dense gloom of the tropical rainforest and three weeks later arrived at Kumasi, 140 miles to the north. Some 30,000 people gathered to witness his entry and to watch an exuberant welcome of martial music, gunfire and dancing.

Bowdich described Kumasi as a well-planned city with wide, named streets, carefully planted banyan trees and a distinctive style of architecture. Houses were built with high-pitched thatched roofs, projecting eaves, complicated plaster fretwork and ornaments of animals and birds; many were furnished with lavatories that were flushed with boiling water. Streets were swept every day and kept clean. The palace complex in the centre of the city covered five acres and consisted of a maze of interconnected courtyards and passages. It housed a number of administrative departments such as the treasury and the asantehene’s personal rooms and harem.”

“In December 1895, his vanguard annihilated an Italian outpost on the mountain of Amba Alagi in southern Tigray and laid siege to Makelle, forcing the Italian garrison there to surrender. Despite the setbacks, Baratier remained confident that his Eritrean forces, armed with more than fifty field guns, were more than a match for the Abyssinian hordes. Pressed by Rome to bring Menelik to heel and restore Italian prestige, he led an attack on Menelik’s army at Adwa on 1 March 1896 but was routed. By the end of the day, some 4,100 Italians were dead or missing and about 2,000 were captured, out of an original total of 8,500; in addition, some 4,000 Eritrean auxiliaries were killed or captured, out of 7,100. Menelik’s casualties were at least as high, but his army remained a fighting force. The Italians were left with shattered remnants.

In the aftermath, the Italians publicly renounced their claim to a protectorate and recognised Abyssinia as an independent sovereign state. Menelik, rather than engage in another round of debilitating warfare, allowed the Italians to keep Eritrea with the Mareb River marking the frontier. Other European states also recognised Abyssinia’s independence. By the end of the scramble for Africa, Abyssinia was the only African state in the entire continent to achieve this status.

Secure on his imperial throne and fortified by international rec-ognition, Menelik himself joined the scramble for territory, adding lands to the east, west and south that had never previously been part of Abyssinia’s empire. He extended his rule further into Oromo territory, seized Somali territory on the Ogaden plateau, and raised the Abyssinian flag as far south as the shore of Lake Turkana. Between 1896 and 1906, he doubled the size of the empire, imposing Amharic language and culture on subjugated populations. Soldier-settlers, known as neftennya, were sent to peripheral areas to ensure imperial control. Christian administrators presided as a ruling elite from fortified villages.”

“The advent of European rule at the end of the nineteenth century effectively brought to an end the long-distance traffic in African slaves which had endured for more than eleven hundred years. The scale of the trade in the nineteenth century surpassed that of all previous centuries. According to modern estimates, the transAtlantic route took 4 million slaves; the trans-Saharan route, 1.2 million; the Red Sea route, 492,000; and the east African route, 442,000. In all, 6.1 million.

Overall, between 800 and 1900, trans-Saharan slave traffic amounted to an estimated 7.2 million; Red Sea traffic, to 2.4 million; and east African traffic, to 2.9 million. Trans-Atlantic traffic between 1450 and 1900 amounted to an estimated 11.3 million. But while long-distance traffic petered out, internal slavery remained deeply embedded in many African societies, lasting long into the twentieth century.”

“The rainforests of the Congo were rich in wild rubber. It came from vines that twined around trees, reaching the forest canopy a hundred feet or more above the ground. Until the 1890s, rubber sap had little value. But the invention of the pneumatic tyre, fitted first to bicycles and then to motor cars, and the increasing use of rubber for industrial products such as electrical wiring, hoses and tubing, led to soaring demand. Leopold seized upon this new source of wealth, devouring reports of commodity prices and rubber shipments. His objective was to make as much money as possible from wild rubber before new. rubber plantations in Asia came into production, lowering the price. Harvesting wild rubber involved no cultivation or any expensive equipment. It required only labour.

Company agents, backed up by the Force Publique, resorted to increasingly brutal methods to force African villagers to collect rubber sap and transport it in baskets to company outposts. Agents were paid on commission and given quotas to fulfill. They in turn imposed quotas on villagers. Women, children and elders were held hostage with official approval until the right quantity was delivered. Villagers who fell behind were flogged, imprisoned and even shot. Villagers who resisted were killed en masse, their villages burned down. To ensure that ammunition was not wasted, company militiamen and soldiers were instructed to cut off the right hand from a corpse so that officers could keep a check on them. The collection of severed hands became a regular part of the trade. But it was not only the dead who lost their hands — the living were similarly mutilated.

The profits made from the rubber trade were enormous. In 1892, Leopold awarded a concession in the northern Free State to the Anglo-Belgian India-Rubber Company, otherwise known as Abir. Abir was given exclusive rights to exploit all forest products for a period of thirty years in an area that was four times the size of Belgium. In return, the Free State acquired a 50 per cent shareholding in the company. In 1895, the company produced 70 tons of rubber; in 1898, 410 tons; and in 1903, 951 tons. Villagers were paid trivial amounts in brass rods, salt, blankets and knives. The company’s margins were as high as 700 per cent a year.

The overall increase in rubber production was impressive. In 1890, the Congo exported 100 tons of rubber; in 1901, 6,000 tons. Leopold used this great wealth to fund a grandiose programme of public works, building palaces, pavilions and parks in Belgium, enjoying his reputation as a ‘philanthropic’ monarch. He also acquired a huge personal portfolio of properties in Brussels and on the French Riviera.

Few glimpses of how this wealth was generated reached the outside world.”

“Leopold pronounced himself to be shocked by such reports, but acknowledged that there might have been some excesses. ‘I will not allow myself to be splattered with blood or mud,’ he told a senior Free State official, ‘it is necessary that these villainies cease.’ He even appointed a six-man commission in 1896 to notify the authorities of any ‘acts of violence of which the natives may be victim’. But nothing was done to impede the rubber regime or check the abuses. It was far too profitable.

The trading activities of Leopold’s Free State, however, began to intrigue an obscure shipping company official, Edmund Morel. Morel’s work for the Liverpool shipping line Elder Dempster brought him into frequent contact with Free State officials in Brussels and Antwerp. While studying trade statistics, Morel noted how ships bringing huge consignments of rubber from the Congo returned there loaded mainly with guns and ammunition; and he concluded that Leopold’s Free State was using a system of forced labour, akin to slavery, backed up by violence, to extract fortunes from Congo rubber. ‘These figures told their own story,’ he wrote later. ‘Forced labour of a terrible and continuous kind could alone explain such unheard-of profits . . . forced labour in which the Congo Government was the immediate beneficiary; forced labour directed by the closest associates of the King himself.’ He said he was left ‘giddy and appalled’ by the significance of his discovery.

‘It must be bad enough to stumble upon a murder. I had stumbled upon a secret society of murderers with a King for a croniman.’ Morel resigned from Elder Dempster in 1901 and dedicated himself to exposing what he called the ‘Congo scandal’, tirelessly collecting evidence, delivering speeches and writing books, pamphlets and press articles. His campaign made little headway in Belgium, but in Britain he persuaded parliament to take an interest. The British government responded by instructing its consul in the Free State, Roger Casement, to investigate.

A veteran of twenty years’ working in Africa, Casement had first travelled to the Congo in 1883 and had since undertaken several assignments there, before setting up the first British consulate in Boma in 1900. The report of his journey into the interior in 1903 dealt a fatal blow to Leopold’s assertions that the Congo Free State was a place of benign colonial rule.

For more than three months, Casement travelled in a single-deck steam launch along the Congo River and its tributaries, stopping at outposts along the way to interview missionaries and villagers about conditions in Abir territory and Leopold’s own vast Domaine de la Couronne, amassing a wealth of detail about how the rubber regime worked on the ground. Witness after witness testified to the brutality of the system:

From our country each village had to take 20 loads of rubber. These loads were big . . . We had to take these loads in 4 times a month . .. We got no pay. We got nothing. … Our village got cloth and a little salt, but not the people who did the work . . . It used to take 10 days to get the 20 baskets of rubber — we were always in the forest to find the rubber vines, to go without food, and our women had to give up cultivating the fields and gardens. Then we starved. Wild beasts — the leopards — killed some of us while we were working away in the forest and others got lost or died from exposure or starvation and we begged the white man to leave us alone, saying we could get no more rubber, but the white men and their soldiers said: Go. You are only beasts yourselves. You are only Nyama [meat]. We tried, always going further into the forest, and when we failed and our rubber was short, the soldiers came to our towns and killed us. Many were shot, some had their ears cut off; others were tied up with ropes around their necks and bodies and taken away. The white men at the posts sometimes did not know of the bad things the soldiers did to us, but it was the white men who sent the soldiers to punish us for not bringing in enough rubber.

Casement returned to the coast with tales of burned villages, severed hands, mass murder and refugee populations fleeing terror. What particularly struck him was the scale of depopulation. At Bolobo mission station, on the Congo River, he was told that a population once numbering 40,000 had been reduced to 1,000.

Casement’s report was published in early 1904. Morel used it to further his campaign, producing a book entitled King Leopold’s Rule in Africa. The book was published in 1904 along with photographs of victims who had been mutilated. One showed a man named Nsala, a villager from Wala district, looking forlornly at a severed hand and foot. It was all that remained of his five-year-old daughter, who had been killed, then eaten, by Abir militiamen.

As public furor mounted, Leopold sought to fend off criticism by appointing a commission of inquiry, fully expecting it to provide a ringing endorsement of his rule. But after an extensive tour of the Congo, the commission came to a verdict similar to that of Casement and Morel. A Punch cartoon in 1906 depicted Leopold as a serpent whose rubber coils were crushing the life out of the people of the Congo. Demands that Leopold hand over his private empire to the Belgian state gathered momentum.

For several years more, Leopold tried to maintain his grip. ‘My rights over the Congo cannot be shared,’ he declared in 1906. Negotiations dragged on until 1908 when he finally agreed to give way in return for substantial sums of public money.

By the end of his twenty-year reign as ‘King-Sovereign,’ Leopold had become one of the richest men in Europe. But the Congo had lost several million people, possibly as many as ten million, half of the estimated population. In an essay on exploration, Joseph Conrad described the activities of Leopold’s Congo Free State as ‘the vilest scramble for loot that ever disgured the history of human conscience’.”

“By the end of 1887, sixty-eight gold-mining companies had been incorporated with a nominal capital of £3 million. In 1888, in an orgy of speculation, some 450 gold-mining companies were floated. More substantial buildings appeared. Johannesburg became, above all, a city of money. But its origins as a mining camp were never far away. The din of stamp batteries crushing gold ore persisted throughout the night and on windy days clouds of yellow dust from nearby ore dumps swirled through the streets.

By 1896, after only a decade’s existence, Johannesburg’s population had reached 100,000. Wealthy whites congregated on the northern outskirts, over the crest of the ridge, living in luxury houses with views stretching away to the Magaliesberg hills, protected from the noise and dust of the mine workings by northerly winds which blew it all southwards. But most white miners and other employees lived in boarding houses in working-class districts close to the mines, frequenting the bars and brothels set up there. Two-thirds of the foreign white population — witlanders, as the Transvaal’s Boers called them — consisted of single men. Black mineworkers were confined to compounds, as in Kimberley.”

“A correspondent for the London Times, Flora Shaw, visiting Johannesburg in 1892, said she was repelled by its brash character. ‘It is hideous and detestable, luxury without order, sensual enjoyment without art, riches without refinement, display without dignity. Everything in fact which is most foreign to the principles alike of morality and taste by which decent life has been guided in every state of civilisation.’”

“It turned into the costliest, bloodiest and most humiliating war that Britain had waged in nearly a century. From the outset, the British campaign suffered one military defeat after another. It took a British expeditionary army eight months to reach Johannesburg and Pretoria and another two years before the war was finally over. Having lost control of the towns, the Boer armies of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State resorted to guerrilla warfare, sabotaging railway lines, ambushing supply columns, destroying bridges, severing telegraph wires and raiding depots, running rings around British forces with hit-and-run tactics.

Ill-prepared for this kind of war, British military commanders resorted to scorched-earth tactics, destroying thousands of farm-steads, razing villages to the ground and slaughtering livestock on such a scale that by the end of the war the Boers of the Orange Free State had lost half their herds, those in the Transvaal three-quarters. Reporting back to London in a dispatch in 1901, Milner described the Orange Free State as ‘virtually a desert’. To make sure that captured burghers would not fight again, the British deported thousands to prison camps overseas. Women and children were rounded up and placed in what the British called concentration camps, where conditions were so appalling that some 26,000 died there from disease and malnutrition, most of them under the age of sixteen. In London, an opposition politician, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, accused Britain in its conduct of the war of employing ‘methods of barbarism’. All this became part of a Boer heritage passed in anger from one generation to the next. The war formally ended on 31 May 1902 when Boer generals agreed to a peace treaty that consigned the Transvaal and the Orange Free State to become colonies of the British empire. But many Boers mourned the loss of their republics.

In the words of Rudyard Kipling, Britain’s poet of empire, the war taught the British ‘no end of a lesson.’ It had required the deployment of 450,000 imperial troops and cost the British exchequer £217 million, far beyond the original estimate of €10 million. The British military lost 22,000 dead — two-thirds of them from disease and illness. Only five years later, the British government concluded that self-government might be a better option for its two Boer colonies. By 1907, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State were again self-governing under the control of defeated Boer generals who had signed the terms of surrender. Britain next decided to amalgamate its four colonies into a Union of South Africa in the hope that the Boers and the British might find a way of resolving their differences and merge into a single South African nation.

The black population fared badly out of this arrangement. After a hundred years of wars and clashes against the British and the Boers, all the African chiefdoms lying within South Africa had succumbed to white rule. Most of their land had been lost through conquest and settlement. During the Anglo-Boer war, some 116,000 Africans were caught up in the sweeps carried out by British military commanders to ‘scour’ rural districts of all means of support for Boer guerrillas and sent to their own concentration camps where some 14,000 died, most of them children. In the aftermath of the war, African leaders had confidently expected that British rule would lead to improved political rights for the black population. But Britain’s priority was to facilitate reconciliation between the Boers and the British which meant ignoring African demands. Africans were excluded from negotiations leading to the founding of the Union of South Africa and denied political rights under its proposed constitution. An African delegation went to London to make representations, protesting at what they regarded as Britain’s betrayal of their interests, but to no avail.

The Union of South Africa was launched in 1910 with much good will. But fear and resentment of British domination ran deep in the two Boer colonies. The war had destroyed much that could not be reconstructed and reduced most of the Boer population there to an impoverished rural people. A growing number drifted to the towns, hoping to find work. But the towns were the citadels of British commerce and culture where Boers from the platteland, possessing no skills or education, found themselves scored and despised for their poverty, their country ways and their language.

Out of the maelstrom of degradation came a virulent form of Atri-kaner nationalism that eventually took hold of South Africa.”

“As von Trotha assembled a huge colonial army — some 6,000 men, more than the number of settlers in the colony — Maherero retreated to the Waterberg, a mountain range on the edge of the dry wilderness known to the Herero as the Omaheke. He took with him some 50,000 followers, two-thirds of the Herero population. His options were limited. Herero attacks on white settlers had long since ended. Some Herero sub-chiefs favoured negotiations.

But von Trotha was scornful of the idea of negotiations and rejected Herero approaches. His plan was not just to defeat the Herero but to annihilate them. In August 1904, his troops encircled Herero encampments in the Waterberg. Under fire, desperate to escape, the Herero found a weak link in the German cordon. Thousands of men, women and children broke through to the waterless Omaheke, fleeing with whatever possessions they could carry. To prevent their return, von Trotha sealed off waterholes, set up patrols, erected guard posts along the perimeter of the desert and then issued a Vernichtungsbefehl or extermination order.

I, the Great General of the German soldiers, address this letter to the Herero people. The Herero are no longer considered German subjects. They have murdered, stolen, cut off ears and other parts from wounded soldiers, and now refuse to fight on, out of cowardice. I have this to say to them . .. the Herero people will have to leave the country. Otherwise I shall force them to do so by means of guns. Within the German boundaries, every Herero, whether found armed or unarmed, with or without cattle, will be shot. I shall not accept any more women or children. I shall drive them back to their people — otherwise I shall order shots to be fired at them.

With a large part of the Herero population trapped in the desert, many dying there of exhaustion and thirst, von Trotha set about rounding up groups still left in Hereroland. German troops were formed into what became known as Cleansing Patrols — Aufklärungspatrouillen — and given orders to shoot on sight if neces-sary. Many Herero were tricked into surrendering with assurances that it was safe for them to return from the bush and then killed. Those who survived were taken to Konzentrationslagers and forced to work as labourers. A German missionary, describing conditions in the Swakopmund camp, one of five main camps, wrote in the Swakopmund Missionary Chronicle in December 1905:

From early morning until late at night, on weekends as well as on Sundays and holidays, they had to work under the clubs of the raw overseers until they broke down. Added to this, food was extremely scarce . .. Like cattle, hundreds were driven to death and like cattle they were buried.

By the end of 1905, only 15,000 Herero were left alive in German South-West Africa out of a previous population of 80,000. Some 2,000 others managed to cross the Omaheke and the Kalahari to seek safety in British Bechuanaland.

The shockwaves from the brutal suppression of the Herero people spread southwards to Namaland. In October 1904, Hendrik Witbooi and other Nama kapiteins joined the uprising, fearing they would be next under attack. For twelve months they fought a debilitating guerrilla war against the Germans, but after Witbooi’s death in October 1905, Nama resistance faded. Like the Herero, Nama clans who surrendered were herded into concentration camps. The mortality rate in one of the camps — a windswept island lying off the harbour at Lüderitzbucht (Angra Pequena) — was so high that German officials referred to it as ‘Death Island’. Out of a previous Nama population of about 20,000, only about half survived.

In December 1905, Kaiser Wilhelm formally expropriated all Herero land. In May 1907, he issued a similar decree expropriating almost all Nama land, leaving aside only a few pockets in Nama hands. In all, the German government took possession of more than 100 million acres of land previously held by Nama, Herero, Damara and San peoples, handing it out to German settlers.”

The 20th Century

“By the time the scramble for Africa was over, some 10,000 African polities had been amalgamated into 40 European colonies and protectorates. The boundaries of the new states, drawn up by negotiators in Europe using maps that were largely inaccurate, took little account of the existing mosaic of monarchies, chiefdoms and acephalous societies on the ground. Nearly half of the new frontiers were geometric lines, lines of latitude and longitude or other straight lines. In some cases, African societies were rent apart: the Bakongo were partitioned between Belgian Congo, French Congo and Portuguese Angola. In other cases, Europe’s colonial territories enclosed an assortment of disparate groups: in 1914, Britain joined together its northern and southern protectorates in Nigeria, creating a new country in which 300 different languages were spoken.

Having expended so much effort on acquiring African territory, Europe’s colonial powers then lost much of their earlier interest. Few parts of Africa offered the prospect of immediate wealth. Colonial governments were concerned above all to make their territories self-supporting. Their remit was limited to maintaining law and order, raising taxation and providing an infrastructure of roads and railways. Economic activity was left to commercial companies. Education was placed in the hands of missionaries.

Under colonial rule, Islam too expanded rapidly across large parts of west Africa. By allowing Muslim emirs to rule northern Nigeria in accordance with Islamic traditions of law and discipline, Britain conferred a stamp of legitimacy on Muslim leadership and Islamic governance and culture. Muslim clerics were able to proselytize in non-Muslim areas of the north hitherto inaccessible to them as a result of warfare or banditry, and to establish Koranic schools and brotherhoods there. The French, having spent years seeking to smash Muslim resistance to their advances in west Africa, were more distrustful of Muslim ambitions, but soon came to terms with the Murid brotherhood of Senegal when they proved to be a vital factor in boosting groundnut production. The redirection of trade away from traditional northern routes towards the coastal zones of west Africa stimulated further expansion. Islam took root in Yorubaland and in major ports such as Lagos, Dakar and Accra. Whereas Christianity was often seen as ‘the white man’s religion’, Islam presented itself as an African religion. Compared to the heavy demands made by Christian missionaries on their recruits, in particular their insistence on an end to customary practices such as polygamy, converting to Islam involved few obstacles. In west Africa, Islam made far greater progress than Christianity.”

“From the outset of the First World War, colonial powers sought to occupy the territory of their rivals, using African troops to fight on their behalf on opposing sides. The first ‘British’ shot of the whole war was fired by a Gold Coast sergeant in August 1914 when British forces, in liaison with the French, invaded the small German colony of Togo. The German governor of Togo tried to forestall the invasion by suggesting by telegram that Togo should remain neutral so that Africans would not witness the spectacle of war between Europeans, but to no avail. By the end of August Togo was in Allied hands.

The Anglo-French campaign to take over German Kamerun proved to be a more arduous task. In August, the British sent in troops from the Gambia, Sierra Leone, Gold Coast and Ni-geria; French columns advanced from French Equatorial Africa. But it was not until February 1916 that the last German outpost capitulated. Germany’s colony in South-West Africa meanwhile was overrun after a three-month campaign launched by an expeditionary army from South Africa. In east Africa, German forces under the command of General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck fought on until November 1918, using guerrilla tactics to keep the British and their allies at bay, surrendering only when hearing of the armistice in Europe.

The impact of the war on several African territories was profound. Colonial powers recruited or conscripted more than two million Africans as soldiers, porters or labourers. In French West Africa, chiefs were given quotas to fill. The French used troops not only for operations in Africa but in Europe. Around 150,000 Africans served on the Western Front in France and Belgium; some 30,000 were killed in action there. One regiment from Morocco became the most highly decorated regiment in the whole of the French army.”

“Tanganyika was handed over to Britain; South-West Africa to South Africa; the tiny highland kingdoms of Ruanda and Urundi (Rwanda and Burundi) were passed to Belgium; and Togo and Cameroon were divided up between Britain and France. As a reward for Italian support in the First World War, Britain gave Jubaland to Italy to form part of Italian Somalia, moving the border of Kenya westwards. Britain also took control of Dar Fur, an independent sultanate which had sided with the Ottomans, incorporating it into colonial Sudan.

Once the new colonial dispensation had been put in place, Africa resumed its role as an imperial backwater. The pace of development was slow. Colonial powers saw no need for more rapid progress. Colonial rule was expected to last for hundreds of years.”

“In the two ancient kingdoms of Rwanda and Burundi, administered first by the Germans and then the Belgians as a single colony called Ruanda-Urundi, the process of tribal identification was taken a stage further. Both kingdoms were occupied by a Hutu majority and a Tutsi minority, speaking the same language, sharing the same customs and living intermingled on the same hillsides. In the pre-colonial era, the royal elite, chiefs and aristocracy of the Tutsi, a cattle-owning people, had established themselves as a feudal ruling class over the Hutu who were predominantly agriculturists. But Hutu and Tutsi alike moved from one group to the other. Some Hutu were wealthy in cattle; some Tutsi farmed. Generations of intermarriage, migration and occupational change had blurred the distinction. German officials in the early 1900s, however, identified Hutu and Tutsi as discrete ethnic groups. With few staff of their own on the ground, they relied on the Tutsi as the ruling aristocracy to enforce control, enabling them to extend their hegemony over the Hutu. The Belgians went further. In the 1920s, they introduced a system of identity cards specifying the tribe to which a holder belonged. The identity cards made it virtually impossible for Hutus to become Tutsis. Belgian authorities also established a Tutsi bureaucracy, used Tutsi chiefs to keep order and gave preference to Tutsi education. Primary schools were segregated. By the late 1930s, the Belgians had made tribal identity the defining feature of ordinary life in both Rwanda and Burundi.

Missionary endeavour aided the process of tribal identifica-tion. When transcribing hitherto unwritten languages into written form, missionaries reduced Africa’s innumerable dialects to fewer written languages, each helping to define a tribe. The effect was to establish new frontiers of linguistic groups. Yoruba, Igbo, Ewe, Shona and many others were formed in this way. Missionaries were also active in documenting local customs and traditions and in compiling tribal histories, which were then incorporated into the curricula of their mission schools, spreading the notion of tribal identity.”

Independence

“In 1945 there were four independent states in Africa: Egypt, nominally independent, headed by a corrupt monarch, but subject to British political interference and obliged by treaty to accept the presence of British military forces; Ethiopia, a feudal empire newly restored to Haile Selassie after five years of Italian occupation; the decaying republic of Liberia, little more than a fiefdom f the American Firestone Company which owned its rubber plantations; and the Union of South Africa, the richest state in Africa, holder of the world’s largest deposits of gold, given independence in 1910 under white minority rule. The rest were the preserve of European powers, all confident about the importance of their imperial mission.”

“Unlike the British, the French regarded their colonies not as separate entities but as integral parts of France, allowing them to send representatives to the French parliament in Paris. In Senegal, the most advanced of France’s colonies in L’Afrique Noire, black residents in four old coastal towns had exercised the right to elect a representative to the French parliament since the nineteenth century. The first African deputy elected from Senegal arrived in Paris in 1914 and rapidly rose to the rank of junior minister. Outside Senegal, in the fourteen other French colonies, no organised political activity had been permitted. But in the winter of 1945, as some six hundred delegates arrived in Paris to devise a new constitution for the Fourth Republic, they included a group of nine from L’Afrique Noire.

In conducting their ‘civilising mission’ in Africa, the French had been highly successful in absorbing the small black elite that emerged from their colonies. In outlook, they saw themselves, and were seen, as Frenchmen, brought up in a tradition of loyalty to France, willingly accepting its government and culture, and taking a certain pride in being citizens of a world power. As their main aim they hoped to secure for Africans the same rights and privileges enjoyed by metropolitan Frenchmen. No one dreamed of independence. Not once at the Constituent Assembly was any voice raised in favour of breaking up the empire. ‘Our programme,’ said a delegate from Senegal, ‘can be summarised in a very simple formula: a single category of Frenchmen, having exactly the same rights since all are subject to the same duties, including dying for the same country.’

Under the Fourth Republic, Africans made considerable gains. In the Paris Chamber, black Africa was represented in all by twenty-four deputies. At home, local assemblies were established for each territory, and federal assemblies for the two main regions of French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa. For the first time, political activity flourished throughout France’s African empire. Social and economic reforms were also introduced, in accordance with de Gaulle’s promise.

However much these measures benefited French Africa, the central purpose of the Union Française, as the post-war empire was called, was still to bind the colonies tightly to metropolitan France. French politicians were tacitly agreed that too much power given to colonial subjects in Paris or in the colonies might threaten the government or weaken the empire. By virtue of their numbers, the colonies were ultimately in a position to swamp metropolitan France — if the principle of equal rights for all citizens embodied in the constitution of the Fourth Republic was followed through to its logical conclusion. The fear that France might eventually become a ‘colony of her colonies’ helped to ensure that only a cautious pace of political progress was pursued.

In the dual system of voting adopted in black Africa, far greater weight was attached to the votes of metropolitan Frenchmen than to the votes of Africans. The territorial assemblies set up in Africa were given limited scope. Real power still lay with officials at the Rue Oudinot, the Ministry of France d’Outre-Mer, and with local French administrations. Most of the political parties that emerged in black Africa at the beginning of the Fourth Republic were sponsored by French officials determined that their own approved candidates were elected to national and local assemblies.

Algeria under the Fourth Republic was treated differently to all other French territories. As before, the three northern départements, Algiers, Constantine and Oran, where most of the European population lived, were considered to be part of France itself, having the same status as départements in mainland France. The towns of Algeria possessed an unmistakable French character. Algiers, cradled in steep hills dotted with red-tiled villas overlooking one of the most spectacular bays in the Mediterranean, seemed just like a Riviera resort. Its broad boulevards and avenues were lined with expensive shops, kiosks, trottoir cafés and bookshops; along the waterfront stood grand, arcaded buildings housing banks and mercantile companies. A third of the population in Algiers was white.

After 115 years of la présence française in Algeria, French colons — or pieds-noirs, as they were called — had achieved a total grip on political power, commerce, agriculture and employment, effectively relegating the majority Muslim population — Arab and Kabyle — to a subservient status and stubbornly resisting all attempts at change. Both groups sent deputies to the National Assembly in Paris, but Muslims numbering eight million were allocated no more than fifteen seats, the same as for the one million pieds-noirs. In Algeria itself, the local assembly was effectively subject to the control of the French administration. Elections were blatantly rigged to ensure that amenable Muslim candidates — ‘Beni-Oui-Our’, as government collaborators were known derisively — won their seats. The upper echelons of the administration were virtually an exclusive French preserve: of 864 higher administrative posts, no more than eight were held by Muslims. In rural areas, a thin layer of 250 administrators ruled over four million Muslims.

The gulf between the two communities was huge. The vast majority of indigènes were illiterate, poor and unemployed. Their numbers were fast growing. In fifty years the Algerian population had nearly doubled, prompting fears among pieds-noirs that they were in danger of being ‘swamped’. In urban areas, most lived in wretched bidonvilles — tin-can slums — on the outskirts of towns.

Algiers was surrounded by more than a hundred bidonvilles, built on wasteland and demolition sites and in the ravines that ran down to the sea. In the Casbah, the old fortress-palace of Algiers, some 80,000 Muslims were packed into an area of one square kilometre, an Arab town embedded in a European city. There were limited job prospects for Muslims; preference was usually given to petits-blancs. Nearly two-thirds of the rural population was officially classified as ‘destitute.’”

“As the poorest country in Europe, Portugal could not afford to expend much effort on developing its African empire. Portugal’s dictator, António de Oliveira Salazar, liked to boast about Portugal’s role as ‘a great colonial power’ and to remind the public of its ‘civilising mission’ in Africa dating back 400 years. But in reality, Angola and Mozambique (Portuguese East Africa) were backward colonies, starved of funds and used as a dumping ground for thousands of poor illiterate peasants and unskilled labourers desperate to escape from poverty in Portugal. When the first overall development plans for Angola and Mozambique were launched in 1953, they included nothing for education and social services. Salazar’s dictatorship was as repressive in the colonies as in metropolitan Portugal. Political activity was tightly controlled; critics and dissidents of any kind were dealt with ruthlessly; anyone suspected of agitation was either imprisoned or sent to a penal colony or into exile.

Seen from Lisbon, the main function of the African population was to provide labour and pay taxes, and in the post-war era, officials at the Ministrio das Colónias saw no reason for any change. For six months every year, African men were conscripted to work for the government or for private employers, on plantations, on roads, on mines, sometimes hundreds of miles from their homes, unless they could prove they were otherwise gainfully employed. The conditions in which they were forced to live were often wretched, made worse at times by corrupt officials and employers who openly flouted the law. Practices such as the use of child labour, wage frauds, corporal punishment and bribery were well known in Lisbon, but little effort was made to rectify them. In 1947, a senior official in the colonial administration, Henrique Galvão, reported to the National Assembly in Lisbon on the damage caused by government policies. Whole areas of Angola and Mozambique, he warned, were being depopulated as African men crossed the borders to neighbouring territories in search of a better life.”

“Eritrea was also placed provisionally under the control of a British military administration, but its future, given to the United Nations to decide, proved difficult to resolve. Ethiopia, as Abyssinia was called in the post-war era, laid claim to Eritrea on the grounds that historically the territory, or parts of it, had previously belonged to the empire. For strategic reasons, too, Haile Selassie was keen to gain control over the Eritrean ports of Assab and Massawa to give Ethiopia direct access to the outside world.

The Eritreans themselves, numbering about three million, were divided over the issue. The Christian half of the population, mostly Tigrayans who inhabited the highlands surrounding the capital, Asmara, tended to support unification with Ethiopia, with which they had religious and ethnic ties. The Muslim half of the population, also found in the highlands but mainly occupying the harsh desert region along the Red Sea coast and the western low-lands, tended to favour independence.

As a compromise, the UN devised a form of federation under which the Ethiopian government was given control of foreign affairs, defence, finance, commerce and ports, while Eritrea was allowed its own elected government and assembly. Eritrea was also permitted to have its own flag and official languages, Tigrinya and Arabic.”

“In 1946, the British army withdrew from its command post in the Citadel and from other bases around Cairo and Alexandria and concentrated its forces in the Suez Canal zone. During the war it had become the largest overseas military base in the world — a huge complex of dockyards, airfields, warehouses and barracks that stretched along the Suez Canal for two-thirds of its length and covered more than 9,000 square miles. The area included three major cities — Port Said, Ismailia and Suez — where one million Egyptians lived. In the post-war era, Britain’s military chiefs regarded the Canal zone, with its dominant position at the crossroads of Europe, Asia and Africa, as an indispensable part of their global interests. Some 80,000 troops were stationed there.

But Britain’s continued presence in the Canal zone became a festering sore for the Egyptians. What was especially aggravating was that under the terms of the 1936 treaty, the British were supposed to restrict their Suez garrison to no more than 10,000 men.”

“Little was known about the group of officers who had taken control. But in historical terms, the changes wrought by the army coup in 1952 were revolutionary. It not only brought an end to the 140-year-old Turkish dynasty founded by Farouk’s great-great-grandfather; it meant that for the first time since the Persian conquest twenty-five centuries before, Egypt was ruled by native Egyptians.

The Free Officers initially claimed that their objectives were limited to ridding Egypt of the old corrupt elite and introducing reforms to break up their large landholdings. But they soon began to entrench themselves in power, laying the foundations of an army dictatorship. With Nasser as chairman, a Revolutionary Command Council abolished the monarchy and set up a republic.”

“In negotiations over the future of Sudan, Nasser initially hoped to press Egypt’s claim to full control. But Britain, aware of the rising tide of Sudanese nationalism, insisted on the right of the Sudanese to decide their own future. Nasser eventually accepted the need for self-determination, expecting that, when the time came, the Sudanese would favour linking up with Egypt. In February 1953, he reached an agreement that allowed Sudan a three-year period of internal self-government; the Sudanese would then decide whether they wanted a union with Egypt or full independence.

The rapid pace of change carried inherent dangers. Sudan was a country of two halves, governed for most of the colonial era by two separate British administrations, one which dealt with the relatively advanced north, the other with the remote and backward provinces of the south. The two halves were different in every way: the north was hot, dry, partly desert, inhabited by Arabic-speaking Muslims who accounted for three-quarters of the population; the south was green, fertile, with a high rainfall, populated by diverse black tribes, speaking a multitude of languages, adhering mostly to traditional religions but including a small Christian minority that had graduated from mission schools. Historical links between the north and the south provided a source of friction. In the south, the northern plunder for slaves and ivory in the nineteenth century had left a legacy of bitterness and hatred towards the north. Northerners still tended to treat southerners as contemptuously as they had done in the past, referring to them as abid — slaves.

Only in 1946, when ample time still seemed to be available, did the British begin the process of integration, hoping that the north and the south would eventually form an equal partnership. From the outset, southern politicians expressed fears that northerners, because of their greater experience and sophistication, would soon dominate and exploit the south. The south was ill-prepared for self-government. There were no organised political parties there until 1953. When negotiations over self-government for Sudan were conducted in 1953, southerners were neither represented nor consulted. Southern anxiety about northern domination grew when new civil service appointments, replacing British officials with Sudanese, were made in 1954. Out of a total of some 800 senior posts, only six were awarded to southerners.

The presence of northern administrators in the south, often abusive in their dealings with the local population, soon rekindled old resentments. In August 1955, southern troops in Equatoria mutinied against northern officers; northern officials and traders were hunted down and several hundred were killed. When Sudan voted for independence on 1 January 1956, the occasion was greeted with jubilation by northerners but apprehension and fear in the south.”

“Britain finally pronounced a date for independence: 6 March 1957.

It was a date that marked the beginning of a new era for Africa. The advent of independence for Ghana, as the new state was called, was seen as a portent, watched and admired around the world. No other event in Africa had previously attracted such attention. Independent Ghana stood out as a symbol of freedom that other colonies wished to attain. No other African state was launched with so much promise for the future. Ghana embarked on independence as one of the richest tropical countries in the world, with an efficient civil service, an impartial judiciary and a prosperous middle class. Its parliament was well established, with able politicians in government and in opposition. Nkrumah, himself, then only forty-seven years old, was regarded as a leader of outstanding ability, popularly elected, with six years of experience of running a government. Ghana’s economic prospects were equally propitious.”

“Although amalgamating northern and southern Nigeria in 1914, the British had continued to treat the North as a distinct and separate entity. Comprising three-quarters of Nigeria’s territory with more than half of its population, it was largely Muslim and Hausa-speaking, accustomed to a feudal system of government run by the Fulani ruling class. Few traces of the modern world — in education or economic life — had been allowed to intrude. By 1950 there was only one northern university graduate — a Zaria Fulani convert to Christianity. Both Hausa and Fulani looked disdainfully on the peoples of the South. Southerners who migrated to the North were obliged to live in segregated housing and to educate their children in separate schools.”

“Rather than face a contagion of wars in the Maghreb, the French government decided to rearrange its priorities. Morocco and Tunisia were ultimately dispensable. Algeria, the centre of French interests and investment, considered as much a part of France as the mainland itself, would be held at all costs. In 1955, Ben Youssef returned from exile to popular acclaim in Morocco, duly recognised by the French government as His Majesty Mohammed V; and Bourguiba was released to lead an interim government in Tunisia. In March 1956, Morocco gained independence as a united kingdom; and Tunisia became an independent republic. For Algeria, six more years of terrible civil war lay ahead.

While France’s hold over the Maghreb was disintegrating, the rest of its African empire — L’Afrique Noire — remained staunchly loyal to the Union Française.”

“Guinea defied de Gaulle. The young Guinean leader, Ahmed Sékou Tour, a trade unionist, campaigned vigorously for a ‘No’ vote, describing de Gaulle’s offer as blackmail. Four days after the vote, Guinea was proclaimed an independent republic.

De Gaulle’s reaction was swift and vindictive. Ignoring polite overtures from Touré, he terminated all French aid. French civil servants and army units, including army doctors responsible for providing health services to the civilian population, were withdrawn. In a mass exodus, some 3,000 administrators, teachers, engineers, technicians and businessmen left the country. They took with them any French government property they could carry and destroyed what had to be left behind. Government files and records were burned; offices were stripped of furniture and telephones, even of their electric light bulbs. Army doctors took away medical supplies; police officers smashed windows in their barracks. When Toure moved into the former governor’s residence, he found that the furniture and pictures had been removed and the crockery wrecked. Cast into isolation, Tour turned to the Soviet Union and other communist countries for assistance.

De Gaulle’s Franco-Àfrican Community survived for less than two years. Other African leaders began to press for independence. De Gaulle at first resisted the demands, but he came to recognise that independence was, as he said, ‘a sort of elementary psychological disposition’. In 1960, the eleven members of the Franco-African Community were launched as independent states: Dahomey (later Benin); Niger; Upper Volta (later Burkina Faso); Côte d’Ivoire; Chad, the Central African Republic; the French Congo (Brazzaville); Gabon; Senegal; Mali; and Mauritania. Two other territories, Cameroon and Togo, administered by France under a United Nations mandate, were also given independence. Other than Côte d’Ivoire, not one of these states was economically viable. Chad, Niger and Mali were landlocked, mostly desert, thinly populated and desperately poor. Mauritania consisted of no more than desert inhabited by nomads which until 1954 had been ruled from the Senegalese city of Saint Louis. Even Senegal, the second wealthiest country in L’Afrique Noire, relied heavily on French subsidies.

To ensure that the new states survived and that French interests there were protected, de Gaulle adopted a benevolent approach, signing agreements to cover a wide range of financial and technical assistance. France supplied presidential aides, military advisers and civil servants to staff government ministries. The French treasury supported a monetary union, underwriting a stable and convertible currency.

Indeed, many of the changes that occurred were no more than ceremonial. The new states were run by elite groups long accustomed to collaborating with the French and well attuned to French systems of management and culture. Their ambitions above all lay in accumulating positions of power, wealth and status now accessible as colonial rule came to an end.”

“In its final stages, the war in Algeria became a cauldron of terror and counter-terror carried out ruthlessly by both sides. By March 1962, one million Algerians, 18,000 French troops and 10,000 pieds-noirs had died. Exhausted by the violence, de Gaulle reached a deal with the FLN agreeing to Algeria’s independence, telling the cabinet it represented ‘an honourable exit’. But in a last paroxysm of violence, white extremists took revenge on the Muslim population, bombing and murdering at random, destroying schools, libraries and hospital facilities, attacking florists’ stalls and grocery shops, determined to leave behind nothing more than ‘scorched earth’. Whatever slim chance of reconciliation between pieds-noirs and Algerians there had been was snuffed out.

In the mass exodus that followed, more than a million pieds-noirs fled to France, many leaving with no more than what they could carry in suitcases. Farms, homes and livelihoods were abandoned en masse. After 132 years of la présence française, French rule ended in chaos and confusion, leaving Algeria in the hands of a revolutionary government.”

“As the demands of Congolese nationalists became ever more insistent, they improvised with reforms, hoping to stem the tide. Finally, fearing the possibility of a colonial war, they simply handed over power as rapidly as they could.

The speed with which Belgium agreed to Congolese demands for independence in 1960 was based on a gamble known as le pari Congolais — the Congo Bet. Because of Belgium’s determination to insulate the Congo from political activity, no Congolese had acquired any experience of government or parliamentary life. No national or even provincial elections had ever been held. Only in 1957 had the Belgians permitted Congolese to take part in municipal elections in principal towns. The lack of skilled personnel was acute. In the top ranks of the civil service no more than three Congolese out of an establishment of 1,400 held posts and two of those were recent appointments. By 1960 the sum total of university graduates was thirty. Indeed, the largest complement of trained manpower was priests: of those there were more than six hundred. At the end of the 1959–60 academic year, only 136 students completed secondary education. There were no Congolese doctors, no secondary school teachers, no army.”

“Death rates for children were the highest in the world; life expectancy, at thirty-nine years on average, was the lowest in the world.

The shortage of skilled manpower was acute. Most African societies were predominantly illiterate and innumerate. Only 16 per cent of the adult population was literate. In black Africa in the late 1950s, at the beginning of the independence era, the entire region containing a population of about 200 million produced only 8,000 secondary school graduates, and nearly half of those came from two countries, Ghana and Nigeria. Few new states had more than two hundred students in university training.”

“In former French colonies, there were no universities at all. At primary level, only about a third of the student-age population attended school.”

“In their quest for control, many African leaders insisted on the need for one-party rule. New states facing so many challenges, it was said, needed strong governments which were best served by concentrating authority with a single, nationwide party. Only a disciplined mass party, centrally directed, was an effective means to overcome ethnic and tribal divisions, to inspire a sense of nationhood and to mobilise the population for economic develop-ment. Multi-party politics, it was argued, usually deteriorated into a competition between tribal blocs and alliances.”

“Another threat to the empire came from Eritrea. Through a mixture of patronage, devious manoeuvres and intimidation, Haile Selassie managed to incorporate Eritrea into the empire in 1962, treating it in the same autocratic manner as the other thirteen provinces of the empire. Various advantages that Eritreans had enjoyed in the post-war era — political rights, trade unions, an independent press — were whittled away. Amharic replaced Tigrinya and Arabic as the official language. Amhara officials were awarded senior posts in the administration. The principle of parity between Christians and Muslims, once carefully observed, was abandoned. The result was a guerrilla war which eventually required a whole division of Haile Selassie’s troops to contain. The brutal methods of repression that the Ethiopians employed to hold on to Eritrea, burning and bombing villages and inflicting reprisals on the civilian population, served only to alienate increasing numbers of Eritreans, Christians as well as Muslims, and fan the flames of Eritrean nationalism.

Encumbered by Haile Selassie’s growing infirmity, Ethiopia drifted along in a state of paralysis. Government ministers and leading aristocrats recognised that the system of government was far too archaic to suit the modern needs of Ethiopia, but, afraid of displeasing the emperor, they took no initiative. When drought and famine afflicted the province of Wollo in 1973, claiming the lives of tens of thousands of peasants, the government, though aware of the disaster, made little attempt to alleviate it. Nor did it seek help from international agencies, for fear of damaging the country’s reputation.”

“As Uganda sank deeper into disarray, with soaring prices and consumer shortages, Amin turned vindictively on Uganda’s Asian community. A wealthy immigrant minority, Asians controlled much of the country’s trade and industry and were widely disliked. In 1972, Amin ordered the expulsion of all Asian families with British nationality, handing out their shops, businesses and properties to his cronies in the army. In the general exodus of Asians that followed — some 50,000 left in all — Uganda lost a large proportion of its doctors, dentists, veterinarians, professors and technicians.”

“Agriculture, meanwhile, suffered from decades of neglect. It was Africa’s principal economic sector, providing a living for four out of every five people. Yet African leaders regarded it as useful primarily as a lucrative source of revenue. Using their power over state marketing boards, they paid farmers for their export crops a fraction of what they received on world markets, pocketing the profits. In some cases, cocoa producers in Ghana and sisal producers in Tanzania, for example, farmers were not paid enough even to cover their own costs of production. A study completed in 1981 showed that rice growers in Mali were paid by the government 63 francs for a kilo of rice that cost them 80 francs to produce.”

“A socialist experiment in agriculture, carried out by Julius Nyerere in Tanzania, proved equally disastrous. It involved uprooting scattered rural populations and placing them in large communal ujamaa villages where basic services such as schools and clinics would be available. The ujamaa campaign was intended to be voluntary, but when local communities showed no enthusiasm for participating in it, Nyerere ordered the compulsory resettlement of the entire rural population. Between 1973 and 1977, some 11 million people were herded into new villages in what amounted to the largest mass movement in Africa’s history; many had to be coerced into leaving their ancestral homes. The disruption caused by Nyerere’s ‘villagisation’ programme nearly led to catastrophe. Food production fell dramatically, raising the spectre of famine. Instead of self-sufficiency, Tanzania became dependent for survival on foreign handouts of food.”

“The overall results for agriculture, however, showed most of Africa in a parlous position. Food production failed to keep pace with rapid population growth. Between 1960 and 1990, the population grew from about 200 million to 450 million. During the 1960s and 1970s, Africa was the only region in the world where food production per capita declined. To cover food production deficits, relatively wealthy countries such as Nigeria and Zambia paid out huge sums on costly food imports; poorer countries came to depend on food aid. The need to purchase food imports, coupled with the fall in agricultural exports, depleted foreign exchange reserves and contributed to balance of payments crises.

The rising rate of population growth had other consequences. Governments were simply unable to cope with the demand for more schools, more clinics, more housing and more basic services such as water supply. The impact on land use was especially damaging. By the 1970s arable land in some areas was no longer in plentiful supply. Peasants thus turned to cultivating marginal land, increasing the problems of soil erosion and degradation, overgrazing and deforestation. In the Sahel region some 80,000 square miles of land deteriorated every year. When a succession of droughts struck the Sahel between 1968 and 1973, the population in parts of Niger, Mali, Chad, Mauritania, Senegal, Upper Volta (Burkina Faso) and northern Nigeria were already living close to the margin of survival. As many as a quarter of a million people may have died; cattle herds were decimated; vast areas of land deteriorated into desert.”

“In growing desperation, African goverments tried to keep themselves afloat not by introducing austerity measures or policy reforms but by borrowing heavily abroad. Between 1970 and 1980, black Africa’s external debts rose from $6 billion to $38 billion. By 1982 they had reached $66 billion. A year later they stood at $86 billion. Many countries were unable to meet debt-servicing costs. In some cases there was no longer any realistic prospect that loans would be repaid. Commercial banks abroad, once eager lenders, now shunned Africa.

The impact of Africa’s failing economies on ordinary life was severe. Crippled by debt and mismanagement, African governments could no longer afford to maintain adequate public services. Hospitals and clinics ran short of medicines and equipment; schools lacked textbooks; factories closed through lack of raw materials or spare parts for machinery; shops were plagued by shortages; electricity supplies were erratic; telephone systems broke down; roads and railways deteriorated; unemployment soared; living standards plummeted. More than two-thirds of Africa’s populations were estimated to live in conditions of extreme poverty.”

“The political record of Africa since independence was stark: not a single African head of state in three decades had allowed himself to be voted out of office. Of some 150 heads of state who had trodden the African stage, only six had voluntarily relinquished power. They included Senegal’s Léopold Senghor, after twenty years in office, and Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere, after twenty-three years in office. Some members of the first generation of African leaders still clung to power even in old age. Félix Houphouët-Boigny of Côte d’Ivoire was eighty-four; Kamuzu (Hastings) Banda in Malawi was ninety-one.

Out of a list of fifty African countries, almost all were one-party states or military dictatorships. In thirty-two states, opposition parties were illegal. Elections, when held, served mainly to confirm the incumbent president and his party in power. Over the course of 150 elections held in twenty-nine countries between 1960 and 1989, opposition parties were never allowed to win a single seat. Only three countries — Senegal, Botswana and the tiny state of the Gambia — sustained multi-party politics, holding elections on a regular basis that were considered reasonably free and fair.”

“The end of Portuguese rule meant that Rhodesia’s entire eastern border, some 760 miles long, was now vulnerable to infiltration by guerrilla groups operating freely from bases in Mozambique.

From 1976, guerrilla warfare steadily spread like a plague across rural areas. Thousands of Zanu guerrillas crossed from Mozambique, attacking white homesteads, robbing stores, planting landmines and subverting the local population. Zapu guerrillas opened a new front in western Rhodesia, along the borders with Zambia and Botswana. Main roads and railways came under attack. White farmers bore the brunt, living daily with the risk of ambush, barricaded at night in fortified homes. A growing number of whites emigrated, rather than face military service.”

“The mood of much of the white population favoured change. A new generation of white South Africans disliked being treated as pariahs by the rest of the world, subjected to sports boycotts, travel bans and trade sanctions. Businessmen wanted a more stable political system that would assist economic growth. Economic prosperity was becoming more important to white South Africa than racial division. On his journeys abroad, de Klerk was readily assured by Western governments of support if he changed course. From one capital to the next, the advice he received was the same: lift the ban on the ANC, release Mandela and other prisoners and start talks.”

“Many whites too felt a sense of their own liberation. Indeed, the feelings of relief that the curse of apartheid had finally been lifted were as strong among the white community which had imposed it as among the blacks who had suffered under it.”

“Among the first victims in 1994 were prominent moderate Hutus — politicians, government officials, lawyers, teachers — all regarded as opponents standing in the way of the ‘Hutu Power’ movement. The slaughter of Tutsis was carried out on a scale not witnessed since the Nazi extermination programme against Jews: in the space of a hundred days some 800,000 were massacred — about three-quarters of the Tutsi population. Though Western governments knew that mass killing was underway, they failed to take the steps needed to prevent it. The genocide stopped only when a Tutsi army led by Paul Kagame fought its way from northern Rwanda to the capital, Kigali, and captured other extremist strongholds.”

“The impact of Rwanda’s holocaust soon spread to neighbouring Zaire. In the final days, as Hutu extremists lost their grip, they ordered a mass exodus of the Hutu population across the border into Zaire’s Kivu region, planning to use it as a base from which to regain power. The roads to Zaire became choked with hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees, fleeing in trucks, cars, on bicycles, on foot, taking their livestock and whatever belongings they could carry. Among them travelled the defeated militias with their weapons and equipment. In two days, about a million people crossed into Kivu.

Mobutu’s Zaire by 1994 had been reduced to little more than a carcass, stripped of all wealth. The currency was worthless. The provinces were largely separate fiefdoms, remote from the reach of central government. Long before the hordes of Hutu génocidaires arrived, Kivu had become a cauldron of ethnic violence between indigenous groups — autochtones — and successive waves of settlers and refugees from Rwanda and Burundi, both Hutu and Tutsi. Hutu militias, bringing with them their virulent brand of ethnic hatred, now added to the mix.”

Conclusion

“Even when African states began to reclaim lost ground, the backlog on the road to recovery made any advance a formidable task. In 1983, Ghana’s military dictator, Jerry Rawlings, embarked on a programme of economic reform designed primarily to revive the agricultural sector and stimulate private enterprise. In further reforms in 1992, he lifted an eleven-year ban on political activity, stood for election as president and won a credible victory, setting Ghana on course for a sustained period of democratic rule. By 1998, however, after fifteen years of reform effort, Ghana’s gross national product was still 16 per cent lower than in 1970.

Nigeria returned to civilian rule in 1999 but in parlous circumstances. An oil bonanza of $280 billion had been largely dissipated in corruption, mismanagement, failed projects and chronic inefficiency. Public services, schools and hospitals were in a decrepit condition; higher education had virtually collapsed; roads were pitted with potholes; the telephone system hardly functioned; power cuts were commonplace. On average, Nigerians were poorer in 2000 than they had been at the start of the oil boom in the early 1970s. Millions lived in slums surrounded by rotting garbage, without access to basic amenities.”

“The Saudi jihadist Osama bin Laden arrived in Khartoum in 1991 and spent five years in Sudan incubating his al-Qa’eda network. Bomb attacks on United States embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 were carried out by ‘sleeper’ cells planted by al-Qa’eda in 1994

Denounced by African leaders and in the West as a rogue regime supporting terrorism, Bashir’s government began to change course, spurning former friends such as Osama bin Laden and other militant Islamists. In September 2001, after al-Qa’eda’s attack on the World Trade Center in New York, Bashir, desperate to avoid retaliation, hastened to pledge cooperation with US measures aimed at al-Qa’eda and other terrorist organisations.

Under the threat of sanctions, he also became amenable to the idea of negotiating an end to the war with rebels in the south. By 2002, the war had resulted in two million people dead and four million displaced. With the United States playing a leading role as intermediary, a peace deal was signed in 2002 and finalised in 2004 according the south the right to self-determination. After a six-year interim period beginning in January 2005, southerners were to choose in a referendum whether to remain a part of a united Sudan or set up an independent state.”

“In northern Nigeria, an upsurge in militant Islamism grew out of widespread discontent over the central government’s failure to deal with mass poverty, unemployment and crime in the region.”

“One week after Mubarak’s downfall, Libya caught fire. By 2011, Gaddaf’s dictatorship had lasted for forty-two years. He had used his control of Libya’s oil revenues to accumulate massive wealth for himself and family members, stamping out any hint of opposition or dissent along the way. His methods were ruthless. But the uprisings in neighbouring Tunisia and Egypt emboldened Libyans in the eastern city of Benghazi to stage their own demonstration. Anti-Gaddafi protests spread to other towns and cities, including Tripoli. Gaddaf tried to crush the demonstrations with his customary use of brute force. Government troops opened fire indiscriminately, killing hundreds of protesters. But public fury at the massacres turned into a popular uprising. Deploying tanks, air strikes and African mercenaries, Gaddaf ordered massive reprisals; government forces, he warned, would show ‘no mercy, no pity’. As his tanks advanced on Benghazi, the UN Security Council, fearing an imminent massacre there, intervened, authorising a ‘no-fly zone’ and ‘all necessary measures’ to be taken to protect civilians. Within hours, Britain and France, supported by the United States, launched air attacks on Gaddaf’s tanks and artillery, enabling poorly equipped militias to survive. Western forces went on to bring down Gaddafi’s regime altogether, using air supremacy to destroy his military power. In August, rebel militias took control of Tripoli, in October, Gaddafi was captured and killed in the coastal town of Sirte, his last loyal redoubt.”

“Over the course of a decade, about a million Chinese moved into Africa — entrepreneurs, technical experts, medical staff, prospectors and farmers. Between 2000 and 2010, Over the course of a decade, about a million Chinese moved into Africa — entrepreneurs, technical experts, medical staff, prospectors and farmers.”

“Nigeria in 2000 possessed only 400,000 ancient landline phones for a population of 160 million. By 2012, the number of mobile phone subscribers there had reached 60 million.”

“Though mining, oil and gas sectors contributed large revenues, they created little employment — less than 1 per cent of the workforce. Only about a quarter of African workers had stable, wage-paying jobs. Nearly two-thirds earned a living through subsistence activities or low-wage self-employment. Despite Africa’s agricultural potential, its record on food production was dismal. Many African countries depended on food imports to feed their populations. A 2010 report showed that while food production on a global basis had risen by nearly 150 per cent during the previous forty years, African food production since 1960 had fallen by 10 per cent, and the number of undernourished Africans since 1990 had risen by 100 million to 250 million.

Africa’s share of the world’s economic output remained but a small fraction: about 2.7 per cent. The gross domestic product of the entire continent amounted to only $1.7 trillion, a figure equivalent to the output of a single country such as Russia.”

“In 1945, there were only forty-nine towns with a population exceeding 100,000. More than half were in north Africa: ten in Egypt; nine in Morocco; four in Algeria; one in Tunisia; one in Libya. Eleven others were in South Africa. Between the Sahara and the Limpopo, only thirteen towns had reached a population of 100,000, four of them in Nigeria. In 1955, the population of Lagos numbered 312,000; of Leopoldville (Kinshasa), 300,000; of Addis Ababa, 510,000; of Abidjan, 128,000; of Accra, 165,000. In the sixty-year period between 1950 and 2010, as the overall population of Africa increased more than fourfold, from 225 million to 1 billion, the numbers crammed into urban areas reached 40 per cent of the total. By 2010, the population of Cairo had reached 11 million; of Lagos, 10.5 million, of Kinshasa, 8.5 million; of Abidjan, 4.1 million; of Nairobi, 3.5 million, of Dar es Salaam, 3.3 million; of Addis Ababa, 3 million; of Accra, 2.3 mil-lion. Most urban inhabitants lacked basic amenities such as clean water, sanitation systems, paved roads and electricity. Many millions lived in shacks made from sheets of plastic, packing crates, cardboard boxes and pieces of tin, a vast underclass seething with discontent.

The overall population of Africa continued to expand at the fastest rate in the world. Whereas it took twenty-seven years for the continent’s population to double from 500 million, a UN-Habitat report in 2010 forecast that it would take only seventeen years for the next 500 million to be added. The UN report calculated that between 2010 and 2050 Africa’s total population would increase by 60 per cent, with the urban population tripling to 1.2 billion.”