Africa in World Affairs

Politics of Imperialism, the Cold War and Globalisation

Rajen Harshé

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429535345
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Africa finds itself at the centre stage of world politics in the twenty-first century. To truly determine its rising influence and role in world affairs would mean unravelling the politics of imperialism, the Cold War and globalisation.

Going beyond Euro-American perspectives, this book presents a comprehensive study of Africa and its role in world politics.

Africa in World Affairs:

• Closely examines the transition of Africa in its colonial and post-colonial phases;

• Explores the intellectual history of modern Africa through liberation struggles, social movements, leaders and thinkers;

• Investigates the continent's relationships with former colonial powers such as Britain, France and Portugal; untangles complexities of French neo-colonialism and sheds light on the role of the superpower, such as the USA and major and rising powers like China and India;

• Highlights complex and wide-ranging diversities of the region, and the ways in which it continues to negotiate with issues of modernity, racism and globalisation.

A core text on Africa and the world, this book will be indispensable for students of African studies, politics and international relations, and history. It will also be a must-read for policymakers, diplomats and government think tanks.

1

Colonial, anti-colonial and post-colonial in continuum

Any worthwhile exercise to understand Africa in international relations inevitably has to begin by unveiling the phenomenon of colonialism, and viewing through the lens of the anti-colonial nationalism that captured the imagination of the continent in the twentieth century. Colonialism inflicted twofold damage. On the one hand, it led to economic exploitation, political subjugation and psycho-cultural violence, and on the other, it effectively denied Africans their pre-colonial past, a past that included the continued existence and blossoming of several indigenous cultures and civilisations in diverse parts of Africa. The manner in which the colonial phase socially and culturally constructed Africa has continued to cause all round damage to the very being of Africa. It is thus essential to undermine and even debunk myths about the continent and its peoples that were incessantly circulated and popularised during colonial times in different parts of the world. Moreover, such myths began to get circulated about Africa from the seventeenth century. Unsurprisingly, these myths did colour the views and notions of the average European or American about Africa for a long time. Most of them emanated in a particular context—when European colonial powers were expanding their presence and dominance in different parts of Africa after coming to terms with the accounts of Africa presented by travellers, merchants, mariners and missionaries. Moreover, the Christian missionaries in their zeal to proselytise and convert Africans to Christianity almost worked as allies of the imperial powers.

In fact, the advent of European imperialist powers after the late nineteenth century allowed European scholars to socially construct the very idea of the ‘Orient’ largely comprising Afro-Asian and Latin American countries (Said, 2001). In the process of structuring such a relationship within the framework of dominant–dependent ties between Europe and the rest of the colonies, the Europeans began to construct the so-called ‘other’ through their narratives of colonial subjects. As the colonial systems, led by diverse countries including Britain, France and Portugal, were operating in different parts of Africa they also met diverse intellectual and socio-political responses from their colonies, depending upon the nature of the colonial rule. It also needs to be underscored that even after the end of colonial rule, in a formal sense, the ‘colonial past’ continued to haunt and mediate with the ‘present’ in the post-colonial states and societies by shaping their thought processes and practices. Keeping this background in view, the present inquiry will initially shed light on myths about Africa circulated during colonial times, and even later, with reference to actual historical realities in Africa. Subsequently, it will reflect on colonialism as a phenomenon and examine, albeit briefly, colonial policies pursued by three major colonial empires, namely Britain, France and Portugal. While situating the phenomenon of colonialism dialectically, it will explore intellectual and social responses to colonialism by highlighting the ideas of influential thinkers and movements in these three former colonial empires of Africa. On the basis of such an exercise, this chapter will reflect on the intricate and ongoing relationship between the colonial, the anti-colonial and the post-colonial continuum.

Africa: myths and realities

As far as the continent of Africa is concerned, there have been carefully crafted and yet fairly crass myths about its existence. For instance, the usage of the term ‘Dark Continent’ to describe Africa was, and is still, quite common. Was the word ‘dark’ used as a reference to the skin colour of native Africans? In any case, Africa was dark for whom? To be accurate, Europeans and Americans were less aware of the people who inhabited Africa and how they lived their lives. However, Indians and Arabs were trading with coastal countries in Africa even before the arrival of Europeans into Africa. If the word ‘dark’ is used in a pejorative sense, then the modern European imperial powers had a substantial role in making the lives of Africans difficult. Indeed, colonialism had brought all forms of injustices to the colonised but few human races have been humiliated in the history of mankind as the indigenous peoples of Africa.

Sadly, they were bought and sold as slaves and humiliated for centuries through the institutionalisation of slavery. There was a thriving market of African slaves in Portugal after 1444. When the famous Portuguese sailor Vasco da Gama journeyed through the Cape of Good Hope, located at the tip of Southern Africa, to Calicut in 1498 and later Goa, in India, the Europeans had gradually started discovering the riches of the coastal regions of Africa. Plundering the riches of colonies was essentially the product of European colonial rule, as was the slave trade. During the initial years, resistance against the slave trade appeared futile. Admittedly, anti-slavery laws were passed in Spain (1542), France (1794) and in Britain the Slavery Abolition Act was passed in 1833. However, such acts were never implemented effectively. The forces against the slave trade began gaining ground at the beginning of the nineteenth century and yet the slave trade only became illegal in Nigeria in 1930, although it had been effectively stopped there much before. Incontestably, the institution of slavery represented one of the more grotesque forms of power relationships and oppression in the history of mankind.

Any perspective on slavery, the marginalised or the colonised, needs to be mindful of the way people in power think and conceive the marginalised. Basil Davidson, a renowned Africanist, has poignantly brought home this point in one of his narratives. He infers that the British, at one time, were unwilling to support the abolition of the slave trade because it was too profitable to be given up. It was the conservative regime of Edward Heath in the 1970s that was reluctant to stop the supply of arms to apartheid South Africa because the sale of arms was too profitable an industry to be given up, even if the successive apartheid regimes were using such arms against freedom fighters in Southern Africa (Davidson, 1971: 20).

Furthermore, if the term ‘dark’ is deployed to convey ignorance about Africa or the isolation of Africa from the rest of the world then it can be argued with substantial evidence that, in the Middle Ages, Europe was more isolated than Africa. Africans, Arabs and Indians had established a flourishing trade through the Indian Ocean. To cite a few examples, Moroccan leather was made south of the Sahara and was bought by Europeans from the Moroccans. The whole sub-continent of Sub-Saharan Africa was flooded with cowrie shells, which became currency. Those shells, in turn, came from places such as the Maldives in the Indian Ocean, Venice in Italy and the Arab kingdoms. There are portraits of Africans on Greek vases and in Roman art (Bohannan, 1964: 16).

There is another myth commonly perpetuated in the West which depicts Africans as barbaric savages who neither knew how to speak nor were aware of the uses of fire and so on. This myth was further strengthened in the process of consolidating and strengthening the European empires in the continent. Such myths are essential to the running of any empire because they create a sense of psychological superiority among the rulers. They are more designed to address likely vulnerabilities of the ruling metropolitan migrant communities in the colonies. With the passage of time, the pre-colonial past of Africa is being consistently explored in contemporary times. In fact, the epicentre of civilisation in Africa was ancient Egypt. Egyptologists have explored the nature of social and political organisation in Egyptian civilisation including arts, literature, libraries, monuments and memorable achievements like the pyramids. However, as it radiated out among the world’s civilisations the Egyptian civilisation absorbed a great deal from different civilisations in Sub-Saharan Africa. Egypt, as Davidson has put aptly, was exploiter and developer of trends already existing in indigenous Africa (Davidson, 1971; Bohannan, 1964: 21).

Apart from such harsh and derogatory myths, people also associated Africa with jungles and lions. Perhaps, less than 15 per cent of the land in Africa is covered by jungle and lions do not stay in jungles but are found on the grasslands. Nevertheless, it also needs to be noted that tireless efforts of a few British historians such as Basil Davidson (1914–2010) and J.D. Fage (1921–2002) through their innumerable pioneering studies in African history have contributed a great deal in rectifying the then prevailing misperceptions about Africa and its past. Especially in his lucid studies on the history of the continent entitled, The African Past: Chronicles from Antiquity to Modern Times (1964) and Africa in History (1974), Davidson has unravelled a rich tapestry of African social and political organisations. Having taken cognisance of the dichotomy between myths and realities, it would be useful to reflect on colonialism in general, before dealing with colonialism in Africa.

Colonialism: phases and nature

The term ‘colonialism’ can be deployed in the broader context of the phenomenon of imperialism signifying an asymmetrical relationship of interdependence between materially advanced and backward societies (Harshé, 1997). Colonialism merely is an aspect of imperialism where the people who conquer alien territories physically migrate to different locations to establish their colonies. In several parts of the world the imperial powers established their colonies with such migrations to facilitate colonial administration. For instance, the British or the French rulers stayed in their respective colonies such as India or Algeria to manage their respective colonial administration. Colonialism as an aspect of imperialism itself has witnessed two dominant phases.

The first phase, during which the New World was being discovered, saw the colonisers establish posts in the Americas, the Caribbean, Australia and New Zealand, where the devastating impact of colonisation was deeply felt by native populations that resided in these parts after the arrival of the colonisers. According to Samir Amin, Catholic Spaniards acted in the name of religion that had to be imposed on the conquered peoples, while the Anglo-Protestants took from their reading of the Bible the right to wipe out the ‘Infidels’ (Amin, 2001). Violence on such a scale did meet its response through the American War of Independence (1775–1783), the revolt of the slaves from Saint Dominique or the Haitian revolution (1791–1804). These responses, in their turn, eventually led to the abolition of slavery, the formation of the Haitian state, and the Mexican revolution/war of independence in 1810. The propensity of colonial rulers to enslave people, commit genocides or even destroy indigenous cultures had begun to reveal itself.

The second phase of colonialism began with the advent of industrial capitalism. Thanks to their insatiable appetite for raw material, the industrialised countries of Europe were in constant search of raw materials to turn the wheels of their industry and capture markets overseas. J.A. Hobson, in his pioneering work on imperialism, which was initially published in 1902, had argued that over-savings/production and under-consumption in the metropolitan countries had provided a major impulse for imperial expansion (Hobson, 2011). Subsequently, after drawing from the substance of Hobson’s thesis, Lenin in 1916, as the First World War (1914–1918) was about to come to its end, had ventured to explain the phenomenon of imperialism through the prisms of Marxism. He had argued that imperialism is an inevitable consequence of the development of monopoly capitalism and that it is the highest stage of capitalism (Lenin, 1970). The validity of this assertion is being constantly tested with the flow of history. However, it may be worthwhile to make a few generalisations on the nature of colonialism itself.

To begin with, colonialism by its very nature, was authoritarian and anti-democratic. It invariably empowered a miniscule minority of an alien population to dominate all the decision-making processes and enjoy extraordinary privileges within the colonies that they administered. The land, the material resources as well as human beings in the colonies were subjected to exploitation and added to the structural violence that is embedded in the very formation of a colony. Thus, forms of exploitation of labour such as enslavement or bonded labour, denial of basic human rights to colonial subjects, severe punishment to those who questioned the colonial order, were implicit in the very functioning of any colonial state. It also needs to be underscored that the colonies in different parts and under different colonial powers had to pay for their own development. The metropolitan powers seldom spent any amount to develop sectors such as education and health through welfare measures. The colonies had to look after these sectors out of their own resources. Britain had devised mechanisms, like native treasury, to gather funds in colonies so that development could be launched through them. The colonial state functioned on the basis of politico-military control over colonies by exercising, primarily, executive and bureaucratic powers (Smith, 1983: 25–7). Such politico-military and administrative control, in its turn, indeed added to the prestige of any colonial power. Furthermore, colonial invasion destroyed indigenous industry in different parts of Africa such as the iron smelting industry in Nigeria or handlooms in Algeria (Davidson, 1974: 277–8). Such an invasion was also extremely disruptive because it tried to gear economies of the colonies to the needs of the metropolitan power by establishing vertical connections between colonial powers and their colonies and simultaneously cutting off horizontal commercial or economic intercourse among African societies.

Under colonialism, the African economies steadily began to get monetised. The colonial powers built infrastructure such as rail, roads and ports to save time and carry the goods from colonies through ships towards metropolitan countries. Especially, in the inter-war period, the cash crop exports in French West Africa increased considerably which led to the rise of powerful shipping companies such as Compagnie Française de l’Afrique Occidentale (CFAO) and the Société Commericiale de l’Ouest Africaine (SOCA). While the former was associated with six banks, steam lines and industry in Marseilles and Bordeaux, the latter was associated with Banque de l’Union Parisienne (BUP) and Société Agricole Africaine (SAA). Such companies built their business around the export of crops and the import of manufactured goods in French West Africa (Green and Seidman, 1968: 113–16). Evidently, there was an asymmetric relationship of economic interdependence between colonial powers and their colonies. In substance, such an exchange was non-competitive and complementary because colonies were importing manufactured goods and exporting raw and agrarian products.

Finally, the very existence of colonialism led to psycho-cultural violence that subjugated and enslaved the minds of the colonial subjects. In fact, the emergence of the entire field of post-colonial studies conceives the arrival and establishment of colonial rule as a departing point. Further, it investigates a wide variety of geographical regions of Afro-Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, Australia and New Zealand and finds intertwined connections between the colonial and the post-colonial phases in their history. Having briefly underlined these two phases and the nature of colonialism it is essential to delineate the scope of colonialism in Africa.

Colonialism in Africa

In general, the scope of colonialism was incontestably quite vast in Africa. Perhaps, with the solitary exception of Liberia, which did not witness European colonial rule, every other existing country in Africa has gone through the trauma of a colonial experience. However, the time frames and depth of colonial occupation differed widely. For instance, under the fascist regime of Mussolini (1922–1943), Italy had attacked Ethiopia in 1935 and from 1936 to 1941 Ethiopia was under Italian control until it was liberated by the Allied forces in the Second World War. In contrast, Angola and Mozambique were under Portuguese colonial rule for over four hundred years. The systematic inauguration of the colonial era could be attributed to the Berlin Conference among the European colonial powers of 1885. The Berlin Conference had set the tone for ‘scramble for Africa’. While ‘scrambling’ for different territories, according to their respective power capabilities to negotiate, the European colonialists had paid scant attention to the ethnic sensibilities of the local populations. Ethnic/tribal groups have always been the basic social groups in Africa. The colonial powers drew borders between their respective colonial possessions by dividing the same ethnic group under the two different colonial powers. For instance, Ewe ethnic group resided in the then Gold Coast (Ghana) as well as Togo. However, the former came under British rule whereas the latter was brought under French rule. Likewise, Somali people were divided between Italian, French and British Somaliland. As a consequence of the Berlin Conference and the colonial rule every other existing state is a multi-ethnic state in Africa with substantial physical, cultural and linguistic diversities.

A cursory glance at the map of Africa in the late nineteenth or the early twentieth century gives us a rough idea about the expanse of the individual European colonial powers in Africa. Among these powers were Britain and France, who were both able to maintain their far-flung empires. The British governed Gold Coast (Ghana), Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and the Gambia in West Africa, Uganda, Kenya, Tanganyika in East Africa, southern and northern Rhodesia or parts of central Africa that comprise Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi and even South Africa, up until 1910. The French controlled the North African countries like Algeria, Tunisia and Mo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of maps
• Preface
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Colonial, anti-colonial and post-colonial in continuum
• 2 The emancipatory winds of Pan-Africanism and African unity movements
• 3 South Africa: From racism and apartheid to African Renaissance
• 4 Exploring the trail of French neo-colonial dominance in Sub-Saharan Africa
• 5 The changing complexities of the USA’s imperial policies in Africa
• 6 Unravelling complex shades in the Sino–African ensemble: Altruistic, neo-imperialist or just a partnership in the development process?
• 7 India’s growing presence in Africa: From a developing country to a rising power
• Conclusion
• Index