I have heard many times including at the United Nations commentators warning Africans to stop blaming colonialism for Africa’s ills. They argue that colonialism ended many decades ago and Africans must begin to take responsibility for their commissions and omissions. Before we decide – definitively – whether or not colonialism has actually ended, we need to examine what colonialism was all about and how colonies were administered.
Western countries colonized Africa in order to obtain cheap raw materials for their expanding industries, cheap foodstuffs for their growing populations, markets for their increasing surplus manufactured products and – to a certain extent – a home for their exploding population. Because European powers wanted to run colonies cheaply, they hired local agents through the indirect rule model. The agents had to be loyal and follow instructions from the few European colonial officers like the governor and district commissioners.
Lord Lugard who played a significant role in the British colonization of Africa and introduced the indirect rule model explained that the growing population of Europe and Europe’s industrial expansion “led to the replacement of agriculture by manufacturing industry, with the consequent necessity for new markets for the product of the factory, and the importation of raw materials for industry, and food to supplement the decreased home production, and feed the increased population”. Lugard added “The backward conditions of the people, and their preference for agricultural pursuits, offer the prospect of continued markets for manufactured goods. The tropics produce in abundance a class of raw materials and foodstuffs which cannot be grown in the temperate zones, and are so vital to the needs of civilized man that they have in very truth become essential to civilization. It was the realization of this fact … which led the nations of Europe to compete for the control of the African tropics” (Ann Seidman 1972).
The competition for control of the tropics began in the Congo basin and led to the 1884-85 Berlin conference where fourteen participants met and agreed on a formula for dividing up the continent without going to war with one another. In other words, colonialism, using loyal African agents, was designed to obtain cheap raw materials and foodstuffs and markets for industrial products. We need to stress that colonial demands for raw materials, foodstuffs and markets for manufactured products did not end on the eve of African independence!
Before proceeding one correction needs to be made about Lugard’s statement. Africans did not have a preference for agricultural pursuits. Pre-colonial Africans engaged in a division of labor based on the available raw materials. When Portuguese sailors arrived in the Congo basin, they found many manufacturing enterprises which were destroyed during hunting wars for ivory and slaves. In Uganda there were many communities that were engaged in manufacturing enterprises based on iron ore, timber, clay and bark cloth material etc. Uganda was not producing cotton, coffee, tea and tobacco when Winston Churchill visited in 1907.
David Livingstone remarked that “Even in the nineteenth century … the African iron workers of Mozambique considered English iron ‘rotten’. He took some hoes back to England; and they were ‘found of such good quality that a friend of mine in Birmingham has made an Enfield rifle of them’” (Gregg Lanning, 1979).
Colonial powers determined Africa’s comparative advantage and confined Africans to the production of raw industrial materials and foodstuffs based not on efficiency considerations but because that is what they wanted. To make room for European manufactured products, African industries were destroyed. And since the launching of structural adjustment in the 1980s they have been replaced by second hand products (Toyin Falola 2003).
At independence, African governments wanted to transform their colonial economic structures and introduced import substitution industries. They made some errors which should have been corrected and move on – like other societies do. Instead because former colonial masters still wanted raw materials, foodstuffs and markets for their manufactured products, forced African governments through a barrage of advisers that Africa’s comparative advantage is in raw materials. Producing and diversifying raw materials and abandoning industries through unfair competition became a condition for receiving financial aid and technical advisers.
Thus, although colonization does not exist in the sense of having white governors and district commissioners, colonialism in the sense of continued trading raw materials and foodstuffs for manufactured products as it was in the colonial days is still alive – and well. It is now called neo-colonialism which like colonialism also began in the Congo basin with the death of Patrice Lumumba.
Former colonial masters have made sure that they select African leaders like the late Mobutu Sese Seko and the new breed of African leaders in Eastern and Central Africa and keep them in power as long as they toe the neo-colonial line of producing raw materials and foodstuffs in exchange for manufactured products. Structural adjustment began in the 1980s has consolidated that arrangement.