#22 Understanding Colonialism: Africa (Part I)

African colonisation was significantly different from all other forms of European invasion. At the end of the 19th century, the continent was divided up into multiple relatively small nation-states. As a result, each state has found the processes of moving towards industrialisation difficult. The story of the colonisation of the continent is how this situation came about.

To grasp the essence of how Europe underdeveloped Africa, I have divided the history of the continent into three overlapping periods:

·        The slave trade from the 1490s, primarily down the west African coast.

·        The colonisation of Southern Africa from 1652 with the arrival of the Dutch.

·        The final colonisation of the continent from 1884 by all the major European powers.

This blog will deal with the first two and the next blog will deal with African colonisation after 1884, excluding Southern Africa.

The early period consisted of the trade in slaves, initiated by the Portuguese from the 1490s. The slave trading in African people did not close until the end of the 19th century, a period of 400 years. The peoples and places that provided the slaves, and the relations between the peoples who captured and sold the salves has yet to be fully told. By far most slaves were sent across the Atlantic to the Americas, but a small number were shipped to Southern Africa, where demand from South Africa widened the scope of the trade to the east coast.

African Slavery

This is a complex history of atrocity, which I have briefly dealt with in an outline in an earlier blog; here I will sketch a few other important features.

In 1456, the Portuguese travelling south down the west African coast came upon Cape Verde Island. As they moved down the coast, they came across Sao Tome in the 1470s. Both islands were empty of inhabitants, and both were colonised, often by the Jews being expelled in their thousands from Portugal at this time, as well as by orphans and convicts. Sugar plantations were established, and slaves were sent to labour on them. Both islands became watering holes for slaving ships moving across the Atlantic.

After that, large swathes of Africa became impoverished and whole areas depopulated as towns and villages were raided for slaves. The Ndongo tribe, for example, was rich and populous in the 16th century but lamented its desolation in the 17th century. There was human destruction on a grand scale across Western, Central and Eastern Africa as hundreds of thousands of men and women were captured and sent across the Atlantic as slaves. Responding to European threats, as the Japanese did so successfully in the middle of the 19th century, was unthinkable in these earlier years across the entirety of the African continent.

The 19th century saw the beginnings of the end of the slave trade, but it took a whole century to finally finish it. The British outlawed slavery in the 1830s, the Portuguese tried to ban it in 1836, and it was abolished in Brazil in the 1880s. The American civil war was fought over slavery, but the Belgians in the Congo and Germans in Tanganyika treated Africans as slaves in the last decades of the 19th century.

It is worth questioning: did slavery come to an end? Chattel slavery certainly died out in the 19th century and was replaced by bonded labour as I have argued in earlier blogs. In the 20th and 21st centuries, technology, tractors and so on have replaced labour on great plantations. Paid labour is now widely seen as legitimate compensation for working for wages. Africa has suffered through the last few centuries for the enrichment of Europe and the Americans.

Southern Africa

The Early Dutch Calvinist Invasion

The invasions and colonisation of the southern continent of Africa had distinct and separate dynamics from that throughout the rest of the world. In the Southern Americas, ancient civilisations had collapsed, and the population succumbed to European diseases. In North America (now the USA and Canada) there had been significant resistance from a small number of peoples who were able to fight on horses. But from the middle of the 19th century, the indigenous Americans were mostly annihilated through force and disease.

In 1652 the Dutch made the first permanent settlement at the Cape of Good Hope in southern Africa. The Cape was strategically important as a watering hole for shipping moving between Europe and Asia. The Dutch East India Company was active at this point, and the ships required meat and water. One hundred and fifty or so Dutch Puritans were deliberately brought by the company to settle and take land. Today we understand the Protestant Puritans as an offshoot of the religious convulsions in Europe. The Dutch were introducing one aspect of the European religious wars into Africa.

These settlers behaved like other settlers who arrived in lands that were not of their heritage. They tended to stay together, speak only their own language, maintain their cultural norms, and continued intermarrying with one another. Settlers the world over are very often a caricature of the culture they left behind and remain stuck in a time warp. Often, hundreds of years later, it is possible to catch a glimpse of the past by visiting settler communities. The Dutch settlers arrived with a sense of their own superiority, alongside the European racial ideology which supported their isolation. Calvinist Dutch south African settlers were about to maintain their own identity throughout generations in the 20th century.

The Dutch Calvinists settled and multiplied at the Cape, used slave labour, traded with the local people, and lived a rural life; they have their own very specific African history. By 1800, there were 15,000 farming Calvinists.

The British Southern African Invasion

The British fight the Boers and the local African People

Early in the 19th century, as the British were beginning to assert their global ascendency, they forcibly took the Cape from the Dutch in 1814, to secure their trade routes to India. They began to construct a naval base to control the seaways. By 1820 the British had introduced 20,000 of their white settlers. This was a new and serious colonisation project to secure the territory from further Dutch or French encroachment. When the British made slavery illegal in the 1830s, the Dutch settlers moved inland on the so-called Great Trek, to take more land from the indigenous people. Some moved north and some east.

Dutch settlers had been confronted from the start with deep resistance; first from the Khoekhoe peoples and later from the Xhosa and Zulus. While the Dutch were always outnumbered, they had rifles. Spears and bows and arrows were no match for the new military power of repeater guns.

The history books are full of the battles fought by the Dutch settlers as they slowly moved north in search of more land and to move away from the British who had annexed the Cape. The Dutch also had to fight the British, and competitive colonialism was at its ugliest in Southern Africa, especially in the Boer wars of 1899 to 1901 when European settler sides fought each other for control of other peoples’ territory. What was at stake, of course, was political power and control of land, as well gold and diamonds. But while both the Dutch and British settlers succeeded in the end, the local native peoples were not annihilated. Yet, Southern African history has always been rife with strong racist and nationalist overtones.

As the Boers moved north, they came across organised opposition and in 1836 they resisted an attack by 5000 Ndebele at Vegkop. The British overcame Boer resistance and annexed Natal in 1843. In response, the Boers moved north again and created the Orange Free State, which the British recognised as the independent Boer Republic in 1854. The Boers took and held land here, with their superior weaponry and a deep belief in their racial superiority.

Relations between Boers, British and local African peoples might have stabilised at this point. But when diamonds were discovered in 1871 in Kimberley, and large deposits of gold were found in 1884, the avarice which had driven the earlier colonisations in the Americas nearly 400 years earlier took hold once again. Gold and diamonds revolutionised Southern Africa. Europeans began to flood there in an attempt to make their fortunes. Tensions between Africans, Dutch Boers and the British rose to an all-time high. The Zulu peoples managed to organise and oppose the British and defeat them at Isandhlwana. In 1879, the Boers also rose against the British and defeated them at Majuba in 1880.

Cecil Rhodes, Gold and Diamonds

The British, under the leadership of Cecil Rhodes, responded with massive troops and defeated both the Zulus and the Boers, the latter at Ladysmith, Mafeking and Kimberley. The Boers switched to guerrilla warfare, though they eventually surrendered in 1901 after their captured peoples were corralled in the first concentration camps. Britain then annexed Boer states and created the new South Africa from the Transvaal in the north to the Cape in the south. Cecil Rhodes emerged from this turmoil and managed to create the privately owned British South African Company and monopolised the gold mines.

Rhodes, with the British state behind him, launched wars of aggression on a scale that would be considered war crimes today. His paramilitary police forces annexed territory, terrorised the countryside, killed thousands of Africans and removed their land rights. Rhodes was behind the black reserves. With these measures, he was able to take hold of the gold mines and make a vast fortune for himself. To put it in today’s terms Rhodes was a white supremacist; at the time, it was widely accepted that that was necessary to take land and to colonise: all undertaken in the name of Christianity and the ‘civilising mission’.

Gold and diamonds rapidly took hold of viral imaginations across Europe; the entire continent began to be colonised by the major European powers. The lure of great wealth was, as always, the primary motive of colonisation. Though it is worth remembering, only a few years earlier these powers understood their military forces were overstretched in defending their activities in Asia.

The result was that whilst the peoples of Southern Africa survived, unlike their brethren in the Americas, they were denied their land, becoming the first impoverished landless proletariat on the continent. But despite this rural transformation of the entire area of Southern Africa, industrialisation did not follow. British interests were to extract wealth from the mines and export it to Britain. African labourers were to be corralled separately from Whites and Indians in Natal.

---

Copyright Notice. This blog is published under the Creative Commons licence. If anyone wishes to use any of the writing for scholarly or educational purposes they may do so as long as they correctly attribute the author and the blog. If anyone wishes to use the material for commercial purpose of any kind, permission must be granted from the author.