African continent was one of the richest lands in the world accumulating vast natural resources and fertile lands. In the vastness of the African continent, with a maximum spread from east to west of about 4,600 miles, and a distance of over 5,000 miles between its northern and southern extremities, an area now inhabited by perhaps 400 million people of diverse cultures and languages, it is impossible to speak of any one common way of life for its many inhabitants before the coming of Europeans. It is possible to say that Europeans were responsible for under-development of Africa brining the institution of slavery and social and political changes which ruined local communities and limit their freedom.
First Europeans, Greeks, Romans, and other Mediterranean peoples came to Africa as traders, settlers, and conquerors to intrude their cultural patterns among African mores as early as the last 1,000 years before the beginning of the Christian era. Furthermore, well before this period there certainly were long centuries of intercourse between the peoples inhabiting the northern. The process of African state formation, of course, was not limited to areas having commercial and other relationships with the Muslim worlds of North Africa and southwestern Asia. “Most African states were the product of an indigenous evolution” (Brathwite 1988, p. 45).
For example, the highly centralized polities of Bunyoro and Buganda, located to the north of Lake Victoria, were the result of migrations, beginning in about the sixteenth century, of Lwo-speaking peoples originating in the territories around the banks of the Nile in the southern Sudan. The two states evolved efficiently structured forms of government, with their rulers, the mukama in Bunyoro and the kabaka in Buganda, ultimately presiding over societies which many observers have compared to the feudal systems of Europe (Brett 1873).
When Europeans came to Africa, Africans were economically independent and socially stable. Europeans began to rule parts of Africa long before the hectic years of the scramble for the territorial control of the continent beginning in the 1880s. In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, several developing currents of European endeavor emerged to fundamentally alter the balance of relationships between Africa and Europe (Axelson 1967; Lewis, 2000).
They included the humanitarian reaction to the inhuman excesses of slavery and the slave trade; the beginnings of a new European territorial expansion into Africa, as well as the extension of previously existing contacts; the awakening stimulus within Christianity, which led to an interest in the evangelizing of nonEuropeans. The European nations, especially Britain and France, gradually increased their involvement in Africa all during the 18th and 19th centuries.
That context, however, further increases the role of the exclusively African racial component of the slave trade. From the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries slavery, even the English colonial varieties, were hardly synonymous with Africans (M’Baye, 2006). Nor were Africans universally synonymous with slaves. In the African sector of the Atlantic slave system Europeans were forced to regard Africans and Afro-Europeans as autonomous and even locally dominant participants in the slave trade. They were often dominant militarily and were certainly dominant in terms of both numbers and limited vulnerability to local diseases.
Following Rodney (1981) “The European slave trade was a direct block, in removing millions of youth and young adults” (p. 105). Nor, even in the Americas, did Africans arrive only as captives and deracinated slaves. While not reducing the significance of economic factors, the new vision of the slave trade reaches beyond the ports of embarkation to the interior of Africa and thus breaks with the bipolar world of white rulers and black subalterns that Brett inherited from the imperialist world vision of the early twentieth century (Brett 1873).
The results of the Industrial Revolution made it almost inevitable that Europeans, growing in wealth and power from their increased store of knowledge and many technological innovations, would expand their presence into weaker regions. The steam engine, quinine for malaria prophylaxis, improved weapons, long-range communications, and a host of other advances made imperialism a cheap, feasible phenomenon (Priestley, 1969).
Europe was responsible for under-development of Africa because “Europeans deliberately ignored those African requests that Europe should place certain skills and techniques at their disposal” (Rodney 1981, p. 107). The traditional major occupiers of African territory, Britain and France, faced competition from new empire-seeking powers, Germany and Italy, and from the individual ambitions of Leopold II of Belgium (Bush, 2000).
Even the long-dormant Portuguese imperialism revived. Explanations for the sudden burst of European activity based upon economic considerations have remained at the forefront from the earliest days of this century. “The whole purpose of establishing colonial governments in Africa,” asserted Walter Rodney, “was to provide protection to national monopoly economic interests” (p. 168) because there were no longer many profitable outlets for capital in Europe, financiers had turned to Africa for profitable investments.
The working class supported this stimulation to empire, but only because it had been misled into thinking that overseas expansion was vital to continuing employment. The British writer, however, was not an economic determinist. Economic factors the “taproot of imperialism,” but nevertheless he considered that the policy decisions already made were reversible, and that the financial resources he thought wasted in overseas ventures could be diverted to better the living conditions for workers in their own countries (Bush, 2000; Axelson 1967).
In West Africa, Britain and France were the chief rivals; with their colonial territories interspersed throughout the region, there was frequent cause for friction. However, no major quarrels resulted, although there was for some time an active race for dominion in the Nigerian hinterland. The French, from the mid1880s, after Goldie’s National African Company had gained domination of the commerce of the river, had demonstrated little activity in the lower Niger region. But during the 1880s, and particularly after their conquest in 1892 of the kingdom of Dahomey, the French became more concerned with inland expansion (Crowder& Obaro 1970).
An 1890 British-French treaty had drawn a line delimiting respective territories from Say on the Niger to Barruoua on Lake Chad, but this agreement did not settle the growing rivalry. Meanwhile, in 1886, the British government, in a decision designed to combat French and German rivalry in this region, awarded a charter to Goldie’s company, henceforth known as the Royal Niger Company (Hopkins 1973). The reason for the sudden quickening of European political and economic interest in Africa was a process that culminated in the loss of independence for almost all Africans by 1914 (Crowder& Obaro 1970).
In reality European expansion was part of an ongoing process. Thus, Europeans only exploited the African continent and population brining nothing to this world. Atlantic slave trade and slow economic and political development caused by European intrusion were the main reason of under-development of the African nations and states. British policies designed to support free trade and allowed that nation to draw what it wanted from Africa without the unnecessary expense of direct colonial administration.
Bibliography
- Axelson Eric. 1967, Portugal and the Scramble for Africa, 1875-1891. Johannesburg.
- Brathwite, E. K. The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy.
- Brett E. A. 1873, Colonialism and Underdevelopment in East Africa: The Politics of Economic Change. London.
- Bush, B. 2000, Imperialism and Postcolonialism (History: Concepts,Theories and Practice). Longman; 1 edition.
- Crowder, M. and Ikime, Obaro, eds., 1970, West African Chiefs: Their Changing Status under Colonial Rule and Independence. New York.
- Hopkins A. G. 1973, An Economic History of West Africa. New York.
- Lewis, S. 2000, Culture, Cultivation and Colonialism in Out of Africa and Beyond. Research in African Literatures, vol. 31, iss.1, pp. 63-80.
- M’Baye, B. 2006: The European legacy, vol 11. pp 607-622.
- Rodney, W. 1981. How Europe undeveloped Africa. Howard University Press; Revised edition.
- Priestley, M. 1969, West African Trade and Coast Society: A Family Study. London.