By: Ukachuchwu Okorie and Ollus Ndomu
Visiting Indonesia few years ago, Dutch King Willem-Alexander apologised for his country’s ‘excessive violence’ in its former colony, saying the past could not be erased but must be acknowledged.
Obviously, colonialism had devastating impact on those parts of the world that it affected especially Africa. First, European historians tried to justify it through setting the tune of its discourse in the colonial and post colonial era, and secondly, supporting unpopular mechanisms in regime change to entrench neocolonialism. Whollystically, the effects of colonialism are grande, but we shall take on pieces of it.
We shall look closely at the near attempt to erode African civilization and history viz a viz the influence of foreign culture, conflict and underdevelopment, education and neocolonialism.
When we talk about the evils of colonialism, a whole lot comes into perspective. From the era of slavery and the desire to venture into the hintherland as tales of slaves on the abundance of raw materials become luring. The Olaudah Equino book coming into the picture coupled with interactions with the middlemen at the coast. From these, the incursion in the disguise of a new era of legitimate trade, which came with diseases unwittingly carried by Europeans, of which the indigenous populations had no natural immunity.
Moreover, to enable easier governance of indigenous populations, colonial powers utilised new slavery tactics like creating and exaggerating ethnic divides, importing new and loyal population and fanning wars.
These policies have continued and visible cultural legacies till this day in Africa.
This is where Frankz Fanon’s colonial thesis of violence comes into focus. Everything about colonialism is violent and as such evil. His arguement in – The Wretched of the Earth – is a psychiatric analysis of colonization because it changes the victims way of life. As a matter of fact, colonialism breeds a kind of mental illness, because it negatively affects both the colonized and his society. Frankz Fanon believes that colonialism is slavery, and that the roles of master and slave, colonizer and colonized, will pervert and destroy the human potential in both, and it is right in Africa. This is why this article considers it as evil in our continent. Africa has been worse off since being held in its jugular by the successor of colonialism, which is neocolonialism and its predecessor, slavery.
Whatever good intentions the European colonizers might have had, the social relationships necessitated by colonialism invert them; in his conclusion, Fanon argues that while Europeans may speak of humanitarianism, their actions suggest just the opposite: Europeans “are never done talking of Man, yet murder men
everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe.” He calls for the colonized to rebel against their masters, so that the Third World can start a new
history of man, or invent a new social order independent of European values.”
Foreign Culture
When we say culture, aspects will be looked at because of the indept nature of harm caused by European colonialism. European influence brought election rigging, corruption, dependence, loss of traditional fashion sense and ethics, exultation of sexual orientation, perpetual division (Anglophone/Francophone), loss of language, religion, loss of confidence, dehumanisation of traditions and more.
Samora Machel in one of his trips to Zimbabawe informed his listeners how bad Africans have been beaten
psychologically, that those colonised by Britain brag about them being products of a great Empire, and same for those in francophone countries. He went on to taunt those of them colonised by Portugal. “Imagine a very weak Portugal, but they still colonized countries in Africa”, he informed. Samora Machel’s
statement can be used to measure the depth Africa has fallen, and it shows the extent of damage European colonialism did in the continent.
In a BBC 4 podcast published on Monday 30 July, 2007 titled ‘The Gift of Democracy?’
Mike Thomson presented a series using documentary evidence to show how colonial Britain taught Nigerians election rigging.The author investigated allegations through an unpublished memoirs of a former colonial civil servant on how the British tampered with Nigeria’s first democratic elections before independence in 1960. Even though it is not being discussed in a scholarly atmosphere, the damage British imperialists did to the people they called Nigerians affects the wider world in many ways. In their greed to control the structures of power, colonial Europe thought Africans how to manipulate the political process with the barrel of guns and violence. In Nigeria, migrant and feudalistic Fulani were tacitly empowered to rule over owners of the land in the north, and were used as willing tools to put the more enterprising and educated south under check. British policies were simply retrogressive.
In the process of imposing their economic conduit structures, merit was discarded for mediocrity and corruption tolerated. As it is in the British colonies, so it is among other colonial authorities. Although colonial policies differ, their exploitative characteristics are same. They perfected policies for the newly independent countries to depend on them. For instance, in 2019 France bowed to pressure and lost supervision of ‘colonial’ west African currency CFA franc, whereby countries will no longer keep half their reserves in Paris.
The CFA franc was launched in 1945 and used in two African monetary zones, one for eight west African countries and the other for six mostly petro-states in central Africa. Unfortunately, the currency gives dominance to Paris and French companies in the region. The negetive effect of this policy is the low
manufacturing strength of former French colonies in Africa and their status as perpetual markets.
The dependence has now beome a psychological issue that many in the francophone region look up to Paris for
designer clothing and accessories at the expense of traditional ones.
We saw the diplomatic row over gay issues during the Barack Obama and David Cameron years. In what the
American based NBC called Obama’s Quiet Mission to Export Gay Rights Overseas, they quoted Associated Press
saying, “The U.S. has deployed its diplomats and spent tens of millions of dollars to try to block anti-gay laws, punish countries that enacted them, and tie financial assistance to respect for LGBTQ rights. It was a mission animated in part by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s declaration that “gay rights are human rights.” Most African countries frowned at the United States stance on tying diplomatic relations
with such an issue. Despite his ancestry, the policy pitched President Obama with many Africans who took pride in his emergence.
The idea of colonial ideology has often torn African progress apart, and it still does till this day. In politics, sports and even continental affairs, the tussle of Anglophone vs Francophone never ends. European rivalries and tussle resonate among Africans who ordinarily neglect primary issues to tow the direction of
their pay masters. The emergence of China as a power block has added a new dimension to the course of loyalty.
Language loss is one of the worse effects of colonialism in today’s Africa. The situation is so bad in many African societies that some languages are now threatened. Apart from the fact that schools and public communications are now in the colonizer’s language, their policy of multi-ethnicism as the basis of new African states suffocated weak and minor ethnic groups. More so, languages have been lost in the post colonial battle for supremacy among competing ethnic nations.
According to South African Desmond Tutu “When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said ‘Let us pray.’ We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.” Organised religion brought by European powers and some of the missionaries were for commercial purposes. Former Archbishop Tutu’s statement sums it up as both missionaries and government worked closely in the exploitation of the African indigenes. As a tool of trade, Churches built capitalist structures that
siphoned wealth to their bases in Europe. It is that template that the new generation Churches now operate.
Through covert and overt pattern, many Africans abandoned their modes of prayer and supplication and their path to God.
Neocolonialism
Neocolonialism is simply a system where colonial powers pretend to let their former colonies be free, but continue to direct affairs through proxy. On paper, these colonies have attained independendence, but in practice, they are not. The term ‘neo’ means ‘new’, which is a modern version of colonialism.
At the end of the second world war, returnee soldiers and nationalists brought vigour to the agitation for
independence of the colonies, which later happened through different processes. However, the European
colonizers were reluctant to leave Africa if not the pressure from different fronts. The United States of America, which became a new superpower was not interested in Europe’s long business of colonial exploitation while protests of varying degrees brought enormous pressure on the colonizers. In all these,
the greed of European powers made them prop up stooges where they committed attrocities even with the
support of US agencies.Terrible things still happen across the continent till this day due to the success of this modern colonialism. It succeded due to the wave of coup d’etat across Africa when many of the nationalists decided to chart a different course from the Western powers. The emergence of Mobutu Seseseko and murder of Patrice Lumumba is an example of the evils of neocolonialism. In this indirect rule of
neocolonialism, different tactics were adopted. Policies were tailored to cause disaffection among the colonised through colour, status and ethnicity. Most of the problems African countries have today is as a result of neocolonialism.
Education
The impact of colonialism in Africa is still felt, seen and heard through the continent’s education, which has for so long failed to promote industrialization and meaningful technology. This is against well placed views of some giant scholars and academicians arguement that colonial or Western education brought civilization to Africa, which by implication is a positive contribution towards development. Their view and
argument appear true on the surface level but when subjected to critical analysis, the reality shows the
hollowness of colonial education which cannot be entirely divorced from the present African underdevelopment.
Introduced by colonial masters to further their cause of dominance, Western education had no root in Black culture and was somewhat tailored to promote acculturation of Africans to the norms and value systems of
their oppressors. Such an education could not be meaningful enough to foster development within the African
environment as it lacked organic linkage. Additionally, Africa’s present inability to promote industrialization and unaided exploration of widespread natural resources proves that colonial education was essentially literary. Colonial authorities did not offer an education with a strong technological base,
thus it produced a workforce that was antithetical to industrial development.
Proud historical accounts clearly show that colonial education was primarily aimed at training interpreters and clerks including inspectors, artisans and housekeepers who could speak the lingua franca of the colonizer (English, French or Portuguese). This shallow education would only help the Europeans in the exploitation of the continent’s rich resources. Postcolonial economic scuffles including the now incremental massive unemployment in Africa further clarify the point that colonial education didn’t foster industrialization of the continent and had no basis for stimulating technological development. In fact, this education promoted the distortion and disarticulation of pre-colonial indigenous pattern of education which at least fostered African technology.
The Africa of pre-colonial days had an indigenous education which empowered its people with skills necessary for technological advancements. For example, the continent had good sculptors, carvers, cloth weavers, miners, blacksmiths and architects such as those who erected the gloriously timeless Egyptian pyramids and bronze works looted by Europeans and stashed in their museums.
Skilful Africans were capable of satisfying the technological needs of various societies across the continent and life was orderly. However, the arrival of Europeans with a whole new education system founded upon the western value system and socio-cultural norms, changed the narrative of Africa’s indigenous education. The Eurocentric education discarded the continent’s indigenous technological skills by
introducing a new focus that placed premium on reading and writing colonial languages which later became official languages in independent Africa. Colonial education was the prelude to the present poor technological base of Africa which has perpetuated widespread underdevelopment.
A critical look at Africa’s unsuccessful attempt at technological transfer through the prism of western education would awaken you to a reality that education without roots in people’s culture and environment cannot respond meaningfully to technological needs. Industrial and technological transfers are still more of a myth than reality in
independent Africa.
Conflicts and Under-development
Years after the colonial era, Africa appears like a continent in crisis. To an outsider, Africa evokes images of failed politics with war and corruption, the world’s second largest continent seems imploding from disease and starvation. The world every now and then blames Africans for their plight. Conflicts, corruption and widespread dictatorship give the world a reason to brand African people as intolerant of ethnic and religious differences and unable to govern themselves.
However, historians understand that such blames are but dangerous misconceptions aimed to mask the complex and historical causes of contemporary crises seen today in Libya, Sudan, Uganda, Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. A critical examination of historical roots of Africa’s political instability, ethnic and internal struggles, and conflicts in general shows that the continent’s current predicaments are not solely the result of African decisions, but are also the consequence of foreign intrusion into African affairs, says Elizabeth Schmidt, history Professor at Loyola University, Maryland. Contemporary challenges across the continent are the outcome of colonial political and economic practices, Cold War alliances, and attempts by western powers to influence African political and economic systems dating from the decolonization and post-independence periods.
A close analysis of conflicts in Somalia, Eritrea and Ethiopia shows that African conflicts are international contests for power. In Africa,
interstate conflicts seldom take the form of conventional wars over invasions to oust sitting governments or national boundaries. Instead, all recorded armed rivalry have taken different, disguised forms which among others include proxy war and covert war. This is the standard of wars seen across the Horn of Africa region. After war revelations have often shown domestic and interstate conflicts are usually sponsor by at least one or more foreign powers. According to Alex de Waal of Foreign Policy, this is just a matter of a government quietly tolerating the guerrillas from a neighbouring country using a refugee camp to recruit or a porous border to smuggle weapons. Alex adds that official pleas of ignorance or incapacity to police a border are a convenient excuse. Often times, involvement in a neighbour’s war is authorized at the highest level and implemented systematically, if secretive, by military intelligence or national security, FP.
The Ethiopia-Sudan border struggle is the best example for this scenario. Both governments have a long record of attacking each other despite regional peace efforts. During the 1980s and 1990s, Ethiopia and Sudan each sponsored rebels in the neighbouring countries with training camps, arms, and logistics, through policy decision. Attacks which killed several hundreds and several thousands saw these countries each deploying its own troops clandestinely in the other’s territory. Take for example, Ethiopian troops led operations under the flag of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA). Ethiopia seemingly succeeded in destabilizing peace in Sudan with its troops sometimes drafted in as counter-insurgents in their hosts’ own country. The SPLA fought against Oromo rebels inside Ethiopia in the 1980s; the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front in turn repelled an SPLA operation inside Sudan’s Blue Nile province in 1990, FP. All these regional conflicts were fought in the interest of foreign powers who wanted to prolong their influence and relevance in the region.
Colonists have left Africa but their influence is still seen in conflicts, failed government systems, unfair international economic policies and smuggling of natural resources. Africa needs to rethink and forge a new path for development and peace. And for real prosperity and stability to take place, greedy foreigners must be jetisoned and totally ignored. The West and their new rivals can never encourage Africa to genuinely grow, we have to do it ourselves.
