The Colonization of Africa
Between the 1870s and 1900, Africa
faced European imperialist aggression, diplomatic pressures, military
invasions, and eventual conquest and colonization. At the same time, African
societies put up various forms of resistance against the attempt to colonize
their countries and impose foreign domination. By the early twentieth century,
however, much of Africa, except Ethiopia and Liberia, had been colonized by
European powers.
The European imperialist push into
Africa was motivated by three main factors, economic, political, and social. It
developed in the nineteenth century following the collapse of the profitability
of the slave trade, its abolition and suppression, as well as the expansion of
the European capitalist Industrial Revolution. The imperatives of capitalist
industrialization—including the demand for assured sources of raw materials,
the search for guaranteed markets and profitable investment outlets—spurred the
European scramble and the partition and eventual conquest of Africa. Thus the
primary motivation for European intrusion was economic.
But other factors played an important
role in the process. The political impetus derived from the impact of
inter-European power struggles and competition for preeminence. Britain,
France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Portugal, and Spain were competing for power
within European power politics. One way to demonstrate national preeminence was
through the acquisition of territories around the world, including Africa. The
social factor was the third major element. As a result of industrialization,
major social problems grew in Europe: unemployment, poverty, homelessness,
social displacement from rural areas, and so on. These social problems
developed partly because not all people could be absorbed by the new capitalist
industries. One way to resolve this problem was to acquire colonies and export
this "surplus population." This led to the establishment of
settler-colonies in Algeria, Tunisia, South Africa, Namibia, Angola,
Mozambique, and central African areas like Zimbabwe and Zambia. Eventually the
overriding economic factors led to the colonization of other parts of Africa.
Thus it was the interplay of these
economic, political, and social factors and forces that led to the scramble for
Africa and the frenzied attempts by European commercial, military, and
political agents to declare and establish a stake in different parts of the
continent through inter-imperialist commercial competition, the declaration of
exclusive claims to particular territories for trade, the imposition of tariffs
against other European traders, and claims to exclusive control of waterways
and commercial routes in different parts of Africa.
This scramble was so intense that there
were fears that it could lead to inter-imperialist conflicts and even wars. To
prevent this, the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck convened a diplomatic
summit of European powers in the late nineteenth century. This was the famous
Berlin West African conference (more generally known as the Berlin Conference),
held from November 1884 to February 1885. The conference produced a treaty
known as the Berlin Act, with provisions to guide the conduct of the European
inter-imperialist competition in Africa. Some of its major articles were as
follows:
1.
The Principle of Notification
(Notifying) other powers of a territorial annexation
2.
The Principle of Effective Occupation
to validate the annexations
3.
Freedom of Trade in the Congo Basin
4.
Freedom of Navigation on the Niger and
Congo Rivers
5.
Freedom of Trade to all nations
6.
Suppression of the Slave Trade by land
and sea
This treaty, drawn up without African
participation, provided the basis for the subsequent partition, invasion, and
colonization of Africa by various European powers.
The European imperialist designs and
pressures of the late nineteenth century provoked African political and
diplomatic responses and eventually military resistance. During and after the
Berlin Conference various European countries sent out agents to sign so-called
treaties of protection with the leaders of African societies, states, kingdoms,
decentralized societies, and empires. The differential interpretation of these
treaties by the contending forces often led to conflict between both parties
and eventually to military encounters. For Europeans, these treaties meant that
Africans had signed away their sovereignties to European powers; but for
Africans, the treaties were merely diplomatic and commercial friendship
treaties. After discovering that they had in effect been defrauded and that the
European powers now wanted to impose and exercise political authority in their
lands, African rulers organized militarily to resist the seizure of their lands
and the imposition of colonial domination.
This situation was compounded by
commercial conflicts between Europeans and Africans. During the early phase of
the rise of primary commodity commerce (erroneously referred to in the
literature as "Legitimate Trade or Commerce"), Europeans got their
supplies of trade goods like palm oil, cotton, palm kernel, rubber, and
groundnut from African intermediaries, but as the scramble intensified, they
wanted to bypass the African intermediaries and trade directly with sources of
the trade goods. Naturally Africans resisted and insisted on the maintenance of
a system of commercial interaction with foreigners which expressed their
sovereignties as autonomous political and economic entities and actors. For
their part, the European merchants and trading companies called on their home
governments to intervene and impose "free trade," by force if
necessary. It was these political, diplomatic, and commercial factors and
contentions that led to the military conflicts and organized African resistance
to European imperialism.
African military resistance took two
main forms: guerrilla warfare and direct military engagement. While these were
used as needed by African forces, the dominant type used depended on the
political, social, and military organizations of the societies concerned. In
general, small-scale societies, the decentralized societies (erroneously known
as "stateless" societies), used guerrilla warfare because of their
size and the absence of standing or professional armies. Instead of
professional soldiers, small groups of organized fighters with a mastery of the
terrain mounted resistance by using the classical guerrilla tactic of
hit-and-run raids against stationary enemy forces. This was the approach used
by the Igbo of southeastern Nigeria against the British. Even though the
British imperialists swept through Igboland in three years, between 1900 and
1902, and despite the small scale of the societies, the Igbo put up protracted
resistance. The resistance was diffuse and piecemeal, and therefore it was
difficult to conquer them completely and declare absolute victory. Long after
the British formally colonized Igboland, they had not fully mastered the
territory.
Direct military engagement was most
commonly organized by the centralized state systems, such as chiefdoms,
city-states, kingdoms, and empires, which often had standing or professional
armies and could therefore tackle the European forces with massed troops. This
was the case with the resistance actions of the Ethiopians, the Zulu, the
Mandinka leadership, and numerous other centralized states. In the case of
Ethiopia, the imperialist intruder was Italy. It confronted a determined and sagacious
military leader in the Ethiopian emperor Menelik II. As Italy intensified
pressure in the 1890s to impose its rule over Ethiopia, the Ethiopians
organized to resist. In the famous battle of Adwa in 1896, one hundred thousand
Ethiopian troops confronted the Italians and inflicted a decisive defeat.
Thereafter, Ethiopia was able to maintain its independence for much of the
colonial period, except for a brief interlude of Italian oversight between 1936
and 1941.
Another example of resistance was the
one organized by Samory Touré of the emergent Mandinka empire in West Africa.
As this new empire spread and Touré attempted to forge a new political order he
ran up against the French imperialists who were also trying extend their
territories inland from their base in Dakar, Senegal. This brought the parties
into conflict. Touré organized military and diplomatic resistance between 1882
and 1898. During this sixteen-year period, he used a variety of strategies,
including guerrilla warfare, scorched-earth programs, and direct military
engagement. For this last tactic he acquired arms, especially quick-firing
rifles, from European merchant and traders in Sierra Leone and Senegal. He also
established engineering workshops where weapons were repaired and parts were
fabricated. With these resources and his well-trained forces and the motivation
of national defense he provided his protracted resistance to the French.
Eventually he was captured and, in 1898, exiled to Gabon, where he died in
1900.
It is quite clear that most African
societies fought fiercely and bravely to retain control over their countries
and societies against European imperialist designs and military invasions. But
the African societies eventually lost out. This was partly for political and
technological reasons. The nineteenth century was a period of profound and even
revolutionary changes in the political geography of Africa, characterized by
the demise of old African kingdoms and empires and their reconfiguration into
different political entities. Some of the old societies were reconstructed and
new African societies were founded on different ideological and social premises.
Consequently, African societies were in a state of flux, and many were
organizationally weak and politically unstable. They were therefore unable to
put up effective resistance against the European invaders.
The technological factor was expressed
in the radical disparity between the technologies of warfare deployed by the
contending European and African forces. African forces in general fought with
bows, arrows, spears, swords, old rifles, and cavalries; the European forces,
beneficiaries of the technical fruits of the Industrial Revolution, fought with
more deadly firearms, machines guns, new rifles, and artillery guns. Thus in
direct encounters European forces often won the day. But as the length of some
resistance struggles amply demonstrates, Africans put up the best resistance
with the resources they had.
By 1900 much of Africa had been
colonized by seven European powers—Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, Spain,
Portugal, and Italy. After the conquest of African decentralized and
centralized states, the European powers set about establishing colonial state
systems. The colonial state was the machinery of administrative domination
established to facilitate effective control and exploitation of the colonized
societies. Partly as a result of their origins in military conquest and partly
because of the racist ideology of the imperialist enterprise, the colonial
states were authoritarian, bureaucratic systems. Because they were imposed and
maintained by force, without the consent of the governed, the colonial states
never had the effective legitimacy of normal governments. Second, they were
bureaucratic because they were administered by military officers and civil
servants who were appointees of the colonial power. While they were all
authoritarian, bureaucratic state systems, their forms of administration
varied, partly due to the different national administrative traditions and
specific imperialist ideologies of the colonizers and partly because of the
political conditions in the various territories that they conquered.
In Nigeria, the Gold Coast in West
Africa, and Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika in East Africa, for example, Britain
organized its colonies at the central, provincial, and regional or district
levels. There was usually a governor or governor-general in the colonial
capital who governed along with an appointed executive council and a
legislative council of appointed and selected local and foreign members. The
governor was responsible to the colonial office and the colonial secretary in
London, from whom laws, policies, and programs were received. He made some
local laws and policies, however. Colonial policies and directives were
implemented through a central administrative organization or a colonial
secretariat, with officers responsible for different departments such as
Revenue, Agriculture, Trade, Transport, Health, Education, Police, Prison, and
so on.
The British colonies were often
subdivided into provinces headed by provincial commissioners or residents, and
then into districts headed by district officers or district commissioners. Laws
and policies on taxation, public works, forced labor, mining, agricultural
production, and other matters were made in London or in the colonial capital
and then passed down to the lower administrative levels for enforcement.
At the provincial and district levels
the British established the system of local administration popularly known as
indirect rule. This system operated in alliance with preexisting political
leaderships and institutions. The theory and practice of indirect rule is
commonly associated with Lord Lugard, who was first the British high
commissioner for northern Nigeria and later governor-general of Nigeria. In the
Hausa /Fulani emirates of northern Nigeria he found that they had an
established and functional administrative system. Lugard simply and wisely
adapted it to his ends. It was cheap and convenient. Despite attempts to
portray the use of indirect rule as an expression of British administrative
genius, it was nothing of the sort. It was a pragmatic and parsimonious choice
based partly on using existing functional institutions. The choice was also partly
based on Britain's unwillingness to provide the resources required to
administer its vast empire. Instead, it developed the perverse view that the
colonized should pay for their colonial domination. Hence, the choice of
indirect rule.
The system had three major
institutions: the "native authority" made up of the local ruler, the
colonial official, and the administrative staff; the "native
treasury," which collected revenues to pay for the local administrative
staff and services; and the "native courts," which purportedly
administered "native law and custom," the supposedly traditional
legal system of the colonized that was used by the courts to adjudicate cases.
In general, indirect rule worked fairly
well in areas that had long-established centralized state systems such as
chiefdoms, city-states, kingdoms, and empires, with their functional
administrative and judicial systems of government. But even here the fact that
the ultimate authority was the British officials meant that the African leaders
had been vassalized and exercised "authority" at the mercy of
European colonial officials. Thus the political and social umbilical cords that
tied them to their people in the old system had been broken. Some astute
African leaders maneuvered and ruled as best they could, while others used the
new colonial setting to become tyrants and oppressors, as they were responsible
to British officials ultimately.
In the decentralized societies, the
system of indirect rule worked less well, as they did not have single rulers.
The British colonizers, unfamiliar with these novel and unique political
systems and insisting that African "natives" must have chiefs, often
appointed licensed leaders called warrant chiefs, as in Igboland, for example.
The French, for their part, established
a highly centralized administrative system that was influenced by their
ideology of colonialism and their national tradition of extreme administrative
centralism. Their colonial ideology explicitly claimed that they were on a
"civilizing mission" to lift the benighted "natives" out of
backwardness to the new status of civilized French Africans. To achieve this,
the French used the policy of assimilation, whereby through acculturation and
education and the fulfillment of some formal conditions, some
"natives" would become evolved and civilized French Africans. In
practice, the stringent conditions set for citizenship made it virtually
impossible for most colonial subjects to become French citizens. For example,
potential citizens were supposed to speak French fluently, to have served the
French meritoriously, to have won an award, and so on. If they achieved French
citizenship, they would have French rights and could only be tried by French
courts, not under indigénat, the French colonial doctrine and legal practice
whereby colonial "subjects" could be tried by French administrative
officials or military commanders and sentenced to two years of forced labor
without due process. However, since France would not provide the educational
system to train all its colonized subjects to speak French and would not
establish administrative and social systems to employ all its subjects,
assimilation was more an imperialist political and ideological posture than a
serious political objective.
In terms of the actual administrative
system in its various African colonies—Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco in North
Africa, and Senegal, French Guinea, French Sudan, Upper Volta, Dahomey, and
others in West Africa, and Gabon, Congo-Brazzaville, Ubangi-Shari in Central
Africa—the French used a system of direct rule. They also created federations
in West Africa and Central Africa. In the colonial capitals the governors were
responsible to the minister of colonies in Paris. Most laws and policies were
sent from Paris, and the governors who ruled with general councils were
expected to enforce them in line with France's centralist traditions. The
colonies were also subdivided into smaller administrative units as follows:
cercles under commandant du Cercles, subdivisions under chef de subdivisions,
and at the next level, cantons were administered by African chiefs who were in
effect like the British warrant chiefs.
While France tried to maintain this
highly centralized system, in some parts of its colonies where it encountered
strongly established centralized state systems, the French were compelled to
adopt the policy of association, a system of rule operating in alliance with
preexisting African ruling institutions and leaders. Thus it was somewhat like
British indirect rule, although the French still remained committed to the
doctrine of assimilation. In the association system, local governments were run
with African rulers whom the French organized at three levels and grades: chef
de province (provincial chief); chef de canton (district chiefs), and chef de
village (village chief). In practice, the French system combined elements of
direct administration and indirect rule.
In general, the French administrative
system was more centralized, bureaucratic, and interventionist than the British
system of colonial rule. The other colonial powers— Germany, Portugal, Spain,
Belgium, and Italy—used varied administrative systems to facilitate control and
economic exploitation. However, no matter the system, they were all alien,
authoritarian, and bureaucratic, and distorted African political and social
organizations and undermined their moral authority and political legitimacy as
governing structures.
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vol. 3 of Africa, ed. Toyin Falola. Durham: Carolina Academic
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Psychology of Colonialism." In The End of Colonial Rule:
Nationalism and Decolonization, vol. 4 of Africa, ed. Toyin
Falola. Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 2002.
Oyebade, Adebayo. "Colonial
Political Systems." In Colonial Africa, 1885–1939, vol. 3 of
Africa, ed. Toyin Falola. Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 2002.
Stilwell, Sean. "The Imposition of
Colonial Rule." In Colonial Africa, 1885–1939, vol. 3 of Africa,
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