InterOuts

The Colonial Rape of Africa.

Part [1][2]

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In his treaty “Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview” by Professor Jurgen Osterhammel, he says ‘Colonialism is a relationship between an indigenous (or forcibly imported) majority and a minority of foreign invaders. The fundamental decisions affecting the lives of the colonised people are made and implemented by the colonial rulers in pursuit of interests that are often defined in a distant metropolis. Rejecting cultural compromises with the colonised population, the colonisers are convinced of their own superiority and their ordained mandate to rule’.

Africa is still rich and very important to the former western colonial powers both for financial and economic reasons and because it contains many of the raw materials essential to stockpile in their strategic reserves (especially those necessary for their technological and military prowess). Taking a few examples, South Africa’s mineral wealth is approximately 2.5 Trillion US Dollars while the mineral wealth of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DPR) is approximately 24 Trillion US Dollars and apparently, Uganda has 13 Trillion US Dollars of Gold. This is mainly untouched overall and is still a vast source of wealth for western ex-colonial powers to loot. The official GDP of Africa in 2022 was 3.1 Trillion US Dollars though some estimates of GDP (from very academic and reputable sources) put it closer to 7.7 Trillion US Dollars. The discrepancy raises a lot of questions, especially as to the probity of the business currently transacted between African nations and western nations. To gain perspective, estimates of Africa losing 29 Billion US Dollars annually from illegal fishing, wildlife/plants and logging are on the low side. On the financial side alone, Africa is losing through illicit flows of finance an amount around 88.6 Billion US dollars annuallyaccording to the United Nations Office of the Special Advisor on Africa in 2020.

Africa has been colonised since times past have long drifted into oblivion. The continued removal of resources including human beings which must be listed alongside the usual obvious suspects like gold, silver, diamonds, emeralds, rubies and of course since the 19th Century, uranium, cobalt, all the metals possible to extract, and now especially lithium and gas as well as oil. Africa contains around 30 % of global mineral reserves, 8 % of global natural Gas and12 % of the world's oil reserves. The continent has 40 % of the world's gold and +/- 90 % of its chrome and platinum. It is also the largest continent inhabited by mankind. It is 30.4million km squared, the USA is 9.8million km squared and Europe is 5.9 million km squared so Africa is twice the size of the USA and Europe combined. So there was plenty of room to plant, mine, build and ravage without the enormous pressure to survive that most of Europe’s inhabitants had to contend with, plus of course, it was not ‘home’ so whatever occurred there was not usually related to back home or even known to have ever happened. Human’s until the so called “Age of Enlightenment’ were always tradable goods, objects or if trained to perform certain duties or perhaps acts of service, listed as items and assets. Never humans as, well humans. Slavery was a very lucrative business for the West, the East, the South and the North and there are no lands that did not employ slavery in one form or another in their past. Slavery in North Africa has been dated back to ancient Egypt. Large numbers of Prisoners of War during the Egyptian New Kingdom (1558–1080 BC) were enslaved as they were in Ptolemaic Egypt (305 BC–30 BC). The Portuguese were the first Europeans to establish a permanent physical presence in Africa, in the 1480s. Until then, forays were just that, time limited journeys to trade, loot and explore Africa though the slave business was well established by the Moslem kingdoms of North Africa and the Middle East with small trading posts and slave pits (to contain them when moving them from inland to the sea ) established along regular routes. Other nations including Europeans went on raids and ‘business trips’ to Africa returning with all manner of things from ivory, gold, diamonds, spices and foodstuffs but very often with slaves making Africa in demand.

However, the fact that the unabated pillage is continuing has finally forced Africa to stand up and refuse to honour contracts that place them at a permanent disadvantage and prevent their moving forward technologically and economically with greater social cohesion and stability. With the changes heralded in the current world’ order’ by Russia, China, Iran, and now parts of South America, Africa and Asia, the whole ‘play’ has been exposed for what it is, a complete scam where the colonial powers are still extracting more than they should at a price which is far too low. I do not say ex since they still behave like they did then – witness France’s refusal to remove its troops from Niger and Mali, both supposedly sovereign nations recognised as such by International Law. It must be remembered that after all, it is Africa’s resources that are being ‘exchanged’. The question is for what? More debt at the company store (the IMF, the World Bank, foreign corporations and multinationals) and continued kowtowing to the ‘illustrious’ west and its air of superiority? There is little doubt in any sane, logical mind that Africa must fully embrace the growth in technology and science, education and health, quality of life and its environment that the ‘better off’ G7 and its ‘friends’enjoy currently. To do that, the financial and technological, scientific and economic constraints placed by the colonial powers or west to enable their continued pillage, looting and subjugation of Africa and its people must cease.

Now for the hard part. How to quantify the centuries of theft and will the figures obtained bear any semblance to the reality on the ground? Then there are the colonial powers themselves to consider, they are after all, from a time when they were the law unto themselves and all they ruled over, as well as their poor subjects. So their accounts and accountability were subject to whim. Before doing that however, how far back do we go? Colonialism has been endemic in human history, even pre-human primates ‘took territory’. Modern colonialism began during what's always touted as the ‘Age of Discovery’( and a little later ‘the Age of Enlightenment’) and began circa 1500 when Portugal looked for new trade routes and civilizations outside the confines of Europe to trade with or conquer. The voyages and discoveries led to tentative settlements to begin with. I have taken the mid-16th Century as the starting point for Africa with the arrival in numbers of European or Western colonists who not only intended to stay permanently but built infrastructure to their method of running a nation so that the administrative, military, judicial, educational, agricultural, medical, nutritional and political sections were firmly under their control so that today, they appear to the observer only to be in their likeness and ‘independent’. South America and America predate this by nearly 2 Centuries. So in essence, the European powers and their lackeys had the final say in everything including the disclosure of financial and economic information. What figures can be gleaned must be viewed as being very much on the low side what with taxes, envy (problematic in feudal states like Europe was composed of in the 16th to 19th Centuries) and of course, fear of attack and theft. It was all to the good to show your wealth and power but the Europeans, were so highly civilized that killing and thieving from each other was part of their cultured existence as there were wars and incursions ( in order to loot, rape and pillage) between them all time. Thus their attitude towards Africa and its inhabitants was one of ownership; one that instantly implies the what is owned is only chattels or goods. It strips out the ‘humanity’ in the equation resulting in what can only be termed ‘barbaric and inhumane’ treatment of the people, owned or otherwise. However, it must be noted there appears to be no authoritative definitive calculation of the amount of money the west collectively took (stole, looted, purloined) from Africa neither per century or even per decade. The figures do not go back very far, so the amounts quoted are for a limited period only and not for the centuries of colonisation and so are misleading. For example ‘western’ countries drained 152 Trillion US Dollars from the Global South since 1960 and about 1.4 Trillion Dollars in illicit funds between 1980 and 2009—roughly Africa's gross domestic product, more than the total money received by Africa. Honest Accounts in 2017 stated that ‘Africa received 162 Billion Dollars in 2015 as loans, aid and remittances but 203 Billion Dollars left the continent in the same year via the repatriation of profits, tax avoidance and climate change adaptation(imposed by the West). In 2017, 47 African countries were in deficit for an amount exceeding 41 Billion US Dollars leaving the majority of their populations trapped in poverty with no foreseeable way forward. Representatives of 13 European states, the United States of America and the Ottoman Empire converged on Berlin at the invitation of German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck to divide up Africa between themselves "in accordance with International Law." Africa had a vast amount of natural resources and undeveloped markets and economies waiting to be exploited. The Berlin Conference came to an end on February 26, 1885, after more than three months of wrangling. No Africans were invited to attend the meeting.

This result brought about The Scramble for Africa from 1884 to around 1914 and came to be known as the New Imperialism. Much has been written and debated on this issue. The reality is that with rebranding and obfuscation, the same colonial pillage is continuing to this very day only better hidden and protected. Professor Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University stated recently that “Africa was divided by the European imperial powers into 55 countries, many of which are quite small… the continent as a whole is 1.4 billion people.” He went on to say that ‘Western Neo-colonialism Cannot Stop Africa’s Rise’ and that ‘there's a lot of instability built into extreme poverty’, a colonial device to divide and conquer that is still working to this day adding ‘they did not do more than pay lip service when it came to addressing “very deep legacy issues of the former colonial age.’’ ‘Economies do not grow by stockpiling inflows and preventing outflows but by enabling people to invest and learn, adapt technologies and access markets’.

The colonial powers are ( were if you insist) as follows, Great Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, The Netherlands, Italy, Portugal and Spain. They divided the entire Continent up between themselves indulging in wholesale slaughter of each other and the nations they had first conquered and then created out of vast tracts of land differentiated by topography, ethnic cultures and languages, often tribal in nature. The way they arbitrarily divided up the vast areas into nation states most often took no account of tribal or cultural boundaries and historically fixed ‘feudal’ states, something still resounding throughout Africa to this day and causing endless wars, incursions and unnecessary divisions. They quickly applied their methods of agriculture, forestry and mining and extracted as efficiently as methods applicable then would allow, everything they could, which then was transported back to the mother land or traded. The euphemistic term ‘ collateral damage’ must be applied since it fits the ethics of the day regarding their treatment of their subjects in Africa as profit reigned supreme and all else was water under the bridge including keeping them on a poverty level so they were compliant. The most brutal colonial regime in Africa was Belgium (under King Leopold 2, "the Butcher of Congo") with an estimated 10 million deaths. Between 1885 and 1914, Britain controlled nearly 30% of Africa's population; France had 15%, 11% for Portugal, 9% for Germany, 7% for Belgium and 1% for Italy. Though not as readily apparent today, much of Africa’s population is still not ‘free’ of the malign influence of the colonial powers and their allies/vassals by virtue of the corporations and institutions still looting their resources for minimal cost with very little filtering down to the man in the street. Add to that the administrative and functional arms of government still applying methods implemented by the colonial powers which still favour their companies and professionals to the detriment of the indigenous providers or ones offering a better deal from other nations.

Great Britain

Britain was the principal ‘slaver’ nation of the modern world. Great Britain took the lion’s share of Africa with the countries as follow, Ghana, Liberia, Sierra Leone, the Gambia, Nigeria, Somalia, Tanganyika, Uganda, Kenya, Northern Rhodesia, Southern Rhodesia, South Africa, Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland, Malawi and Sudan. The Crown took its share of the loot and it and the levies paid for transport, customs, storage, protection against piracy and theft provide figures which with other sources when verified as authentic for the time period and prevailing ‘law’ give an approximate version of what was acquired by the Kingdom from Africa. India recently calculated the during the period of colonial rule by the British -the Raj-, the British ‘masters’ extracted a conservative figure of 60 Trillion Dollars at today’s rate from the nation. The ‘authoritative’ version published in the West is “Over roughly 200 years, the East India Company and the British Raj siphoned at least £9.2 trillion (or $44.6 trillion, the exchange rate was 4.8 Dollars to 1 Pound Sterling for the majority of the colonial period)”. The publishing of data related to the amount taken financially by Britain over several centuries is seldom quoted or available with references being modern as in ‘The New Colonialism, Britain's scramble for Africa's energy and mineral resources', a report by War on Want. This lists over100 companies on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) that have mining operations in Africa – and control resources worth in excess of 1 trillion Dollars, published in 2016. Google does not give any specific references to the overall amount (with little bits on specifics over a short time span) the British ‘extracted’ from Africa and neither does Wikipedia. Other sources are either not specific or carefully avoid the issue other than giving figures on art, culture and ignoring commodities (gold, diamonds etc.), raw materials (oil, timber), foodstuffs ( palm oil etc.) and of course the labour to obtain them. Slavery brought huge profits to ‘The Empire’ for centuries and many of today’s nobility and power players derive from families whose wealth was due to this ‘ethical’ form of business. Today, the west extracts from Africa, commodities worth 1.5 + Trillion Dollars per year, in western prices. That is not what Africa receives for them. It is enough to end extreme poverty globally, a few times over. From 1960, the total is around 75 + - Trillion Dollars. If this had remained and been invested in Africa (infrastructure, production, etc.) it would be around 130 + Trillion Dollars today. For the west, the profit is so large that it outstripped the rate of economic growth in their economies. In essence it shows that net growth was dependent on the extraction from Africa of wealth and not the so often claimed Western technological and cultural supremacy as the driving force. Yes they counted, and enormously, but the main provision of the finance to enable the demand led growth in western economies and nations came from wealth removed from Africa by deviously illicit means. Implicitly this revolves around amoral, quasilegal as well as non-legal means to obtain large profits, over and above those generated by normal business operations. So the venerated (why?) Queen Victoria and the oft referred to British Empire made the majority of their celebrated advances in all fields including war and slavery on the back of Africa and not through their hard working ‘Victorian’ ethic and morally superior lives. So much for the British, always quick to point out their ‘superior’ ethics and democratic values.

In an article in the Guardian, the writer makes the following points ‘ In Joseph Inikori's masterful book, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England, he shows how African consumers, free and enslaved, nurtured Britain's infant manufacturing industry. As Malachy Postlethwayt, the political economist candidly put it in 1745: "British trade is a magnificent superstructure of American commerce and naval power on an African foundation”. In his book The Great Divergence, Kenneth Pomeranz asked why Europe, rather than China, made the breakthrough first into a modern industrial economy. ‘To his two answers - abundant coal and New World colonies - he should have added access to west Africa. For the colonial Americas were more Africa's creation than Europe's: before 1800, far more Africans than Europeans crossed the Atlantic’. Without Africa, the modern world as we know it would not exist.

What is the value of the plunder the United Kingdom removed from Africa? Low end inferences hold around 150 to 200 Trillion Dollars and the high end? Depends on you political persuasion and agenda and access to data and information, much of which is still unobtainable often with very dubious reasons given as to why this is so. The astonishing amounts or hard cash deriving from Africa even if only conservative estimates, give food for thought as to the reality of the issue. The true underlying attitude of the colonists like Great Britain is summed up perfectly by England’s bulldog, Sir Winston Churchill and I quote verbatim :I do not agree that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been made to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, a more wordly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.

The British Parliament legislated the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act in 1807. Estimates run around the 12.5 million slaves were sent from Africa to North and South America with the Caribbean between the 16th century and 1807. The issue of slavery is still being levelled at the British Royal family to this very day as the BBC pointed out and haunts them with King Charles 111’s visit to Kenya in November 2023 bringing forth many articles and headlines especially with regard to the British military’s actions against the indigenous people (the MauMau uprising etc.). One source quoted that the United Kingdom’s debt for slavery was 18 Trillion Pounds Sterling which was immediately debunked by a Judge at the United Nations as being on the low side. Other estimates give a figure of 35 Trillion Pounds Sterling This alone without the other ‘proceeds’ of colonisation (India conservatively estimated an amount of 60+ Trillion US Dollars extracted by the British Raj) makes it debatable whether we will ever know the true figure by which Great Britain benefited from ’owning’ the world.

Is there really any room for the arrogance, paternalistic colonialism and downright effrontery of the claim, subtly but implicit, that the English are a superior race whose culture and nation was built on hard work, sound Christian morals and belief in the sanctity of life and human rights (The Magna Carta et al.)?

Part [1][2]