Should Africa Be Recolonized? -By Chibuike Obi

In 1922, Prof Hugh Egerton, the first Beit Professor of Colonial History at the University of Oxford,
described the imposition of colonial rule in Africa as ” the introduction of order into blank, uninteresting, brutal barbarism while Prof Hugh Trevor-Roper, Regius Professor at the same University of Oxford, in 1963, described African history as a tale of barbarous tribal gyrations ( both statements quoted in Basil Davidson’s The Black Man’s Burden).

These views of African History held by two prominent 20th-century British historians had dominated accepted Western European scholarship on African history for the whole of the 18th century, the whole of the 19th century, and the first half of the 20th century. But by the beginning of the 20th century and continuing into the 21st century, the works of many African, African Diaspora, Asian, and indeed European, American, and other White scholars had almost completely reversed those retrograde and racist views and brought into proper perspective the relation of Africa to its history and the history of the rest of the world. Scholars and writers like Walter Rodney, Franz Fanon, Samir Amin, Basil Davidson, Stanley Diamond, Elizabeth Isichei, Kenneth Dike, and numerous others had produced rigorous and widely acclaimed scholarship which had convincingly refuted and finally overturned the dominant racist paradigm of conventional African historical scholarship of the past 250 years.

Or so it was thought. In the past two decades, the publication of Western European Empire apologetics by people like the British historian Niall Ferguson (Empire: How Britain Made The Modern World), and the American political scientist Bruce Gilley “The Case for Colonialism”

celebrating the essential benignity of the British Empire and the persistent popularity of the works of professional racists like Craig Murray and Nicolas Wade would seem to indicate a recrudescence of racist African historiography which had been thought dead, buried, and out of sight forever.

A typical example of this genre of contemporary racist writing, which in this case is geared towards cheerleading US empire building and hegemony, is Niall Ferguson’s assertion that Americans should perform the role once performed by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs. (This can be translated as saying that the British Empire was so wonderful and beneficient to its colonies that the US should take up the role of World Empire and spread happiness and enlightenment to the benighted nations of the world. This in any case is what the US has been doing since its independence from the UK in 1776: A partial list of its actions; the principle and practice of Manifest Destiny in North and South America; the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan; the devastation of Vietnam ; Ronald Reagan’s murderous central American proxy wars, Bush’s invasion of Iraq; Obama’s drone assassination and illegal mass surveillance programs, his torture and prosecution of whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, his imposition of neoliberal trade and investment regimes like TPP, his unrelenting and unconditional support of the apartheid Israel state mass murder of Palestinians, his unrelenting and unconditional support of Saudi Arabia’s genocide in Yemen and steadfast support of other murderous Middle-Eastern dictatorships, his NATO-led destruction of Libya, his imposition of murderous right-wing regimes in Honduras and other Central and South American countries and other horrific US regime-change operations. Policies continued by both Trump and Biden).

So it could be argued that anyone who is nostalgic for the glories of Pax Britannica and is rooting for Pax Americana is either entirely ignorant of the utter malignity of the British Empire or working assiduously to advertise him or herself a courtier of American power and craven exponent of American exceptionalism.

Scholarship by the above-mentioned African and African Diaspora scholars had, one would have thought, decisively demonstrated the long-lasting and continuing pernicious effects of colonization on Africa.

The arbitrariness of the colonial borders which cut off ethnic groups with common cultures and languages and joined other people with little or nothing in common; the pervasive use of divide and rule tactics in ruling colonial subjects that signified a sheer indifference and hostility to any attempt at unifying the diverse peoples forcefully enclosed within illogically drawn-up borders; the suppression of indigenous industries like the destruction of the Akwete cloth industry in south-eastern Nigeria (Elizabeth Isichei,” The History Of The Igbo People”); the fostering of loan-aid dependency, for example, the British in 1959 preferring to hold on to Ghana’s 200 million pound sterling reserves deposited perforce in London and to instead force Ghana to borrow 2 million pounds for industrial development thereby setting Ghana on the path towards aid dependency (see Chinweizu “The West And The Rest Of Us); the sundering of independent trade relations between native societies and the consequent realignment of the direction and benefit of the trade relations towards the UK and other European metropolitan power centers; the Mau-Mau massacres by the British in Kenya are just some of the horrors of the British Empire’s actions in Africa.

Of course, the UK built modern communication networks, schools, and hospitals and quelled conflicts and reduced the disorder which was pervasive in Africa at that time even though the conflicts and disorder were often the effects of previous European depredations in Africa-think the slave trade and the colonization effort itself. But these actions by the UK were undertaken for their gain than for the benefit of those whom they colonized. Communication and transport facilities (often built with forced or grossly underpaid labor) were usually geared towards the export of primary goods like palm oil, coal, cocoa, groundnuts, etc, and were not designed to develop independent economies in the colonies.

This then makes the position of Ferguson that the innovations of free labor, capital, and trade that Britain bestowed on Africa were blessings hard to understand. Britain only pushed free trade because it was in its interests to do so; its advanced industries gave it an edge in the manufacture of cheap and superior goods and when it did not, it suppressed infant industries capable or likely to compete against its industries. In the case of free labor, it was only free to the extent that the imposition of taxes and the forceful expropriation of land necessitated the need for hitherto self-sufficient agrarian workers, who had been forcefully dispossessed, to look for work wherever they could find it. It is noteworthy that the so-called Asian tigers, which were former British colonies, who did develop successfully, disregarded the gospel of free trade and capital mobility and imposed very stringent conditions on capital flight and mobility across borders. Again it should be noted that Alexander Hamilton, the first US economic minister, ignored the doctrines of Adam Smith and protected American infant industries up to the point they became mature and could compete with older British industries.

Given that none of Britain’s African colonies is an economic success story and many of them are in many cases much worse off after formal independence, two inferences may be drawn as to the cause of their underdevelopment. The first is that the British Empire’s legacy of free trade, labor, and capital did not benefit the colonies and that in fact, colonialism was an unmitigated disaster for the colonies. The second is that Africans have simply proved themselves incapable of governing themselves after the formal departure of the British thus validating the positions of people like Egerton and Trevor-Roper that Africa without Europe is simply a spectacle of blank, brutal, barbarisms and barbarous tribal gyrations.

It is then left for Africans to decide which of the two inferences is true. If they choose the former, they should then embark on an independently charted track to development (borrowing judiciously from other successful economies) and if they choose the latter, they should believe themselves to be, in the words of Obi Egbuna’s character, Brother Leroi, in “A Tale Of Three Souls”, “the most gutless bunch of emasculated cassava eaters that ever crawled an African village.”

NB: the perhaps more pernicious and certainly more insidious case of the legacy of Arabian economic, cultural and religious imperialism on Sub-Saharan Africa is a story for another day.

Chibuike Obi, a freelance journalist based in Niger State, can be reached at ojionu@hotmail.com