Book Review

The Fate of Africa
By:Martin Meridith
 
Reviewed By: Samia Mashaly
 
During the scramble for Africa at the end of the nineteenth century, European powers staked claims to virtually the entire continent. At meetings in Berlin, Paris, London and other capitals, European statesmen and diplomats bargained over the spheres of interest they intended to establish there.
 
Hitherto Europeans had known Africa more as coastline than a continent; their presence had been confined mainly to small, isolated enclaves on the coast used for trading purposes. On the ground, European rule was enforced both by treaty and by conquest. From their enclaves on the coast, officials moved ever deeper into the interior to proclaim the changes agreed in the chancelleries and the country mansions of Europe.  
 
Scores of African rulers who resisted colonial rule died in battle or were executed or sent into exile after defeat. Samori of the Mandingo was captured and died in exile two years later; the Asantehene, King Agyeman Prempeh, was deposed and exiled for nearly thirty years; Lobengula of the Ndebele died in flight; Behazin of Dahomey and Cetshwayo of the Zulu were banished from their homelands.                                                         

In the concluding act of the partition of Africa, Britain, at the height of its imperial power, set out to take over two independent Boer republics, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, and incorporate them into the British Empire, assuming that a war of conquest would take at most a matter of months. It turned into a grueling campaign lasting three years, required nearly half a million imperial troops to finish it, and left a legacy of bitterness and hatred among Afrikaners that endured for generations.

 Faced with guerrilla warfare for which they were unprepared, British military commanders resorted to scorched-earth tactics, destroying thousands of farmsteads, razing villages to the ground and slaughtering livestock on a massive scale, reducing the Boers to an impoverished people. Women and children were rounded up and placed in what the British called concentration camps, where conditions were so appalling that some 26,000 there from disease and malnutrition, most of them under the a sixteen. All this became part of a Boer heritage passed in anger from one generation to the next, spawning a virulent Afrikaner nationalism that eventually took hold of South Africa.

A reshuffle of territory occurred as a result of the First War German colonies were shared out among Britain, France, Belgium and the Union of South Africa, a British dominion founded in 1910. Tanganyika was handed over to Britain; South West Africa to South Africa; the tiny territories of Rwanda-Burundi were passed to Belgium; and Togoland and Cameroon were divided up between Britain and France. As a reward for Italian support in the Firs War, Britain gave Jubaland to Italy to form part of Italian Somaliland, moving the border of Kenya westwards. But otherwise the boundaries of Africa remained fixed.
 
Only one African state managed to stave off the onslaught European occupation during the Scramble: Ethiopia, an ancient Christian kingdom, once ruled by the legendary Prester John.
 
Having expended so much effort on acquiring African empires, Europe's colonial powers then lost much of their earlier interest in them. Few parts of Africa offered the prospect of immediate wealth. Colonial governments were concerned above all to make their territories financial1y self-supporting. Administration was thus kept to a minimum; education was placed in the hands of Christian missionaries; economic activity was left to commercial companies. The main functions of government were limited to maintaining law and order, raising taxation and providing an infrastructure of roads and railways. There seemed to be no need for more rapid development. Colonial rule was expected to last for hundreds of years.
 
With so few men on the ground, colonial governments relied heavily on African chiefs and other functionaries to collaborate with officials and exercise control on their behalf. The British, in particular, favored a system of "indirect rule", using African authorities keep order, collect taxes and supply labor, that involved a minimum of staff and expense. The model for indirect rule was devise, Lugard in northern Nigeria where Fulani emirs had governed accordance with Islamic traditions of law and discipline stretching back for centuries. Lugard posted British Residents at their courts allowed the emirs to continue to police, tax and administer justice on their behalf much as before. Similar methods of indirect rule were adopted in Buganda, in Loziland and in other parts of Britain's African empire.
 
Year by year the new colonies gradually took shape. Railway lines snaking into the interior from the coast reached Lake Victoria in 1901, Katanga in 1910, Kano in northern Nigeria in 1912 and Lake Tanganyika in 1914. New patterns of economic activity were established. African colonies became significant exporters of minerals and agricultural commodities such as groundnuts, palm oil, Cotton, coffee,
 
Cocoa and sisal. By 1911 the Gold Coast (Ghana) had become the world's leading exporter of Cocoa. In the highlands of eastern and southern Africa and along the Mediterranean coast of Algeria and Tunisia, European settlers acquired huge landholdings, establishing the basis of large-scale commercial agriculture. In Kenya the fertile
 
White Highlands were designated for their exclusive use. In 1931 half of the entire land area of Southern Rhodesia Was stipulated for the use of white farmers who at the time numbered no more than 2,500. In South Africa some 87 per cent of the total area was declared white land.
 
The small educated elites that colonial rule produced in the 1920s and 1930s were preoccupied primarily with their own status, seeking to gain for themselves a role in administration in preference to the chiefs whome they regarded as rivals for power. They paid little attention to the welfare of the rural masses. Few espoused nationalist ambitions. The Second World War, however, brought profound change to Africa. Showing a purpose and vigor never seen on the continent before, colonial governments built airports, expanded harbors, constructed roads and supply depots and demanded ever greater production of copper, tin, groundnuts-any commodity, in fact, useful in the war effort. Bases such as Freetown, Takoradi, Mombasa and Accra became a vital part of the Allied network.
 
The war also threw up decisive shifts in power, away from Europe and its colonial powers. As European influence declined, the emerging superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, competed for ascendancy. For different reasons, both were anti-colonial powers. When Winston Churchill and President Roosevelt drew up the Atlantic Charter in 1940, supporting the right of all peoples to choose their own government. Churchill had in mind self-determination only for the conquered nations of Europe, not for British territories. But Roosevelt was adamant that postwar objectives should include self-determination for all colonial peoples.
 
The aftermath of the war brought frustration and restlessness, in Africa as much as in other parts of the world. African elites took the Atlantic Charter to constitute some form of official encouragement to demand political rights, yet faced obstruction. Ex-servicemen returning home with new ideas and skills, wider experiences and high expectations about the future.

Britain was the only colonial power even to contemplate the possibility of self-government for its African territories, having established precedents in Asia. It nevertheless expected to hold sway there at least until the end of the twentieth century. In the postwar era, partly for reasons of self-interest, but because a more enlightened mood about the conduct of colonial affairs prevailed, it embarked on major programs of development, of agriculture, transport, education and health services.

Universities were opened in the Gold Coast, Nigeria, Uganda and Sudan. But with plans for political advancement, the British government was far more cautious. A long apprenticeship was envisaged. There would be no short cuts. Africans needed to be introduced to the business of government with careful preparation, step by step. To give the colonies their independence, said one senior Labor politician, Herbert Morrison, would be like giving a child a latch-key, a bank account and a shot-gun'.

The French, too, embarked on major development programs in the postwar era and introduced political reform, giving African populations greater representation. Unlike the British, the French regarded their colonies not as separate territories but as part of la plus grande France. Political advancement thus meant according Africans a higher number of representatives in the French parliament. Since the nineteenth century, African residents in four coastal towns in Senegal had exercised the right to participate in the election of a representative to the French Parliament.

The first African deputy elected from Senegal arrived in Paris in 1914 and rapidly rose to the rank of junior minister. In 1945 the number of deputies from French Africa elected to represent African interests was raised to twenty-four. Local assemblies were also established for each territory, and federal assemblies for the two federal regions of French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa. Nevertheless, however much French Africa benefited from political and economic development, the central objective of the "Union Française", as the postwar Empire was called, was to bind the colonies tightly to metropolitan France. The links were said to be indissoluble.

Of the two other colonial powers, neither Belgium nor Portugal permitted any kind of political activity in their African territories. Belgium regarded the Congo essentially as a valuable piece of real estate that just required good management. The Congo's affairs were directed from Brussels by a small group of Belgians who simply passed down edicts to officials on the ground; neither Belgians living in the Congo nor the Congolese had a vote. Portugal, the poorest country in Europe, remained in the grip of Salazar's dictatorship which dealt ruthlessly with critics and dissidents of any kind. Anyone suspected of agitation in Africa was either jailed or sent to a penal colony or into exile.
 
The advent of the Cold War introduced a new factor to the African equation. In 1948, after the communist seizure of power in Prague, Western governments became convinced that communists were embarked upon a campaign of world mastery in which African colonies were prime targets. When, a few days later, riots erupted in the Gold Coast, hitherto regarded as Britain's "model" colony, the governor, Sir Gerald Creasy, who had only recently arrived from London, was quick to detect what he believed was a communist conspiracy.
 
In radio broadcasts, he referred to the danger of a communist takeover and of new forms of terrorism.
 
A commission of enquiry into the riots found little evidence of communist subversion, but pointed instead to profound political and economic grievances and recommended swift political advancement as the solution. The British government concurred. A new governor, Sir Charles Arden-Clarke, was dispatched to the Gold Coast in 1949, with the warning that 'the country is on the edge of revolution and with instructions to implement a new constitution giving Africans not only increased legislative responsibilities but executive power, in order to avert it. 

This book follows the fortunes of Africa in modern times, opening in the years that it sped towards independence and encompassing the half-century that has since passed. It focuses in particular on the role of a number of African leaders whose characters and careers had a decisive impact on the fate of their countries. It examines, too, the reasons why, after the euphoria of the independence era, so many hopes and ambitions faded and why the future of Africa came to be spoken of only in pessimistic terms.

Although Africa is a continent of great diversity, African states have much in common, not only their origins as colonial territories, but the similar hazards and difficulties they have faced. Indeed, what is so striking about the fifty-year period since independence is the extent to which African states have suffered so many of the same misfortunes.

 		 
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