How Europe developed Africa

This is because the ESC prefers propaganda to fact, especially when it comes to history. This is the area in which they promote the greatest amount of misinformation and, of course, once you get your history wrong, other errors multiply. One of the most popular myths promulgated by these Afrocentric pseudo-historians is that Europe is responsible for Africa’s present state of poverty.

But Africa’s economic disadvantages stretch back to the dawn of human history itself — that is, when modern homo sapiens evolved in East Africa over 100,000 years ago. Despite this headstart, as anthropologist Jared Diamond points out in his magnificent book Guns, Germs, and Steel (available at RIK), Europe was able to conquer Africa because Europeans had the triple advantage of superior technology, widespread literacy, and the political organisation for exploration and conquest. "All three arose historically from the development of food production," writes Diamond. "But food production was delayed in sub-Saharan Africa (compared with Eurasia) by Africa’s paucity of domesticable native animals and plant species, its much smaller area suitable for indigenous food production, and its north-south axis, which retarded the spread of food production and inventions."

So Vasco da Gama was able to take over East Africa’s Kilwa port in 1502, thus getting a grip on the gold trade from Zimbabwe. And, as he explored the coast, da Gama observed that "in these very large and beautiful cities" there was already a flourishing trade in black slaves. This fact is constantly downplayed by Afrocentrists. Thomas Sowell, in Conquests and Cultures, notes that "by the time the Europeans discovered the Western hemisphere at the end of the fifteenth century, Moslem merchants already dominated the trade in West Africa, as they did in East Africa and North Africa."

This, by the way, also gives the lie to another favoured myth of the Afrocentrists — that, until the Europeans came, African tribes lived peacefully with one another. In fact, inland tribes like the Ibo were raided continually by their more powerful coastal neighbours in order to get slaves. Not only that, but European merchants were confined to coastal ports specifically so the African traders could operate as a cartel and get higher prices for the slaves. And, while 11 million enslaved Africans crossed the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas, 14 million were sent to Islamic nations in the Middle East and North Africa.

This brings me to the next arrow on the Afrocentrists’ unstrung bow. The depredation of Africa’s populace during the four centuries of the slave trade, they argue, was a crucial factor in retarding the continent’s development. But historian Hugh Thomas points out in his book, The Slave Trade, that "though a drop in population may have been caused by the sustained trade in slaves, a fertile population would have added as many as, or more than, it lost in the slave trade as a result of normal reproduction...If, as seems possible, the population of West Africa in the early eighteenth century was about 25 million, enjoying a growth rate of, say, seventeen per thousand, the effect of the export trade (say, 0.2 percent of the population per year) would merely have been to check the growth in population, since the rate of slave exports and that of natural increase would have been more or less the same."

But the Afrocentrists’ main argument is that the European colonisers simply stole Africa’s immense wealth. That, they contend, is why the Europeans invaded Africa in the first place. However, historian Niall Ferguson, author of Empire, says, "..it is impossible to understand the scramble for Africa without seeing that it had its antecedents in the perennial struggle between the great powers to maintain — or overthrow — the balance of power between them in Europe and the Near East."

Indeed, while missionaries, businessmen, politicians and military leaders all urged the creation and expansion of colonies in Africa, treasury officials were usually against such projects. And the statistics suggest that these officials were right on the money. Ventures in Africa weren’t often successful. In the private sector, eight of 19 sisal plantations made a profit, while only four of 22 cocoa estates, eight of 58 rubber plantations, and a mere three of 48 diamond mines paid dividends. Nor do investments by European governments lend support to the thesis of Africa’s profitability. In the early 20th century, Britain invested more in Canada alone than in Africa and India put together, and less than seven percent of Britain’s imports came from Africa. Germany had less than one percent of its foreign investments in Africa, and France exported ten times more to Belgium than to Africa.

"Europe’s economic impact on Africa was far greater than Africa’s economic impact on Europe," Sowell asserts, noting that African exports and imports grew substantially during the colonial era. In German East Africa, exports of peanuts, rubber, cocoa, coffee and sisal all grew several times between 1905 and 1913. A similar economic expansion occurred in the French, Belgian, and British colonies. Ferguson writes, "It has been since independence that the gap between coloniser and the ex-colony has become a gulf. The same is true of nearly all former colonies in sub-Saharan Africa, with the notable exception of Botswana." The per capita GDP of Zambia, for example, was five times less than Britain’s in the 1950s; by 1996, it was 28 times less.

To point out all this is not to downplay the suffering and deaths of many millions of Africans. But the distortions promulgated by the ESC and others of that ilk are, in my view, a gross disrespect to Africa’s past, and help undermine efforts to heal the continent’s present ills.

E-mail: kbaldeosingh@hotmail.com

Website:www.caribscape.com/baldeosingh