The Fulbe Jihads

Although the nineteenth century was to see great changes in sub-Saharan West Africa resulting from the gradual abolition of the Atlantic slave trade and its replacement by other forms of commerce, such changes came about only very slowly and, for a long time, affected only a small part of the region. In general, the first half of the nineteenth century witnessed mainly a continuation of the eighteenth-century pattern, with the slave trade actually increasing in volume, and with events in the interior being moulded more by influences emanating from the Islamic world to the north than by seaborne contacts with Europe and America. At the beginning of the century, the most significant events in the region were the holy wars or jihads of the Fulbe people scattered across the savanna belt from the Senegal River to the Cameroun highlands. These events had nothing to do with direct European intervention in the region, yet they affected the whole of the western and central Sudan.

As we mentioned in Chapter 1, these jihads had their origin in the revival of Islam in the western Sudan, which was brought about by the Arabic-speaking Moors who came into Mauritania from across the Sahara in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This was not a once-for-all impact, but rather a continuing impulse toward religious reform, which renewed itself in every generation. The leaders of such revivals retired from the hustle and bustle of politics and trade, and went to live in remote places.

The colonial period in tropical Africa lasted for about seventy years. The first thirty years of this period may be called the years of establishment, the next thirty the years of active development, and the last ten the years of retreat. In this chapter, we deal with the years of establishment mainly from the point of view of the colonial governments. In the next chapter, we shall try to look at the same years mainly from the point of view of the African peoples, and to consider the changes which the colonial period introduced into everyday life.

The Policies of the Colonial Powers

Once Africa had been divided between them, the European governments lost much of their earlier interest in the continent. There were few parts of Africa which were expected to produce immediate wealth. The European nations had partitioned Africa mainly in order to ensure that they would not be excluded from regions which might prove valuable in the future. Possession was what mattered to them, not development.

At the end of the nineteenth century, European states took a much narrower view of the functions of government, even within their own frontiers, than they do today. European states of those days had, for example, no public health services or old-age pensions and no public housing other than the workhouse. In most European countries, state education was still a recent introduction, and it was not yet provided for all children.

The Years of Optimism

The wider world within which the majority of the African countries gained their independence during the late 1950s and 1960s demonstrated two apparently contradictory features. On the one hand, the Cold War between the communist and capitalist political systems was waged with grim determination by both sides and divided the world into two opposing camps. On the other hand, there was an upsurge of economic optimism which was common to the leading states on each side of the ideological divide. Experts of whatever economic persuasion – politicians, businesspeople, managers, economists, academics, civil servants – were firmly of the opinion that economic development, properly directed, could close the gap between rich and poor countries within a comparatively short time span. Prominent economists like Walter Rostow and Arthur Lewis wrote cheerfully of poor countries needing only brief injections of outside capital and technology before achieving economic ‘takeoff’, when they would cease to be mere suppliers of primary produce and learn to process their own commodities. Controlled industrialisation was the aim and, from both ends of the political spectrum, it was presented as something that could be determined by government action.

It was an aim which the leaders of the new African nations were happy to embrace and, for a time, it appeared that they would not be disappointed. During the 1950s and 1960s, commodity prices were generally favourable for African producers, although there were big fluctuations in the prices of some products.

The region we call ‘Western Central Africa’ encompasses the region of the Congo forest and the light woodland country to the south of it. Today this area is occupied by Angola and the states of Congo (DR), Gabon, the People's Republic of Congo, and the Central African Republic. In terms of the older African states, it includes the area of the Luba–Lunda and the lower Congo kingdoms. The Portuguese were the most active external influence in this region, but not the only one. During the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century, the northernmost frontier of Angola was at the Loge River, and from here northwards to Mount Cameroun and up both sides of the Congo estuary, there was a kind of commercial no-man's land, the shore dotted with the trading factories of English, Dutch, American, French, and Spanish as well as Portuguese firms. During the second half of the nineteenth century, an even more important source of external influence was that of the Swahili Arabs and Nyamwezi from East Africa. Only during the colonial period was the region as a whole reconnected with its natural ports of exit on the Atlantic coast.

The Pombeiros and the Mwata Kazembe

During the early part of the century, Portuguese influence reached the interior by two main routes, one of which started in Luanda, the other in Benguela. The Luanda route was the older and, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, it led in a sense right across the continent.

South Africa was the first African country to experience the social stresses resulting from the transformation of an agricultural into an industrial economy. The pace of change between 1900 and the outbreak of the Second World War was faster – and on a larger scale – than in any other part of the continent. By 1939, the concentration of mines and factories on the Witwatersrand was comparable to the industrial regions of Europe and North America. In the centre of the Rand stood Johannesburg, the largest city in Africa except for Cairo. From the Rand, gold flowed to the banking houses of the world, binding South Africa into the web of international finance and commerce. Yet, the fruits of this material prosperity were unevenly distributed. Only gradually did even all the white people reach a high standard of living. Africans, because of their colour, were excluded from all but a meagre share. Political change in no way kept pace with economic advance. The white rulers were restricted by attitudes and policies which had taken root in the nineteenth century or even earlier. They seemed incapable of any fresh approach to the racial tensions which became sharper as more and more Africans were integrated into the expanding economy.

South Africa after the Boer War

After defeating the South African Republic (Transvaal) and the Orange Free State in the Anglo–Boer War, the British felt guilty at the way in which they had bullied the two small Boer republics.

The Sahara and Islam: The Bonds Unifying Northern Africa

The geography of the northern half of Africa is dominated by the Sahara desert. Throughout its vast area, 2,800 km (1,700 miles) from north to south and nearly 8,000 km (5,000 miles) from east to west, rainfall is less than 13 cm (5 inches) a year. Except around a few oases where underground supplies of water reach the surface, agriculture is impossible, and the desert's only inhabitants have been nomadic herdsmen, breeding camels and moving their animals seasonally from one light grazing ground to another. To the north of the desert lies the temperate Mediterranean coastland – its rainfall concentrated between January and March, with wheat and barley as its main cereal crops and sheep, the main stock of its highland pastures. Southward are the tropics, the land of the summer rains, favouring a different set of food crops from those grown around the Mediterranean. In the desert and northward live Berbers and Arabs, fair-skinned peoples speaking languages of the Afroasiatic family. South of the desert begins the ‘land of the blacks’ – to the Greeks; ‘Ethiopia’, to the Berbers, ‘Akal n'Iguinawen’ (Guinea); and to the Arabs, ‘Bilad as-Sudan’.

The desert has always been a formidable obstacle to human communication, but for two thousand years at least – since the introduction of the horse and the camel made travel easier – people have persevered in overcoming its difficulties. Before the days of the motorcar and the aeroplane, it took two months or more to cross.

Following our region-by-region survey of events in the 1990s, it seems appropriate to conclude with an overview of general factors concerning the African continent as a whole, as they appeared to stand at the end of that decade. First, despite the toll taken by the HIV/AIDS epidemic and other killer diseases, Africa's population continued to rise by 2.4 percent a year. Whereas in 1900 Africa comprised 4.5 percent of the world's total population, by 2000 this figure had risen to 10 percent of a world total of 6 billion. Largely for this reason, the people of Africa had become, statistically, the poorest in the world. Whereas the gross national per capita income of the United States stood at $34,100 and that of the UK at $24,430, Africa's richest country, Libya, thanks to its oil and its barely habitable deserts, hovered around $7,640. South Africa had $2,620 and Egypt $1,490. But, at the lowest end of the scale, almost nine people out of every ten in Africa's poorest countries were living on less than $2 a day; of these, two-thirds struggled to survive on less than $1 a day.

The urbanization of Africa during the 1990s had altered the whole pattern of government and society in most African countries. Although the poorer quarters of African towns might seem squalid to the passing traveller, life in them was regarded by their inhabitants as a considerable improvement over rural areas still lacking electricity, piped water, and drainage, and with most effective activity confined to the daylight hours.

The Conflict between Boer and Bantu

In tropical Africa, the basis for the early meetings between Africans and people from the rest of the world was trade. In South Africa, such encounters were usually over land. In tropical Africa, European and African merchants, even those engaged in the wretched slave trade, met on an essentially equal footing. They treated each other with a mixture of suspicion and respect. Europeans and Arabs were careful to acknowledge the authority of African rulers and to pay attention to the manners and customs of African peoples. In South Africa, the Europeans were present from the beginning not as traders, but as settlers. As their numbers grew and as they pushed inland from their first foothold on the Cape peninsula, they cast envious eyes on the land of the local people. During the seventeenth and most of the eighteenth centuries, this land was occupied by the San hunters and by the Khoi herdsmen. Thereafter, it was the much more densely settled land of the Bantu, who were agriculturalists as well as pastoralists. The only way the Boers could gain possession of the fertile land of the eastern Cape province was by conquest. Such a conquest might take the form of a party of frontier farmers, on horseback and armed with their hunting rifles, driving out the inhabitants of a nearby San or Khoi encampment or Bantu village.

At the time when the British colonies in West and East Africa were advancing toward political independence, the British government decided, in 1953, to create a constitutional arrangement for its Central African territories which set them apart from its other African lands. The protectorates of Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, which had few resident Europeans, were joined with Southern Rhodesia, which had been effectively controlled by its white settlers since 1891, to form the Central African Federation. It was hoped that this would grow into a powerful, multiracial state, big enough to act as a counterweight to the power of white-dominated South Africa. One of the many compromises built into the Central African Federation was a division of ultimate responsibility between the metropolitan country and a locally based settler government. After ten years, the Federation broke upon the rock of this unresolved conflict. Westminster could not resist the tide of African nationalism in the two northern territories, whereas Salisbury was determined to hang on for a much longer time.

Along either side of the Central African Federation, and controlling its main lines of access to the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean, lay the Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique. For thirty years after the Second World War, the Portuguese empire in Africa proved an exception to the rule that a colonial system based in Europe could not resist the onslaught of African nationalism. The reasons for this exception were, first, that Portugal was one of the poorest countries of Europe.

The Impact of Colonial Rule

The impact of colonial rule on African societies varied greatly, not only from one territory to another, but also from one part of a territory to another. To some extent, the reasons for this sprang from their social organisation or the way in which they made their living. For example, specialised pastoralists, like the Masai in Kenya or the Herero in South-West Africa, found it much more difficult to adapt themselves to the wishes of colonial governments than most of the peoples who lived by agriculture. Then again, warrior groups, like the Ndebele of Southern Rhodesia or the Ngoni of Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland – themselves the colonialists of an earlier period, found it more difficult to work and pay taxes than their former subjects, the Mashona and the Chewa. Much more important than the sociological reasons, however, were the sheerly accidental circumstances under which each group in a particular territory made its first contacts with the colonial government.

There were people who gained from colonial rule. In nearly every territory, there were ‘favourite peoples’, those who by good luck or good judgement made common cause with the colonial power and received privileged treatment as a result. To such peoples, the colonial period brought at first no shame, but, on the contrary, extended frontiers, enhanced prestige, and a sense of prosperity and achievement. In Northern Rhodesia, for example, the Barotse – who, under the influence of the missionary Coillard had written to ask for British protection – received special treatment from the British South Africa Company.