The Fortunes of Africa: A 5,000 Year History of Wealth, Greed and Endeavour

by Martin Meredith

  King Prempe and other members of the royal family were first imprisoned in the fortress at Elmina, then sent into exile in Sierra Leone. But so many Asante subjects travelled all the way to Sierra Leone with gifts of gold dust and news of Asante politics that the British authorities moved them to the Seychelles Islands in the Indian Ocean. On his return to Asante, Prempe was officially recognised not as the Asantehene but as the Kumasihene – the king of Kumasi. In 1935, the title of Asantehene was restored to his successor, Prempe II. The Golden Stool was hidden from the British until 1920 when they gave an assurance that it would remain in Asante hands. In 1935 it was displayed in public for the first time since 1896 at the instalment of Prempe II.

  Part XI

  The British traveller Richard Burton (1856) spent six months in Somaliland in 1854 and noted the Somalis’ love of both camels and poetry:

  Every man has his recognized position in literature as accurately defined as though he had been reviewed in a century of magazines – the fine ear of this people causing them to take the greatest pleasure in harmonious sounds and poetic expressions, whereas a false quantity or prosaic phrase excites their violent indignation . . . Every chief in the country must have a panegyric to be sung by his clan, and the great patronize light literature by keeping a poet.

  For an informative account of the Somali leader Muhammad Abdullah Hassan, see Robert Hess’s essay on the ‘Mad Mullah’, Journal of African History V, 3 (1964), pp 415–33.

  The Maxim gun, a prototype of the modern machine gun, designed and produced by Hiram Maxim in a London factory in the 1880s, was used with devastating effect in the course of several African campaigns, including Omdurman. In a poem titled ‘The Modern Traveller’, the Anglo-French writer Hilaire Belloc summed up the advantage it gave to European powers:

  Whatever happens, we have got

  The Maxim Gun, and they have not.

  The French retreat from Fashoda and with it the end of their ambitions to establish a French territory extending across the middle belt of Africa from the Atlantic coast to the Red Sea cast a pall over French officialdom that lasted for generations. In his memoirs, General de Gaulle listed the disasters that had afflicted France in his youth and that had led him to devote himself to upholding France’s ‘grandeur’: the first on the list was the Fashoda incident. In the twentieth century, France’s vigilance against Anglophone encroachment in what they considered to be their own backyard in Africa – ‘le pré carré’ – became known as the Fashoda syndrome. Martin Meredith (2011) examines its fatal consequences in Rwanda.

  Part XII

  Joseph Conrad’s journey up the Congo River from Stanley Pool to Stanley Falls in 1890 took him four weeks. On the return journey, a French agent for an ivory-collecting company died on board. A few years later, a Belgian officer in the Force Publique, who had been posted to Stanley Falls as station chief, gained notoriety for decorating the flower bed in front of his house with the heads of twenty-one women and children killed during a punitive military expedition.

  Stanley returned to the Congo in 1887 at the head of an expedition to rescue a European official, Emin Pasha, under siege in the southern Sudan. In his account of the expedition, In Darkest Africa (1890), Stanley railed against the depredations of the ivory trade:

  Every tusk, piece and scrap of ivory in the possession of an Arab trader has been steeped in human blood. Every pound weight has cost the life of a man, woman or child; for every five pounds a hut has been burned; for every two tusks a whole village has been destroyed; every twenty tusks have been obtained at the price of a district with all its people, villages and plantations. It is simply incredible that, because ivory is required for ornaments or billiard games, the rich heart of Africa should be laid waste at this late year in the nineteenth century, and that native populations, tribes and nations, should be utterly destroyed . . .

  Adam Hochschild (1998) covers the story of Leopold’s Congo Free State in riveting and meticulous detail. The plunder of the Congo Basin for wild rubber was carried out not only by Belgian companies but by French concessionary companies which used similar methods of forced labour, hostage-taking, flogging and murder. As much as two-thirds of the territory of French Equatorial Africa was allocated to them.

  Part XIII

  Much of the evidence about the Rhodes conspiracy and Joseph Chamberlain’s role in it remained hidden until Jean van der Poel’s pioneering work was published in 1951. In 1961, J.S. Marais followed van der Poel with a magisterial study of the fall of Kruger’s regime. Elizabeth Longford’s 1982 narrative adds further detail.

  Controversy over the causes of the Anglo-Boer war lasted for much of the twentieth century. It started in 1900 with the publication of John Hobson’s book The War in South Africa: Its Causes and Effects, in which he claimed that ultimately Britain had gone to war ‘to place a small oligarchy of mine-owners and speculators in power at Pretoria’. In essence, he said, the war grew out of a conspiracy by gold millionaires and Jewish financiers, aided and abetted by British politicians, aimed at making mining operations more profitable. Hobson developed this theme into a general analysis of the relationship between capitalism and imperialism in his book Imperialism published in 1902. Hobson’s work had a profound influence on Lenin who acknowledged it in his treatise Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, published in 1917. It was subsequently used by generations of Marxist and left-wing writers to illustrate the evil machinations of capitalism.

  But Hobson’s perspective of the war was limited. He had no knowledge, for example, of the role played by Milner. When historians later searched government archives and the private papers of politicians and magnates for evidence about the conspiracy, there was little to be found. The archive evidence showed that British ministers, when taking decisions about the Transvaal in 1899, were motivated not by any concern about mining company profits or about ambitions to control the gold trade, but by the need to strengthen Britain’s political hold over the Transvaal to reinforce British supremacy in the region. Milner himself claimed responsibility for starting the war. ‘I precipitated the crisis, which was inevitable, before it was too late.’ The historian Iain Smith unravels the issues in his book The Origins of the South African War (1996). The best single narrative of the war is given by Thomas Pakenham (1979).

  Germany’s brutal occupation of South West Africa is covered by Horst Drechsler (1980); and by David Olusoga and Casper Erichsen (2009).

  Part XIV

  The character of Egypt began to change during the early twentieth century with a steady exodus from rural areas and the rapid growth of Cairo and Alexandria. According to the 1927 census, Cairo’s population had reached more than one million and Alexandria’s stood at half a million. In his brilliant sequence of novels, The Alexandrian Quartet (1957–60), Lawrence Durrell describes the hedonistic lifestyle of the wealthy expatriate community that dominated Alexandria’s society in the interwar years.

  Richard Mitchell’s seminal work on the Muslim Brotherhood (1969) covers its formative years before 1952. Gilles Kepel (1993) provides further detail. In Hasan al-Banna’s risala ‘Our Mission’, he wrote:

  We believe that Islam is an all-embracing concept which regulates every aspect of life, adjudicating on every one of its concerns and prescribing for it a solid and rigorous order . . . Some people mistakenly understand by Islam something restricted to certain types of religious observances or spiritual exercises . . . but we understand Islam – as opposed to this view – very broadly and comprehensively as regulating the affairs of men in this world and the next.

  While most of the Brotherhood’s early activities were directed towards incremental reform of Egyptian society, al-Banna embraced the Islamist concept of jihad. The use of force was legitimate, he argued, to defend the Muslim community when it was subjected to the rule of unbelievers or vulnerable to external threat. The primary targets of jihad were Western imperialists and Zionists who had colonised Muslim lands. But jihad was also justifie
d in dealing with rival opposition groups and the Egyptian government.

  Haile Selassie was worshipped as a living God (Jah) by adherents of Rastafarianism, a religion which emerged in Jamaica in the 1930s and took its name from his title of Ras Tafari. During a three-day visit that Haile Selassie paid to Jamaica in 1966, some Jamaicans were convinced that miracles had occurred. Anthony Mockler (1984) deals with Italy’s occupation of Abyssinia.

  A census of South Africa’s population in 1910 recorded a total of 5,878,000, with 3,956,000 Africans; 1,257,000 whites, of whom about 700,000 were Afrikaners; 517,000 Coloureds; and 148,000 Asians. The Carnegie Commission’s report The Poor White Problem in South Africa was published in five volumes in 1932 (Pro-Ecclesia, Stellenbosch).

  Part XV

  The rise of African nationalism and the decolonisation period is covered in general surveys by David Birmingham (1995); Frederick Cooper (2002); Prosser Gifford and Wm. Roger Louis (eds. 1982); John Hargreaves (1995); Thomas Hodgkin (1956); and Martin Meredith (2011). Case studies include Dennis Austin on Ghana (1964); James Coleman (1958) and Richard Sklar (1963) on Nigeria; John Cartwright on Sierra Leone (1970); David Throup on the origins of the Mau Mau rebellion (1987); Ruth Morgenthau on French West African colonies (1964); Alistair Horne on Algeria (1987); Aristide Zolberg on Ivory Coast (1969); and Crawford Young on the Belgian Congo (1965). Ludo de Witte’s groundbreaking investigation into the murder of Patrice Lumumba was published first in Dutch in 1999, then in French in 2000, then in English in 2001. Nelson Mandela’s career is covered by his autobiography (1994) and by biographies by Anthony Sampson (1999) and Martin Meredith (2014).

  Part XVI

  The chapter title ‘The First Dance of Freedom’ is taken from a quotation from Lord Byron’s Detached Thoughts, 1821–2: ‘I sometimes wish I was the owner of Africa; to do at once, what Wilberforce will do in time, viz – sweep Slavery from her desarts, and look on upon the first dance of their Freedom.’

  In his study of one-party states in West Africa, published in 1965, Arthur Lewis, a distinguished West Indian economist, observed:

  What is going on in some of these countries is fully explained in terms of the normal lust of human beings for power and wealth. The stakes are high. Office carries power, prestige and money. The power is incredible . . . Decision-making is arbitrary . . . The prestige is also incredible. Men who claim to be democrats in fact behave like emperors. Personifying the state, they dress up in uniforms, build themselves palaces, bring all other traffic to a standstill when they drive, hold fancy parades and generally demand to be treated like Egyptian Pharaohs. And the money is also incredible . . . salaries . . . allowances, travelling expenses, and other fringe benefits. There are also vast pickings in bribes, state contracts, diversion of public funds to private uses and commissions of various sorts. To be a Minister is to have a lifetime’s chance to make a fortune.

  Africa’s economic decline is examined by Robert Bates (1981); Thomas Callaghy and John Ravenhill (eds. 1993); David Fieldhouse (1986); John Ravenhill (ed. 1986); Douglas Rimmer (ed. 1992); Richard Sandbrook (1985, 1993); and Nicolas van der Walle (2001).

  Between 1990 and 1996, 37 out of 48 African states in sub-Saharan Africa held multi-party elections. More than half of the elections resulted in a former dictator remaining in office. Military coups were a recurrent feature of the post-1990 period. Between 1991 and 2001 there were 47 coup attempts, of which 13 were successful.

  China’s advance into Africa is analysed expertly by Deborah Brautigan (2009) and Ian Taylor (2010). The Chatham House report, Nigeria’s Criminal Crude (2013), was written by Christina Katsouris and Aaron Sayne. In 2013, the World Bank reported that the number of people living in extreme poverty in Africa had risen in the previous three decades from 205 million to 414 million.

  PICTURE PERMISSIONS

  Corbis: 19, 21, 22, 33.

  Getty: 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 20, 24, 36, 37.

  Mary Evans Picture Library: 9, 18, 32, 34, 35.

  Punch: 23, 25, 27, 29.

  Rex: 17, 28, 30, 31.

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