by Tim Marshall
Indeed, south of the Sahel, in the bottom two-thirds of Africa, there is more diversity in most things. The land becomes more temperate and green vegetation appears, which becomes jungle as we approach Congo and the Central African Republic. Towards the east coast are the great lakes in Uganda and Tanzania, while across to the west more deserts appear in Angola and Namibia. By the time we reach the tip of South Africa the climate is again ‘Mediterranean’, even though we have travelled almost 5,000 miles from the northernmost point in Tunisia on the Mediterranean coast.
Given that Africa is where humans originated, we are all African. However, the rules of the race changed c. 8000 BCE when some of us, who’d wandered off to places such as the Middle East and around the Mediterranean region, lost the wanderlust, settled down, began farming and eventually congregated in villages and towns.
But back south there were few plants willing to be domesticated, and even fewer animals. Much of the land consists of jungle, swamp, desert or steep-sided plateau, none of which lend themselves to the growing of wheat or rice, or sustaining herds of sheep. Africa’s rhinos, gazelles and giraffes stubbornly refused to be beasts of burden – or as Diamond puts it in a memorable passage, ‘History might have turned out differently if African armies, fed by barnyard-giraffe meat and backed by waves of cavalry mounted on huge rhinos, had swept into Europe to overrun its mutton-fed soldiers mounted on puny horses.’ But Africa’s head start in our mutual story did allow it more time to develop something else which to this day holds it back: a virulent set of diseases, such as malaria and yellow fever, brought on by the heat and now complicated by crowded living conditions and poor healthcare infrastructure. This is true of other regions – the subcontinent and South America, for example – but sub-Saharan Africa has been especially hard hit, for example by the HIV virus, and has a particular problem because of the prevalence of the mosquito and the Tsetse fly.
Most of the continent’s rivers also pose a problem, as they begin in high land and descend in abrupt drops which thwart navigation. For example, the mighty Zambezi may be Africa’s fourth-longest river, running for 1,600 miles, and may be a stunning tourist attraction with its white-water rapids and the Victoria Falls, but as a trade route it is of little use. It flows through six countries, dropping from 4,900 feet to sea level when it reaches the Indian Ocean in Mozambique. Parts of it are navigable by shallow boats, but these parts do not interconnect, thus limiting the transportation of cargo.
Unlike in Europe, which has the Danube and the Rhine, this drawback has hindered contact and trade between regions – which in turn affected economic development, and hindered the formation of large trading regions. The continent’s great rivers, the Niger, the Congo, the Zambezi, the Nile and others, don’t connect and this disconnection has a human factor. Whereas huge areas of Russia, China and the USA speak a unifying language which helps trade, in Africa thousands of languages exist and no one culture emerged to dominate areas of similar size. Europe, on the other hand, was small enough to have a ‘lingua franca’ through which to communicate, and a landscape that encouraged interaction.
Even had technologically productive nation states arisen, much of the continent would still have struggled to connect to the rest of the world because the bulk of the land mass is framed by the Indian and Atlantic oceans and the Sahara Desert. The exchange of ideas and technology barely touched sub-Saharan Africa for thousands of years. Despite this, several African empires and city states did arise after about the sixth century CE: for example the Mali Empire (thirteenth–sixteenth century), and the city state of Great Zimbabwe (eleventh– fifteenth century), the latter in land between the Zambezi and Limpopo rivers. However, these and others were isolated to relatively small regional blocs, and although the myriad cultures which did emerge across the continent may have been politically sophisticated, the physical landscape remained a barrier to technological development: by the time the outside world arrived in force, most had yet to develop writing, paper, gunpowder or the wheel.
Traders from the Middle East and the Mediterranean had been doing business in the Sahara, after the introduction of camels, from about 2,000 years ago, notably trading the vast resources of salt there; but it wasn’t until the Arab conquests of the seventh century CE that the scene was set for a push southward. By the ninth century they had crossed the Sahara, and by the eleventh were firmly established as far south as modern-day Nigeria. The Arabs were also coming down the east coast and establishing themselves in places such as Zanzibar and Dar es Salaam in what is now Tanzania.
When the Europeans finally made it down the west coast in the fifteenth century they found few natural harbours for their ships. Unlike Europe or North America, where the jagged coastlines give rise to deep natural harbours, much of the African coastline is smooth. And once they did make land they struggled to penetrate any further inland than about 100 miles due to the difficulty of navigating the rivers, as well as the challenges of the climate and disease.
Both the Arabs and then the Europeans brought with them new technology which they mostly kept to themselves, and took away whatever they found of value, which was mainly natural resources and people.
Slavery existed long before the outside world returned to where it had originated. Traders in the Sahel region used thousands of slaves to transport vast quantities of the region’s then most valuable commodity, salt, but the Arabs began the practice of subcontracting African slave-taking to willing tribal leaders who would deliver them to the coast. By the time of the peak of the Ottoman Empire in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries hundreds of thousands of Africans (mostly from the Sudan region) had been taken to Istanbul, Cairo, Damascus and across the Arabian world. The Europeans followed suit, outdoing the Arabs and Turks in their appetite for, and mistreatment of, the people brought to the slave ships anchored off the west coast.
Back in the great capital cities of London, Paris, Brussels and Lisbon, the Europeans then took maps of the contours of Africa’s geography and drew lines on them – or, to take a more aggressive approach, lies. In between these lines they wrote words such as Middle Congo or Upper Volta and called them countries. These lines were more about how far which power’s explorers, military forces and businessmen had advanced on the map than what the people living between the lines felt themselves to be, or how they wanted to organise themselves. Many Africans are now partially the prisoners of the political geography the Europeans made, and of the natural barriers to progression with which nature endowed them. From this they are making a modern home and, in some cases, vibrant, connected economies.
There are now fifty-six countries in Africa. Since the ‘winds of change’ of the independence movement blew through the mid twentieth century, some of the words between the lines have been altered – for example, Rhodesia is now Zimbabwe – but the borders are, surprisingly, mostly intact. However, many encompass the same divisions they did when first drawn, and those formal divisions are some of the many legacies colonialism bequeathed the continent.
The ethnic conflicts within Sudan, Somalia, Kenya, Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, Mali and elsewhere are evidence that the European idea of geography did not fit the reality of Africa’s demographics. There may have always been conflict: the Zulus and Xhosas had their differences long before they had ever set eyes on a European. But colonialism forced those differences to be resolved within an artificial structure – the European concept of a nation state. The modern civil wars are now partially because the colonialists told different nations that they were one nation in one state, and then after the colonialists were chased out a dominant people emerged within the state who wanted to rule it all, thus ensuring violence.
Take, for example, Libya, an artificial construct only a few decades old which at the first test fell apart into its previous incarnation as three distinct geographical regions. In the west it was, in Greek times, Tripolitania (from the Greek tri polis, three cities, which eventually merged and became Trip
oli). The area to the east, centred on the city of Benghazi but stretching down to the Chad border, was known in both Greek and Roman times as Cyrenaica. Below these two, in what is now the far south-west of the country, is the region of Fezzan.
Tripolitania was always orientated north and north-west, trading with its southern European neighbours. Cyrenaica always looked east to Egypt and the Arab lands. Even the sea current off the coast of the Benghazi region takes boats naturally eastwards. Fezzan was traditionally a land of nomads who had little in common with the two coastal communities.
This is how the Greeks, Romans and Turks all ruled the area – it is how the people had thought of themselves for centuries. The mere decades-old European idea of Libya will struggle to survive and already one of the many Islamist groups in the east has declared an ‘emirate of Cyrenaica’. While this may not come to pass, it is an example of how the concept of the region originated merely in lines drawn on maps by foreigners.
However, one of the biggest failures of European line-drawing lies in the centre of the continent, the giant black hole known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo – the DRC. Here is the land in which Joseph Conrad set his novel Heart of Darkness, and it remains a place shrouded in the darkness of war. It is a prime example of how the imposition of artificial borders can lead to a weak and divided state, ravaged by internal conflict, and whose mineral wealth condemns it to being exploited by outsiders.
The DRC is an illustration of why the catch-all term ‘developing world’ is far too broad-brush a way to describe countries which are not part of the modern industrialised world. The DRC is not developing, nor does it show any signs of so doing. The DRC should never have been put together; it has fallen apart and is the most under-reported war zone in the world, despite the fact that six million people have died there during wars which have been fought since the late 1990s.
The DRC is neither democratic, nor a republic. It is the second-largest country in Africa with a population of about 75 million, although due to the situation there it is difficult to find accurate figures. It is bigger than Germany, France and Spain combined and contains the Congo Rainforest, second only to the Amazon as the largest in the world.
The people are divided into more than 200 ethnic groups, of which the biggest are the Bantu. There are several hundred languages, but the widespread use of French bridges that gap to a degree. The French comes from the DRC’s years as a Belgian colony (1908–60) and before that, when King Leopold of the Belgians used it as his personal property from which to steal its natural resources to line his pockets. Belgian colonial rule made the British and French versions look positively benign and was ruthlessly brutal from start to finish, with few attempts to build any sort of infrastructure to help the inhabitants. When the Belgians went in 1960 they left behind little chance of the country holding together.
The civil wars began immediately and were later intensified by a blood-soaked walk-on role in the global Cold War. The government in the capital, Kinshasa, backed the rebel side in Angola’s war, thus bringing itself to the attention of the USA, which was also supporting the rebel movement against the Soviet-backed Angolan government. Each side poured in hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of arms.
When the Cold War ended both great powers had less interest in what by then was called Zaire and the country staggered on, kept afloat by its natural resources. The Rift Valley curves into the DRC in its south and east and it has exposed huge quantities of cobalt, copper, diamonds, gold, silver, zinc, coal, manganese and other minerals, especially in Katanga Province.
In King Leopold’s days the world wanted the region’s rubber for the expanding motor car industry; now China buys more than 50 per cent of the DRC’s exports, but still the population lives in poverty. In 2014 the United Nations Human Development Index placed the DRC 186th out of 187 countries it measured. The bottom eighteen countries in that list are all in Africa.
Because it is so resource-rich and so large, everyone wants a bite out of the DRC, which, as it lacks a substantive central authority, cannot really bite back.
The region is also bordered by nine countries. They have all played a role in the DRC’s agony, which is one reason why the Congo wars are also known as ‘Africa’s world war’. To the south is Angola, to the north the Republic of the Congo and the Central African Republic, to the east Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania and Zambia. The roots of the wars go back decades, but the worst of times was triggered by the disaster that hit Rwanda in 1994 and swept westward in its aftermath.
After the genocide in Rwanda the Tutsi survivors and moderate Hutus formed a Tutsi-led government. The killing machines of the Hutu militia, the Interahamwe, fled into eastern DRC but conducted border raids. They also joined with sections of the DRC army to kill the DRC’s Tutsis, who live near the border region. In came the Rwandan and Ugandan armies, backed by Burundi and Eritrea. Allied with opposition militias, they attacked the Interahamwe and overthrew the DRC government. They also went on to control much of the country’s natural wealth, with Rwanda in particular shipping back tons of coltan, which is used in the making of mobile phones and computer chips. However, what had been the government forces did not give up and – with the involvement of Angola, Namibia and Zimbabwe – continued the fight. The country became a vast battleground, with more than twenty factions involved in the fighting.
The wars have killed, at a low estimate, tens of thousands of people, and have resulted in the deaths of another six million due to disease and malnutrition. The UN estimates that almost 50 per cent of the victims have been children aged under five.
In recent years the fighting has died down, but the DRC is home to the world’s most deadly conflict since the Second World War and still requires the UN’s largest peacekeeping mission to prevent full-scale war from breaking out again. Now the job is not to put Humpty Dumpty together again, because the DRC was never whole. It is simply to keep the pieces apart until a way can be found to join them sensibly and peacefully. The European colonialist created an egg without a chicken, a logical absurdity repeated across the continent and one that continues to haunt it.
Burundi is another example, with ethnically rooted political tensions simmering throughout 2015 and worsening in 2016. Formerly part of German East Africa when it included what is now Tanzania, it was divided between Belgium and the UK after the First World War and administered by Belgium from 1945 until independence in 1962. The Belgians used the Tutsi people to govern over the Hutus and, despite being just 15 per cent of the population, the Tutsi continue to dominate politics, economics and the military. More than 300,000 people died in the civil war between 1993 and 2005. Levels of violence began to rise again in 2015/16 after President Pierre Nkurunziza reinterpreted the constitution to allow him to run for a third term. This was not quite what President Obama had in mind when, during his Africa tour in July 2015, he criticised African leaders, saying, ‘The continent will not advance if its leaders refuse to step down when their terms end . . . Sometimes you will hear leaders say, “I’m the only person who can hold this nation together.” If that’s true then that leader has truly failed to build their nation.’ That sentence encompassed both the colonial legacy of Africa and how its modern leaders have often been part of the problem rather than the solution to that legacy.
Africa has been equally cursed and blessed by its resources – blessed in so far as it has natural riches in abundance, but cursed because outsiders have long plundered them. In more recent times the nation states have been able to claim a share of these riches, and foreign countries now invest rather than steal, but still the people are rarely the beneficiaries.
In addition to its natural mineral wealth, Africa is also blessed with many great rivers – although most of its rivers do not encourage trade, they are good for hydroelectricity. However, this too is a source of potential conflict.
The Nile, the longest river in the world (4,100 miles), affects ten countries considered to be in the proximity
of its basin – Burundi, the DRC, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda and Egypt. As long ago as the fifth century BCE the historian Herodotus said: ‘Egypt is the Nile, and the Nile is Egypt.’ It is still true, and so a threat to the supply to Egypt’s 700-mile-long, fully navigable section of the Nile is for Cairo a concern – one over which it would be prepared to go to war. Without the Nile, there would be no one there. It may be a huge country, but the vast majority of its 84 million population lives within a few miles of the Nile. Measured by the area in which people dwell, Egypt is one of the most densely populated countries in the world.
Egypt was, arguably, a nation state when most Europeans were living in mud huts, but it was only ever a regional power. It is protected by deserts on three sides and might have become a great power in the Mediterranean region but for one problem. There are hardly any trees in Egypt, and for most of history, if you didn’t have trees you couldn’t build a great navy with which to project your power. There has always been an Egyptian navy – it used to import cedar from Lebanon to build ships at huge expense – but it has never been a Blue Water navy.
Modern Egypt now has the most powerful armed forces of all the Arab states, thanks to American military aid; but it remains contained by deserts, the sea and its peace treaty with Israel. It will remain in the news as it struggles to cope with feeding 84 million people a day while battling an Islamist insurgency, especially in the Sinai, and guarding the Suez Canal, through which passes 8 per cent of the world’s entire trade every day. Some 2.5 per cent of the world’s oil passes this way daily; closing the canal would add about fifteen days’ transit time to Europe and ten to the USA, with concurrent costs.
