African Economic Problems

The fundamental weakness in African economies, the product of history and physical features, can be summed up in a single phrase - the low development of primary industry, i.e. agriculture in all forms, fishing and mining. Africa is not in a position to live by selling skills - i.e. importing raw materials, adding value, and re-exporting; primary production is therefore vital. This is not often so brutally stated, for reasons which will appear. Wherever it is forgotten, the danger of attempting to build an elaborate secondary and tertiary system with no primary base or motive power immediately arises.

Low primary production is associated with low purchasing power and low division of labour; therefore, a small, market, low opportunity for investment in secondary industry, and a low level of trade. Even in Zambia or the Congo, where primary mineral resources have been highly developed, the resulting trade in minerals lay to Europe, and the purchasing power generated was largely exported too - the white miners of Northern Rhodesia spent most of their earnings in southern Africa, the Congo Belgians in Europe. Certainly, African earnings - were remitted to a poverty-stricken subsistence economy in distant rural areas; but they were mainly dissipated in social expenditure there, and little found its way into agricultural improvement. It is where cash-crop agriculture has been strongly developed that the effects on African purchasing power have been felt in a growing local market and in further productive investment.

Low-yield subsistence agriculture - apart from its effects on health and energy - means low division of labour, and a tiny market even for food. There four families out of five are farming, the market for farm produce, outside the producing family, is 0.25 per cent of a family: it only rises to 1.5 per cent when the proportion of all families in farming has fallen to 40 per cent. It is very largely this low food production which marks the contrast with medieval Europe, where there was usually just enough food to allow division of labour and the development of a market economy.

Subsistence agriculture, a falling death-rate, and scanty employment opportunity outside farming implies huge underemployment in crowded rural areas. When widespread education is added to this explosive mixture, concealed underemployment is revealed as overt unemployment, because the differential in pay between the modern and the traditional sector is so high. The educated young, in a mobile society, will go where the rewards are greatest; they join the queue seeking wage-paid work in the urban sector.

An additional problem arises from the late entry of Africa into an already developed World economy, with its tendency to produce substitutes for tropical raw materials and with, allegedly, less elasticity of demand for raw materials than for manufactures - though this last point will need more argument. This situation in the outer world is the more serious because the inter-territorial market within Africa has been so hard to develop.

Africa's Most Modern Port

Until quite recently there were very few modern deep-water harbours able to accommodate ocean-going ships around the African coastline. Apart from the ports of South African and the Mediterranean coast, most of the maritime trade was handled at the numerous surf ports which had served the African people for centuries. Overseas vessels which called at these ports had to anchor out from the coast while fleets of the traditional paddle craft carried the goods in relays between ship and shore. Quite obviously such an out-of-date method had proved increasingly uneconomic in modern times, and as trade grew so did the delays to shipping.

In the years following World War II, queues of ocean-going ships might be seen off the African surf awaiting their turn to discharge or load cargoes. Since then, however, the principal harbours on the east and west coasts have been dredged and deepened. Concrete wharves with modern cargo sheds have been constructed to allow the direct berthing of deep vessels, and electric and mechanized handling appliances have been progressively installed. As a result of the greatly improved rate of servicing the ships, overseas trade at these harbours has increased rapidly.

The most important single maritime development in Africa during the past decade is Ghana's great new port of Tema, which has replaced the surf port of Accra a few miles away.

Eastern Ghana now has a first-class modern seaport for handling large ships and all types of cargo - a facility which will assist the country's development. Without it, the famous Volta River Project - Ghana's largest single, economic undertaking could never have been started at all. Tema Harbour is nearly one mile in circumference and, with a water area of about 500 acres, is the largest man-made harbour around the African coastline. Eventually there will be twenty deep-water berths for shipping and the port can handle up to a million tons of dry cargo annually. There is a separate oil berth for ocean super-tankers of up to 34,000 tons. The benefits of this new African port are not to be confined to Ghana alone. Through the developing international highways, other states in the region will be able to share its advantages and thereby develop overseas trade for the good of all.

The extensive river systems of West Africa will play that part too. These are capable of great development as low-cost transport routes to serve the communities a very long way from the coast?

The Scramble for Africa

In 1884 there were little more than a few trading stations along the coasts of Africa, missionaries spreading out from them, and explorers seeking to fill in maps. The main European peoples interested in Africa during this period - to the extent that they were interested - were the French, the British, the Portuguese and the Germans. Soon after German unification, a tremendous colonial drive formed in the country. Had it not been that German explorers were so intrepid and kept killing themselves off, Germany might have had a larger stake in Africa earlier than she in fact had. It was the intensification of German activity and the entry of Belgium into Africa which created the catalyst leading to the colonial occupation of Africa by European countries. The term 'sphere of influence' was first used of African interests.

The Germans began to occupy parts of the coast that had been occupied previously by the Portuguese, the British and the French. The mercantile traders began to raise objections in their own parliaments and with their own governments. This period was preceded by several decades in which traders and settlers in places as far away as Fiji were badgering their governments to annex territories. Throughout, the British government refused to take on any more responsibilities. The Americans were more successful in their refusal, but demands were nevertheless made on them. French governments, because of their heavy losses in the Franco-German War and the consequent need for an outlet for energies and an assignment for existing organisations, were more amenable to such suggestions. Yet even they did not want to assume most of the responsibilities that ultimately they did. Do not forget how much social energy a colonial empire takes to run.

The Germans, after their unification, began to look for outlets. They had a lot of idle people and an organisation that needed something to do. After Waterloo, the same factors began to affect the British, but not with the same force. It was at the same time - the middle nineteenth century -that Europe became a market-dominated society. It is difficult for us to realise today that it was not until the first third of the nineteenth century that England became unequivocally a market-type society: the need for all persons, in order to live, to sell one of the factors of production in the market. Always before that, people could stand outside the market or enter it only peripherally. It was with the Corn Laws and the Poor Laws and the Speenhamland Act of 1832 in England - later on the continent - that people were pushed into the market. Something had to give. The organisation was there. And the 'colonial areas' were there. The whole got involved in the internecine fusses among the European principalities (as it might best be put from an African point of view).

When the Germans, a new nation, emerged on the African scene they were feared by the French, as well as by the British and all the others. When the Germans settled down and began to occupy the countries they claimed, everyone else began also to occupy their own stretches of territory. All the chessmen were now in place except the king. The king turned out to be Leopold II of the Belgians. Leopold was just as ambitious as the rest, but had a small, contained country in Europe which he could not expand. He thereupon put his not inconsiderable personal fortune into African exploration with an eye to expansion of his realms in that area. In 1876 Leopold founded an organisation called the African International Association. He tried to get national chapters formed in various countries and to maintain the international headquarters in Belgium. In fact, national headquarters were formed in the capitals of most European countries; the international headquarters, however, never took fire and to the end remained no more than the Belgian chapter. Americans sent representatives to the meetings of the various societies although they never formed a society themselves.

With the Germans occupying the position they did, and with Leopold wanting an outlet for his energies, his people, and his capital, a conference in Berlin was called by Kaiser Wilhelm I in 1884-5. The Berlin Conference did several things: it regulated trade on the Congo and internationalised it. It regulated trade on the Niger-Benue. Perhaps most important of all for subsequent events, it laid down the rule that if a country was going to make a claim to territory, that territory had to be actually occupied. The result of this conference was that the occupation of Africa - the so-called 'scramble for Africa' - began. There followed a series of bilateral treaties among various European countries dividing up the coast, and stretching inland.

Leopold got the others to agree that he could establish a free state in the Congo Basin. He was the king of both Belgium and the Free State. The Congo Free State did not belong to Belgium - it belonged to Leopold. All of the money that went into it was his. So was all that came out. Stanley, in the hire of Leopold, proceeded up the south bank of the Congo signing treaties with the chiefs; he was all but paralleled by de Brazza on the north side of the Congo signing similar treaties for the French.

The British action in the scramble took place almost entirely in terms of trading companies: the South Africa Company, the Central Africa Company, the Royal Niger Company and others. These companies manned colonial governments and maintained private armies long before the British government became involved directly.

The French government was much more directly behind the activities of Frenchmen. From their position on the Ogowe they pushed north, and from their position in Senegal they pressed eastwards, the two forces meeting in the vicinity of Lake Chad.

Out of the scramble the Germans got Togo, Cameroun, South West Africa and Tanganyika-Ruanda-Urundi. The Portuguese reasserted their rights to Portuguese Guinea, Angola and Mozambique. The British, the Portuguese and the Germans were all fussing about Angola - the decision in favour of Portugal (but perhaps with the connivance of some of the British factions who wished to avoid the responsibilities of empire) was made by President Grant.

The Congo Free State was left, in Leopold's will, to Belgium. So did it become the Belgian Congo. Cecil Rhodes dreamed of a railroad and British domination from the Cape to Cairo. The accompanying maps show the positions of European nations in 1884, 1885 and 1914. The face of the African map was changed overnight. The face of Africa was, however, to take longer.

Important actions in the First World War were fought in Africa, when Germany lost her hold. Then Africa settled down to being forgotten again - until after the Second World War. The quietude of colonialism was upon her.

Although Africa had felt the impact of Europe for centuries, it was not until after the First World War that so-called 'competent' administration was established over all of the areas of Africa. Northern Nigeria's middle belt did not have a stable administration until about 1918 - Africans before that time had been widely influenced by Europe, but in most areas that influence was material and superficial until the 1920s. At the same time, there were to be found along the coast and in South Africa situations in which third, fourth and even fifth generations of Christianised, educated Africans were to be found. The tremendous range is still there.

With the scramble for Africa, the African populations became what might be called 'frozen'. Migratory movements did not cease, but did slow to a crawl. And all Africa was gripped in the vice of false stability which is the earmark of every successful colony. Boundaries were established, chiefs were appointed, and 'responsible' leadership was ensconced in foreign-dominated political systems.

And for the next decades, it looked to Europeans as if 'traditional' Africa was slow, unchanging, eternal and, indeed, sleeping. Africa had been effectively darkened. (P. Bohannap: Africa and the Africans, Doubleday).

The Great Tradition And The Little Tradition

The disparity between Europe and Africa lies not so much in the community cultures of each as in the civilizations of each. Although this distinction can be traced back to Sir Henry Maine and beyond, it can best be understood in the terms given it by Robert Redfield, the American anthropologist. He claimed that there was, in all the 'old civilizations of the world' - that is, civilizations grafted on earlier cultures and peoples rather than founded anew as Anglo-American and Australian civilizations were - a disparity between a 'great tradition' and a 'little tradition', Redfield was led to this formulation by his interest in peasant cultures; unlike 'primitive' societies and unlike civilizations, the social groups that exhibit peasant cultures all depends to some degree on the existence of the 'manor' - the city or the Church or some other carrier of a 'great tradition'. The peasants – the carriers of the little tradition - do not themselves participate fully in the great tradition, although in most cases at least some of their members may move into the social groups that represent the great tradition.

Africa and Europe shared a little tradition that diverged on amazingly few points. But both areas also developed great traditions, and there it was that they most tellingly grew apart. On to a more or less common village community structure came to be grafted widely divergent institutions. In Europe the institutions of the great tradition were feudalism, the Church and its various political manifestations, the heresies and the Protestant movements, and finally the Industrial Revolution and all the changes that it wrought.

In Africa, the great tradition lay in the ideas of divine kingship, associated as it was with the major technological developments of metallurgy and ultimately of everything that follows from it. With the expansion of Arab culture across North Africa and down the east coast, the situation developed in which all of North Africa and the Eastern Horn became associated with the Near East. Arab occupation .of Europe was stopped (with a few exceptions) at the Bosporus and in the mountains of the Iberian Peninsula. Marc Bloch, the eminent French historian, has pointed out that one of the reasons that medieval Europe could develop as it did is that there was no invader to destroy European culture as it developed. We are used to thinking of the Teutonic tribes destroying Rome; we are not accustomed to realising that from the eleventh century on, there were no major invaders of Europe. The medieval civilizations - the great traditions - of Europe and those in the Sudan were in some regards alike. But the Arabs destroyed the civilizations that were developing in Africa. Had the Arabs got past the Spanish or the Turks, the medieval and modern history of Europe might well resemble that of Africa much more than it in fact does.

Moreover, Arab intrusion into Africa offered an easy path for Islamic influence once the Arabs themselves were Islamised: Islamic influence was never felt extensively in Europe except as an external factor - what Toynbee has called a 'challenge'. Africa did not 'and does not combat Islam. Christendom, through missionaries and other forces, is still combating it.

Thus, the shutting out of Africa from the European consciousness began with the desiccation of the Sahara. It was reinforced when certain aspects of Egyptian civilization came to be important influencing factors of Aegean and Greek culture, while differing aspects of the same Egyptian civilization went south to Cush and the kingdoms south of the Sahara. Then throughout the era that is known in Europe as the Middle Ages, both Europe and Africa turned inward to their own affairs, but in Africa those affairs were vastly changed by the Arab influx.

Yet through all the medieval period, there was trade - sometimes extensive trade - across the Sahara via the great kingdoms of the Sudanic areas and the peoples of the northern littoral of the African continent. We know, for example, that Africa was, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, flooded with cowrie shells which were brought by the Venetians from the Maldive Islands, and which crossed the desert. Cowries during this period became a type of currency in many parts of Africa, and ultimately became so plentiful that their value underwent serious deflation; in the most important centres they all but lost their value. We knew also that the flow of Negro slaves across the Sahara never totally ceased. Comparatively few got as far as Europe, but some did. During the period that European civilizations were largely cut off from the civilizations of Asia Minor and India, the commerce and other interrelationships of Asia Minor and India, and the commerce and other interrelationships between eastern Africa and Asia were at their height. It begins to look as if Europe were the Dark Continent.

When Europe began to rediscover Africa, along with her rediscovery of the rest of the world, a series of occurrences took place that made smooth and amicable relationships between the peoples of the two continents almost impossible. If we follow tradition and take the exploration voyages sponsored by Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal as our starting point, we discover that the exploration of Africa can be thought of as a continuation of the movements that began when the Iberians organised to force the Arabs out of the peninsular. In the years after 1407, when Prince Henry of Portugal took part in the sacking of Ceuta, opposite Gibraltar, he formed an academy and was instrumental in letting out on contract the task of exploring the west coast of Africa. His explorers received certain rights and rewards in exchange for claiming these areas in the name of Portugal and more specifically for bringing back items that could be used in national (not to say royal) trade. Among the earliest imports into Portugal were Moorish slaves. Negro slaves were not far behind.

In the next two or three centuries the exploration of the African coastlines was tied irretrievably with the slave trade. As we shall see, slavery is an African institution which has peculiar forms that are totally unlike the institutions of servility that were found in medieval Europe. For this reason, there was an effective misunderstanding between Africans and Europeans about just what slavery consisted of, and yet Africans were able, because they had a tradition of slavery, to exist and even to prosper in a slave situation. This fact led Europeans to state that they considered Africans to be 'natural' slaves and 'born' hewers of wood and drawers of water. As we have seen in our investigation of the development of racial attitudes, this idea very quickly implanted itself and led to disdain on the part of Europeans for Africans and African culture.

The abolition of the slave trade added fuel to the fire. For all that it was a humane movement and one which the modern world of that time had to undergo in order to develop industrialism to the point that it desired, the way in which it was carried out was ultimately most uncomplimentary to Africans and destructive to the relationships existing between Africans and Europeans. As we have seen, minimal claims were made for Africans - they were, after all, 'fellow creatures' and the implication was left that they might not be much more.

The situation was certainly not improved by the explorers of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These men, who were driven out of the European cultures which culminated in the strictures of the Victorian era, were, for the most part, either malcontents or men of overweening ambition searching for position and power. Such men were in no position to understand or even to perceive the intricacies of African civilization or the basic similarity between the 'little traditions' - the peasants - of Africa and those of Europe, although some of them - Mungo Park and David Livingstone - did see the similarities. Men like Cruickshank and Winterbottom also could see what they were dealing with and reported fully and correctly. The same could be said, however, for very few.

It was in this era that the idea of the Dark Continent – the phrase was Stanley's - came to the fore. With the exploration and with the expansion of the West which accompanied industrialisation and the vast social and cultural changes then going on, Africa was a. prime target for colonial expansion. In order for colonial expansion to take place, it became necessary to consolidate the view of African cultures as savage and barbarian in order to justify one's activities.

Europe and Africa, which had once been culturally close together, grew successively farther and farther apart. Africa, at the time the colonial empires emerged in the late nineteenth century, was thoroughly the 'Dark Continent', subject to almost all the stereotypes that remained in effect until after 1945. If one begins with Carthage, and has one's thinking dominated by events in a Europe cut off from the spread of Islam, and then by the modern colonial situation, the justification of the view becomes clear: Africa south of the Sahara is one world, and the Mediterranean is another. But the picture must be expanded at both its ends. 

(P. Bohannan: Africa and the Africans, Doubleday).