PART I

One thing is clear from history: the West has been absolutely ruthless in their conquest of Africa, the Americas as well as Asia. It’s a lesson to be had for the naïve, trusting Africans that the colonialists’ foray into Africa was not a road paved with good intentions. Not at all.

Examples abound.

• 1652 The Dutch, led by Jan van Riebeeck, settled at the Cape and massacred the Khoisan and Xhosa, and exiled others to Robben Island. Later, the Cape became a major slave recipient area with slaves from Dahomey, Angola, Mozambique, India, Indonesia, Madagascar and Malaysia.
• The colonialists ensured that the races lived separately, be it church, school, dwellings or social amenities. This was more so in the British compared to the French. The French at least allowed a few identified Africans to rise up to their parliament in Paris. The French were more for cultural imperialism. The British were more for economic imperialism. The African leaders in French colonies were Gallicised. This made the French more pernicious. To date, former French colonies have discernibly greater colonial hangovers compared to British colonies. The Portuguese were somewhere in-between.
• In all colonies:

1. Mixed marriages were anathema. Miscegenation was common in Portuguese colonies but not mixed marriages. In South Africa, miscegenation was common, but inter-racial marriage was a crime.
2. There were separate facilities for different races – bars, restaurants, churches (sic), transportation, etc.
3. Every day, Africans faced daily humiliations as they were treated as sub-humans.
4. Education expenditure and facilities were highly skewed. On average, Colonial Governments spent 30 times more on European education than on African education. Asians were better off, getting about a third of the resources spent on Europeans.
5. The top and skilled jobs were reserved for Europeans. Africans got menial and labourers’ jobs. Later Africans were allowed to be clerks.
6. Africans were not allowed to buy land in their own countries!!!
7. Africans had extremely limited scope to trade and own businesses.
8. Asians got far better treatment than Africans and had far more rights than the indigenous Africans. Asians were able to make a bit of money off the colonial enterprise from both Africans and Whites. The main problem of the Asians — then and now — is that most do not want to integrate. They maintain, by and large, a way of life that is very different from their ‘adopted’ African countries. For example, mixed marriages between Asians and Africans — the surest way of checking on the level of integration — is a rarity in the extreme. Marriages between Africans and whites are more common.
9. For their numbers, there are comparatively few Asians in African countries’ civil services and defence forces. After independence, Asians in some African countries were discriminated against because they were seen as having benefitted, to a significant extent, from the colonial enterprise. The Asians ran most of the medium-sized businesses. Later on, the Asians were still discriminated against because they were, on the whole richer than Africans. Many sent their children abroad, many for good. For many, from the Indian subcontinent, Africa was just a stepping stone to the West.
10. In British colonies, the administrators would hold meetings with the ‘natives’ and pretend to listen to their grievances and then fob them off. All colonialists were condescending to the max, until the s**t hit the fan.
11. Through Native Authorities the British extracted poll and hut taxes and levied natives for ridiculous things like owning dogs, bicycles etc. These taxes and levies in most cases were to be paid in cash and so the Africans had to leave their villages to find jobs in mines, plantations and factories etc to find the money to pay, on pain of a lashing or imprisonment.

PART II

• There were dissenters in the ranks of the Afrikaner, the British, the French, and the Portuguese camps who saw the way the colonial enterprise was quilted as flawed and evil. These dissenters realised that they were sitting on a powder keg of African discontent.
• The colonial enterprise in the Congo Free State – later known as Belgian Congo, then as Congo Kinshasa, and still later as Zaire and now as Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) – is a case study in depravity by Europeans.
  • During the colonial period of the Belgian Congo, at least 10 million Congolese died at the hands of the Belgians. All died prematurely directly or indirectly. This was half of the total population. King Leopold II was ostensibly in Congo Free State to fight slavery and bring development to the peoples there. Leopold employed agents to collect ivory from villagers, often not paying anything, just confiscating it. The lucky ones would get a few beads and other trinkets for their labour, and perhaps a few coins. The company running this vile operation was called Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company, widely known by the acronyms A.B.I.R. or Abir Africa. Leopold then used an army of Belgian officers and African soldiers, called the Force Publique, to spread terror. These paramilitary mobile enforcers were also known as the ‘Bula Matari’. This term meant rock crusher, the name given to Henry Morton Stanley by a BaKongo chief when he saw Henry crushing rocks with a hammer. This was during the making of the road from the Port of Matadi going up the Congo River to Stanley Pool. The ‘Bula Matari’ came to signify the terror unleashed by Leopold in the Congo. King Leopold’s intentions in the Congo were very far from honourable. Leopold was the archetypical Bad Samaritan. With the region brutalised by the Portuguese and the Arab and Swahili slave traders, Leopold heaped chicotte whips on the Congolese instead of pouring wine and oil on their wounds, as he had promised to do
  • Other facts not widely known are that during the colonial period under King Leopold II and then Belgium directly:

1. The Force Publique took children and women as hostages until they got food and enough rubber from the men of the villages. The usual practice was that of a surprise descent on a village, surround it, kill all their livestock – the dogs, pigs, goats, and chickens – as part of their terror tactics. They would then release the men to go into the forest to collect rubber. The captives would only be released if and when the evil ones, acting on behalf of King Leopold II and swelling his coffers in Europe, were satisfied with the rubber collection. If they were not satisfied, the agents/militia would kill some of the villagers as a warning to others.
2. Apart from hostage-taking or kidnapping of villagers, the Belgians routinely practised forced labour – through slave chains – the burning of villages, and indiscriminate chicotte whippings. For many Congolese, death was indeed by a thousand cuts of the chicotte. This was despite Belgium being a very solid Catholic country: Ave Marias, Hail Marys, Beatitudes and all that. Because of the quotas they had to fill, the Congolese villagers had to be in the forest collecting rubber for a long, long time. So, they could not cultivate and ended up starving. Many were killed by snakes and other wild animals.
3. To prove that they had killed men – as proof of how they had expended their allocation of ammunition – soldiers of the Force Publique would cut off hands, feet, and genitals of their Congolese victims to show their bosses!

So, fellow Africans, do not be under the illusion that colonialism was benign; it was not and cost millions of African lives.