This critical analysis will to the best of my ability study
the so called benefits of colonialism, who exactly it was benefiting? The
quality and quantity of these benefits and lastly the magnitude of these
benefits, furthermore it will look at the negative consequences of the
colonialism so as to see if it outweighs the benefits.
Colonialism was the advent of the 19th century
where European powers partitioned Africa unto themselves and forcefully entered
Africa and through deceptive means as well as military might conquered the
people they passed dubious laws in their local countries and somehow gained
rights over the indigenous population, the natives and the land[1].
They then set out on a massive scale exploitation and murder of the African
people, they were pushed into reserves and forced to work in the settler farms
(farms which were previously there’s) for cheap labour, this was coupled by
indirect maneuvers such as hut taxes. In the event of this taking place in
order to enhance better and efficient exploitation they created infrastructure
for their settlers and some few social amenities. This meager developments were
meant for them on our land and not us, this explains the sharp racial
segregations that were evident everywhere in Africa at that time, blacks were
regarded the same as dogs thus were not eligible to enjoy this so called
‘benefits’ for example in south Africa during the Apartheid in one bus (or all)
there was a sign saying blacks and dogs are not allowed and we all know that
equated blacks to dogs, thus in a nutshell that’s what entailed colonialism
For starters we need to carefully apply reason and see if
this so called benefits were intended or were by mistake, it was never in the
intention of the colonizers to benefit the colonized with basic things because
then that would not be colonization but a mere helping hand this is not what
happened in Africa. The benefits that came to Africa of which I will deal with
were to facilitate their exploitation and not the local populace.
The question still lingers on can one benefit from
oppression?
Let’s look at this certain benefits that Europe benefited
Africa with
Reduced warfare
Arrogant and ignorant white supremacists state shamelessly
that colonialism helped unite Africans and end warfare that was inherent among
us in terms of cattle raiding and interstate warfare that was at times rampant.it
was deceptively stated that Africa was in chaos in the 19th century, and that
‘tribes’ like the Ngoni and the Yao and Samori’s sofas were killing left, right
and center.[2] However
on a close analysis you will find that since most African societies were
functionally independent and everything that the society needed was at its
avail, the only one point in which raiding became necessary was in extraneous
circumstances where let’s say a disease would hit a community’s cattle, wiping
it out, this is when the elders of the society would arrange a raid on the
enemies (neighbors) in order to replenish their stocks and ensure survival, and
in the most rare cases it would happen when a long period of drought had
encompassed the society. And even during this raid[s of course there a casualties
but very few because the raiders would time when the other community had sent
its men to graze cattle far away from the village, this is when they would
attack and get hold of the cattle. In the event of coming across of women or
children they were not harmed but rather captured, there was marriage by
capture hence basic rules of war were maintained.
Colonialism did not unite Africans actually it disunited us
and led to the warfare that they claim to have reduced. Firstly when they
partitioned Africa they paid no regard to the existing societal boundaries
hence they separated societies into half greatly weakening them, furthermore
they applied policies that were aimed at turning us against each other because
they understood well that ‘divided we fall’ such policies were divide and rule
whereby they co-operated with some African leaders, they resorted to arming
African communities so as to attack other African communities and this was
mostly their enemies. A good example is the Baganda they were armed and fought
off their neighboring enemies greatly weakening them little did they know this
was a ploy so that the British can conquer the other land without much
resistance. If this was not enough in the Kenyan context the colonial
government banned the formation of national political parties and allowed the
formation of ethnic fronts of political participation this was segregating us
so that we be tribally divided and united against the common enemy. It is this
divide and rule tactics that has exhibited disunity amongst Africans and this
has resulted in major hate between tribes thus tribalism. For example in Rwanda
the colonizing country used one of the tribes as leaders over the other, thus
since the system was still one of oppression one of the tribes disliked the
other as they saw them as a mere extension of the persecutor (colonialists)
thus by the time the genocide broke out, to one of the tribe they were
revenging as well as liberating themselves from this extension of the
persecutorial rule. This tribalism and genocide politics was a straight result
of the direct and rule policy. Hence colonialism did not reduce warfare amongst
African tribes; it developed it into a large scale and gruesome warfare.
Colonial infrastructure
It is not debatable and true that the colonialists did
introduce infrastructure that was not there in Africa such as roads, buildings,
rail and power. However the cookie here is that this infrastructure was meant
to be for them in facilitating better exploitation of the people. To prove this,
let’s look at Kenya.
All roads and railways led down to the
sea. They were built to extract gold or manganese or coffee or cotton. They
were built to make business possible for the timber companies, trading
companies and agricultural concession firms, and for white settlers, The
British were interested in the agriculturally fit areas and with areas where
they could make profit( mind you their own profit not benefit Africa) that is
why if you look at Northern Kenya which is made of arid and semi-arid areas
they largely ignored them and this disproportionality in development is what
has been carried on to post-colonial Kenya, roads going to Northern Kenya are
virtually non-existent or have not achieved the status of being called roads, a
Monday newspaper reaches Moyale on Friday. People of Northern Kenya in 1963
during the Lancaster house conference wanted to secede and join Somalia because
they did not regard themselves as Kenyans because surely they weren’t treated
as such and still are not treated as such. Hence they feel left out. It is my
humble submission that to the extent of the disproportional nature of the
infrastructure so introduced and its long term effect of disuniting Kenya from
the North that its demerits outweigh its benefits because this was the
beginning of underdevelopment and for a nation to develop it should be in one
accord or else it will be developing at the cost off its unity with the
abandoned parts. It would do justice to not consider how first of all this
social amenities were put in place specifically the railway in Europe rail
building was characterized by a massive capital investment and bonuses to the
workers in Kenya the pay to the coolies and black workers were lashes. A more
prominent example is the Embakasi airport of Nairobi. Because it was built
during the colonial era (starting in 1953) and with U.S. loans, it is customary
to credit the imperialists for its existence. But it would be much more
accurate to say that the people of Kenya built it with their own hands under
European supervision, in fact it has gone down in the annals of history as it
being the first airport to be built with hands![3]
Foreign investment
Many capitalist scholars brag about how European capital was
invested in Africa for the benefit and modernization of Africa through
colonialism, they make it sound it’s like they did us a very important favor,
however with the careful application of reason(which they thought this black
beasts were not capable of ) we come to see that most of the funds that were
invested in Africa were gotten from the spoils of slavery hence this was dirty
money which had been gotten from massacring and subjecting blacks to untold
misery during slavery good examples are the Barclays bank(whose founders were
active slave drivers) and the Niger company which was a monopoly of many other organizations
that made their buck from slavery. Apart from slavery it should be noted that that
Europe’s greatest source of primary capital accumulation was overseas, and that
the profits from African ventures continually outran the capital invested in
the colonies, in this sense it should be seen that apart from the initial
capital(traceable to slavery profits) the more that was added was from the
profits made in the colonies themselves for example diamond business in South
Africa made too much profit that some of it was constantly reinvested as
capital.
Expansion of agriculture
As they wine and dine they kept on and keep on living on the
unwarranted assumption that they modernized and expanded agriculture however
the true thing is that the African entered colonial agriculture systems with a
hoe and came out with a hoe (plus a whole lot of fatigue and not enough produce
to feed his family that he could show for it). They brag of introducing new
crops to Africa such as maize by the Portuguese, due to their non-industrialization
policy they did not build factories in Africa for the processing of this goods,
the factories were in Europe this brought about the retarded situation which is
that lets Ghana grew cocoa but imported cocoa products! They pushed the
Africans to reserves where they forced them to practice shift cultivation on a
piece of land that was too small. Furthermore they introduced monoculture which
is the growing of one crop and just that one is majored in. mind you before
they came Africa practiced diverse agriculture of all forms of plants that were
healthy however with their introduction of monoculture and their emphasis on
cash crops over food crops this is the major cause of famine in Kenya today
because this policy has been continued long after independence. Diversified
agriculture was within the African tradition. Monoculture was a colonialist
invention, how ridiculous is it for us to plant tea and flowers and lay
emphasis on its export when we have citizens who are sleeping hungry? How
erroneous is it that we put emphasis on cash crops whereas we are not food
secure ourselves? It’s quite fallacial that when hunger breaks out in Kenya the
nation contributes up to a billion worth of foodstuffs whereas this is not the
remedy but just a temporal relief .Lastly it is to be noted that the so called
crops that they introduced in Africa back home they were food for their horses.
With respect to agriculture and nutrition it is to be noted that the crops that
they introduced which later on became staple foods were neither nutritious nor
as healthy as the foods that were previously there such as sorghum, cassava ,
millet thus has greatly impacted on the natural African physique, which was
exceptionally well to prove this we lay down the test proposed by Rodney which
is we draw a contrast with the communities that have retained their eating
patterns and foods such as the Maasai , they are exceptionally strong than the
average Kenyan man .This has overally limited our life span as nowadays due to
the westernization of our diet it has lowered our immunity we are dying of the
same diseases as the white man, lifestyle diseases such as Heart disease and
Diabetes!
Expansion of gender inequality
What happened to African women under colonialism is that the
social, religious, constitutional and political privileges and rights[4].
Prior to colonialism women played a great role overally in community natters
and were even described as the matricentric core of production, however
shocking as it may seem women were more involved in leadership matters and
played a greater role. In Ancient Egypt when the pharaoh died the queen took
over leadership and we had queens who were very brilliant in leadership and
greatly steered ancient Egyptian civilization to prosperity[5].
Back in Britain the women were called the ‘Victorian woman’ this entailed that
the man should go to work do everything necessary and the woman was to stay
home take care of the household and give birth this was the role of women in
Britain. In Africa traditionally the division of labour was such that the men
would do the hard manual labour, with the advent of capitalism in Africa more
men entered it in great numbers given the hard nature of the labour involved
this consequently this made women’s work become greatly inferior to that of men
within the new value system of colonialism: men’s work was ‘modern’ and women’s
was ‘traditional’ and ‘backward’. Therefore, the deterioration in the status of
African women was bound up with the loss of political power by African society
as a whole; this is why nowadays we have to set sui generis rules such as the two third gender rule because its
result was the sharp marginalization of women especially politically.
‘Opening up of Africa’ to Trade
It is often bragged that colonialism opened up Africa to
legitimate international trade, however before we go far we need to discuss two
things first. Trade is the exchange of goods and services equitably and on a
negotiable basis but when one party dictates the trade terms and price then
that ceases to be trade and develops into something else but not trade. Secondly
in Africa there was trade that was really doing well, every country had a form
of local industry that produced goods in surplus which were in turn traded. Since
this inter-African trade did not bring benefits to Europeans it was not
encouraged by them, and up to the latter part of the colonial period only 10%
of Africa’s trade was internal.
Lastly you see Africa was not opened up to trade
internationally we were limited to trading with Europe only in that they
dictated what we planted, what quantity to sell, and the price at which they
would buy it (is this trade?) so they did not open us to trade with the world
they opened us to further forms of exploitation in the name of trade to Europe
only and not elsewhere and we are still dependent on them until today. We trade
with Europe then they trade with the world with our products for instance Kenya
exports millions of tonnes of tea to Britain about 60% of the whole produce,
Britain consumes 20% and resells the remainder 40% to the rest of the world. Africa
was denied the opportunity of developing healthy trade links with parts of the
world other than Europe and North America. Some trade persisted across the
Indian Ocean, but on the whole it is fair to say that the roads in Africa led
to the sea-ports and the sea-lanes led to Western Europe and North America.
That kind of lop-sidedness is today part of the pattern of underdevelopment and
dependence. To conclude I would quote what Rodney said in terms of trade “There
may be more rubber and coffee exported, there may be more cars imported with
the proceeds, and there may be more petrol stations built to service the cars.
But the profit goes abroad, and the economy becomes more and more a dependency
of the metro poles’
Education
It is stated time and time again that colonialism introduced
formal education to Africa what is never mentioned is that there was already
education in Africa only that the African education was out of the environment
and based directly on the work pattern of the societies and I continued
lifelong especially when one moved from on age grade to the next. Among the
Bemba of what was then Northern Rhodesia, children by the age of six could name
fifty to sixty species of tree plants without hesitation, but they knew very
little about ornamental flowers. The explanation is simply that knowledge of
the trees was a necessity in an environment of ‘cut and burn’ agriculture and
in a situation where numerous household needs were met by tree products; learning
about flowers was and still is not useful to the survival of an African. Pre-colonial African education was outstanding because of its close links
with social life, both in a material and spiritual sense; its collective
nature; its many-sidedness; and its progressive development in conformity with
the successive stages of physical, emotional and mental development of the
child. It was both informal and formal and in some advanced African societies
writing had already been introduced. The colonizers did not introduce education
into Africa: they introduced a new set of formal educational institutions which
partly supplemented and partly replaced those which were there before, and
which were highly irrelevant to the life of an African because the purpose of
the colonial system of education was to train Africans to help man the local
administration at the lowest ranks and to staff the private capitalist firms
owned by Europeans.
It was not an educational system
designed to give young people confidence and pride as members of African
societies, but one which sought to instill a sense of deference towards all
that was European. The quality as well as the quantity of this education was
below minimal, first of all there was racial segregation in that the whites
around got the best educational facilities, out of millions of Africans only a
few hundred made It to school, and out of this few that made it to school less
than 50% finished it successively, this is because there was no prospect and
even if there was it was minimal of an African making it to secondary or
university because Africans were being trained to be clerks and messengers.
Furthermore they didn’t want to administer quality education to the blacks
because this would open their eyes to demand for their rights. The system of
education did not house any new ideas thus it was not progressive at all. It
was not relevant to the African environment they had no programme of
instruction relating to the plant life with which they would otherwise have familiarized
themselves with. Instead, they were taught about flowers — and about European
roses, it taught one more of Europe than back home in Africa it was at the
expense of that when one was colonially educated he was also de-Africanized,
and we have good example in Kenya one sir Charles Njonjo is popularly known to
be among those who embraced white culture fully and is even referred to as a
white man. Other that intellectual education of Europe genuine technical
education was ruled out, because the fundamental purpose of the colonial
economy did not permit the development of industry and skills within Africa.
Imperialist whites snigger at Africans for being ‘illiterate
natives’ then argue that illiteracy is part of ‘the vicious circle of poverty’.
Yet, it is the same same people who boast proudly that they have educated
Africa. How did they educate Africa then?
A system full of impediments and no prospect of success is no system at all.
The colonial schooling was education for subordination, exploitation, the
creation of mental confusion and the development of underdevelopment.
It is at this juncture that I conclude that the so called
key benefits of colonialism were not benefits but seemingly unintended outcomes
and these needs to weigh against their negative consequences as well as the
negative nature in which they were introduced. It is good focus to break down these
mythical benefits so s to eradicate this psychological prison we are in that
the white man is better than Africans hence we should bow to him!
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