Staff Writer Jack Ford traces the relationship between Africa and the West from its beginnings to its contemporary form, arguing that both Africa’s underdevelopment and modern-day Western prosperity are rooted in exploitation of the continent.
On the eve of European maritime contact in the fifteenth century, the African continent was alive with change – developing, as Walter Rodney famously argued, along its own distinct socio-economic trajectory. Much of these initial sections are drawn from the UNESCO Histories (particularly Section 2, Ch 3) and Rodney’s Marxist analysis ‘How Europe Underdeveloped Africa‘ (among other scholarly sources).
The myth of an ‘African stasis of development’ before European arrival is completely unfounded in reality.
Rising from dense woodland, the stone city of Great Zimbabwe, the capital of the Karanga Kingdom, was in political flux. At its centre, the Imba Huru or ‘Great Enclosure’, was erected mortarless and entirely of granite. Standing two hundred and fifty metres in circumference, and eleven metres high, the immense structure was being slowly abandoned. A series of dynastic power splits and shifting trade routes were dispersing locals, and driving many northward from southern Africa’s first major city. Birthed from this period of crisis, the state of Mutapa was ruled by an aristocracy rich in gold.
Mutapa straddled two valuable pathways for exchange: receiving Arabic merchants from the North, alongside Chinese and Indian maritime traders from the East. This state was ruled over by the ‘Mwene Mutapa‘ – a ‘great lord’ – who appointed governors to conquered territories. Zimbabwean society was seeing ever more class stratification, state-building, and rising production; with an advanced system of tribute as backbone. Slowly, it was emerging into a centralised tributary state: a structure resembling feudalism.
Restored only 130 years prior to the dawn of the fifteenth century, the Solomonid Empire of Ethiopia reigned over the Horn of Africa in the tail end of its ‘Golden Age’. Claiming descent from the biblical Solomon, the Emperor was an ‘Elect of God’. A proud landed nobility mobilised immense forces of labour toward feats of architecture, establishing vast complexes of monasteries. These works were the product of an exploited class.
Over a long period of development, communal ties of kinship were broken down to form social strata – a feudal-like class system. Histories were written to glorify the aristocracy, and the line between state and religion was practically non-existent. The empire undertook a series of territorial expansions, via a mobile royal tent city, providing spoils to a domestic tax-exempt landowning elite: a royal lineage made manifest in geographical boundaries.
Formed in the lands of modern day Anambra State, Nigeria, the Nri Kingdom was a decentralised theocracy. Ruled over by a spiritual leader – the Eze Nri – the Kingdom did not have a standing army, but instead governed through a ritual authority and title societies. Territorial expansion was carried out through converts and allegiances, not conquest, while outsiders from other regions could be welcomed.
Advanced metallurgy and trade networks were produced without a central despotism or class-based land dispossession. This communal mode of production stood as a sophisticated alternative to feudal-like social structures – regulating trade not through military coercion, but through spiritual emissaries, a religious mandate of peace, as well as a complex system of sanctuaries and oaths. The Nri were characteristic of a type of polity efficient even while lacking centralisation.
The product of a series of successor states, the Empire of Songhai succeeded the Empires of Ghana and Mali. Though of different ethnic ruling classes, this series can be viewed as a developing political formation over the course of a millennium. These ‘Empires of the Western Sudan’ are often described as ‘trading states’, however such mercantile behaviour was only born from development of a vast agricultural base. International trade stretched from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, with merchants able to traverse thousands of miles without conflict.
A nascent state held together clashing social formations, while extracting tribute; however it was yet to dissolve old communal holdovers. This state almost ceased to exist entirely in times of crisis. A budding class of proto-serfs began to develop in rural areas, but a complete transformation of land relations (a class bound to the land) was yet to arise. Meanwhile, irrigation on a grander scale to feed a growing population was only in the beginnings of development by a small state capacity. The Empire of Songhai never had the opportunity to develop this irrigation, or to make its full transition to new relations of production – the target of a Moroccan invasion which eventually (alongside internal strife) collapsed the entire empire.
These distinct modes of production existed alongside one another in a vibrant continental patchwork. Uneven development, and co-existence of social forms is a universal feature of human socio-economic evolution globally – not a characteristic unique to the African experience. In Rodney’s account, antagonistic contradictions, like those seen in European feudal contexts, were only embryonic within the communal mode of production, and hence development in these societies was via a process of reform, as opposed to revolution. Naturally, where feudal-like structures did arise, antagonism was not far behind.
Slavery existed across African states – subjects of trade in Ethiopia, integral to economic structures in Songhai, a ritually-excluded class (‘osu’) in the Nri Kingdom. Yet, it was not the basis of economic life in any of them: the vast majority of surpluses were drawn from tributary systems, floodplain agriculture, and religious authority over trade/tribute respectively. The absence of revenues drawn from the private ownership of land meant that enslaved peoples constituted the main form of revenue-producing private property; a fact that would soon be exploited by European merchants.
African development needs to be understood on its own terms. However, this progression of development was ultimately distorted at the advent of European contact.
Atlantic merchant capital began to metastasise on the continent, turning Africa inside out, or ‘extraverting‘ the continent (to borrow Samir Amin’s phrasing) by subordinating internal development to the fulfilment of European demand – first through the export of people, and later raw materials directly.
Narrowing Agency
Following the contact between Portugal and Kongo, the dynamic was one of mutual exchange and a parity of sovereignty. Even the Kongo’s monarch, the Manikongo Nzinga a Nkuwu, voluntarily adopted Christianity, and the pair exchanged emissaries.
Trade was conducted under a strict royal monopoly under the Manikongo. Over time, however, Portuguese capital demanded ever more goods and ever more labour, particularly on the sugar plantations of Sao Tome.
Merchants began to subvert the royal monopoly, trading directly with vassal nobility – undermining the authority of the Manikongo. These nobles, ascendant in wealth and power, became rebellious factions, armed by the Portuguese. To maintain control, in turn, the state also had to buy Portuguese arms.
Over the span of a century, the sovereignty and political integrity of the Kingdom of Kongo had been wholly undermined: Portuguese merchants were kidnapping nobility and directly depopulating the kingdom. Afonso I, son of Nzinga a Nkuwu, pled for an end to this chaos. These pleas fell on deaf ears.
The relationship between European development, and African underdevelopment is dialectical: the former is afforded by the latter – the pair produce one another through the framework of international exchange.
The metastasis of European involvement on the African continent does not originate in a place of ideology, but of material need. Growing capitalist demand for all kinds of goods, particularly staple commodities – sugar, tobacco, cotton – while maximising speed and profitability, led to the development of an infrastructure of slavery: a mass movement of labour to fulfil European demand in many areas. This movement is particularly apparent in Brazil and the Caribbean, wherein labour on sugar plantations and later exploitation of natural silver and gold reserves were carried out by the largest amount of imported enslaved peoples.
Of course, this global position as an exporter of captured people did not come about overnight, but was a slow process of subjugation to an international dynamic of trade.
Initially, Europeans could not directly conquer a significant part of Africa: direct control was restricted to a few select coastal regions. Instead, power was exerted over the continent through economic means, such as the scale of European demand, a complete control of oceanic trade, financing, and a monopoly on the knowledge and law of international trade.
At the advent of European arrival, and for many centuries following it, African elites were ‘dynamic partners’ to a European trade – able to maintain territorial integrity, pressure for better imported goods, and (at least initially) engage in the ‘voluntary’ sale of captured peoples to Europeans, as claimed in the work of John Thornton as well as Ismaila Ciss’ later research on Senegambia. These elites were administrators at the point of transaction, even if operating within a system whose broader boundaries were controlled by Europeans.
The association between ruling African elites and Europeans was easily established, and European demand hardened existing class divisions, while simultaneously creating new ones. The same cannot be said for more horizontally organised societies. For instance, the Balanta people (of modern Guinea-Bissau), as a stateless society, were frequent targets of Kaabu raids for captives, hence they developed numerous means to actively resist the slave trade by raising fortified settlements, shifting to defensible wet-rice agriculture, and organising labour through age grades. Some decentralised societies not only adapted to these new conditions, but also actively thrived under them.
In the beginning, African elites had the option of voluntarily engaging with the slave trade by selling people captured in war. Slowly, however, this dynamic of ‘voluntary engagement’ altered, and the agency of these elites was narrowed. A wider exploration into this dynamic of narrowing agency is also explored in the work of Idrissou and Sehou.
Military technology, though not a decisive factor in the first 150 years of contact, slowly contributed to a ‘lock-in effect’. Once adopting these technologies, African states became dependent on the import of European weapons to forward domestic political goals, creating a structural demand for weapons. European weapons were thus traded for human captives. Meanwhile, the scale of European demand became ever more dramatic, and rewards for the sale of slaves rapidly outstripped other commodities, further ‘narrowing’ the potential for other viable economic alternatives. The import of ‘prestige goods’ from Europe by African ruling classes also became a kind of ‘consumption trap’, as such goods were required for the maintenance of social authority. All of these factors, compounded by treaties that reduced competition and European trade risk, gradually tethered African agency to continued cooperation with European capital, and their insatiable demand for human captives.
This institutional reliance on slavery on behalf of the Europeans was not a developmental necessity, but the fastest and most profitable manner through which to develop, and hence European capital pursued it; tying Africa, Latin America, and the West Indies into global capitalism, yielding untold human suffering. This process, despite fluctuations, remained a continuously profitable venture, not purely in the sense of capital accumulation but also through the consistent flow of silver and gold for money, naval technology, and capital reinvestment into manufacturing, shipping, and many other sectors. The slave trade also strengthened transnational links within Europe, hastening the continental transition toward capitalism.
The European slave trade also birthed an ideological justification for its own existence – structural racism. An initial economic demand for fast maximal profits was rationalised first through religion, then via a new ‘race science’, whose reasoning justified all actions of Europeans. This form of White racism stood integral to the capitalist mode of production, and would, as articulated by Césaire, eventually ‘boomerang’ back onto the European continent itself in the form of Nazism.
This was the process by which Africa was turned inside out gradually over the span of centuries. This created a structure of stagnation: massive loss of population from the transatlantic slave trade created a population without growth in number, a technological arrest (owing to this loss of population, and an influx of European consumer goods), and an overall ‘extraversion‘ of African development. Trade networks were turned inside out, now primarily utilised for the transport of captives and other goods sought-after by European capital.
This structural stagnation would only be intensified by the process of direct colonisation.
Formal Colonisation
Seated before a vast map of the continent, fourteen delegates spent three and a half months establishing the framework for the carving of the African continent. Otto von Bismarck had called the meeting to protect German commercial interests, and prevent an inter-capitalist war over the wealth of the Congo and Niger. The ideological self-justification for the conference was as means to settle the ‘three C’s: Commerce, Christianity, and Civilisation‘ – settling European commercial rivalries, spreading Christianity, and bringing ‘Civilisation’ to the continent. Not a single African delegate was present.
The mode of exploitation of Africa had shifted from the systematic depopulation of the continent via the transatlantic slave trade to direct colonial plunder, after a brief intermission of ‘legitimate commerce‘.
The ensuing Scramble for Africa ignited conflicts across the entire continent, as European powers began to make manifest their planned division of Africa. These conflicts took a multitude of forms.
Ethiopian resistance to Italian imperialism yielded the first major defeat of a colonial power at the 1896 Battle of Adwa, forcing the Italians to recognise the sovereignty of the Ethiopian state. German settlement in the region of Namibia was met with fierce pastoralist resistance from the Herero and Nama peoples between 1904 and 1908. This resistance was met with an unyielding campaign of genocide – the first of the twentieth century, with the German military killing 80% of the Herero and 50% of the Nama through direct slaughter, driving populations into the Omaheke desert, and concentration camps. This genocide links to the later rise of Nazism with institutional, ideological, and methodological continuity.
British colonialism of Sudan, through an inherited Egyptian project of colonisation, yielded an intermittent conflict against the Mahdist Sudanese from 1881-1899. The Mahdist resistance against Egyptian attack was a victorious anti-colonial war, capturing Khartoum in 1885, founding a sovereign state for a decade before a British ‘reconquest’ in 1896-98. The British enlisted colonial troops in a campaign of industrial slaughter of the population – a campaign of total war waged not only against soldiers, but also against civilian populations with complete military asymmetry. A protracted conflict against French colonialism was also waged across West Africa under the leadership of Samory Touré, utilising sophisticated guerrilla tactics as well as modern weaponry before his capture in 1898. Touré’s 20 year campaign across West Africa was foundational for anti-colonial struggle, as the Wassoulou Empire also engaged in state-building across the period since its founding in 1878.
Despite defeats on the level of military combat, resistance to colonialism continued within colonial states themselves.
These new colonial formations did not extract wealth solely through trade but through a ‘systematic expatriation of African surplus.’ The colonial state used a combination of outright forced labour, ‘starvation’ wages, and taxation to extract the maximal amount out of rural peasants as well as urban workers, while maintaining a complete monopoly on political and military power. Colonialism wrought upon the continent the complete appropriation of African social institutions, entirely dislodging populations from their own historical trajectories. Rodney describes the effects of colonialism as consigning African peoples to the role of ‘objects of history‘.
The inception of a new more discrete form of plunder can also be seen here, in the form of trading companies and banks enforcing low prices for African exports, and high prices for European imports. This ‘deterioration in terms of trade’ is Unequal Exchange in its most direct form.
European colonies had a threefold effect on the ledgers of the ‘mother country.’ They created financial losses for metropolitan areas, which had to front the steep cost for administration and military action through taxation. All the while, the African continent remained drained of value regardless – consistently enriching European capital, and cheapening commodities for European consumer populations. The colonies appeared as ‘loss-making’ institutions on the fiscal books, while the plunder of raw materials and labour, unrecorded on the imperial balance sheet, continued to drain value to Europe all the same.
This occupation also yielded significant organisational and technological advancement in Europe – corporations able to test out new business techniques, and pull resources directly to be put toward consumer-industrial goods (advanced oils and fats, alloys) and military goals (uranium). These advancements were kept in Europe. Reserves of African colonies were also directly utilised as instruments for stabilising the ‘mother country’ in the shadow of the Great Depression and WWII reconstruction.
Despite the claims of European apologists, infrastructure was neither a developing nor ‘civilising’ addition to the continent, but a means through which to draw minerals and cash crops from interior to coast. Colonial economies were highly specialised into the primary sector by design. Likewise, expenditure on African education and health was a fraction of the equivalent spent toward Europe or White settler populations. Such colonial schools, too, sought only to reproduce Western narratives and train a school of alienated ‘comprador’ administrators to perpetuate the colonial dynamic.
The structural violence of the system of colonialism and the institutions that it raised to serve its own ends were untenable from the outset. Forced labourers, colonial-educated elites, and squeezed rural-urban working populations leveraged what tools were given to them to wrest control of Africa from European hands. Fierce wars of attrition were waged against colonising nations by the Algerian FLN against France, and rival Angolan movements MPLA and FNLA, Mozambican FRELIMO, and Guinea-Bissau PAIGC against Portugal. Meanwhile, strikes led by Kwame Nkrumah’s CPP alongside widespread riots forced Britain to negotiate Ghanaian independence. Paths to independence were varied and complex – military, economic, and legalistic. However, the result was the same – political separation from direct colonial control.
Neocolonialism and the Neoliberal Horizon
The reclamation of sovereignty across the African continent marked a new political beginning – a reclamation of historical trajectory. Revolutionary political organisations began to develop the continent on its own terms – Lumumba’s MNC in the Congo, Sankara’s CNR in Burkina Faso, Cabral’s PAIGC in Guinea-Bissau. Inroads were made into economic progression that built national economies without reliance on European capital.
The MPLA, FNLA, and UNITA were the three principal actors that severed Portuguese control of Angola. Quickly, however, these factions fell into a brutal civil war – a Cuban-backed Marxist MPLA led by Agostinho Neto, and a Western-backed and ideologically fluid UNITA led by Jonas Savimbi (the FNLA quickly collapsed at the advent of the conflict). Despite this civil war, Angolan independence was declared in 1975, nominally free of Portuguese influence for the first time in half a millennium.
This war unfolded over the course of almost three decades, yielding untold ruin to the nation of Angola. The MPLA transformed into a body of ‘lapsed Marxists’, while UNITA became a ‘state-within-a-state’ erected atop Savimbi’s cult of personality – receiving the support of both America and South Africa. UNITA embedded itself within Western capital and the expanding dominion of American-backed Apartheid South Africa across the continent, as it tried to create a ‘constellation’ of segregated states from Namibia to Mozambique to Angola.
African movements toward liberation were sunk repeatedly through political assassinations and organised overthrows. Lumumba was killed with Belgian and American involvement, Sankara killed with collusion from French (and potentially American) secret services, likewise Cabral with direct Portuguese involvement. The new capitalist hegemony of the US was marked by its active support for ‘decolonisation’ while developing more discrete and insidious forms of control across the continent.
Value transfer from Africa became ever more discrete and ever more effective: Unequal exchange, in embryonic form in the colonial era, now became the primary mode of exploiting the continent as well as the rest of the Global South. Unequal Exchange was intensified and made the language of the neoliberal world order through the advent of structural adjustment programmes (SAPs).
The introduction of SAPs and the wider post-colonial framework of Unequal Exchange constitutes a direct continuation of the wealth extraction of direct colonisation. If a developing nation desires financial aid from the International Monetary Fund it must adopt a series of neoliberal adjustment policies – ‘privatisation, deregulation, fiscal austerity (called stabilisation), and trade liberalisation’. Public wealth is sold off in a ‘fire sale’, stock and currency are subject to foreign predation through speculation, impoverishing populations, and widening social inequality. National sovereignty is wholly undermined, and recipient economies are forced into adopting an export-focused economic model.
Economists Hickel, Sullivan, and Zoomkawala estimate, in a wider study, that wealth drain from the entirety of the Global South was an estimated $62 trillion to the Global North in the period 1960-2018. This figure becomes a staggering $152 trillion accounting for growth. This is a drain which continues into the modern day. In a study of 2017 global value drain figures by Andrea Ricci, approximately 38.6% of North African domestic GDP was drained by Unequal Exchange, and 8.7% of Sub-Saharan GDP. This discrepancy is due to the latter’s lack of integration into the wider world economic system – not a marker of improving economic performance.
Unequal Exchange, the subject of a full article (‘Trade, Treats, and Fascism‘) forms the basis through which high living standards in the West are perpetuated – an ‘Imperial Mode of Living‘ founded atop a culture of hyper consumption of cheap imported Southern goods, and the continued extraction of corporate super-profits.
Africa is not ’emerging’ from a historic underdevelopment but is combatting an underdevelopment which is actively produced.
This is part one of a two part series. The second piece is an article titled ‘How China Develops Africa’ – an analysis of the contemporary and historical dynamic between China and Africa, and a comparison with the West.
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