Continued exploitation of Africa by Europe
By Adebayo Lamikanra On Aug 21, 2022
I must confess that I did not embrace Facebook when it was first introduced, dismissing it as nothing more than a fad. A short lived fad which was soon to be discarded as the world moved on to newer and better things. I had not reckoned with human narcissism, that ingrained desire to strike a pose before the rest of the world and in doing so create a flattering profile, attracting approval from people all around the world, like minded people who in turn provide their own competing profile for appreciation. My mindset at the time did not allow me to jump onto the Facebook band wagon. However, I was not allowed to indulge myself in this fancy for very long as shortly after the unveiling of Facebook, friend requests began to drop into my inbox with undeniable regularity. These requests came mainly from those I had taught or was teaching at Obafemi Awolowo University, young men and women who wanted to know my views about all manner of topics or wanted me to know what had become of them since they slipped the leash of the university and were now making waves in the big, bad world. Another group of people who filled my inbox with friend requests were those who did not know me from Adam but had been following my writings which at that time were being published with enough regularity in the Guardian to suggest that I was a Guardian columnist. Although I held out for some time and did not accede to those requests, I had to give in and joined the rest of the world in registering on what has become the largest platform in the world on which you could meet just about anybody. Since then, I have met a few people in the flesh who tell me with a smile that they knew me quite well since I was their friend on Facebook. This, I always receive as a compliment since it suggests that of all the thousands of their phantom friends, I had managed to manoeuvre myself into a position of reality, occupied by me in the same way that some space in their mind was reserved for their real friends, those people with whom they shared a common physical space. For all that however, the Facebook experience is for me, still very strongly coloured by its overall lack of reality.
No matter how intimate your Facebook friends appear to be, the relationships contacted on Facebook carry with them a strong whiff if anonymity which is a form of protection from reality unless of course the so called friends choose to solidify their phantom friendship by arranging to confront each other with their respective physical presence. After all, Facebook was birthed by a group of young men who were more comfortable chatting with disembodied human beings than chatting up and actually engaging with people in the flesh. There is therefore an element of recklessness albeit protected by a form of anonymity in the very act of making a broadcast on Facebook.
In the end when I finally overcame my resistance to the very idea of exposing myself on Facebook, I soon found myself with a couple of thousands of friends most of them as remote as they were before we became friends but with the capacity to talk to each other and to any number of people who could not only eavesdrop on our conversations but could actually barge in and take over whatever it is we are talking about. Of course this is the very essence of Facebook because the quality of your post is judged by the number of people who take the trouble to react to your post or better still to actually take the trouble to make comments which generate other comments some of which agree with the original post or disagree in such a way as to show that they are ignorant, sometimes totally ignorant of the subject under discussion and have nothing to offer but their annoying nuisance value. Unfortunately this happens distressingly frequently and is a discouragement to honest participation. For this reason more than anything else I find that I only make periodic visits to the Facebook, to take a cursory glance at what is trending there. This is why I was on Facbook a few days ago to find that one of those denizens of the virtual world said something to the effect that all what is causing the discomfiture which is assailing all countries in Africa can be traced to the contents of a book written by a Guianese professor of history who died at the age of thirty-eight as long ago as 1980. The book which trended furiously in the seventies had the expressive title of ‘How Europe underdeveloped Africa’ was written by Walter Anthony Rodney a radical historian who pitched camp with the masses that had the multiple misfortune of living in Africa and in the African Diaspora. This book was in the tradition of a long line of radical African, Afro-American and Afro-Caribbean scholars who interrogated the Afrcan experience and came away convinced that the root of African suffering remained planted in the soil of Europe and the European Diaspora all over the world.
The Europeans collided with Africa with characteristic violence towards the end of the fifteenth century when Portuguese sailors who had received schooling in the school of navigation which had been sponsored by a Henry, distinguished from any number of Henrys of that period by being introduced to the world as Henry the Navigator even though he never set foot outside Europe. It was in this school that the Portuguese learnt to sail down the West coast of Africa and return safely to Europe. On those early journeys they touched many places before they arrived in the kingdom of the Kongo which extended over a vast area and took in many parts of what we now know as Angola and the Congos. The king on the Bakongo throne who welcomed the Portuguese to his kingdom was called Joao 1 but it was his son Afonso 1 who interacted with the Portuguese for close to half a century. Within that period, the Portuguese interfered so much in the affairs of the kingdom that he became nothing more than a vassal to his European visitors, a situation which lasted till the twentieth century and brought all indigenous development to in that area to a halt. There is no doubt that the Portuguese brought the underdevelopment of Kongo with them as they very early became involved with the transportation of the Bakongo out of their country as slaves and configured the kingdom as a source of slaves for the nascent Trans-Atlantic slave trade which went on for more than three centuries and led to the deportation of more than 12 million Africans across the Atlantic in the largest forced migration the world has ever seen. Not only were so may Africans transported in appalling conditions the whole of the economy of West and Central Africa was skewed in the direction of the slave trade which was responsible for the disruption of trade over the entire region.
People have always tended to think of the slave trade in terms of the bodies which were spirited out of Africa to provide labour for the growing economy of Europe through the cultivation of lands in the New World. But this is a short sighted reading of the situation because of the twelve million people that were forced into a life of unremunerated labour, a considerable number of them were highly skilled people and intellectuals who had their usefulness to their communities curtailed by their sad fate. It is often forgotten that without the unpaid labour of Africans it would not have been possible their masters to understand the intricacies of tropical agriculture, the source of their wealth. Eminent historians have now come to the conclusion that without the wealth created by those millions of enslaved Africans, the foundation for the capitalist exploitation of the world would not have been possible. This observation, controversial when it was first pointed out by the brilliant Eric Williams who went on to become the Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, has since been corroborated by other prominent historians including Walter Rodney.
Although capitalism was built on the backs of enslaved Africans, the descendants of those slaves have been carefully and rigorously excluded from the benefits of this cruel but all conquering economic model. Africa has been systematically prevented from owning tbe means of production which has led to the fabulous wealth which transformed Europe and its Diaspora into veritable paradises on earth whilst the children of Africa have been relegated to the status of the wretched of the earth, suffering from all the biting indices of disease, poverty and human degradation . This is why genuine African scholars and leaders of the quality of Walter Rodney, Nkrumah, Nyerere, Awolowo and others have come to the conclusion that the only way that our sorry condition can be ameliorated is to seek refuge in Socialism which would in any case means a return to what existed in most parts of Africa before the Europeans arrived to turn our world upside down and inside out.
The Europeans arrived in Africa at the beginning of the sixteenth century at a time when several impressive empires were flourishing with uncommon vigour in many parts of Africa. Apart from the famous empires of Ghana, Mali and Songhai which were either waxing or waning there were empires within the boundaries of modern Nigeria that were not just making progress but were strong enough to resist European predation for centuries. The Oyo empire was flourishing impressively in the derived savannah region of the Yoruba country whilst the Benin empire held sway in the forest region as Ife civilisation as well as the Benin empire were producing stunning works of art which have not been surpassed anywhere in the world for their beauty and sheer artistic appeal. It cannot be just coincidence that those artistic feats have not been replicated since the unfortunate arrival of the Europeans on our shores and their subsequent inland penetration as soon as they had developed the military capacity to safely brush aside whatever resistance that Africans could mount against them. All these are empirical evidence of European conspiracy to under-develop Africa so that they can continue to have unfettered access to our resources both human and natural as the current migration of our best brains to Europe has so clearly demonstrated. All those who have a contrary opinion should present objective and well researched evidence to support their claim instead of making empty noise on Facebook.
