Does History Contribute to Underdevelopment in Africa?

INTRODUCTION.

I agree that history has a place in explaining underdevelopment in Africa. First and foremost the history of Africa is the history of colonialism and underdevelopment. It is the history of slavery, of wars, conflicts and hunger. It is also the history of the beginnings of man and civilization. However, while underdevelopment was as old as Africa itself, colonialism came about between 1885 and 1906. For most of Africa according to Akintoye (1976), colonialism lasted between six to eight years. At elementary level, colonialism is said to rule. This 'doctrine' manifested in Africa after the Berlin conference, during which African countries were balkanized and shared into areas of influence among European states in 1884. These areas of influence were tagged colonies and protectorates. Arguments have been generated as per whether colonialism was beneficial to Africa. But we are not into such argument since each side has its own merits. However, since we are constrained to examine the circumstances which led to formation of the Organization of African Unity, it becomes imperative to look at this phenomenon even though briefly since again it features prominently at any attempt to explain efforts at the birth of the continental organization. Briefly on the other side, colonialism was not completely a bad event because whether one likes it or not, it brought with it western civilization with all its attractions. However, the critics of colonialism started with its method and ended up with its consequences. Africa was shared and conquered in most cases under force of arms. The method of governance was strange. It alienated African culture and tradition and ostracized both traditional and political elite. It was what many Africans perceived as a total loss of freedom. The culture of French territories were completely destroyed and lost in French tradition. SLAVERY.

For more than 2,000 years, people in many different parts of the world have forced their fellow humans into slavery. Between about 1500 and 1900, Europeans forcibly uprooted millions of people from throughout West Africa and West Central Africa and shipped them across the Atlantic in conditions of great cruelty. To refer to the Africans who were enslaved only as 'slaves' strips them of their identity. They were, for instance, farmers, merchants, priests, soldiers, goldsmiths, musicians. They were husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters. They could be Yoruba, Igbo, Akan, and Kongolese.

European slavers dispersed them across the Americas to lead lives of degradation and brutality, without thought for their personal lives. Millions died in the process. As a result, people of African descent are spread throughout the Americas and Western Europe. The loss of population was not more serious for Africans than the loss of history in their historic evolution. White people came to justify slavery by an assumed racial superiority. Black people were treated as inferior, their achievement scorned, their history buried and their resources plundered. Africans themselves had always been involved in the Atlantic slave trade, as chiefs importing guns from Britain in exchange for slaves and as traders rounding up the human commodities for sale. This slave trade bears the nature of Africa's underdevelopment. By providing firearms amongst the trade goods, Europeans increased warfare and political instability in Africa. Some states, such as Asante and Dahomey, grew powerful and wealthy as a result. Other states were completely destroyed and their populations decimated as they were absorbed by rivals. Millions of Africans were forcibly removed from their homes, and towns and villages were depopulated. Many Africans were killed in slaving wars or remained enslaved in Africa's Many states, including Angola under Queen Nzinga Nbande and Kongo, strongly resisted slavery. However, the interests of those involved in the trade proved too great to overcome.

About two-thirds of the people sold to European traders were men. Fewer women were sold because their skills as farmers and craft workers were crucially important in African societies. The burden of rebuilding their violated communities fell to these women. From the 1670s the Slave Coast (Bight of Benin) underwent a rapid expansion of trade in slaves which continued until the end of the slave trade in the nineteenth century. Gold Coast slave exports rose sharply in eighteenth century, but dropped markedly when Britain abolished slavery in 1808 and commenced anti-slavery patrols along the coast.

The Bight of Biafra, centred on the Niger Delta and the Cross River, became a significant exporter of slaves from the 1740s and, along with its neighbors the Bight of Benin, dominated the Trans-Atlantic slave trade until its effective end in the mid-nineteenth century. These two regions alone account for two-thirds of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade in the first half of the 1800s.

Inter-communal wars waged to procure slaves were intensely destructive of human lives. Tens of thousands of people were slaughtered in a single skirmish. The wars and rampant kidnappings fuelled hostility and suspicion between communities. Distrust was a basic requirement for individual and communal survival. The slave trade arrested and distorted the cultural development of African societies. It affected the meaning people gave to the world and their place within it. Increased uncertainty of life gave added force to superstitious beliefs and customs. People sought salvation and protection from the spiritual world. They paid homage to gods to safeguard themselves and their families from misfortune. The psychological impact of the dehumanizing trade was crippling. There was constant anxiety caused by perpetual fear of being captured and herded away like common animals to a place of no return. Some Africans believed that whites took slaves to eat them. During the slave trade Africans came to believe themselves to be inferior. They lost confidence in themselves, their culture and their ability to development.

COLONIAL RULE IN AFRICA.

This process of 'Africanization'of the British colony was not to last after the 1860s.In the scramble for Africa European opinion changed. Land was annexed inland from the trading posts on the coast and by 1880 frontiers were been drawn by European powers marking off their colonies and their protectorates. To achieve the relative wealth of the colonial period, imperial overseers geared the economies of Africa towards exporting raw materials. Thus Egypt became a vast producer of cotton, Ruanda-Urundi almost completely dedicated to growing coffee, and Upper Volta to the production of palm oil. Basing an entire nation's wealth on one commodity, however, would have debilitating effects in later