Roger Sandall’s Out of Africa: always the same thing studies the sad truth of Africa:
No — there?s nothing new out of Africa. Not any more. Not today. Maybe there was in Ancient Rome in the days of Pliny the Elder, and that?s what inspired his much repeated and deeply misleading quotation — ‘out of Africa always something new’. But that was long ago: for the rest of us it?s been an unending chronicle of chaos and corruption and cadavers since 1960.Yet how high our hopes were back then! I was teaching at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and we had a documentary showing Kwame Nkrumah at home in Ghana giving a speech. The African crowd in Accra loved it. Freedom! Freedom! Freedom! they cried at us from the screen, and Nkrumah and his enthusiastic assembly were so carried away it looked as if the very idea of liberty might be enough to do the trick — the trick of course being how to take the tribal fabric of Old Africa, and using a western pattern, create a modern civil society overnight.
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As he wrote in his book Africa Must Unite, the first task was to expropriate the expropriators:?The colonial powers were all rapacious; they all subserved the needs of the subject lands to their own demands: they all circumscribed human rights and liberties; they all repressed and despoiled, degraded and oppressed. They took our lands, our lives, our resources and our dignity. Without exception, they left us nothing but our resentment ??
This looting of the continent by the whites had left its peoples destitute: ?It was when they had gone and we were faced with the stark realities, as in Ghana on the morrow of our independence, that the destitution of the land after long years of colonial rule was brought home to us.?
Sandall asks, “Such passages were certainly stirring — but were they true?”
Colonial conquest involved bloodshed. But in West Africa this was largely over by the end of the nineteenth century, and during the first decades of the twentieth century ?British colonial administrations governed firmly but lightly. They did not attempt to control closely the lives and activities of their subjects. Taxation was modest and people enjoyed virtually complete personal freedom, including the freedom to choose their own activities, to move around the country unheeded, and to dispose of their incomes as they wished. Tribal warfare, slavery and slave-trading — formerly widespread or endemic — had been effectively suppressed.?
Novelist Joyce Cary, reminiscing about his life in the colonial service of Nigeria:
?It was the rule then in the Nigerian Service, and this has always been one of the guiding principles of British colonial policy, to preserve local law and custom as far as possible, and to do nothing that might break the continuity of local government. Tribal chiefs and tribal councils were to be maintained, and progress made by educating chiefs, by improving their roads, public services — which (as experience shows) by itself modifies the whole situation and can (if that end is kept in view) quite quickly build up a class capable of some share in the government.?
“Corruption is universal, malignant, and destructive, and the joke retold by Keith B. Richburg in his Out of America: a Black Man Confronts Africa says it all”:
A western-educated African visits an old university friend in Indonesia and is impressed by his spectacular house, his three Mercedes, his huge swimming pool and numerous servants. How on earth, he asks, can his Asian friend afford all that? The Indonesian points to a grand elevated highway in the distance, and patting himself on the chest says ?ten percent?.A few years later the Indonesian visits the African at his home and is staggered to see a whole fleet of Mercedes, air-conditioned indoor tennis courts, and an army of uniformed chauffeurs and servants. How on earth can his friend afford it all? ?You see that highway?? says the African — but when the Indonesian looks he sees nothing at all, just empty fields right out to the horizon. His host looks at him with a smile, taps himself on the chest, and says ?One hundred percent!?
Colonial powers didn’t introduce cruelty to Africa:
The disagreeable fact must also be faced that in Africa life has always been cheap, that extraordinary cruelties have been all too common, and that anything even vaguely resembling notions of human rights in its traditional societies were entirely unknown.
Two examples from pre-colonial times:
The Bemba ?In nearly every village are to be seen men and women whose eyes have been gouged out; the removal of one eye and one hand is hardly worthy of remark. Men and women are seen whose ears, nose and lips have been sliced off and both hands amputated. The cutting off of breasts of women has been extensively practised as a punishment for adultery but ? some of the victims ? are mere children ? Indeed these mutilations were inflicted with the utmost callousness; every chief for instance has a retinue of good singers and drummers who invariably have their eyes gouged out to prevent them running away.?Benin ?Altars covered with streams of dried human blood, the stench of which was awful ? huge pits, forty to fifty feet deep, were found filled with human bodies, dead and dying, and a few wretched captives were rescued alive ? everywhere sacrificial trees on which were the corpses of the latest victims?everywhere, on each path, were newly sacrificed corpses. On the principal sacrificial tree, facing the main gate of the King?s Compound, there were two crucified bodies, at the foot of the tree seventeen newly decapitated bodies and forty-three more in various stages of decomposition. On another tree a wretched woman was found crucified, whilst at its foot were four more decapitated bodies. To the westward of the King?s house was a large open space, about three hundred yards in length, simply covered with the remains of some hundreds of human sacrifices in all stages of decomposition. The same sights were met with all over the city.?