AFRICA AND EUROPE: COMMERCE, CONFLICT AND CO-OPTION

Africa and Europe have had a long and complex relationship, and the two continents’ economies have been interlinked just as their interaction on a cultural level has been characterized by a series of misunderstandings as well as reciprocal orrowing. In the nineteenth century, this led ultimately to the partition of Africa by several European governments, but in many ways the “colonial moment” has distorted our understanding of Afro-European relations over the longer term. As reflected in the Eurocentric terms “old world” and “new world,” the African landmass, unlike the Americas, had dealings with Europe since antiquity: northern Africa, notably, has long had commercial and cultural links with southern Europe, while sub-Saharan Africa’s relationship with Europe, though somewhat less direct before the fifteenth century, was of increasing importance nonetheless.
Europe’s modern perceptions of Africa essentially date from the era of the Atlantic slave trade, and particularly from the latter half of the eighteenth century, when among apologists for the slave trade and humanitarian abolitionists alike there developed the idea that Africa was a land of savagery and  bloodthirstiness, a primitive continent forgotten by progress and civilization, crying out for redemption. For defenders of the trade, the traffic in human beings was acceptable because Africa was doomed anyway, even necessary because the transportation of slaves to the Americas offered them an “escape” from the terrible fate of living in Africa itself; in any case, slave-traders were simply buying up the surplus produced by endless wars, purchasing individuals who would normally have been put to death according to savage custom. For abolitionists, Africa needed Europe to rescue it from itself, to “modernize” it, to bring it into the fold of Christian civilization. Both views, clearly, were based on racial concepts of the African and his society, rooted in the notion of the African as childlike and in pseudo-scientific theories relating to physical types popular from the eighteenth century onward.

The racism which emerged during, and as a direct result of, the slave trade would harden through the nineteenth century and beyond; the rhetoric surrounding the abolition of the slave trade in the early nineteenth century would be echoed at the end of the century during the “scramble” for Africa. We have seen in an earlier chapter how the “legitimate”  commerce which increasingly supplanted the slave trade brought with it heightened European interest in the continent, a fascination ultimately  rooted in abolition and commercial “legitimacy.” Firstly, Europe was increasingly seized by the need to “explore” Africa. The slave trade, having been Europe’s primary economic connection with sub-Saharan Africa, had not required extensive knowledge of Africa itself: Europeans had rarely needed to venture beyond the coast, even had they been able to, and they certainly did not need to know where slaves were coming from. The “new” commercial requirements of the nineteenth century, however, aroused scientific interest in Africa, in terms of its potential resources and productivity, its geography and climate, its major centers of population. There was an increasing interest in what lay in the interior, driven in large part by a desire to exploit the continent’s economic Potential. In this way, there was a powerful commercial motive behind exploration from the early nineteenth century onwards, and this was combined with – and often disguised by – a spirit of scientific enquiry, manifest in the organization of expeditions financed by learned institutions which aimed at the penetration of the interior in search of “knowledge.” Sometimes, indeed, such expeditions were genuinely scientific endeavors; but rarely were they of no commercial value.
And the major focus, for much of the nineteenth century, was Africa’s rivers: explorers sought to chart the Niger, Congo, Nile, Zambezi, searching above all for the navigability which held out the promise of commercial gain. In the process, of course, European travelers collected enormous amounts of data – albeit often of questionable reliability – on the peoples, power centers, products, and trade networks of the regions they passed through.
Secondly, Europe and North America in the eighteenth century had witnessed an evangelical revival, an attempt by the Church to reassert itself in the face of the twin assaults of “science” and “reason,” and of growing secularism in the West. An important part of this revival was the emergence of a powerful missionary impulse, evident in the call to go forth into the world and preach God’s word, particularly among “heathen,” savage, uncivilized peoples. The Church movement, moreover, was closely linked to the humanitarian abolitionist movement aimed at the destruction of the evil that was the slave trade; many abolitionist campaigners were themselves evangelical Christians, committed to what they saw as the intertwined goals of ending slavery and preaching the Gospel. Africa, thus, became a target for missionary activity: in the course of the nineteenth century, a number of evangelical Protestant orders were later joined by several Catholic societies.
Importantly, missionary activity and exploration were often indelibly intertwined. Many explorers were themselves missionaries, advancing scientific and commercial knowledge while finding willing souls for Christ at the same time: indeed the two were increasingly seen as inseparable, as Christian converts in the interior would only assist commercial development. David Livingstone, in southern and eastern Africa, became the most celebrated “exploring missionary” of the age, though his ability to win converts was less impressive than his geographical “discoveries,” and the physical endurance required to achieve these. Moreover, exploration itself, of course, opened up new areas for missionary activity, with bibles often following in the wake of scientific-commercial expeditions.

It is perhaps debatable the degree to which missionaries and explorers later became the agents of European colonialism, though some undoubtedly were, and many others at least created the political and moral framework within which conquest would take place. As the nineteenth century advanced, a number did receive either implicit or explicit support from their own governments; and missionaries in particular lobbied hard for political intervention, pressurizing governments to give them official support and to shoulder their civilizing responsibilities. Public pressure of this kind took place at a time – the last decades of the nineteenth century – when there was a growing belief in Europe’s civilizing mission in Africa, the “white man’s burden,” in the words of Rudyard Kipling. European governments rarely intervened in Africa on the back of the missionary lobby alone, and usually acted in response to (supposed) commercial opportunities, or in order to offset strategic threats from rival European powers. But the kind of imagery projected by missionaries and travelers was extremely powerful for politicians and public alike, and had a great influence on popular perceptions of Africa as the nineteenth century progressed. As for explorers, these were increasingly employed – quietly or otherwise – essentially as commercial agents, working for government-chartered companies and pushing into the interior to discover the continent’s economic potential. Henry Morton Stanley, traversing the Congo basin in the pay of King Leopold of the Belgians, is perhaps the most noted example of this. Moreover, Europeans in this context – especially missionaries – were the forerunners of cultural imperialism, and much of what they did in Africa involved at least the implicit assumption of the essential superiority of European civilization. In condemning much of what they saw of African culture, religion, and society as the work of the devil, or at least as the product of savage heathenism, their very presence was meant to demonstrate to Africans their fundamental inferiority, clearly one of the keystones in the foundations of European colonial rule. More enduringly, missionary work and exploration signaled an exercise in objectification of Africa by Europe, part of an ongoing (if increasingly unconscious) process of self-validation. Through didacticism and data-collection, Europeans elevated themselves above Africans, who thus lay prone and primordial beneath them.
All this said, however, it is important not to exaggerate the actual impact Europeans had in Africa before the last twenty years of the nineteenth century. Missionaries operated, as they had always done, in small, isolated groups, tolerated by African rulers who believed they might be used to local advantage. Explorers, sometimes treated with hostility or mild contempt, and doubtless greeted with amusement, were rarely regarded as a significant threat, but were there to be exploited for commercial or other gain. Before about 1880, Europeans in the African interior were vulnerable, often insignificant individuals, passing through African societies with minimal impact. Overall, indeed, the European presence in Africa remained largely coastal, as with the French in Algeria and Senegal, the British in Sierra Leone and the Gold Coast, the Portuguese in Angola and Mozambique. Only in southern Africa was there a sizeable white colonial presence. We should not, therefore, make the mistake of assuming the inevitability of European conquest at the end of the nineteenth century. For much of the nineteenth century, no European power would have
envisaged such a scenario; official policy toward Africa, rather, was characterized by vacillation and a reluctance to commit to any greater expense than was necessary in terms of what can loosely be termed “imperial ambition.” The British were unwilling to expand in the Gold Coast and in Cape Colony, and were indecisive in both areas; likewise the French in Senegal. Neither Britain nor France, the two leading powers on the African continent, were convinced of the value of or the need for colonial possessions there, and thus, while we might identify missionary and exploratory activity as denoting growing European interest, this in itself did not in any way represent some form of transcontinental imperial ambition. And yet, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, “conquest” – in the broadest sense of that term – was indeed what happened. An important reason behind this – perhaps the main reason – has been discussed  and relates to “legitimate” commerce and the growing belief in the need to intervene directly in African society and economy if profit was to be realized. It was assumed at the outset of the nineteenth century that
“legitimate” commerce would bring stability and peace to Africa, and that the doctrine of “free trade” (rather loosely interpreted, admittedly) would allow the economic exploitation of Africa with a minimum of political commitment. But it was increasingly clear that this was not the case, and that if trade was to flow freely, if resources were to be profitably exploited, if Africa was to constitute a stable market for European products, if capital investment was to be protected, then political control was required. Again, this linked with burgeoning racial thought, which now assumed that Africans were childlike and irrational, incapable of modernizing themselves, or of stabilizing their war-torn, bloodied, and splintered kingdoms and societies. It was, again, the most extraordinary exercise in objectification, in which Europeans imagined Africa according to their own fears, anxieties, and prejudices – many of which have in fact endured beyond the late nineteenth century, and proven remarkably resilient.

The Africa that was imagined by Europe then hovers phantom-like in the Western imagination still. The so-called Scramble for Africa is more complex than perhaps it may initially seem, however. In the first instance, of course, the multitude of European invasions of the continent between the 1870s and the 1900s were made possible by industrial and technological superiority, a superiority which by the late nineteenth century was most dramatically manifest – at least from the African perspective – in military supremacy. Thus was the desirability of subjugating the continent doubtless greatly enhanced by the ability to do so. Much of the story of the Scramble involves the description of Africans as victims, in the context of the internal power politics of Europe itself which gave rise to an international rivalry with both Africa and many parts of Asia as prey. The economic competition between industrial nations led to the search for both raw materials and captive markets; the political rivalry and the quest for international prestige manifested itself in the acquisition of African territory. But while many forms of “conquest” did indeed take place, the term itself is often misleading, and the political and economic “remaking” of Africa in the late nineteenth century was as much a matter of negotiation as of physical imposition. This was no one-way traffic: Africans manipulated European ideas, and exploited their fears; African manpower, mobilized by the momentous violence of the nineteenth century, was involved in the Scramble itself – which was thus expedited by local knowledge and military skills. Africans, as we shall see, were active participants in the various processes of reinvention and reconstruction which unfolded in the late nineteenth century, and the colonialism which resulted was as much the product of African creativity as of European firepower. The “Scramble” was just that: a largely uncoordinated, often headlong rush from the coast into the hinterland and beyond, a multitude of military advances and engagements interspersed by diplomatic interactions, which resulted – ultimately – in the demarcation of some of the most bizarre territorial entities in modern global history. Maps may have been drawn in European capitals; but the process of partition itself involved both Africans and Europeans, and indeed the latter could not have come to govern the vast continent without the former. Certainly, the arrangements through which many colonial territories came into being necessarily involved African intellectual input, African political ingenuity, African manpower. African responses were diverse in the extreme, and peoples frequently attempted more than one tactic  simultaneously with the same goal in mind.
While some bent European “invasion” to their own ends, and indeed engaged in some more localized invasions of their own through the vehicle of European hegemony, others took up arms and fought, and died, sometimes in great numbers. States and societies responded according to local or at best regional exigencies, and as many saw opportunities in European encroachment as saw threats. In some areas, a greater unity of purpose in resistance was achieved, notably under the banner of Islam: across North Africa, notably, Islam offered larger territorial and ideological cohesion than was possible in the savannahs and forests further south. And in Libya and Morocco, for example, such resistance continued beyond the First World War, during which period in most other areas armed opposition was finally subdued. But across the continent, whatever the nature of their response or contribution to new political realities, Africans everywhere were instrumental in the shaping of colonial structures and policies; meanwhile, the African response to colonial political, economic, and cultural authoritarianism would continue to evolve. In the early 1900s, the groundwork was laid for the creation of the modern African nation-state, an essentially indigenous entity, for all Europe’s military superiority, but infused with European imports and impositions. Colonial regimes varied in the detail across the continent, but with the partial exception of those of longer standing – South Africa, or Algeria – all found themselves in the 1890s and 1900s confronted with a similar range of novel problems. Colonial states aimed to establish territorial hegemony, which meant the ability to exercise practical political sovereignty – in effect the possession of a legal monopoly on the use of force – within a defined area. The militarism of the colonial state was inherent, in most cases flowing directly from the violence involved in the creation of the state itself. Colonial armies making use of African recruits formed the basis of security in the vast majority of new territories. Violence, or the threat of it, was thus the means by which control was maintained, although – as we shall see later in the book – the overt militarism of the early colonial state would recede in most territories by the 1920s; certainly, in some respects, the “Great War” can be seen as the culmination of the period of partition, in terms of the stabilization of systems and the establishment (with some notable exceptions) of military security. Following directly from this was the need to establish stable government, no easy task in those territories acquired through force of arms. New strategies of governance were required, preferably (and in some areas necessarily) involving minimal expense. In this context there was considerable diversity across the  continent; while indirect rule was favored in some territories, others were characterized by more direct forms of administration, and others again were selected for white settlement, systematic or otherwise. At one time it was common to understand the African response in terms of either “resistance” or “collaboration”: Africans either fought and were
ultimately subjugated by force of arms, or else they accepted the arrival of Europeans and cooperated with their new masters, recognizing that resistance was, indeed, futile. This dichotomy is unhelpful, as is that between “primary” and “secondary” resistance, another concept developed in the 1960s distinguishing initial resistance to European invasion from anti-colonial revolts a few years later.

It is necessary, rather, to view African responses in a more holistic manner, and to understand that while some societies did indeed take up arms against colonial armies, others adapted political and indeed cultural norms and not only “resisted” in more subtle ways, but also shaped the colonial system to their own ends. Anti-colonial violence, meanwhile, was itself interspersed with diplomatic overtures and attempts to reach mutually beneficial arrangements, and was constrained by political and economic exigencies. Ultimately, European intrusions were absorbed into long-term African processes of internal change.

By Richard James Reid in the book "A History of Modern Africa : 1800 to the Present", published by Willey-Brackwell (John Wiley & Sons) Oxford, UK, 2012, excerpts from p.69-71. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.