Famine in Africa (1984)

From the October 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

The hut we came to is open to the sky in several places and tinged orange with light reflected from corncobs drying on the roof. Inside there are two children, one sick and one very sick; also a fat shy woman with a young goat nibbling at her skirt. The floor is strewn with loose hay and a young chicken gets killed when it runs under our feet. The child we have come to sec is dying. Blinded with the pus running from his eyes and gasping with painful respirations. Occasionally his body is shaken with long fits of coughing. It is useless to prolong his suffering. We offer soap, which can do no harm, and eye ointment for the other child. The dying child seems to be no more than 18 months old but with his thin limbs and dried skin he looks prematurely aged. His mother says he is five years old. [1]

Today Africa faces, in the words of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, “the imminent danger of famine on a massive scale”. Already some 150 million people, or a third of the entire population, endure critical shortages of food. According to the World Bank, unless a huge increase in food aid is forthcoming, several African countries could “collapse entirely and revert to bush economies” with “disastrous consequences for world health, world trade and international security”. [2]

Much of the continent is presently in the grip of a catastrophic drought. In Ethiopia and its bordering states the landscape has in parts become a desolate wilderness, thinly littered with the horns of dead cattle. On the other side of the continent, in West Africa, the threat of a disaster eclipsing that the great Sahel drought of ten years ago has receded, but lack of rain has let loose a plague of leaf hopper insects. In Northern Mali, for instance, a three-inch-long beetle which causes blisters on the skin has ferociously attacked surviving crops of millet.

In much of Eastern and Southern Africa conditions are deteriorating as the drought enters its third year, cruelly punctuated by the occasional flash flood. Possibly the hardest hit of all is Mozambique, straining under the additional burden of a costly civil war. Even South Africa, its wealthy neighbour, has had to import several million tons of grain from abroad, in contrast to previous years when it produced substantial surpluses.

But the drought — reputedly the harshest in a century — is clearly not the only factor in Africa's worsening food situation. Per capita food production has been steadily declining over the last 20 years (by eleven per cent since 1970), drought or no drought. In this respect Africa is unique, for elsewhere in the world productivity has generally increased (though this does not mean the problem of world hunger is any nearer a solution). In the book Food First (1982) Frances Moore Lappe and Joseph Collins stress the difference between drought and famine:

Drought is a natural phenomenon. Famine is a human phenomenon. Any link that does exist is precisely through the economic and political order of a society that can either minimise the human consequences of the drought or exacerbate them.

According to some writers the whole problem began with the colonial conquest of Africa by European powers. Walter Rodney, a Guyanese historian, epitomises this point of view:

Colonialism created conditions which led not just to periodic famines but chronic undernourishment. malnutrition and deterioration of the physique of African people. If such a statement sounds wildly extravagant it is only because bourgeois propaganda has conditioned even Africans to believe that malnutrition and starvation were the natural lot of Africans from time immemorial. [3]

While there is undoubtedly some truth in this argument, it does rest upon an idyllic view of the pre-colonial era. There certainly were famines before the colonisation of Africa, although they were admittedly less severe than those that followed. In 1520 the Portuguese priest Alvarez had this to say after returning from Ethiopia:

It seems to me that in the whole world there is not so populous a country or one so abundant in crops. And because I was amazed the inhabitants said to me “Honoured guest, do not be amazed, because in the years that we harvest little we gather enough for three years plenty in the country; and if it were not for the multitude of locusts and hail, which sometimes do great damage, we should not sow the half of what we sow because so much remains that it cannot be believed. [4]

But as the Ethiopian economist Ewinetu has pointed out, traditional Ethiopian society became increasingly unable to prevent shortages occurring from time to time. This was because the mass of the population were less and less inclined to hold reserves of food — thus leaving themselves vulnerable to drought — out of fear that such reserves would only be “an invitation to the exactions of feudal lords" in whose hands the granaries came to be concentrated. At least 23 major famines were recorded by Ethiopian chroniclers in the period 1540-1800.

Around the time Alvarez set foot in Ethiopia there began the infamous transatlantic slave trade, which lasted into the nineteenth century. Estimates of the numbers of captives landed in the Americas throughout this period vary between ten and twelve million, although this does not take into account the many millions more who died in passage, before enshipment or as a result of slave raids. Such a massive haemorrhage of people from Africa's shores — usually the more economically productive members of the community — had debilitating effects on African society and agriculture. Yet, as Marx observed, "the turning of Africa into a warren for the hunting of black skins” was also one of the “chief moments of primitive accumulation”, heralding "the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production”. [5]

In turn the emergence of industrial capitalism in Europe made new demands on the African continent. The decline of the slave trade saw a redirection of effort from the shipment of human beings into export of the fruits of their labour in the form of agricultural products. This move towards cash crops was first apparent on a significant scale in West Africa. The most important product from this region at the time was palm oil, Europe needing more and more soap as her factories grew in number and her cities in filth. The palm oil trade, initially controlled by Africans, was later dominated by European merchants on the coast with the military support of their governments.

In the final two decades of the nineteenth century virtually the entire continent was carved up by European powers in the Scramble for Africa. Belfort Bax, anticipating Lenin’s fallacious theory of Imperialism, claimed in an 1888 issue of Commonweal that this colonising presented the possibility that the capitalist world might "take a new lease of life out of the exploitation of Africa" (Britain at the time was in the throes of the Great Depression). Nevertheless this extension of European control did much to increase the spread of cash crop production at the expense of traditional subsistence agriculture.

Where an unfavourable climate discouraged settlement, African peasants were sometimes coerced by gun and whip into growing crops for export. Perhaps the most brutal application of violence to be found anywhere in Africa was in the Equatorial Zone, where cut-throat concession companies operated a ruthless system of forced labour, razing villages to the ground to compel the local population to collect wild rubber or ivory for export. More typically however, economic pressure was applied by levying taxes on land, cattle or huts for which peasants had to earn money through the sale of crops. Such revenue helped to finance the colonial administration of these territories and thus represented an additional incentive to promote cash crop production.

Sometimes huge tracts of land were acquired by European settlers themselves for the purpose of growing cash crops (Lord Delamere. for example, purchased 100,000 acres of some of the best land in Kenya at a bargain price of one penny an acre). Often this direct takeover of the land was accompanied by a prohibition on local peasants competing by producing these same crops themselves. This, combined with the reduction in the amount of land available for peasant farming, drove impoverished Africans to seeking work on European farms.

Furthermore in several African countries a significant mining sector developed which, like cash cropping, had severely disruptive consequences for traditional agriculture. As Fanning and Mueller point out:

In the advanced capitalist nations, the exodus from the rural areas which accompanied the process of industrialisation was preceded by a dramatic increase in agricultural productivity. By contrast, industrialisation in the underdeveloped countries of Africa was the cause of a massive decline in rural productivity. [6]

South Africa

Nowhere was this clearer than in the case of the "native reserves" of South Africa established by the British in the mid-nineteenth century. The first, in Natal, was attacked by the white farming community on the grounds that it represented a standing military threat— the Zulu had not yet been finally crushed — and that it would stem the flow of labourers to the farms. As late as 1903 Louis Botha, soon to become the first prime minister of a unified South Africa, threatened to break up the network of reserves in the country in order to secure a greater supply of labourers. But in fact Botha's view was already outdated, for the existence of the reserves no longer impeded the flow of labour: their purpose had been transformed from a paternalistic one of temporarily sheltering the African into providing a vast reservoir of cheap labour that could be tapped at will.

The major impetus behind this transformation was the discovery of immense mineral wealth in South Africa in the second half of the nineteenth century. The tycoon-politician, Cecil Rhodes, in sponsoring the 1894 Glen Grey Act which severely limited the size of lots Africans could farm in the Glen Grey valley of the Ciskei, pioneered the adaptation of reserves to the needs of the mining industry of which he himself was a prominent beneficiary.

But it was the 1913 Natives Lands Act which dealt the most crushing blow of all to African agriculture and laid the foundations of apartheid in legislation. In terms of this Act, Africans (who vastly outnumbered Europeans) were prohibited from purchasing land outside the reserves designated for them, which amounted to a mere 7.3 per cent of the area of South Africa. De Kiewict, in his assessment of this Act. wrote:

The congestion of the reserves, the backwardness of their methods and the exhaustion of their resources accounted for the departure each year (50 per cent in 1925) of the able bodied men to earn money as labourers . . .The natives were the victims of too few acres. [7]

Thus, undermining of subsistence agriculture dovetailed neatly with the interests of the mining sector which, because of its labour intensive nature, required an abundant supply of labour. White agriculture benefited too despite the fact that it competed with the mines (and later manufacturing industry) for labour. Firstly there was the direct benefit that went to white farmers who no longer had to face competition from Africans. Secondly the prosperity of the mining sector, which depended very much on the availability of African labour, contributed massively to government revenue. This, in turn, enabled the government heavily to subsidise white agriculture, not least because this was where its traditional power base lay.

After the war the Nationalists sought to implement a policy of separate development. Verwoerd. hoping to reverse the tide of black urbanisation accompanying South Africa’s industrialisation, entertained the idea that the reserves might become self-sufficient agrarian economies capable of supporting the populations living within their borders as well as — in due course — those resident in "white" South Africa. In this way. it was felt, the vexed political issue of how to justify the continued denial of rights to Africans might be defused.

But of course separate development as an ideal was totally impracticable and soon acknowledged to be so. Far from becoming less dependent on one another, the reserves and white South Africa became ever more so. While the proportion of land occupied by the reserves was increased to 13.6 per cent of the total area in 1936 — roughly that of the ten "ethnic" homelands of today — this did not serve to arrest the process whereby Africans were driven in increasing numbers to look for work in white South Africa. Ironically, while separate development sought to develop the homelands as self-sufficient economics, the removal of millions of so-called economically unproductive Africans to the homelands in the name of separate development has only compounded the desperate poverty there. Ironic, too. is the fact that within a country as wealthy as South Africa there is to be found an enduring pattern of starvation resembling that which one might expect to find in some of the poorest countries of Africa.

Elsewhere in Africa the first plantation companies appeared on the scene in the early part of this century. Like the mines they relied on migrant labourers who were paid a pittance, rationalised on the grounds that the dependants of plantation workers could support themselves by subsistence farming. The reality was that subsistence farming was being eroded by the very system of migrant labour on which the plantations relied.

By establishing their own plantations these companies were able to ensure the enormous quantities of agricultural produce needed for the scale of production of European factories. Indeed, the arrival of the plantation company coincided with a massive expansion of trade in agricultural products, over 90 per cent of which was geared to external markets. But it was not the plantation itself that spearheaded such growth for by now the (tax induced) peasant production of export crops had become significant.

One of the earliest of the plantation companies was set up by William Hesketh Lever in 1911. Unilever is today the world’s largest food corporation with a turnover of $10 billion by 1978 which exceeds the combined GNP of 25 African countries. To begin with however Lever brothers, having established a foothold in the Congo, experienced great difficulty in operating plantations in Nigeria. Throughout West Africa, except in the German colonies of Togo and Cameroons, the colonial authorities were generally opposed to plantation agriculture since the peasant production of cash crops was well established in this region compared to other parts of Africa. In the case of Nigeria this policy was only reversed in the 1930s when there was a slump in the price of cash crops. Until then the British authorities in Nigeria maintained that plantation agriculture would inevitably lead to a large-scale drift from the land and that the violent resistance this would provoke could prove costly to quell. In addition, it was felt that creating a landless proletariat would pave the way to “communism” — an entirely misplaced fear at the time but one that was fuelled by the rhetoric of the Bolsheviks who had recently come to power in Russia.

Needless to say it was not "communism" but black nationalism that came to power throughout Africa, and within a remarkably short space of time. But the grinding poverty of the great majority proved as intractable in the face of so-called national liberation as it did under colonial rule. Some writers have attempted to account for this as a phenomenon called neo-colonialism. In other words. Africa's predicament today is held to be the legacy of its colonial past which served to constrain subsequent economic development along lines that worked against the interests of the African states themselves.

Robin Cox

References

1 The Growth of Hunger. R. Dumont and N. Cohen. 1980.

2 The Observer, 18/3/84.

3 How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, W. Rodney. 1972.

4 The Guardian. 27/8/80.

5 Capital, Vol.l.

6 Africa Undermined. G. banning with M. Mueller, 1979.

7 A History of South Africa: Social and Economic, W. de Kiewiet, 1941.

What Next for South Africa? (1990)

From the April 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

We may never know what discussions took place between President de Klerk and Nelson Mandela before the famous prisoner’s release, but it is evident they did a deal. It is possible they agreed on a detailed programme of reform. Economic forces have been pressing in on the deadlocked conflict for decades but movement has been slow. It has been thirty years since Harold Macmillan spoke of “a wind of change blowing through Africa”, but in South Africa this has been a gentle breeze which disturbed little, leaving the white monopoly of power intact. Delayed change results in greater pressure and now it seems the deadlock is about to be broken. What will this mean for our fellow workers in South Africa, both black and white?

An ideal model of capitalism would rest on a simple division between capitalists and workers with the latter voting in governments to administer their own exploitation in a “liberal democracy”. Capital would be free to invest most profitably and train workers to achieve maximum output without skin colour or ethnic background being an issue. This would tend to secure the most efficient use of labour resources, with political stability and without excessive expenditure on forces of repression.

Tortured history
In practice capitalism rarely confirms to this model. In South Africa the legal classifications of “European”, “Bantu”, “Coloureds” and “Asians” complicate the economic and political structure in ways which inhibit efficiency. They result from the tortured history through which these groups took root in the country.

Even within these groups there was never a common identity. For over two centuries the Europeans were bitterly divided between British and Dutch. Cape Town was established as a supply station by the Dutch East India Company. During the Napoleonic Wars the British pre-empted a French take-over by seizing it themselves after which it was kept as a British colony. In the 1830s a large number of the Dutch trekked north to found the Transvaal and Orange Free State but again they came into conflict with the British when gold, diamonds, coal and other materials were discovered in the Boer republics. To gain control of these materials colonial adventurers like Cecil Rhodes conspired with the British government to instigate the Boer War. Following the defeat of the Boers, and the sufferings of their families in concentration camps in which thousands died from disease and starvation, British imperialism gained control over the entire land area of what is now South Africa.

But it was not only the people of European origin who were in conflict. Tribal differences also divided the African peoples who in the seventeenth century had migrated south from East Africa. These divisions are still a potent force, further complicating the politics of South Africa. The Zulus are mainly concentrated in Natal under Chief Buthelezi and it is interesting that he controls his power base, Inkatha, as its unelected leader. Despite their demand for it, there is no “one person, one vote” amongst the Zulus. Nelson Mandela is a Chieftain of the Xhosa people and is acclaimed as being more representative of black South Africans through the African National Congress.

During the past seven years more than 2,500 people have died in violence between different black groups and Mandela has appealed passionately for an end to the fratricidal strife. “Throw your arms into the sea”, he recently implored a vast crowd of Zulus. The response of Inkatha was positive but also tempered with a warning:

  Only the enemies of peace and black unity would wish otherwise. However, we shall not succeed to achieve this by protracted attempts to demonise, vilify and marginalise Dr. Buthelezi. To do this is tantamount to planting the seeds of future civil war in our country.

This threat of possible civil war, presumably in circumstances in which the Afrikaner Nationalist government may have collapsed, is indeed ominous.

Those called the “Cape Coloureds” were originally descended from the offspring of early Dutch male settlers and their female servants brought to the Cape Province from the Dutch East Indies. The temptations of sexual relations between the “races” were more than the Calvinist citizens could resist and, in any case, pre-dated the ideology of “apartness”.

The indigenous inhabitants of South Africa were the defenceless Hottentots who suffered genocide at the hands of every invader, Dutch, British and Bantu. These three groups, very different in their origins and outlook, were pitched into the same land area and now form the main elements in today’s political strife.

Capitalists’ political frustration
One of the ironies of this history is that Rhodes instigated war with the Boer Republics under the slogan of “democratic rights for all white citizens” with the object of gaining control of diamonds, precious metals and vital raw materials. In this he succeeded but as the mining industry developed under mainly British investment together with manufacturing, the white working class of the urban areas eventually formed a political alliance with the rural Afrikaners to elect an Afrikaner Nationalist government in 1948 which has held power ever since. The various National Party governments under Malan, Strijdom, Verwoerd, Vorster and Botha (the names alone speak of the return of the Afrikaners to power) have never been the “natural” or direct representatives of capitalist class interests. The more liberal-minded United Party disappeared and its current replacement, the Democratic Party, has little chance of gaining majority white support.

Capitalist interests would have best been served by a reform programme aimed at integrating the black population within a non-racial system of exploitation. This could have been introduced through a gradually-widening franchise based, for example, on property or education qualifications, arriving eventually at “one person, one vote”. This was not to be. It is to the eternal discredit of white workers in South Africa that in the majority they have pursued what they saw as their interests through racist trade unions and by voting for the National Party.

But if all this has been frustrating for capitalist class interests neither has it advanced the hopes of the Afrikaner nationalists. Their ideal of apartheid, or separate development, was always an illusion. Whether we see it as, at best, a nostalgic yearning for an independent “volk” or, at worst, a cynical euphemism for racial oppression does not matter. Either way, apartheid was against the tide of history.

When the more fanatical Conservative Party accuses de Klerk of “betrayal” and “sell-out” the greater truth is that the National Party has been overwhelmed by the economic forces of capitalism. The seeds of this were planted when the Afrikaners won political control. As a government they had no choice but to depend on taxes from mining, industry and manufacture to run their state machine. From this moment on, they were tied to capitalism. It costs a lot of money to pay for the repression of 20 million black people and, inevitably, the bills increase. Where once the Afrikaners eschewed the idolatry of gold, diamonds and profit, their heirs speak the universal language of trade and commerce. De Klerk is a capitalist politician.

In his recent important speech to the South African Parliament on 2 February he said:

  A new South Africa is possible only if it is bolstered by a sound and growing economy, with particular emphasis on the creation of employment.

At times he sounded like a Thatcherite:

  By means of restricting capital expenditure in state institutions, privatisation, deregulation and curtailing government expenditure, substantial progress has been made already towards reducing the role of the authorities in the economy.

At other times he also sounds like Gorbachev:

  The government’s policy is to reduce the role of the public sector in the economy and to give the private sector maximum opportunity for optimal performance. In this process, preference has to be given to allowing the market forces and a sound competitive structure to bring about the necessary adjustments.

We might ask how it comes about that politicians as different in their backgrounds as de Klerk, Thatcher and Gorbachev are committed to the same policies. They each share a common role as functionaries of capital; the economies of South Africa, Britain and Russia are locked into the same system – world capitalism. As a result their respective governments are compelled to react to the same economic pressures to achieve efficiency and profitability and to pursue strategies which best protect their long-term interests. These are the same forces which are driving politicians in South Africa, despite their own very different origins into a common outlook.

An added reason why de Klerk can sometimes sound like Gorbachev is that both face problems of restructuring, or perestroika. According to the Independent (27 February):

 British businessmen and bankers are unlikely to return to South Africa in droves as a result of the lifting of the ban on new business investment . . . They left because of rising commercial and political risks, poor investment returns, difficulties in repatriating profits and higher returns available in other countries.

In his speech to the South African Parliament de Klerk complained of “a serious weakening in the productivity of capital and stagnation in the economy’s ability to generate income and employment opportunities”.

It is evident that de Klerk, through his negotiations with Mandela and the ANC, hopes that he will be the man to restructure the South African economy on the basis of political stability achieved through extended democratic rights, but it is likely that the National Party has left it too late. Surely the party and the man for the task is the ANC under Nelson Mandela? Is it not more likely that it will be they who emerge as the new functionaries of capital best suited to achieving a more efficient exploitation of workers in South Africa without distinction of “race”, as capital demands?

Not afraid of black government
Certainly a number of leading capitalists assume that the future lies with a black government. For some years, Gavin Relly, the chairman of Anglo-American, South Africa’s largest business corporation which controls gold, platinum and coal production, has been in close contact with the ANC. In 1985, together with the chairman of the South African Foundation, which represents general business interests, he met with Oliver Tambo and a negotiating team from the ANC. He said then:

  What we are concerned with is not so much whether the following generation will be governed by black or white people, but that it will be a viable country and that it will not be destroyed by violence and strife.

He added that he and the ANC “shared a common interest in maintaining the profitability of the South African State”.

Since Mandela’s release there has been some concern in capitalist circles over the ANC’s apparent commitment to nationalisation, including the mines. However, on 26 February Gavin Relly, continuing his personal contacts with the ANC, met Mandela and afterwards urged investors to calm their fears. He said it was premature now to get agitated about the ANC’s economic programmes:

  The community and international community should not get into a flurry over nationalisation. These are issues for sensible men to discuss. Issues of nationalisation will have to be subjected to the tests of debate and the tests of what is practical to make the modern economy work.

In his own comments on the meeting, Mandela said nationalisation remained, in certain areas, a basic policy of the ANC, but the economy at large would still be based on private enterprise. “The entire economy will remain intact” (Independent, 27 February). Again, we shall never know the details of their discussions but it is clear that Gavin Relly, a leading representative of capitalist interests, emerged a happy man from his meeting with Mandela.

Where does all this leave our fellow workers in South Africa? Our interests are directly linked with theirs and if democratic freedoms are now to be extended to that country it is in all our interests. Perhaps now the Directorate of Publications in Cape Town will release our pamphlets and the copies of the Socialist Standard which have been kept under lock and key in the cell where banned literature is stored.

In the short-term it appears that workers in South Africa may well continue to support those reformist organisations which they see as representing their interests in a “racially” divided society. However, it is also likely that the increasing pressure of the economic forces of capitalism and the reforms which are in prospect will simplify the issue into a straightforward confrontation between capitalist and working class interests. This will leave the fundamental problems of the workers still to be solved. Even now the vital work must be to ensure that a growing world socialist movement is extended to South Africa.

Pieter Lawrence

Material World: It’s Not Overpopulation, it’s the System (2017)

The Material World Column from the September 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

 ‘We must find new lands from which we can easily obtain raw materials and at the same time exploit the cheap slave  labour  that is available from the natives of the colonies…’– Cecil Rhodes

People need to wake up and learn that the world is not what much of the media would like us to believe it is. We are frequently told that Africa suffers from too many people. Yet  Africa is blessed with a rich bounty of natural resources and  has the potential  to support its rising population well into the foreseeable future. The continent holds around 30% of the world’s known mineral reserves. These include cobalt, uranium, diamonds, and gold, as well as significant oil and gas reserves.  The Pambazuka website reminds us that  Ethiopia is five times the size of the UK yet the UK’s population of 66 million is just over three-quarters that of Ethiopia’s at 83 million. Uganda’s land-area is comparable to the UK’s, yet with a population of only 33 million. Ghana is approximately equal to the size of the UK, however, Ghana is populated by only 25 million people, far less than one-half the UK’s population.    Somalia is 2.6 times the size of the UK but has a population of only 9 million. Professor William Moseley of Macalester College explained that “There’s  about 13 Somalis per square kilometre, which is much lower density than what we’re seeing in our own drought-stricken state of Oklahoma. Yet we tend to focus on the population issue.” Africa is still one of the world’s least densely populated  regions.

Africa presently does not grow enough food to feed its own population but it certainly has the ability to grow enough food to feed itself plus some. Many African countries have the advantages of fertile soil and the possibility of year-round farming and more than one harvest per year. About a quarter of the   potential   arable land of Africa is being cultivated presently. For example, well over 50 per cent of Uganda’s arable land, some of the richest in Africa, remains uncultivated. Even here, an increasingly high proportion of the cultivated area is assigned to cash-crops (cocoa, coffee, tea, groundnuts, sisal, cut flowers, etc.) for export. Uganda could expand its current food production significantly and not only be completely self-sufficient but help to feed neighbouring countries. This vast acreage of rich farmlands across the continent has the capacity to support the food needs of future generations of Africans.

Of course, it would be foolish to deny that Africa’s population is not rising. Of the countries where women average more than five children, almost all are in Sub-Saharan Africa, which now accounts for 12 percent of the world’s population and will account for more than a third by 2100. The population of Niger is projected to increase by 274 percent during the next 35 years. In Niger, women have on average more than seven children, and men consider their ideal to be more than twelve. But with land divided among so many sons, the size of a typical family plot has fallen by more than a third since 2005, meaning there is little long-term hope for feeding children.

There are also mounting problems with increased  urbanisation and its effects. In 1950, no city in sub-Saharan Africa had a population greater than one million. It is now estimated that over 50 cities have a resident population of over one million people and by 2025, more than 80 cities in sub-Saharan Africa will acquire populations of over one million. By 2050, about 56 percent of Africans will probably live in urban areas.   In a couple of   decades   Nigeria will reach a population about as big as that of the present-day United States in a country roughly the size of Arizona, New Mexico, and Nevada. A typical apartment block is known as a “Face Me, Face You” because whole families squeeze into 7-by-11-foot rooms   along  a narrow corridor with up to 50 people sharing a kitchen, toilet, and sink.

Africa seems to be the embodiment of all the social ills of capitalist exploitation  and it has been systematically plundered for its raw materials and human   labour.  Conditions for our fellow-workers in Africa has revealed capitalism in all its naked brutality with its extremities of misery and suffering. A peasant gets peanuts for growing peanuts because that is the going rate for peanuts on the world market. If the price of peanuts is raised, the local exploiter will gain at the expense of the importer, and the peasant still gets peanuts. It is now no utopian fantasy but a practical proposition to suggest we can live in a world without waste or want or war, in which each person has free access to the benefits of   civilisation. We certainly have the knowledge and the technology. All that is missing is the will and desire for change that can make that next evolutionary advance possible; a belief in ourselves as masters of our own destiny. And how soon this happens depends on us all – each and every one of us.

ALJO

Bloody inroads (1980)

From the March 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

In two dramatic decades, virtually the entire continent of Africa was carved up among the European powers in what has appropriately been called “the scramble for Africa”, leaving only Ethiopia independent. What gave rise to this sudden change? For the answer we must first look at Europe itself.

England, for a long time the “workshop of the world”, was facing increasing competition. Her industrial supremacy was diminishing rapidly. In 1870 she was still smelting half the world’s iron —more than three times that of any other country—but before the close of the century she was overtaken by America and hard-pressed by Germany for second place. The growth of manufacturing created the need to open up new markets, a need well understood by the then French Prime Minister, Jules Ferry, when he remarked: “What [our great industries] lack more and more is markets. Why? Because . . . Germany is covering herself with barriers; because, beyond the ocean, the United States of America have become protectionist .. .”. The so-called Golden Age of Laissez-Faire capitalism was coming to an end, as England’s competitors waxed stronger. Stanley, the famous explorer of the Congo Basin, enthusiastically addressed the Manchester Chamber of Commerce in 1884 with the words: “There are forty millions of people beyond the gateway of the Congo, and the cotton spinners of Manchester are waiting to clothe them. Birmingham foundries are glowing with the red metal that will presently be made into ironwork for them”. But it was Leopold the Second of Belgium who employed Stanley to establish military posts in the Congo and make treaties with the local tribes. These were the foundations of Leopold’s empire, where the most barbaric practices (such as the flogging to death of fugitives or slackers with the sjambok) were commonplace.

Along with new markets, the colonies could provide raw materials such as copper, rubber, palm oil, timber and cotton which the expanding home industries craved. They also provided highly profitable outlets for the export of capital.

The means of communication and distribution were rapidly advanced with the invention of steamships, locomotives and telegraphs, the effects of which were only felt in the world at large in the last few decades of the century. These made possible massive increases in colonial trade and the expansion of empires. All these factors, working in conjunction, created the possibility for many powers to lay claim to vast territories, reacting to each others’ claims by annexing more, in a sort of complex chain reaction. Hitherto lack of competition, amongst other factors, had detracted from the sense of urgency which now accompanied empire-building.

The specific motives—and pretexts—or colonisation differed from area to area. In North, West and East Africa, colonisation was “largely governed by strategic requirements having little to do with Africa herself”, as far as the British were concerned. South of the Zambesi River “British policy was driven by a deliberate and determined desire to establish a British dominion in South Africa” (Scramble for Africa A. Nutting). Thus Britain gained control of the Suez Canal Company (on the strength of a loan from Rothschilds) and eventually Egypt, to protect the route to her valuable possessions in India. To secure her hold in Egypt she looked upon her territories elsewhere as “disposable assets”, to be bartered if necessary.

By no stretch of the imagination could South Africa be a mere “disposable asset”. The second half of the nineteenth century revealed her immense mineral wealth, beginning with the discovery of diamonds in Qriqualand West in 1867. Bitter disputes broke out over the ownership of the diamond fields involving the Boer republics and the various Qriqua and Tswana chiefs. These were effectively resolved by the annexation of Qriqualand West by Britain in 1871. Diamond wealth spawned the De Beers Consolidated Mining Company, whose vast resources were used to promote the activities of the British South Africa Company. It was through this organisation, with the megalomaniac Cecil Rhodes at its helm, that Rhodesia was brought under European domination.

In 1877, after unsuccessful attempts to establish a federation of states in South Africa, which people like Rhodes dearly wanted, Britain annexed the Transvaal only to hand it back in 1881 after suffering a humiliating defeat by the Boers. In 1884, Germany laid claim to South West Africa and Rhodes, fearing a possible link-up of Boers and Germans, succeeded in getting Bechuanaland annexed by Britain, thus driving a wedge between the two and securing the strategically important “missionary Road to the North”, important for it gave access to what he believed was the Eldorado of the North. From the 1860s explorers had come across the ancient gold workings in that area and in the Tati district the German explorer, Karl Mauch discovered gold. Rhodes and his company finally captured this fabled land of King Solomon’s mines with such ruthlessness against the Matabele that the Company’s own ambassador in Bulawayo felt prompted to remark that “the Pioneer at his most highly developed state is a white savage, the most terrible of men”.

However, the real Eldorado lay not to the north but southwards, for in 1886 in the Witwatersrand area of the Transvaal a rich gold bearing reef was discovered. With the rising fortunes of the Transvaal grew the fear that British supremacy in South Africa was threatened and that the British colonies there might throw in their lot with the Boer Republics. For the next thirteen years British policy was directed at denying the Boers access to a seaport by surrounding the Transvaal with newly acquired British territory. With the completion of the railway line between the Rand and Portuguese held Delagoa Bay every effort was made to exploit the grievances of the “Uitlander” population of mainly British extraction living on the Rand. Such was the determination of British imperialism to resolve the issue by force that Chamberlain, the Colonial Secretary, faced with the relatively generous Boer concessions to Britain’s demands, despairingly commented: “I dread above all the whittling away of differences until we have no causus belli left”.

But Chamberlain need not have worried for all along an overriding “causus belli” was there. It was still there when the frictions resulting from the partition of Africa played an important role in dividing the world into two armed camps that led to the outbreak of World War One. And today it continues to menace our very existence, until the workers of the world are prepared to learn from its blood-soaked past that the capitalist system of society cannot and will not be made to behave otherwise, and resolve therefore, to abolish it from all the continents of the earth.

Robin Cox