The west coast of Africa, looking today much
as it did a hundred years ago. At that time the old evils of the slave trade had
become a distant though disgraceful memory But there now opened a new chapter
of confrontation along these tropical shores. In past years Europeans had come here for
profitable business. Now they wanted more, much more. Old trading posts like this one had long been
the scene of a partnership between maritime traders from Europe, and local Africans. By the 1880s, that old partnership was being swept away in a dramatic change. The outcome of a new European drive for overseas empire. Industrialized countries led by France and Britain
had begun to invade the black continent. Each hoping for new sources of
raw materials for its factories, new markets for its manufacturers, and new positions of advantage against its rivals. This was called the "Scramble for Africa." By 1914, only two countries remained
outside European possession.
Liberia in the West, and Ethiopia in the East. Britain had seized the lion's share of control. Egypt and the Sudan in the North. The immense wealth of South Africa; Valuable colonies like Rhodesia and Kenya; and richly populated territories
such as Nigeria and the Gold Coast. France had invaded Algeria in the 1830s. Now after new wars of conquest,
she added more colonies to her empire South of the Sahara, including the island of Madagascar. Little Portugal carved out two vast colonies, Angola and Mozambique. While imperial Germany took the Cameroons and southwest Africa and on the east coast Tanganyika. The vast Congo basin fell to king Leopold of the Belgians. Italy and Spain completed the enclosure. The fate of the continent was utterly changed. Between the colonizing powers themselves
the carve-up was peaceful. But their rivalry was intense. In 1884, a congress of the competing governments
met in Berlin to settle their disputes. Germany's "iron chancellor" Bismarck was there And active behind the scenes
was the ambitious Belgian king He spoke them all when he said "I am determined to get my share
of this magnificent African cake." Any power that could occupy African
soil could effectively claim it. Now the task was to stake out
frontiers in utterly uncharted land. Said the french prime minister, "we have embarked on a gigantic steeplechase into the unknown." The British prime minister, lord Salisbury was to say of this period, "we've been engaged in drawing lines
on maps where no man's foot has ever trod." "We've been giving away mountains and
rivers and lakes to each other" "Only hindered by the small impediment
that we never knew exactly where we were." The great game was to get hold of places
and positions of advantage over rivals, no matter what irrational frontiers might result. One of the most absurd cases was
the magnificent Gambia river. Britain had long held Bathurst, Banjul today, and was determined to keep this river route to the interior But France, invading from the West coast enclosed all the territories surrounding the Gambia River
in her new colony of Senegal. So the French were naturally eager to obtain the Gambia River. They offered Britain in exchange
the much larger and richer Ivory Coast. But the British Parliament insisted
on keeping the Gambia, thus dividing the peoples of the region and the result was, and is, a country that is 300 miles long,
but never more than 30 miles wide. What the African inhabitants might
think of this colonial carve up was never asked The European idea in the words
of one British governor was to seize African territory, and then, as much as possible, rule the country as if there were no inhabitants. In fact, European contempt for Africans
now reached new depths. and no wonder for how otherwise and by asserting
that Africans were "helpless children," "lazy savages" could Christian Europe justify
taking their countries away from them? The "helpless children" meanwhile sang
their own version of a famous hymn "Onward Christian soldiers, into heathen lands,
prayer books in your pockets, rifles in your hands." "Take the happy tidings where trade can be done,
spread the peaceful gospel with the Gatling Gun." The European invasions were widely resisted. Conquest was never easy, and sometimes as
these old drawings and photographs testify, conquest led to a ruthless killing that
later generations would prefer to forget. Resistance took many shapes. In French West Africa,
a focal point was found in Muslim loyalties. Many heroes, still unforgotten, came on that scene. Some like the Senegalese religious leader [Amadou Bamba] offered the way of peace but was still sent into exile. Others like the fierce warrior leader
Samuri [Ture] fought off French attack after attack, and was crushed and exiled only after years of war. Death took many, strong or weak. With the skulls of earlier wars displayed in their capital Kumasi, the powerful Ashanti nation ruled over most of modern Ghana. Led by their kings, who had the title of Asantehene they'd long defended their country against Britain. But now they desperately wanted a peaceful settlement. In 1895, fearing a disastrous war with Britain, King Prempe made a strong bid for peace
from his palace here at Kumasi. He offered the British the right to
establish in Ashanti a chartered company with all the concessions, the privilege,
that such a company could possibly desire. But it wasn't enough, for the British
now wanted territorial possession as well as privilege. The Ashanti nation had already fought
long hard battles against the British. But this time, in 1896, they decided to surrender. In a ceremony of deliberate humiliation, the king
was made to kiss the British commander's boot, and then sent into exile. But it wasn't the end of the story. The British now blundered. A new British governor, sir Frederick Hodgson decided that he had to get possession
of the sacred golden stool, symbol of the Ashanti nation's soul. Arriving at the British fort here in Kumasi, he ordered the assembled chiefs
to hand the stool over. Worse still, he demanded the right to sit on it,
something that no person had ever been allowed to do not even the king himself. To Hodgson's final insult,
the Ashanti replied with war. This little fort at Kumasi is what the British had built just in case, and now they sorely needed it. The few dozen British inmates of the fort were besieged
for months, and had to eat rats to stay alive. Hodgson's act of folly had exacted a bitter price. Efforts to send in relief from the coast were
repeatedly frustrated by Ashanti resistance, until finally the governor and his wife
got away to the coast, and the absurd but tragic affair could be closed. this ended war between Britain and Ashanti, and a year later, in 1901,
the British quietly annexed the country, which became part of the colony of the Gold Coast. All over Africa, the new military technology of
automatic guns gave easy victories to the invaders. Countless resistors died. Many thousands at the single Battle of Omdurman
in Britain's conquest of the Sudan Meanwhile, in another part of the Sudan,
the French were also scoring victories. For the most part, public opinion rejoiced. For were these not victories over an
inferior species, a kind of joke humanity? There were some critics, but not many, and their voice was ignored or silenced. What really mattered was to do down
one's European rivals. If you were British, to get the better of the French in
West Africa, or of the Germans in East Africa. While orphans like little Uganda were left on
the protective doorstep of Father John Bull. Even before 1900 there came
a new source of conflict. Settlers from Europe: French in the far North, Dutch and then British in the far South, and some Germans. Other settlers were attracted to the
good farming land of the east. To Tanganyika northern and southern Rhodesia and the
British territories of Uganda and Kenya. Once again, nobody asked permission. An early French governor had laid down the golden rule. Wherever good water and fertile land are
found, he said, settlers must be installed without questioning whose land it may be. The settlers, not surprisingly, agreed. The next step in East Africa, was to build
a railway from the coast to the interior. The line was completed in 1901, and millions of
acres of good farming land in Kenya were opened to white ownership and settlement
for the buying price of next to nothing. These white strangers, oddly enough,
were at first welcomed by the African inhabitants. But the welcome didn't last for long. For they soon discovered that colonial government
wanted them to give things. Above all, their land and their labor. These colonial demands provoked
a repeated resistance. And against that resistance, the colonial government, with white settlers arriving in ever larger numbers from Britain, waged a war with little mercy, and of course, with
rifles and machine guns against spears and arrows. This "beating down" of a sometimes a violent and
desperate African protest was called pacification, or less politely "hammering." A British officer then fighting in Kenya
kept a sadly instructive diary: "Marched into fort hall and the
expedition comes to an end." "To my mind, the people of the Embu
have not been sufficiently hammered" "and i should like to go back at once and
have another go at them." "During the first phase of our
expedition against the Irieni," "we killed 797 ******* and during the second phase
against the embu we killed about 250." There was in fact much more of the same thing. In a sixth campaign against the Kenya Nandi, for example, British troops reported killing 1117 people,
besides seizing all their livestock. In 1906, a junior British minister in London
cabled this protest "Surely it cannot be necessary to go on killing these
defenseless people on such an enormous scale." The minister's name was Winston Churchill,
but on that occasion his intervention had no effect. By 1915, about 4 million acres of
African farming land in central Kenya had been given to about 1000 British settlers. By the 1920s, about half of the able-bodied men
of Kenya's two largest farming peoples the Kikuyu and the Luo were working as laborers for British newcomers. How was that done? The answer, once again, was something new in Kenya: taxation To cultivate these splendid acres,
it was necessary to make Africans pay taxes in cash. Having no money economy of their
own, Africans could pay tax in cash, only if they went to work
for a European wage. An old Maasai recalls those early days. The Maasai proved particularly good
at dodging the payment of the new taxes. So the colonial government thought it should send
some of these apparently "idol warriors" to school, so as to turn them, if possible,
into tax collectors among their own people. Small boys were seized for this purpose. On the other side of the continent in northern
Nigeria, the colonial scene was very different. With no white settlers, life was peaceful. Things continued much as before. The British had conquered this huge region
far from the sea for no real reason, other than to keep it from the French So the British were content with a supervision
which allowed them to take a back seat. Under the direction of Lord Lugard,
this was called "indirect rule." This was the residence of the British official
who governed the northern Nigerian province of Cano. Indirect rule meant ruling through local kings in this case the local Emir, who after defeat,
accepted British overlordship on condition that nothing was done to
modernize or democratize the conquered system. Indirect rule was cheap and highly effective. Local kings and princes kept the peace
and law and order in their own interest, as well as in that of the British.
Both sides at the top had much to gain. So kings, like this one, the emir of Katsina were able to stay in power and even add
to their personal privileges. They were able to call on their own local retainers to
govern the everyday affairs of the country in this way the native governing
class as the doctrine said was to remain a real living force as well
as being a curious and interesting pageantry "The ceremonies are the same
as a thousand years ago." "There were kings in northern Nigeria
when Richard Lionheart set out on crusade." "Today he and all the emirs of northern Nigeria
play their part as subjects of the king of England." "but their subjects still show their loyalty as in the days
when Katsina was warring with her neighbors." "Katsina still resists new influences from the world
outside." In short, no modernization of any kind,
and therefore big problems for the future. I talked to Nigerian professor Obaro Ikeme. For the larger part of Nigeria,
British rule did not mean anything for many years. In other words, although at the centers of administration there was a change, which could be seen
by the people and felt by the people, in the outlying areas life went on
as if the British did not exist. If you take Lugard's own particular area the north for example, the seats of the Emir, and the seats of the district's heads
may have felt the immediate impact of the British presence. But the villages were ordered and run just as before,
with one important difference though:
taxation. That the people had to pay tax to a new power. The British built up a core of Africans
who became known as native administrators, and developed some commitment to the system. The salaries were comfortable, they had power,
which they used to enrich themselves at the expense of their followers and their subjects Consequently, the British were able to succeed
largely by developing a core of people who became partners with them. "British officers headed by a resident are there in every Emirate" "To advise and assist the Emir and his ministers in their day-to-day work," "and each month the resident presides at
a full meeting with the Emir's council." "There may be word from Nigeria's governor in
Lagos or from the colonial office in London." "Or the council may discuss the
repatriation of pilgrims from Mecca." "The dignity of the past, the traditions of Katsina,
are present in the council chamber." Here once more, this time behind polite words
was the essence of colonial paternalism. In the French colonies along the coast,
the scene was both the same and different. Dakar, capital of Senegal. Actually the little suburb
of Rufisque, a charmingly nostalgic place. Senegal was France's oldest colony in tropical Africa,
and one where the French presence, like that of the British in northern Nigeria, could
easily be absorbed. Generally, the French ran their colonies on much the same system as the British, but there was one important difference. The British thought that their Africans
could never become anything but Africans, and certainly not British. The French idea, on the contrary, was that in the end, at some distant time, all their Africans would become black Frenchmen. The culture and the language of France, were offered as the eventual supreme blessings. This idea was called assimilation. Originally this was a generous idea,
but colonial rule reduced it to little or nothing. Yet in four municipalities, of coastal Senegal,
assimilation did take effect. This picturesque island of Gorée,
just off the port of Dakar, was one. Here you could go to school, and even become a French citizen. But you belonged to a tiny minority. By 1926, only 48,000 Senegalese had become assimilated,
out of a total of one and a half million. The Senegalese historian, professor Cheikh Anta Diop explains. One man from Gorée Island who did make it,
and carved out for himself a brilliant career, was Blaise Diagne. Of humble origins, Diagne became the first black man to be
elected to the French national parliament in Paris. He campaigned for black rights, and began
to win concessions. That was in 1914. During the first world war, an embattled France
called for tens of thousands of African troops, as Flanders swallowed its victims. Blaise Diagne agreed to be France's recruiting sergeant, and his African reputation vanished in the slaughter. France had long relied on African mercenaries,
even as far back as the Crimean War. But now it was different in scale and in suffering. More than two hundred thousand African troops,
mostly conscripts, were sent to France. And at least one hundred and seventy thousand
were thrown into the holocaust of the trenches. Thousands never came home. Others returned with an experience
that survivors have still not forgotten. Shoulder to shoulder, white men and
black men, equal in the trenches. Were they now to become equal in the colonies? Only the monuments suggested that. With the coming of peace in 1918, the victorious colonial systems looked more strongly entrenched than ever before, though military rule now gave way to civilian government. This led to a far more thorough system of tax collection. To pay for the government, the linchpin of the
British system was the district officer. "I'm the district officer in this particular area." "The native authority treasurer sends his figures to me
for checking against last year's figures." "When it's decided what the tax is to be this year," "I go off to tell the chiefs and people
what they're to pay, and why." "That's my wife." "I spend so much time doing the rounds, that if she
didn't come we wouldn't see much of each other." "We take our beds and everything else as the rest
houses where we spend the nights have no furniture." "You know, we are very ordinary people.
But the pagans still find us a bit of a puzzle." "That's the local chief.
We ask news of the crops of the children." "It's like sitting in a shop window.
We come here every year, and follow the same ritual." "But they always behave as though it was the first time." "Peace is all very well, but it is dull,
and they love a bit of variety." Many colonial officials were good, practical,
hardworking people, devoted to their ideals. They were sure that the strong paternal arm of
colonial rule must be a blessing for Africans and would have to be continued for centuries. They firmly believed that if left to themselves,
Africans would simply go on living as before, and that they thought would be a thoroughly bad thing. An old film tells the story as the colonial officials saw it. "This simple life under the hot African sky
was once a life of fear and uncertainty." "British rule has brought peace, the enterprise" "of European officials, and settlers, and of Indian traders has opened up the country." "But there is still a long battle to be fought with ignorance, poverty, and disease." "In these lands, where there are so many changes to be made,
much can be achieved by money," "and the initiative of the white man." In the more favored colonies, those were the hopes of the 1920s. and in some respects they were fulfilled. There came the founding of the first modern hospitals,
veterinary services, and other benefits of western life. But all the money to pay for these good things
had to come from Africans. So they now began to drive for the export of crops to yield cash The cash crop era got into its stride. Ground nuts, as here in Senegal, were a crop that brought
cash to farmers and to colonial purchasing companies But the cash crop success also brought problems. So long as their crops were bought,
African growers could be reasonably content. But in 1929 they began the huge and long disaster
of the world depression, and prices collapsed. Food production for local people already badly hit because of land taken for cash crops
became a subject of major crisis. What was true of the French empire
was just as true of all the others. Here in the Gold Coast, the big cash crop was
cocoa, providing the bulk of the colonies exports. The crop was grown and harvested
entirely by African farmers, who had to sell it to British and
other foreign buying companies. These companies banded together so as to
pay the farmers an artificially low price. The farmers of Ghana then the gold
coast nonetheless worked so well that they became the world's biggest
producers of cocoa and so of chocolate, which Africans didn't eat. But the gains were far from equally shared. The Ghanaian historian professor Adu Boahen: There's no doubt at all that the farmers were being cheated. The prices that were being paid for the cocoa bore no relationship to the prices
that they had to pay for the imported goods. We had no say in the pricing of our own commodities. We had no say in what we paid for what was imported. This was in fact one of the greatest indictments
against the colonial economic policies. The fact that so much emphasis
was placed on a single cash crop. And we have to import rice, we have to import
palm oil, and so on, you know, to feed ourselves. Because so much emphasis, and so much attention
was paid to this single cash crop, cocoa. The colonial governments are just concerned with
obtaining raw materials to feed our factories abroad. The raw materials were produced by the skill and
enterprise of hard-working African men and women Yet the advertisements in Europe deeply racist
by this time presented an insultingly different picture. At the same time, African businessmen found
that the trading positions they had established in earlier times, were now swept away. There's no doubt at all that before the colonial period,
Africans were playing a far more important and dominant role in the economy than
during the colonial period. There were many of them running their own
import export businesses. In the 1920s and 1930s, all these African merchant
princes eventually disappeared from the field because the dice were so much loaded
against them as a result of the colonial system. The banks were discriminating against them in
the granting of loans. The expatriate firms and particularly the Syrian / Lebanese
firms were undercutting them and they just could not stand the challenge. And therefore many of them simply ran out of business. And the children of these great merchant princes now became the employees of the great African capitalist companies, like UAC, UTC, SUA and so on. Colonial trading companies,
British, French, Belgian, Portuguese, monopolized wholesale business with the
full backing of their colonial governments. What king Leopold had called "this magnificent
African cake" was beginning to yield its riches. Often those were painful days but they have to be recalled by anyone who
wishes to understand the problems of Africa now. The turmoil of today in the Congo or Zaire, has its roots in the infamous Congo Free State of King Leopold. Here the emphasis was on the growing of rubber, and the methods used to extract it were
no better than a reign of terror. Local people were forced to collect rubber
under the most cruel conditions as these old photographs show. If the rubber they collected was poor, or small in quantity, men and sometimes women too
could expect to lose a hand or foot in punishment. Terrible things were done. An official British fact-finding commission reported. The daily agony of an entire people unrolled
itself in all its repulsive, terrifying details. Public opinion in Europe grew horrified. Gradually the agonies were reduced. Yet huge damage had been done, moral as well as physical, and was going to cast a dark and violent shadow over the future of the Congo. Forced labor by the 1920s was practiced
on a wide scale in most of the colonies. All early roads and railways were built by forced labor. Much was achieved but the cost in life
and health was sometimes catastrophic. This spectacular railway in French equatorial
Africa was built by 125,000 Africans to link the coast with Brazzaville the inland capital. Beyond doubt, a great feat of engineering. But before a single passenger could travel on it, nearly 14 thousand Africans were to die in building it. Travel in comfort came at a price. By the 1920s the colonial railway map was complete. These lines had one central purpose to ensure the export
of minerals and other wealth most of all from Southern Africa. European mining activity for gold copper zinc
diamonds transformed Southern Africa thanks again to African labor acquired by the usual procedure
of administrative force and taxation Conditions were hard to bear. Some 30,000 Africans died in Southern Rhodesian mines
between 1904 and 1933, mostly of disease. And wages at the end of that period
were lower than they'd been at the start This labor system was called chibalo. Very old men can still remember it. Gold mining boomed. In those years of chibalo, the Southern Rhodesian mining
industry produced gold worth 87 million pounds sterling at the cost of 20 dead African miners each week
on average for 30 years Just as in the bigger minds of South Africa,
living conditions for miners were appalling. Safety provisions were primitive; discipline
was often brutal; healthcare almost non-existent. Prison labor was used whenever available,
and that was often. And child labor too. After 1930, the whole labor system in large regions had come to depend on people having to abandon their villages and go far away to work in colonial mines or on plantations. this was called migrant labor, a huge upheaval which soon began to destroy the old stabilities of rural Africa. An official British committee in 1935
reported that the old order of society was being completely undermined by migrant labor. The years ahead were going to confirm it. But it was in the Portuguese colonies especially
Angola and Mozambique that forced labor was at its worst Here in Mozambique, and by brutal methods,
African farmers were forced to grow cotton and to sell it at prices fixed by the colonial government. Prices kept so low that the farmers used to say of the cotton that they were forced to grow that cotton was the mother of poverty The raw cotton was sent to textile factories
in Portugal and returned in the form of shirts for africans to buy. All the profits were Portuguese. The more the farmers learned to hate cotton the more
they were forced to grow it on pain of severe punishment. The farmers in this old film had no legal means
of protest, but they could express their anger by singing anti-colonial songs in their own language. There seemed then no way out, no hope ahead, And before long, the same disaster struck
here as elsewhere. Food crops disappeared,
and once prosperous areas were hit by famine. In spite of African suffering, settlers arrived in growing numbers. Some were political exiles from the Portuguese dictatorship. Many were poor people hoping for a better life Sent out to be farmers, most preferred
the easier life of the towns. They opened shops and businesses and aimed
at the success which had eluded them at home. This actually suited the official colonial doctrine. The Portuguese dictator Marcello Caetano
laid it down in plain words. The blacks are to be organized and enclosed, he said,
in an economy directed by whites. Mass resistance was to develop later, but already even the poorest and least educated Africans could see that colonial rule had much more to take than to give. Whatever good may have come from colonial rule has to be measured, unfortunately, against the
essential aims of each of the colonial systems. These aims were frankly stated. They were to extract wealth. We've looked at some of the ways in which wealth
was extracted by the use of forced or cheap labor, by the seizure of land, by the incessant pressure
on growing crops for export rather than crops for local food needs and always by the deliberate
treatment of Africans as inferior beings. Whatever appearances might suggest, Africans in fact were
no longer prepared to accept their permanently inferior status. All over the continent the first signs
of a new political dissent had already begun to appear. In the nineteen twenties for example
with the protest action of Harry Thuku in Kenya. At the same time, with [Joseph] Casely Hayford
and his companions in British West Africa And perhaps above all, with Herbert Macaulay,
often called the father of Nigerian nationalism. But their demands were small. some of these anti-colonialists were completely taken in by the british system they thought it was a good thing and that we should become part of that good thing. and the real pressure was for the British to become a bit more liberal. During the 1930s and notably with the rise
to prominence of the fiery but very effective Nigerian nationalist Nnamdi Azikiwe much stronger
and more far-reaching demands began to be made. Men like Azikiwe used the press where this
was possible, as it was in British West Africa. They now sought a mass audience. Politics moved out of polite drawing rooms
into the clamor of the streets. So the resistance movement took many forms and it was not confined only to the elite
as some people tend to think in fact it was also evident in the rural areas and even among the ordinary farmers and the
ordinary workers One form of mass resistance took shape in
a big cocoa hold-up in the Gold Coast when farmers demanded fairer prices. Once again the press could be used to good effect. But unfortunately in the 1930s there was never any coordination between the protests of the
rural folk and the farmers and the protests being organized by the elite. And this is why the resistance movement was not very successful But now in 1935 came a new and savage challenge
to African hopes of progress: another colonial invasion. Fascist Italy's brutal assault on Ethiopia,
then called Abyssinia. And therefore when this invasion took place, it meant the the complete snuffing
out of this last beam of hope. Italy's troops entered Addis Ababa, capital of
a now subjected Ethiopia. And still there came no more than verbal protest from outside powers Yet Ethiopia's defeat, painfully confirmed
when her people laid down their arms, sent out a call for action to Africans everywhere. Indeed, for some of us 1935 now is being
considered as the more appropriate date for the beginning of the modern nationalist
period of African history rather than 1939 or even 1945. Because we believe that but for the breakout
of the outbreak of the second world war in 1939 probably the struggle for independence would have
begun from 1935 as a result of the of the of the indignation as a result of the anger as a result
of the of the emotions as a result of the strong feelings of anti-imperialism that were aroused by
the Italian innovation of Ethiopia. Those feelings were aroused above all among the few who could win a modern education at schools like this one. Achimota in the Gold Coast, where Kwame Nkrumah, future leader of the country's
independence movement had been a student. Young people began to read whatever anti-colonial
newspapers they could find. Even in the midst of discouraging years,
hope flourished afresh. A new generation of educated Africans, some of them
trained here at Achimota, was reaching maturity. And then came the tremendous upheavals
of the second world war. Surging with revolutionary force
through the entire colonial world. By 1945, as we shall see in our next program, the scene
was set for great dramas in a struggle for independence.