Black Man’s burden to decolonise

By Owei Lakemfa
COLONIALISM  was a vicious bandit whose primary goal was to loot  and exploit the labour of the colonised peoples. There were admittedly, incidentals such as introducing Western education  and building railways to cart the raw materials of the hinterland to the coastal areas.

For any type of infrastructural development, the colonised picked the bills or paid the price.  For instance, when France  decided to build the Brazzaville-Ocean Railway, it simply invaded villages, rounded up  youths and force-marched them hundreds or thousands of kilometres to the construction sites.

It was like the slave marches to the coastal areas; those too weak to endure the trek were left to die. During construction, there was no shelter for the workers  and the food was mainly fruits.

In the book, Forced Labour in Colonial Africa first published in the 1930s, A .T Nzula, I. Potekhin and A. Z. Zusmanovich wrote that the Africans “work, fall and die. The same ditch is used for corpses and other purposes”.
The fate of Africans in Congo-Kinshasa was far worse. The Belgian King Leopold II  in

1885 seized all the lands and decreed that:  “The state has the right of absolute  and exclusive ownership  of all  the land and its fruits. Any person gathering any fruits whatsoever will be punished as a thief, and any person buying such fruits, as a purchaser of stolen goods”.

All Africans in Congo became automatic tenants on their ancestral land and had to pay rents to the colonialists. Additionally, it was the duty of every  African  to provide free food for the colonial soldiers and workers of the foreign companies like Lever Brothers.

Also, African villages were obliged to  supply particular foreign companies specific amount of rubber. Villages that failed to do so were wiped out; women and children were held as hostages while the men produced the  rubber requested. There were also mass amputations.

To add to these unimaginable crimes against humanity,  the colonialists also imposed as “tax”   at least 128 kilogrammes of palm kernel each. To the pauperised African, this requires  two to three months work. The alternative given was that the African worked free for European plantation owners.

Apart from these, there was also collective taxation under which villages and towns were given an amount of food stuff to supply free to a given colonial company.

The fact that  the African met these almost impossible conditions, did not mean he was free to work for himself or family.

In 1922, the Colonial  Governor General  instructed his officials thus: “Under no circumstances  whatsoever should it be permitted to occur that a peasant, who has paid his taxes and other legally required obligations, should be left with nothing to do.

The moral authority of the administrator, persuasion, encouragement and other measures should be adopted to make the native work”.

The vast “Free Congo”  measuring 2,345,410 square kilometres or about thrice the size of Nigeria, was run as a slave camp very much as the slave plantations in the United States, the main difference being that the Africans in Congo were not transported across the oceans.

From 1914, Africans were forced to grow cotton which must be sold only to a company, Cotonco at prices determined by the company.

With  a number    of African countries becoming independent, Belgium was forced to grant independence to   the Congo on June 30, 1960. A young civil servant, Patrice Lumumba was elected Prime Minister. He tried to move the new country towards true independence from Belgium and chart an independent foreign policy.

For such audacity, the Belgian,  French and American governments decided that Lumumba must not only be removed, but also killed. The American Central Intelligence Agency(CIA) sent agents to Kinshasa with poison to assassinate Lumumba, but before they could do so, the Belgians moved faster.

Within three months they had gotten the Katanga province to declare secession and ceremonial president  Joseph Kasavubu to illegally dismiss Lumumba.

The Prime Minister asked for peace keepers from the United Nations (UN), they arrived from various countries, including Nigeria only to put Lumumba under house arrest while the enemies of the country were given free rein to rampage, loot and dismember the country.

When he escaped from the UN troops, he was captured by those of ex-Corporal Joseph Mobutu which after torturing him, flew Lumumba to secessionist Katanga.

The Belgian government gave the nod, and Lumumba and two other leaders of the country were executed in a forest. That was 50  years ago, and until today, the Democratic  Republic of the Congo has not known peace.

Decolonisation which Frantz Fanon described as “always a violent phenomenon” was particularly bloody in colonies where the White man refused to leave. These included Kenya, Algeria, Guinea Bissau, Western Sahara, Cape Verde, Mozambique, Angola, Namibia, Zimbabwe and South Africa.

In the decolonisation process, the Europeans granted only what is called “flag independence”, that is the mere  replacement of the colonial flag with that of the new country while all other things, including the economy remained in the hands of the colonialists.

To ensure that the emergent countries did not cut off the umbilical cord, the mother colony also succeeded in most cases in  installing leaders who were opposed to the very idea of independence like Ahmadu Ahidjo in Cameroun and Abubakar Tafawa-Balewa in Nigeria.

Kwame Nkrumah in an August 6, 1960 speech in the Ghanaian parliament alerted

“There is real danger that the colonial powers will grant  a nominal type of political independence to individual small units so as to ensure that  the same old colonial type of economic  organisation continues long after independence  has been achieved”. This precisely was done in many cases, including Chad,  Central African Republic, Gabon, Sierra Leone, Benin and Togo.

Nkrumah also  warned of  the mother colony:  “With one hand  it may concede independence, while with the other it will stir  up the muddy waters of tribalism, feudalism, separatism and chicanery in order to find its way back in another guise”  After fifty years, Nkrumah’s words have come to pass.