SLAVERY AND COLONIALISM

The reasons why Europeans were seeking colonies so fervently in Africa are numerous, but none suggest cruelty, greed or evil-heartedness for them.

 Capitalism had reached a stage where control of capital was coming to be concentrated more and more in a few hands, which left too little purchasing power in the home market for the commodities that could be produced. Hence it created a situation of under-consumption. There was therefore the need to export to underdeveloped regions which might contain valuable raw materials.

The abundance of these raw materials in the underdeveloped regions might have caught the eye of these Europeans. And seeing that Africans obviously were not putting these vital raw materials into use as they would, naturally, they sought to put in mechanisms to dominate these resources. So with an upper hand in offensive weaponry, and no international laws to guard against an attempt to subjugate Africans, settled and dominated all facets of the African.

Another explanation borders on the prestige and honour it brought European governments, and the possibility to win voters when territories were won. Once again, it must not be forgotten that there were no international laws to make settling and domination illegal, nor were there global laws spelling out the rules of trade engagements.

Then there is the much hated reason, which is that the Europeans saw most of the practices in Africa and some parts of Asia as uncivilized, hence they took it upon themselves to embark upon a mission to civilize the world. This proclamation by the Europeans, partly racial and partly moral, may not be the best of remedies to what they saw as some of the morally inappropriate practices of some people in the world, but a slight justification comes for this mission to civilize when we consider human sacrifices made in the nineteenth century by some chiefs i as a traditional wont.

If thought determines action for persons, then by extrapolation the dominant ideologies in any period of time determine the phenomena of the world. The Europeans burnt women with strange behaviours at the stake in the era of witch-hunting. A phenomenon which occurred due to the idea of superstition.

This practice which was borne out of the belief in the supernatural does not exist anymore in these countries. The people who carried out acts like this and those of similar nature have gained the maturity in knowledge.

Pre-colonial Africa facilitated the European conquest. These internal dissension and conflicts said to have been brought about by artificial barriers of the colonizers, thereby alienating hitherto unified and organized African people existed even in pre-colonial Africa.

History attests that the states in pre-colonial Africa were plagued by internal dissonance because there were no widely accepted methods of transferring political power. African rulers supplied the major part of the 7.6 million slaves exported to the European colonies, as well as the unknown numbers sent by Muslim traders across the Sahara and the Indian Ocean

There is a significant link between some of the reasons of Africa's lateness to attaining socio-economic growth in the measure expected by virtue of her vast reserve of natural resources, and her colonial domination and slavery past.

Slavery and colonialism may have altered their path as Africans in their quest to the attainment of progress and the betterment of our living conditions. However, events in contemporary Africa, unpleasant as it may be, are caused by factors more within Africa and less by outside influences (no continent is without external challenges).

The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade was a double-edged sword benefiting Europe and devastating Africa. It initiated the trafficking in African human beings to be enslaved and work in the "New World." It is an indisputable historical truth that the wealth created by that enslavement fuelled the Industrial Revolution that, if we honestly track the historical turn of events, has created this century's "developed world." The complement to and handmaiden of slavery and the slave trade was colonialism. It was to work the "colonies" that Africans were first brought to the Americas. The colonies were exploited for their natural resources and for those that were then created by unpaid labour. First and foremost the resources went always to and for the benefit of the "Mother Country."

The TAST depleted Africa of millions of its strongest and most fit workers. That loss in and of itself was devastating to Africa's development. This dire situation was further compounded by the colonization of the African continent. Racism, the same ideology developed by Europeans to justify their inhumane trafficking in Africans, was then used to justify the European colonization of, not only Africa, but the rest of the world. Racism, first directed towards Africans, became the ideology of choice for European expansion and colonization of Asia and the Pacific. "Inferior peoples" (always non-white) were being brought the benefits of civilization. In exchange for the wonders of Christianity, they need only surrender their lands, its resources, their labour and right to self-determination. Those who would not concede the advantages of Christianity were to be convinced by steel and gunpowder. Thus by persuasion and force of arms, Europeans implanted themselves on the American and Asian continents and the Pacific Islands. Often their strategy was genocidal, elimination of the truly indigenous where they proved unwilling or unfit to provide a sufficient profit for their colonial masters.

The conditions of Africans in the Diaspora and the African continent are characterized by "underdevelopment." That underdevelopment is neither genetic or the result of individual character flaws but flow directly from the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, Slavery and Colonialism. They are inseparably intertwined and bound together by racism. Any attempt to sever them is ahistorical. Any attempt to redress one aspect without addressing the others is doomed to failure. This connection between racism, the TAST and colonialism is not simply an issue for Africa and Africans. Remember, "The sun never sets on the British Empire." This is a global issue, which is why the West's resistance to it has been so fierce, so "intransigent." If the WCAR establishes the principle of the TAST and Colonialism as crimes against humanity, a precedent will be set from which the vast majority of the world's countries, nearly all former colonies, can benefit.

Colonialism and the slave trade represented an international criminal conspiracy of Europeans for Europeans. Like organized crime gangs who start out fighting for their own turf and, at some point realize, killing each other is counter-productive. Europe summed up it is better to divide the spoils amongst each other than to continually fight against each other. The clearest expression of this international conspiracy, of this European criminal enterprise, took place in Berlin in 1885-86. The Berlin Conference divided Africa up between the colonial masters. It made for a tidier racket. Don't infringe on each other's. Notwithstanding, the fact that these gangs didn't always respect their territorial agreements (WWI and WWII), they always submerged their differences when a threat to white supremacy was posed by the "coloured" hordes.

In the case of Africa and the Caribbean region, the period of slavery and the slave trade was followed by the period of colonialism. It can be argued that colonialism itself was a crime in international law, for it was usurpation, imposed by force, of the rights of the colonized peoples to their sovereignty. It was a the very least a crime against peace, and, in most if not all colonized territories, crimes against humanity were frequently committed. In the case of the United States, former slaves were subjected to a system of exclusive, separate development, racial persecution, civil rights denials and ghettoisation, which has only in part been overcome in the recent years following the civil rights movement.

The important point is that African peoples, until recently, had no independent voice, nor even any status in the world community. How could, the people of, say, Ghana o Jamaica make a claim for reparations when their country was considered to be an 'overseas possession' of the very country whose people had kidnapped and enslaved their ancestors? ... Even after the independence of African nations from colonialism, the shackles of neo-colonialism have fettered the power of African governments to speak with any real independence against their former conquerors.