Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

In view of the similarity of the problem faced by the newly independent nations, it may seem curious that they have not shown a greater tendency to cooperate with each other or to attempt to form some kind of common front toward the world. The chief effort to do this has been in the form of a number of meetings of so-called “uncommitted nations” of which the chief was held at Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955, and a number of efforts to move toward some kind of Pan-African system. On the whole, however, this effort toward cooperation has been blocked by three influences: (1) the sensitivity of newly independent nations to preserve this independence intact as long as possible, even to the degree that particularist local interests and rivalries are dominant over common interests; (2) the fact that all these nations need economic aid and technical assistance from the advanced countries, and are, on the whole, in competition with each other to get it; and (3) the tendency of many of the newly independent areas (such as Indonesia or Egypt) to adopt pro-Soviet attitudes in the Cold War leading to efforts by the Soviet Union to infringe upon their basically neutralist policies to persuade them to make a commitment to the Communist side in the Cold War.

In many ways the problems of independence have a distinctly different character in Africa from Asia. In Asia, as is traditional along the Pakistani-Peruvian axis, the structure of societies has been one in which a coalition of army, bureaucracy, landlords, and moneylenders have exploited a great mass of peasants by extortion of taxes, rents, low wages, and high interest rates in a system of such persistence that its basic structure goes back to the Bronze Age empires before 1000 b.c.

In Africa the situation has been quite different, and has generally been in constant flux. This results from a number of influences, of which one is that Africa has been underpopulated and has not developed the kind of land monopolization that supported Asiatic despotism. The dominant social units of African society have been kinship groups: extended families, lineages, clans, and tribes with landownership (generally of little importance) vested in these and often with a fairly wide division between ownership and rights of usufruct. Moreover, land use in Africa has generally been a fallow system, often of the “slash-and-burn” type, in which land is cropped for a few years and then abandoned for an extended period to recover its fertility. Thus agriculture has been on a shifting basis, and peasant life in Africa has been almost as mobile as pastoral activities are, without the permanent localism that is associated with rural villages in Eurasia. Moreover, in Africa tillage of the soil, usually by digging stick rather than by plow, has tended to be carried on by women, usually wives, and the relationship of the agricultural worker to any exploiter has been a matrimonial or family relationship rather than a relationship that was basically economic, as in Eurasia’s serfdom, hired laborer, or plantation slavery.

All these features of the basic relationships between men and the land in Africa have restricted the growth of the kind of agrarian superstructure associated with Asiatic despotisms, and left instead a very amorphous and fluctuating system in which no complex exploitative system could be screwed down on the masses of the people because these people were too free to move elsewhere. As a result of this, the kinship groups that are the chief feature of rural Africa are constantly mobile, and even today can tell how their common ancestor, a few generations back, arrived in their residence from some other vague place.

This mobile and transitory character of native African life has been increased by two other historical features of Africa’s past: the pastoral intrusions and slave raiding.

The pastoral intrusions arose from the movement into and across Africa of warlike peoples who lived from herds of cattle or horses and imposed their loose rule upon the more peaceful peasant natives. These pastoral intruders have been of two kinds. The first were Bantu cattle herders who derived their way of life from other peoples in northeastern Africa and moved generally south and southwest toward Natal and Angola. These include such savage fighting peoples as the Zulus or the Matabeles of Rhodesia.

The second pastoral group has been made up of Arabic or at least Islamized intruders, also from northeastern Africa, who have moved, generally westward across Africa, with horses. These generally followed the grasslands of the Sudan, between the desert and the tropical forest, and are found today as dominant and warlike upper classes in many areas such as northern Nigeria. Both groups of pastoral intruders brought in distinctive social and cultural contributions, including new religious ideas, and have enserfed numbers of the African peasants, as groups of villages or tribes rather than as individuals.

The second major force that has traditionally disrupted African life and prevented it from developing any elaborate social hierarchies or long residence linked to specific areas has been the practice of slave raiding, which goes back to ancient Egypt, was carried on by both kinds of pastoral intruders, and culminated in the devastation of much of Africa in the massive slave-trade raids of the middle nineteenth century, such as were witnessed by Dr. Livingston.

The establishment of European colonial rule over Africa, chiefly after 1880, eventually abolished the slave trade and greatly reduced the influence of the pastoral intruders. But this did not decrease the mobility and transitory characteristic of African life, since any increase in rural stability was more than overbalanced by the extension of commerce and of craft manufactures which led to a drastic growth of towns and the shattering of many of the kinship structures such as lineages and tribes. In fact, one of the most obvious problems brought to Africa by European influence has been the detachment of atomized individuals from the social nexus, based on blood and marriage, that previously guided their lives and determined their systems of values and obligations.

Each imperial power imposed its own patterns on the people under its colonial domination, most obviously in the introduction of its own Ianguage. These different patterns and languages remain as dominant forces after independence is achieved, serving to link together the areas with the same colonial past and to separate those with a different colonial experience. In fact, the division of Africa into separate French-speaking, English-speaking, and Portuguese-speaking areas (with all that these differences imply) is now one of the chief obstacles to the creation of any major Pan-African unity.

In very general terms we might say that the British impact on its African territories was largely political, the French was cultural, the Belgian was economic, and the Portuguese was religious.

The obsession of the upper classes of Britain with government and politics was reflected in their colonial policies, which emphasized the introduction of law and order, introduced political and legal systems based on English models, and educated the minority of native peoples who obtained education in the politically dominated training provided for the English upper classes (most educated natives studied political science and law). To this day ex-British colonial areas show this pattern.

The French in Africa talked of their “mission civilisatrice,” by which they meant, at a minimum, to offer native peoples the French language with a smattering of French culture. Many natives fell in love with this culture, and with Paris, so that when liberation came they did not, as did the British-trained natives, become obsessed with the spirit of political opposition, but rather showed a desire to continue the extension of French cultural life, especially literature, along with political independence. Today some of the best poetry written in the French language comes from Africans.