as Recolonization, and Beyond Slavery, Capitalism, Racism, , , AFRICA IN THE COLONIAL AGES OF EMPIRE

Words like “colonialism” and “empire” were once frowned upon in AFRICA IN THE the U.S. and other Western mainstream media as worn-out left-wing rhetoric that didn’t fit reality. Not anymore! Tatah Mentan observes COLONIAL AGES that a growing chorus of right-wing ideologues, with close ties to the Western administrations’ war-making hawks in NATO, are encouraging OF EMPIRE Washington and the rest of Europe to take pride in the expansion of Slavery, Capitalism, Racism, Colonialism, Decolonization, their power over people and nations around the globe. Independence as Recolonization, and Beyond Africa in the Colonial Ages of Empire is written from the perspective that the scholarly lives of academics researching on Africa are changing, constantly in flux and increasingly bound to the demands of Western colonial . This existential situation has forced the continent to morph into a tool in the hands of . According to Tatah Mentan, the effects of this existential situation of Africa compel serious academic scrutiny. At the same time, inquiry into the African predicament has been changing and evolving within and against the rhythms of this “new normal” of Colonial Empire-Old or New. The author insists that the long and bloody history of imperial conquest that began with the dawn of capitalism needs critical scholarly examination. As Marx wrote in Capital: “The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signaled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moment of primitive accumulation.” Africa in the Colonial Ages of Empire is therefore a MUST-READ for faculty, students as well as policy makers alike in the Tatah Mentan changing dynamics of their profession, be it theoretically, methodologically, or structurally and materially.

TATAH MENTAN is an erudite Theodore Lentz Peace and Security Studies Fellow and Professor of Political Science with enormous contributions to knowledge in the global political economy of international relations.

Langaa Research & Publishing Common Initiative Group P.O. Box 902 Mankon Bamenda Tatah Mentan North West Region Cameroon

AFRICA IN THE COLONIAL AGES OF EMPIRE Slavery, Capitalism, Racism, Colonialism, Decolonization, Independence as Recolonization, and Beyond.

Tatah Mentan

Langaa Research & Publishing CIG Mankon, Bamenda Publisher: Langaa RPCIG Langaa Research & Publishing Common Initiative Group P.O. Box 902 Mankon Bamenda North West Region Cameroon [email protected] www.langaa-rpcig.net

Distributed in and outside N. America by African Books Collective [email protected] www.africanbookscollective.com

ISBN-10: 9956-764-09-4 ISBN-13: 978-9956-764-09-9

© Tatah Mentan 2018

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical or electronic, including photocopying and recording, or be stored in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher

Dedication

The colonial encirclement of the world is an integral component of European history from the Early Modern Period to the phase of decolonization and beyond. Individual national and expansion histories referred to each other in varying degrees at different times but often also reinforced each other. Transfer processes within European Empires and in the colonies show that not only genuine colonial powers such as Spain and England, but also “latecomers” such as Germany participated in the historical process of colonial expansion with which Europe decisively shaped world history. In turn, this process also clearly shaped Europe itself. This book is therefore dedicated to African victims of this encircling process whereby the dominant politico-economic interests of Colonial Empire expropriate for their own enrichment the land, labor, raw materials, and markets of the African continent and its people for many centuries.

Table of Contents

Part I: Prolegomena to the Colonial Ages of Empire-Old and New…………………………………… 1

Chapter One: Introduction and Summary………..…………… 3

Chapter Two: On Colonial Empire: Theoretical Situatedness……………………………………… 33

Part II: Africa in the Old Colonial Age of Empire………… 81

Chapter Three: The Cotton Empire of Slavery, Racism and Resistance………………..……………… 83

Chapter Four: Africa in the Old Empire Of Territorial …………………………………… 119

Chapter Five: Africa: Legacies of Old Colonial Age of Empire……………………………………… 177

Part III: Africa in the New Colonial Age of Empire…………………..…………………………… 229

Chapter Six: Africa between Independence and Neocolonial Age of Empire…………….………………… 231

Chapter Seven: Africa in the Neoliberal Colonial Age of Empire……………….……………………… 291

Chapter Eight: Africa in the Colonial Age of Globalization Empire………….……………………… 353

v Part IV: Back to the Future and Exiting the Colonial Ages of Empire……………...………………… 411

Chapter Nine: Reprise, Summary, and Conclusion…….……… 413

Chapter Ten: Which Way Africa-Towards Africa-Exit from Colonial Empire? …………...……………… 443

vi Acknowledgements

Researching and writing this book was much harder than it appeared to me at first. I had unfathomable help along the way. First, I want to extend a warm and deeply appreciative thank you to Professor Rose Brewer for inspiring me to dig deep into Africa’s historical trajectory in American and world history. She gave me an inspiring opportunity to give a talk to her students in April 2001 on the African Predicament. The challenging questions her students raised for our discussion during the talk compelled me to seek to understand what happened that Africa and Africans became objects of scorn, enslavement, spoliation, colonization, and exploitative enclosures in world capitalist imperial history. Being in this land, I realized that virtually no part of the modern United States as well as the capitalist world system—the economy, education, constitutional law, religious institutions, sports, literature, economics, even protest movements—can be understood without first understanding the slavery and dispossession that laid its foundation. To that end, I opted to dig deeply into Europe’s colonization of Africa and the New World, when, from Columbus’s arrival until the Civil War, some tens of million Africans and some 5 million Native Americans were forced to build and cultivate a society extolling “liberty and justice for all.” The seventeenth century was an era when the roots of slavery, white supremacy, and capitalism became inextricably tangled into a complex history involving war and revolts in Europe, England’s conquest of the Scots and Irish, the development of formidable new weaponry able to ensure Europe’s colonial dominance, the rebel merchants of North America who created “these United States,” and the hordes of Europeans whose newfound opportunities in this “free” land amounted to “combat pay” for their efforts as “white” settlers. Centering this book on Africa in the Colonial ages of Empire, I attempt to provide a deeply researched, harrowing account of the apocalyptic loss and misery of Africa and its people that likely has no parallel in . Such an effort could not succeed without tremendous help from other scholars. These scholars range

vii from theoreticians of imperialism to historical chroniclers of historical events on both sides of the ideological spectrum. These scholars are so numerous that making a laundry list of their names will fill a whole book. Hence, I simply say: A Big Thank You to those academic forebears. Finally, I recognize that none of my writing would take place without the patient support and encouragement of my family. We discuss the ideas found in this book frequently, why the historical events happened and how to say them better.

viii Abbreviations and Acronyms

CAS Country Assistance Strategy CPIA Country Policy and Institutional Assessment CSO Civil society organization DNA DeoxyriboNucleic Acid DPL Development policy lending FY Fiscal year GATT General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade IBRD International Bank for Reconstruction and Development IDA International Development Association IMF International Monetary Fund LDP Letter of Development Policy LIC Low-income country MDG Millennium Development Goal MOU Memorandum of Understanding MIC Middle-income country PAF Performance assessment framework OED Operations Evaluation Department OP Operational Policy (statement) OPCS Operations Policy and Country Services PRS Poverty reduction strategy PRSC Poverty reduction support credit PRSP Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper UNCTAD Conference on Trade and Development UNICEF United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund WB World Bank

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Part I

Prolegomena to the Colonial Ages of Empire- Old and New

Preview

Colonial Empire is a complex, intricate constellation or web of interrelations between the powerful colonizer and marginalized colonized people, characterized by uneven power relations but constantly negotiated and aimed at the submission of those on the periphery and who are often in distant settings, by taking over and controlling minds, land and resources. Colonial Empire is a historically dynamic thing subject to change as predominant notions of what the empire represents as a subject are themselves transformed. To make this argument, this paper borrows from two different critiques of the colonial empires. Attraction of colonial empire entails more than tolerating propaganda, the ideological image of political stability and peace, and economic security and progress (= control) as the benefits of colonial empire – whether through empire’s self-portrayal or the perceptions generated by its direct, implicated and indirect beneficiaries. Attraction of empire is about its appeal, its perceived ‘rationality’, including normality, properness and order. All of life is integrated in what can be called an imperial framework project, and no effort, forceful, persuasive or otherwise, is spared to prove the framework as rational and beneficial to all. Problems show up when it is challenged, or when the power source or material means that maintains it collapses, or when the majority of people are no longer convinced that it is indeed a proper and rational framework. Investigations of Colonial Empire beyond socio-historical, descriptive and similar investigations could include: how groups and communities struggled to deal with the imperial pull and push of conquest, spoliation, assimilation, and resultant dangers; efforts to maintain a certain identity and/or tradition in the face of imperial imposition; and, to understand the efforts to move towards the rewriting of a group’s identity completely, in contradistinction from imperial influence and impact.

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2 Chapter 1

Introduction and Summary

Overview

European colonial empires began with a race of between the then most advanced maritime powers, Portugal and Spain, during the 15th century. The initial impulse behind these dispersed maritime empires and those that followed was trade, driven by the new ideas and the capitalism that grew out of the European Renaissance. Agreements were also made to divide the world up between them in 1479, 1493, and 1494. European imperialism was born out of competition between European Christians and Ottoman Muslims, the latter of which rose up quickly in the 14th century and forced the Spanish and Portuguese to seek new trade routes to China. To understand the impact of European empires on Africa, any worthy study must focus on four patterns that shed light on the ethics of outside interventions: (1) the epidemiological and bodily harms caused by conquest, cultural genocide, and economic underdevelopment; (2) the uneven and inadequate infrastructures established during the colonial era, including certain politically iatrogenic consequences; (3) the ethical ambiguities and transgressions of colonial research and campaigns; and (4) the concerted and inadvertent efforts to undermine African socio-cultural and political practices, which were not always commensurable with introduced European techniques. This kind of historical analysis helps us home in on different kinds of ethical problems that have grown out of past asymmetries of power-between people, professions, states, and institutions-that shape the nature of international political systems to this day in Africa.

Introduction

Empire is currently the overarching concept in all discussions of imperialism and colonialism. An empire can be defined minimally as a relationship “of political control imposed by some political societies over the effective sovereignty of other political societies” (Doyle 1986, p. 19). Yet, this definition does not appeal to some scholars. For example, Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri’s Empire has as its main premise that the era of “Imperialism” is over and that we are now living in an era of the so-called “Empire.” Negri is “the leading advocate of a theory that claims that the age of imperialism is dead.” Really! It

3 is correct to say, as Negri himself does, that modern society is a truly “globalized” society, that capitalism has reached such a level of expansion that it is able to extend its tentacles into every nook and cranny of the planet. However, at the same time, the limits imposed by the nation state, which are the expression of the various national capitalist classes, cannot be overcome within the capitalist economy itself and represent a massive fetter on the future development of humankind. Today, more than ever before, such a contradiction can only be resolved by the destruction of capitalism, thus creating the conditions for putting an end to borders and the nation-state, and for building the union of workers of all nationalities into a world socialist federation. But, departing from the perspectives of Hardt and Negri in Empire, Panitch and Gindin’s book is one with a clear center. In The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire by Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin (2012), there is a fundamental thesis which structures the book. The thesis is that to understand the emergence of contemporary global colonial capitalism, it is necessary to consider first and foremost the role played by the states in its construction. Taking issue with various “globo-philic” ideas, the premise is that, far from being the result of economic determinants that operate “automatically,” global capitalism has depended on the capacity of the state to create mechanisms suitable for the internationalization of capital: primarily, the capacity for the US state to function as guarantor of the accumulation of capital on a world scale (Mentan, 2013). This book is therefore about imperial capitalist globalization and the state. It shows that far from being an inevitable outcome of inherently expansionist economic tendencies, the spread of capitalist markets, values and social relationships around the world has depended on the agency of states throughout the Old and New Colonial Empires, particularly in Africa. The reason is that in the capitalist world, there has never been, and probably never will be, a situation in which a world power engages in military conflict only to give up its share of the spoils to the imaginary ‘Empire’ to which it allegedly belongs. An empire usually involves a core polity governing peripheral spaces and populations; peripheries are typically subjected to different legal and administrative practices than the core. As Suny (Suny 2001, p. 25) writes, an empire is “a particular form of domination or control between two units set apart in a hierarchical, inequitable relationship, more precisely a composite state in which a metropole dominates a periphery to the disadvantage of the periphery.” What has empire got to do with Africa in the 21st century, when African countries (Mentan, 2010) are flying national flags and singing national anthems?

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