The End Of Colonialism In Africa

THE 1950's The 1950's was a time of accelerated political change. At the end of the Second World War there were only three independent countries in Africa:

• Liberia, which had been founded by freed slaves and declared itself independent in 1847.
• Ethiopia, which was an ancient territory, had never been colonized by a European power despite the attempts of the Italians in the 1880's and 1930's
• and Egypt, which had achieved independence in 1922.In 1951

Libya was granted independence from Hitler's former ally, war-weary Italy. Egypt renounced its historic control over Sudan. Britain had little choice then but to grant full independence to Sudan in 1956. In the same year, Morocco and Tunisia became independent of France.

Leaders of Indian Nationalism, Ghandi and Nehru, 1948.

INFLUENCES: INDIA: The country which made the biggest impact on African nationalists was India which was led to independence by Mahatma Gandhi in 1947. His confident doctrine of nonviolence, and his track record battling racial prejudice in South Africa made him a hugely influential model among African nationalists. He was assassinated in January 1948.

1945 Pan-African Congress , Chorlton Town Hall in Manchester England.

PAN-AFRICANS: Already in 1945 at the 5th Pan African Congress in Manchester, UK, there were a number of delegates who were later to bring their countries to independence. These included Hastings Banda (later President of Malawi), Kwame Nkrumah (later President of Ghana), Obafemi Awolowo (later Premier of the South West Region Nigeria) and Jomo Kenyatta (later President of Kenya).

But nobody could have predicted that within fifteen years of the meeting in Manchester, the vast majority of African countries would be independent. In the early 1950's, Julius Nyerere estimated that complete independence would not happen until the 1980's.

AFRICA & USA & SOVIET UNION: On the world stage America wanted an end to colonialism for reasons of free trade (easy access to African markets which had previously bought from Europe) and political influence. The Soviet Union wanted an end to colonialism and capitalism for reasons of ideology and to increase its sphere of influence.

While African nationalists took a pragmatic view of soviet style communism, the British government was concerned about the Soviet influence on Africa. And where African nationalists met with resistance or persecution from Europe, many welcomed the support and interest of the Soviet Union.

AFRICA & USA & SOVIET UNION: "…generally speaking, it is the detribalised native who responds best to communism, as he misses the narrow confines of tribal life and a leader on whom to bestow loyalty. This gives the Rand, with its inflow of immigrant labour, its special importance in the diffusion of communism in Africa…

Communism has made the least progress where the influence of Islam is strongest. Though in the past year the communist picture has been one of retrogression on some fronts, there are signs of increased interest in anti-colonialism from Moscow." --British Foreign and Colonial Office, Notes on the Aims, Strategy and Procedure of the Communists in Africa, 1 May 1950.

(source: BBC)

THE WIND OF CHANGE (the end of colonialism in africa) 1

Chinese Neo-Imperialism in Africa

After King Leopold's Belgium exploitation of the Congo. The Chinese are rapidly replacing the Europeans overexploitation of African land, labor, and natural resources.

The Financial Times writes: The Beijing Consensus: How China’s Authoritarian Model will Dominate the Twenty-First Century, by Stefan Halper, Basic Books £16.99, 312 pages

On his first visit to China late last year, Barack Obama stuck closely to the script mapped out by his predecessors George W Bush and Bill Clinton. He asserted that America welcomed China’s growing wealth and power. Relations between the US and China were not, he insisted, a “zero-sum game”. America was comfortable with a rising China.

Stefan Halper, a senior research fellow at Magdalene College, Cambridge and a former official in the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations, is having none of it. He believes that the coming decades will see an increasingly overt competition between the two nations. China, he asserts, “poses the most serious challenge to the United States since the half-century cold war struggle with the Soviets”. What is more, Halper is not particularly optimistic about America’s chances in this new struggle. His book is subtitled “How China’s Authoritarian Model will Dominate the Twenty-First Century”.

Halper says he has been on a voyage of intellectual discovery. His initial intention was to “produce a book on the rise of the new consumer class [in China] and how the process was eating away at the power of the ruling party”. The notion that capitalism will eventually bring democracy to China has been a crucial part of the west’s approach to the country, ever since the opening of the Chinese economy in 1978. The collapse of communism in eastern Europe in 1989 strengthened the mainstream American belief in the onward march of economic and political liberalism, otherwise known as the “end of history”. (source: The UK Financial Times)

Watch the youtube video below as Serge Michel and Michel Beuret, tell the dramatic -- and largely unknown-- story of the rise of China's economic empire in Africa and how it stands to transform geopolitics.

Over the course of nearly two years, Michel and Beuret traveled thousands of miles between China and Africa to report the story of this collaboration. Supplemented by the work of award-winning photojournalist Paolo Woods, China Safari establishes why the world is coming to realize Africa's potential and what role China is playing in the transformation.

Authors@Google: Serge Michel & Paolo Woods

Why history matters: The past in the present

Does History matter? How does the past shape the present? Should history play a role in shaping politics today? Should we be held accountable for the wrongs of the past? Does history divide or unite us? Former Premier of NSW Bob Carr and prominent Australian and American scholars discussed these and other issues.

How do studies of race and slavery, the American Civil War, Guantanamo Bay, the ANZACs and the stolen generations affect the way we see ourselves, and others? Panelists explore how and what we remember collectively, and how this contributes to our sense of patriotism, nationalism, or indeed, alienation. What does it mean to write, and embrace, more inclusive histories? Can new accounts of the past help us to create a better future? This forum takes up the challenge of determining how history matters, and who should take responsibility for it.

Participants:

• Bob Carr, former Premier of New South Wales and US Studies Centre Board of Directors

• David Blight, Yale University, author of Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001), and Director, Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University

• W. Fitzhugh Brundage, University of North Carolina, author of The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory (2005)

• James T. Campbell, Stanford University, author of Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787-2005 (2006), and Chairman of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice

• Jonathan Hansen, Harvard University, author of The Lost Promise of Patriotism: Debating American Identity, 1890-1920 (2003)

• Glenda Sluga, University of Sydney, author of The Nation, Psychology and International Politics (2006)

A Sydney Ideas Forum co-presented by the United States Studies Centre, and the Department of History, SOPHI at the University of Sydney

Why history matters: The past in the present (Watch online)

Why history matters: The past in the present from United States Studies Centre on Vimeo.

Americans follow African slave trail

Donkor Nsuo "Slave River" at Assin Manso, Ghana

Photographer George Marfo, 2006

The BBC's Orla Guerin meets African Americans coming to Ghana in the hope of connecting spiritually with West African ancestors sold into slavery.

Tina Bailey feels the pull of Africa - so strongly that she has just traveled to Ghana from her home in Tennessee for the third time.

She is one of many African Americans coming to follow in the footsteps of ancestors they cannot name who were enslaved and sent to the New World.

The first stop for Tina's tour group is by the "slave river" at Assin Manso - where captives had their last bathe on African soil. Tina slips away from the group to spend a moment alone by the water's edge. She says it is hard to see all this again, but she feels compelled to.

"It's very hard, it's very hurtful," she says, speaking through her tears.

"But if this happened to my people, I can at least walk their path several times. It's my connection to home. It's probably the only way I'll know where home is."

Tina can't be sure her ancestors were Ghanaian. She knows they came from West Africa and is considering DNA testing to try to find out more. But for her this is a homecoming, and the history here is deeply personal.

"This is my pain," she says, "and my mother's pain, my family's pain, and it hurts a lot," she says.

Ghanaian welcome

Further down the coast, the slave castles built by the European powers still stand - brutal reminders of a time West Africa was robbed of the young and the strong, and the future was taken away in chains.

The first stop is at Cape Coast Castle - forbidding and fortified - which was at the centre of the slave trade.

Tina and her fellow tourists, who come from across the USA, descend to the dungeons. They are airless, dark, desperate places. Each one held up to 200 men, crammed in, struggling for breath. They waited a month for the slave ships to arrive. Local experts say more than half of them died.

The tourists form a circle, joining their hands and bowing their heads in honour of their dead ancestors.

Outside in the courtyard, Obasi Kitambi, a doctoral student from Chicago, says it was painful that his people "endured so much treachery and torture and pain, and even today people are not really acknowledging that".

But he says it is "critical" that African Americans make this journey.

Ghana is keen to bring back the descendants of the slaves, to visit, invest or take up residence.

It is urging every African in the diaspora to make a pilgrimage here at least once in their lifetimes, and bear witness to history. Some are doing more than that.

Rosa Kincaid, a doctor based in St Louis, has made a lasting connection to the Ghanaian village of Kanka.

Wearing traditional robes and draped in glittering jewellery, including an ornate crown, she was made an honorary chief of the village, where she hopes to build a clinic.

"I am the sister who has returned, the daughter who has returned," she told villagers at the ceremony "and I thank you for the opportunity to serve you all."

She says it will not be easy to deliver a clinic for the villagers but she hopes to be "empowered by the ancestors".

Sensing the horror

Two hundred years after Britain abolished the slave trade, there is talk in Ghana of the need for the West to address the debts of history - to begin a debate on the issue of reparations and what form they might take.

Many African Americans are haunted by slavery and its legacy, and feel they have not received an adequate apology.

According to the American civil rights activist, the Rev Jesse Jackson, "there must be some sense of remorse, and some commitment to attempt to repay the damage done".

On a visit to Ghana, he told BBC News that the beneficiaries of the slave trade, including Britain and America, should face the truth of the past.

"It's time for truth and reconciliation," he said.

"But those who want reconciliation want to avoid the truth of the exploitation. Africa is the foundation of Europe and America's wealth. Africa is the creditor. Europe and America are the debtors."

Back at the coast, the last stop for the tourists is Elmina Castle, which was built by the Portuguese in 1482 - before Columbus discovered America.

They squeeze through the narrow arch that leads to the "room of no return". It's grimy and claustrophobic, empty of everything but the sins of the past.

From here the slaves were forced on to ships that would take them across the Atlantic to toil and die.

"You can feel the spirits here," Tina Bailey says.

"You can smell what happened here. You can almost taste it. It was quite a holocaust, very inhumane, and I'd like to say never again - never, ever again."

For Tina, Ghana is journey's end. After her death she wants her ashes brought here from America and scattered at a beach along the coast. (source: BBC)

Namibian Skulls to be Returned from Germany

In the Namibian article entitled, "Ovaherero Skulls And The German Genocide Challenge," Bob Kandetu writes, WORD is around that May 28 2011 will mark the repatriation of the skulls of Namibians from Germany, which were exported during the German-Ovaherero wars in Namibia.

The mood is at best sombre among the Ovaherero and somewhat reminiscent of a day in 1923, when the remains of the watershed Ovaherero King Samuel Maharero were awaited from Botswana by train.

Ovaherero men had spent days frequenting the Okahandja train station. When the train stopped, Hosea Kutako signalled in loud voice. ‘Omuhona Uavaza’. A sea of men stood at attention and when the coffin was drawn from the train by men in uniform, hundreds broke down and cried profusely as if in despair. Then thousands escorted the coffin to the Otjiserandu Commando. They were boxed in by hundreds of horse riders. It was a day filled with mourning and reflection for the Ovaherero of Namibia.

It is hard to imagine what will happen on that day when the skulls will arrive from Germany, but there won’t be celebrations. Recently Utjiua Muinjangue reported in her speech during the Swakopmund commemoration of the Orumbo Rua Katjombondi. She spoke of her visit to Germany and reported having seen one of the Ovaherero skulls in the archives of the Albert-Ludwig University in Freiburg. The number 744 was inscribed onto the skull and the accompanying envelope contained a note with the words: Swakopmund: Süd-West Afrika. Muinjangue paused with a hoarse voice; the audience was in deep reflection and their mood was telling.

The Ovaherero await the repatriation of the skulls with mixed feelings. They are guardedly happy that this is happening yet they battle with this pent-up rage too. These skulls were taken from Namibia, Swakopmund to be specific. During the war between the Ovaherero and Germans, men were hanged at Orumbo, their heads were removed and their wives forced to clean these heads so that they can be shipped to Germany for laboratory explorations. Those women who declined the instructions were executed on the spot and their bodies buried in the same graves as their beheaded husbands.

These are the skulls that will be repatriated from Germany and it is no joke that there is rage in the hearts of the Ovaherero men and women at the prospect of receiving these skulls back from Germany. And I intend to mount a campaign for these skulls to be buried in the Orumbo rua Katjombondi in Swakopmund from where they originated, with a fitting ceremony.

Germans packing African skulls to be sent to Germany

Colonialism was armed robbery and even more; it left behind more devastation than benefits for the subjects, the victims of colonialism. The Ovaherero never declared war on the Germans, in fact they could not, because they had no capacity to travel to Germany and declare war on the German throne. They were found in the only dwelling place they had and knew. After the extermination order and its manifestations, eighty per cent of the Ovaherero had fallen and were destroyed. Their properties were reduced to rubble, their wealth expropriated. They reported to a government they did not know and could never have wished for. This gave rise to the thought of John Updike who once said: “The world itself is stolen wealth… all property is theft and those who have stolen most of it, make the laws for the rest of us”.

Traditional Nama-Herero Grave

The Ovaherero of Namibia have all the right to charge the German government with genocide and the German government must shoulder the responsibility. No amount of academic discourse will do the trick. (source: The Namibian, 5 April 2011)