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Nation Building in Black Africa
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20428 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1992 |
4,662 Words |
| Author
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Robert I. Rotberg
Robert I. Rotberg is president of Lafayette College in Easton,
Pennsylvania. |
The process of creating nations in black Africa is still not concluded more than three decades after many were created and most of the continent south of the Sahara became free. Each state has a flag, an anthem, stamps, a state television and radio service, one or more official languages, and an identity. But each still contains a mélange of peoples, often uncomfortably yoked together in parliaments, cabinets, armies, and all aspects of official life.
When the colonial overlords retreated, beginning with Britain in the Sudan and Ghana in the 1950s, France in West and Equatorial Africa at the end of that decade, Britain, France, Belgium, and Italy in the great transfer of 1960, and then Britain and Portugal's settler areas of eastern and southern Africa throughout the succeeding decades, they left behind great geographical accidents and anomalies. The three hundred mile long silver that is Malawi makes no more sense historically than the outline of today's Togo or the larger and more rational-appearing shape of Zimbabwe. All, even obscure Djibouti or Equatorial Guinea, Spain's remnant, are products of the nineteenth century, when the nations of Europe occupied the shores and then the interior of black Africa.
Sea captains and slavers led the way, but it took an era of exploration from the late eighteenth century through three quarters of the nineteenth century for the continent's opportunities and obstacles to become known. Then, to oversimplify vastly, imperialism and the scramble for black Africa followed. Most often, especially in Britain's cases, the European conquest occurred more in order to keep others out than from naked greed. British finance ministers knew how horribly expensive conquest (and subsequent administration) could be. But their foreign ministers were nervous that French or German advances would adversely affect British hegemony worldwide. So preemptive competition prevailed, and the resulting carves up of black Africa followed the lines of easy access, momentary advantage, the feints of adversaries, accessible rivers, or the tracks of traders of and explorers.
The Germans and French raced to see which one would control the Ismalic strongholds of northern Nigeria, but the British won. Britain and Germany competed for the interior west of Zanzibar and eventually divided it. Cecil Rhodes, the South African mining magnate, competed with South African mining magnate, competed with Belgium's King Leopold for the copper riches of Katanga (Shaba), and Leopold using the armed might of a battalion led by a Nova Scotian mercenary killed a major chief and bested Rhodes. The Portuguese fought Rhodes for control
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