Subject: The wealth of the
west was built on Africa's exploitation
http://victoria.indymedia.org/news/2005/08/43097.php
The
wealth of the west was built on Africa's exploitation
...Robert
Beckford called on the British to take stock of this past. Why, he asked, had
Britain made no apology for African slavery, as it had done for the Irish potato
famine? Why was there no substantial public monument of national contrition
equivalent to Berlin's Holocaust Museum? Why, most crucially, was there no
recognition of how wealth extracted from Africa and Africans made possible the
vigour and prosperity of modern Britain?
The wealth of the west
was built on Africa's exploitation
Britain has never faced up to
the dark side of its imperial history
Richard Drayton
Saturday August 20, 2005
The
Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1552921,00.html
Britain was the principal slaving nation of the modern world.
In The Empire Pays Back, a documentary broadcast by Channel 4 on Monday, Robert
Beckford called on the British to take stock of this past. Why, he asked, had
Britain made no apology for African slavery, as it had done for the Irish potato
famine? Why was there no substantial public monument of national contrition
equivalent to Berlin's Holocaust Museum? Why, most crucially, was there no
recognition of how wealth extracted from Africa and Africans made possible the
vigour and prosperity of modern Britain? Was there not a case for Britain to pay
reparations to the descendants of African slaves?
These are
timely questions in a summer in which Blair and Bush, their hands still wet with
Iraqi blood, sought to rebrand themselves as the saviours of Africa. The G8's
debt-forgiveness initiative was spun successfully as an act of western altruism.
The generous Massas never bothered to explain that, in order to benefit,
governments must agree to "conditions", which included allowing profit-making
companies to take over public services. This was no gift; it was what the
merchant bankers would call a "debt-for-equity swap", the equity here being
national sovereignty. The sweetest bit of the deal was that the money owed,
already more than repaid in interest, had mostly gone to buy industrial imports
from the west and Japan, and oil from nations who bank their profits in London
and New York. Only in a bookkeeping sense had it ever left the rich world. No
one considered that Africa's debt was trivial compared to what the west really
owes Africa.
Beckford's experts estimated Britain's debt to
Africans in the continent and diaspora to be in the trillions of pounds. While
this was a useful benchmark, its basis was mistaken. Not because it was
excessive, but because the real debt is incalculable. For without Africa and its
Caribbean plantation extensions, the modern world as we know it would not
exist.
Profits from slave trading and from sugar, coffee, cotton
and tobacco are only a small part of the story. What mattered was how the pull
and push from these industries transformed western Europe's economies. English
banking, insurance, shipbuilding, wool and cotton manufacture, copper and iron
smelting, and the cities of Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow, multiplied in
response to the direct and indirect stimulus of the slave
plantations.
Joseph Inikori's masterful book, Africans and the
Industrial Revolution in England, shows how African consumers, free and
enslaved, nurtured Britain's infant manufacturing industry. As Malachy
Postlethwayt, the political economist, candidly put it in 1745: "British trade
is a magnificent superstructure of American commerce and naval power on an
African foundation."
In The Great Divergence, Kenneth Pomeranz
asked why Europe, rather than China, made the breakthrough first into a modern
industrial economy. To his two answers - abundant coal and New World colonies -
he should have added access to west Africa. For the colonial Americas were more
Africa's creation than Europe's: before 1800, far more Africans than Europeans
crossed the Atlantic. New World slaves were vital too, strangely enough, for
European trade in the east. For merchants needed precious metals to buy Asian
luxuries, returning home with profits in the form of textiles; only through
exchanging these cloths in Africa for slaves to be sold in the New World could
Europe obtain new gold and silver to keep the system moving. East Indian
companies led ultimately to Europe's domination of Asia and its 19th-century
humiliation of China.
Africa not only underpinned Europe's
earlier development. Its palm oil, petroleum, copper, chromium, platinum and in
particular gold were and are crucial to the later world economy. Only South
America, at the zenith of its silver mines, outranks Africa's contribution to
the growth of the global bullion supply.
The guinea coin paid
homage in its name to the west African origins of one flood of gold. By this
standard, the British pound since 1880 should have been rechristened the rand,
for Britain's prosperity and its currency stability depended on South Africa's
mines. I would wager that a large share of that gold in the IMF's vaults which
was supposed to pay for Africa's debt relief had originally been stolen from
that continent.
There are many who like to blame Africa's weak
governments and economies, famines and disease on its post-1960 leadership. But
the fragility of contemporary Africa is a direct consequence of two centuries of
slaving, followed by another of colonial despotism. Nor was "decolonisation" all
it seemed: both Britain and France attempted to corrupt the whole project of
political sovereignty.
It is remarkable that none of those in
Britain who talk about African dictatorship and kleptocracy seem aware that Idi
Amin came to power in Uganda through British covert action, and that Nigeria's
generals were supported and manipulated from 1960 onwards in support of
Britain's oil interests. It is amusing, too, to find the Telegraph and the Daily
Mail - which just a generation ago supported Ian Smith's Rhodesia and South
African apartheid - now so concerned about human rights in Zimbabwe. The tragedy
of Mugabe and others is that they learned too well from the British how to
govern without real popular consent, and how to make the law serve ruthless
private interest. The real appetite of the west for democracy in Africa is less
than it seems. We talk about the Congo tragedy without mentioning that it was a
British statesman, Alec Douglas-Home, who agreed with the US president in 1960
that Patrice Lumumba, its elected leader, needed to "fall into a river of
crocodiles".
African slavery and colonialism are not ancient or
foreign history; the world they made is around us in Britain. It is not merely
in economic terms that Africa underpins a modern experience of (white) British
privilege. Had Africa's signature not been visible on the body of the Brazilian
Jean Charles de Menezes, would he have been gunned down on a tube at Stockwell?
The slight kink of the hair, his pale beige skin, broadcast something misread by
police as foreign danger. In that sense, his shooting was the twin of the axe
murder of Anthony Walker in Liverpool, and of the more than 100 deaths of black
people in mysterious circumstances while in police, prison or hospital custody
since 1969.
This universe of risk, part of the black experience,
is the afterlife of slavery. The reverse of the medal is what WEB DuBois called
the "wage of whiteness", the world of safety, trustworthiness, welcome that
those with pale skins take for granted. The psychology of racism operates even
among those who believe in human equality, shaping unequal outcomes in
education, employment, criminal justice. By its light, such all-white clubs as
the G8 continue to meet in comfort.
Early this year, Gordon
Brown told journalists in Mozambique that Britain should stop apologising for
colonialism. The truth is, though, that Britain has never even faced up to the
dark side of its imperial history, let alone begun to
apologise.
Dr Richard Drayton is a senior lecturer in imperial
and extra-European history since 1500 at Cambridge University. His book The
Caribbean and the Making of the Modern World will be published in
2006.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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