Positive and Negative Impacts Western Colonialism Peoples

¶ … positive and negative impacts Western colonialism peoples Africa. Give specific examples.

Imperialism in Africa

European colonization of Africa was one of the most important events in world history, providing Europeans with the raw materials and labor resources to conquer and control much of the rest of the world. Moreover, centuries of European colonial domination left an indelible imprint on Africa's societies, economies, and cultures that is still visible nearly half a century after the end of decolonization. Though imperialism clearly benefited Africa and some Africans, on balance, it is clear that imperialism was negative for Africa and Africans.

Europeans had colonized Africa as far back as the Greeks' establishment of a mercantile colony at Naucratis in the sixth-century B.C.E. Typically, however, when scholars discuss colonization of the African continent, they are referring to the period from the sixteenth-century C.E. through the mid-twentieth century, when European powers vied with one another to exploit Africa's vast labor and mineral resources. The most important period of colonial activity, from the perspective of this paper, was the late-nineteenth century, a segment of the era in world history known as the "new imperialism," a period from France's conquest of Algeria in 1830 to the outbreak of World War I in 1914 and characterized by competition between European countries to control as much African territory as possible. By the end of the nineteenth-century, the Europeans' mad dash for African territory had paid impressive yields: Europeans controlled 10 million square miles of land inhabited by 110 million Africans, or almost the entire continent.[footnoteRef:-1] [-1: Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa: White Man's Conquest of the Dark Continent from 1876 to 1912 (New York: Random House, 1991), xxi.]

In order to fully exploit Africa's vast resources, European colonialists had to develop the continent's infrastructure. The largest and most important colonial infrastructure project is the Suez Canal, a waterway that connected the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian Ocean and opened in 1869. Another infrastructure project was Great Britain's "Cape to Cairo" Railway, an ambitious (and never completed) project designed to cross the continent from Cairo, Egypt in the north to Cape Town, South Africa in the south by a continuous railroad line. Both the Suez Canal and portions of the Cape to Cairo Railway are still in use, and they are both major economic engines for multiple African countries.[footnoteRef:0] In other words, European colonialists were responsible for constructing two of Africa's most important infrastructure projects, facilities that are still vital to the continent's economies today. [0: Christian Wolmar, Blood, Iron, and Gold: How the Railroads Transformed the World (New York: PublicAffairs, a member of the Perseus Books Group, 2010), 188.]

Yet, for all of the structural benefits of colonization -- the Suez Canal, the Cape to Cairo Railway -- the reality is that European colonization of Africa was devastating for the continent, responsible for the corruption and poverty that characterizes many African nations. According to famed historian Walter Rodney, European countries deliberately retarded African development so that they could exploit the continent's mineral and labor resources.[footnoteRef:1] Of course, the most obvious form of European colonial exploitation of Africa and Africans was slavery, which Rodney called "the basic factor" in Africa's underdevelopment. Though slavery goes back to ancient times, the emergence of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade in the mid-fifteenth century created a racial hierarchy in Africa that legitimized the expropriation of Africans' labor by force.[footnoteRef:2] This racial hierarchy existed, in modified form, in South Africa as late as 1994; called "apartheid," it was a system of legal discrimination and enforced segregation that had its roots in slavery. Slavery tainted everything, even Europe's "gifts" to the Africans; for instance, the French forced Egyptian peasants to perform the hazardous and backbreaking word of actually digging the Suez Canal, a form of chattel slavery known as "corvee."[footnoteRef:3] [1: Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Nairobi, Kenya: Sitima Printers and Stationers, Ltd., 2009), 8.] [2: Patrick Manning, Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental, and African Slave Trades (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 4. ] [3: Zachary Karabell, Parting the Desert: The Creation of the Suez Canal (New York:: Knopf Doubleday Publishing, 2004), 112.]

The negative effects of European colonization of Africa did not stop at enslavement and exploitation; as Rodney makes clear, European colonization left Africans with an enduring legacy of corruption and poverty. Despite the fact that Africa is Earth's second largest continent, and the planet's most populous, it remains the poorest. Moreover, as economist John Mukum Mbaku makes clear in his new book, Corruption in Africa: Causes, Consequences, and Cleanups, Africa "… is one of only a few regions that has failed to make any significant improvements in human development [since the end of the Cold War} & #8230; [and one] of the most important contributors to this state of affairs in Africa is corruption."[footnoteRef:4] [4: .John Mukum Mbaku, Corruption in Africa: Causes, Consequences, and Cleanups (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), xi.]