Literature and philosophy: intersections and concepts

¶ … Colonial Experience

Upper Africa

The Nineteenth Century brought dramatic changes to Africa and its people. The European powers divided up the continent among themselves. France took the lion's share, reserving most of Upper Africa to itself. Yet the French Empire in Africa was a diverse realm - Arab and Berber in the Maghreb, and Black African in the lands to the south of the Sahara. Not only ethnic differences, but also differences in cultural and economic development divided the peoples north and south of the great desert. At one stroke, the French found themselves masters of a vast population of Black Africans who knew little of the modern world. Organized primarily into small kingdoms, and tribal units, their societies harkened back to those of the pre-industrial age. They lacked modern technology, transportation, communication, and education. Their social life revolved around the family group and time-honored traditions. Exposure to an alien colonial regime challenged the very bases of their societies.

For the first time in history, the peoples of French Africa south of the Sahara found themselves intimately linked to the larger world. Their colonial masters expected them to become part of a global, imperial economy, to provide the labor and raw materials for French industry. While caravans had for centuries crisscrossed the Sahara, they had provided only an indirect connection between the Black Africans and the nations of Europe and Asia. Slave traders had long plied the waters of the continent's Atlantic coast, but their direct influence had been limited to a handful of forts along the seaboard. Various coastal kingdoms had monopolized this insidious trade in human beings. They were the middlemen who funneled human beings to the coast, and European products to the interior. Antiquated guns and mass-produced trinkets were the chief products offered for sale by European traders. African culture and society continued much as they were. It was only the sudden appearance of French soldiers, administrators, and businessmen in the heart of Africa at the end of the Nineteenth Century that brought real change.

However, this change was slow to take effect. It was more than twenty years before the French were able to develop a marketable commodity in the Sudan, cotton eventually moving more than seven hundred miles over rail for transshipment to Europe. Indeed, Africans were forced to grow cotton, as well as coffee and bananas when they should have been growing food. Heavy taxation combined with the resultant shortages forced thousands to migrate each year to the coast in search of seasonal employment on the cocoa and groundnut plantations and in the forests cutting timber. (Smitha) In a situation that was markedly worse than in most other colonies, French businessmen were given a free hand, and oppression was rampant:

The French conscripted Africans to labor on public works projects and on French owned plantations -- for the growing of crops destined not for Africans but for the people of Europe. And Africans were forced to work on the construction of three hundred miles of railroad from Brazzaville (on the Congo River) to Pointe Noire (on the Atlantic coast), construction that over a ten-year period killed nearly ten thousand."

Smitha)

Besides causing death and dislocation, such gross economic exploitation deprived the Africans of the means to develop their own economy and infrastructure. Such profits as existed went into European pockets, and the use of Africans as little more than draft animals robbed them of the opportunity to acquire more advanced skills.

However, it was not only in the field of economics that the French dominated. Unlike the British, they made little attempt to employ the native elites in the colonial government. The goal of colonial education was the turning of Africans into Frenchmen, so much so that members of the native elites even demanded a French education, and urged greater assimilation

It seemed the only way forward in a system where nearly every link in the chain of command led directly back to Paris. And while there was some experimentation with local government participation in Senegal, the general picture was one of almost complete control by the conqueror. Ineffectual, incompetent, and ignorant French civil servants were commonplace. Frequently sent to remote outposts, they often governed by brute force. (Wooten) Techniques such as these destroyed native authority and undermined the traditional social structure. Even worse they served to effectively prevent the vast majority of Africans from gaining any experience of Western democracy. European concepts of jurisprudence, the rule of law, and the consultation of the governed, were largely ignored, accustoming the Africans to the idea of a repressive, authoritarian regime. Self-expression, inquisitiveness, and freedom of choice - all so essential in a modern industrial economy were thwarted again and again by Eurocentric colonial policies. (Obadina)