Society
Britain is fighting a losing battle in Africa
Published 18 September 2000
It is more than 40 years since Harold Macmillan stood on African soil and proclaimed the wind of change. It was not an act of generosity. Africa had bush-telegraphed revolt in pursuit of independence and of control over those raw materials that were so hotly chased by European imperialists.
Ever since the original encounter between Europe and Africa, there have been like minds on both sides of the divide. There were slave traders of dark as well as white skin. Recent events in Sierra Leone continue this tradition: it is all about diamonds, and no amount of government propaganda can conceal this trade in international capitalist greed.
British colonialism enmeshed, controlled, regulated and superintended civil society down to the private innards of African social life.
If we could target a date and place when the modern revolt began against British imperialism, it would be on 28 February 1948 in Accra, the capital of the Gold Coast, now Ghana. Members of the ex-servicemen's union, who had been demobbed after losing lives in the defence of European democracy, now pursued African democracy.
The colonial government had raised food prices, and the ex-soldiers had received no pension; members of the union marched on the governor's residence to protest. The superintendent of police, a white man, fired at the leaders. In the ensuing melee, three men were killed and several injured. News of the shooting generated widespread protest. European shops were looted. The police were unable to restore order for 48 hours. The act of white men shooting black men (not boys) on African soil will always, as it did 50 years ago, provoke outrage throughout Africa.
Recent events in Sierra Leone open yet another chapter in the conflict over raw materials. In the Gold Coast 50 years ago, it was gold; today, it is diamonds. The protagonists in this long historical war have changed little except that the masses are being involved in a completely different way.
African intellectuals led the continent's original thrust for freedom. They were educated in schools set up by missionaries, and then abroad in the universities of the conquerors from Oxford to Chicago and Moscow. They were the antithesis of most of the tribal leaders - modern figures educated in the wills and wiles of parliamentary democracy, the modern state, the standing army and modern mass education for all the people. Where there was an armed struggle for independence, as in Kenya and Rhodesia and South Africa, it was accompanied by a modern political party with the African intellectual at the helm: Kenyatta, Mugabe, Mandela.
This panoply of African nations collapsed in corruption and state brutality into military regimes, into militias of every tribal hue from Somalia to the ex-soldiers of Zimbabwe and South Africa to the West Side Boys (men) of Sierra Leone.
British commentators shout "thugs and bandits" at armed militias that tax local communities to survive. This wrongly brings a European sensibility to bear on African problems (although one might say that the "freedom fighters" of Ulster act no differently).
The ministries in African states which brought state education to the masses had unavoidably also brought a generation of African youth into the political and economic fray. These young people are as modern in their ways and demands as the youth of Los Angeles or Kingston. Thus we see young African men on our TV screens from Zimbabwe, Sierra Leone, South Africa and Somalia in the pursuit of freedom, armed to the teeth like American soldiers in Vietnam - and, also like them, drugged up to the eyeballs. The intellectual leaders are gone; the rebels no longer follow western standards.
The British government cannot defeat this army, increasing in numbers, criss- crossing African states with meaningless borders. It is a losing battle, which ought never to have been launched. Get out now, is my advice. Victory in a single battle in the jungles of Sierra Leone does not mean that the war is won.
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