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Africa Under Imperialism
By Omer Bin Abdullah
27/01/2001
Years ago, I visited Italy on a journalistic assignment, which included traveling from Rome to Milan. A middle-aged secretary at the host organization quietly whispered into my ear that I travel by train instead of Alitalia, because “Mussolini did not make Alitalia.” He was right. I traveled in comfort in the train but had a difficult time flying back to Rome.
Perhaps this is equally true of most former colonies. These countries were well kept and orderly when under alien rule, but have become unkempt and continue a downward slide. The colonial plunder notwithstanding these countries had far more economic resilience than they have under their rule. The colonial administrators replicated a world of their own, but left their possessions to the mercies of those who either lacked the knowledge to govern or were disloyal to the motherland. In a way it a sort of ‘scorched earth’ policy where rulers erected temporary tents, had fun with nary a thought if these tents would see another day.
A Western physician who traveled to Egypt in 1982, the land of her birth, could not help noticing: “Ugly elevated roadways forced their way around the city and past the entrance to al-Azhar, the oldest university in the world. Sterile, generic apartment buildings were pasted in clusters in new suburbs with names like 'Nasser City.' The main station, once crenellated and striped like a Moorish palace had been re-faced, and in the process made faceless, with stucco.”
She added” “Nothing seemed to function: the drains in the streets backed up, there was a permanent gridlock of cars, camels and donkey-carts, telephone directories were in Arabic only, but it made no difference, since the system did not work, anyway…At Luxor, plastic Coca-Cola bottles floated in the Nile.”
The ravages of colonialism are too numerous to list; especially the biggest victim has been the Muslim self-respect.
Egypt was opened to the West for the first time in 1798 by Napoleon, and this began the extraordinary evolution of its present identity. The body of savants that accompanied Napoleon's army set about cataloguing and classifying Egypt, its flora and fauna, its art, its architecture, its monuments and its inhabitants, as if it were some newly discovered species. This set the tone for the "otherness" described by Edward Said that has characterized the Orient in general and Egypt in particular, in the Western mind. At the same time, Napoleon revealed to the world the prize that the expanding nations of Europe would compete for over the next two centuries, and revealed to Egypt the attractions of the West that would have such an enormous impact on its identity.
France considered that it had a "mission civilisatrice,” which was, as Said expresses it:
To restore a region from its present barbarism to its classical greatness, to instruct (for its own benefit) the Orient in the ways of the modern West...to formulate the Orient, to give it shape, identity, definition, with full recognition of its place in memory, its importance to imperial strategy, and its "natural" role as an appendage to Europe...to feel oneself as a European in command, almost at will, of Oriental history, time and geography... Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 86.
Napoleon, in fact, failed to appropriate Egypt as part of his empire, but French culture and civilization took hold there in a manner altogether disproportional to the total duration of France's occupation of the country.
France left a bedazzled Muhammad Ali that he set about deliberately introducing European ideas and skills into Egypt during his 40 years' leadership, and grafting European traits onto the Egyptian identity. Everything European was identified as progressive, powerful, and desirable. French replaced Turkish as the language of the cultivated; students were sent to France and England to acquire a European education and bring back habits of order, submission, and obedience, which would supposedly transform Egypt's outlook, and move it very rapidly into the modern world. French administration, military organization, and even sewer systems were transplanted into Egypt in the hope of turning it into a Western nation overnight.
The process was continued by his son, Said, who began the construction of the Suez Canal, a vast symbolic monument to Egypt's fascination with the West. Ali’s grandson, Ismail, carried it still further. He was so impressed by Paris that he decided to do exactly the same thing in Cairo. He brought in architects and planners to create an instant Paris on the Nile, cutting through medieval parts of the city, destroying whatever history was in the way of the desirable long straight boulevards, and building the elegant apartment houses, hotels particuliers and gardens.
Ismail's deliberate separation of Cairo into a modern European section and the old medieval section symbolically began the separation that is characteristic of Egyptian society (as indeed of many colonized societies) -- that is, a splitting of its identity into East and West, ancient and modern that has persisted ever since, and which accounts for r a good deal of the problem of Egypt's self-image. Ismail's wild extravagance in the pursuit of the European dream also set in motion the train of Egypt's perpetual indebtedness, and laid the country wide open to other kinds of colonization.
At the time Egypt was already under such cultural devastation, that Britain stepped in and took the country over, body and soul, on the pretext of straightening out Ismail's financial disasters, imposing almost every aspect of the British way of life upon the Egyptians.
For Britain, the Egyptians were just another form of raw material for Britain's industrial society.
Britain did make the country run in a way that it had never done before, gave it an efficient administration, straightened out its financial chaos, built the first Aswan Dam and organized a flourishing trade in raw cotton; but at the price of making Egypt totally dependent, passive and convinced that it was incapable of directing its own affairs or developing in any way. Egypt was systematically barred from the sort of industrial development that would have enabled it eventually to become financially independent. In particular, it was made to rely mainly on the production of raw cotton to supply British factories, and was then a convenient, captive market for British manufactured goods. The myth was perpetuated that the climate was too dry for textile production. The only significant indigenous enterprise that took off during the time of the British occupation was the establishment of the Banque Misr. Other than that, it was astonishing to find even a few locally manufactured items such as canned mangoes and tomato ketchup.
Egypt was in effect kept in a position of extreme dependence, and its identity was affected accordingly.
Egypt lacked stature, and its self-image was diminished by the perpetual humiliation of its occupation. Colonialism had the same effect elsewhere: In Northern Nigeria, there was one white administrator for every 100,000 Africans.
The much touted ‘civilizing’ can be judged from the fact that only 5% of the Africans were educated in missionary schools. They received a western style education, not in order to become leaders of their own countries, but to assume subordinate positions in the colonial system.
Africa’s poor gained little or nothing from colonialism. However, its elites bloomed because of it. They were given a ladder to climb the global pyramid. African millionaires, who today live on the upper layers of the pyramid with bank accounts in Western capitals, certainly owe their fortune to colonialism. Without opportunities created by the linking of Africa to the Western world, it is unlikely that indigenous ruling classes would have catapulted themselves from pre-capitalist levels of wealth to modern bourgeoisie affluence. So the answer to the often-posed question, ‘did Africans benefit from colonialism’ is, the elites definitely gained while the poor majority did not.
Having tasted life as consumers in the international market, African elites became ardent believers in the global economy. Imperial powers no longer needed to administer their colonies, at least not for reasons of economics. Local ruling classes would out of their own volition keep their nations in the market and direct the bulk of their national resources and capital to the West.
Such humiliation led the nations to accept dictators the like of Nasser and others of his ilk who painted dreams of restoring their nations’ respect, only to bring them under further humiliation.
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