The imperial conquest of Africa was undertaken to tap African resources in order to help
resolve the economic problems of Europe. Yet the circumstances of the conquest,
brought the colonial rulers to grips with a basic contradiction; only a long, intensive
process could create conditions within Africa that could bring about substantial
opportunities for investment sales and profits. Beneath the surface of colonial political
and administrative policy lay the unfolding process of capital penetration, a process that
was far from reaching fruition in the colonial era.
The conquest and foreign rule in Africa was a period of systematic plunder. This plunder
also had a role in capitalist development. Capitalism begins with an initiatory process of
what Marx called primitive accumulation of resources and labour. It comes into being
“dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt” through “the
expropriation of the mass of the people by a few usurpers”. However, once an
expropriated population, divorced from the means of production, is available for the
‘free’ sale of its labour to the highest bidder, the expropriation becomes incorporated as
part of the daily work process.
Colonial rule began with an act of political expropriation, with the use of force to extract
surplus from Africa in the form of either direct labour or the product of labour which
could then be commodified. The state acted as a tribute-taker rather than an organizing
agency for capitalist producers as in a developed capitalist society. Capitalism demanded
the further development of commodity production and the circulation of goods from
which firms from the metropolitan countries could benefit. Where possible colonialism
was about pressing forward the social and economic conditions, the development of class
forces that could lead to capitalist production in Africa itself. In certain parts of Africa,
particularly those with a long history of slave and “legitimate” trade, commodity
production was already well advanced at the time of conquest. South Africa was the one
place where capitalist production became generalized during this period.
Elsewhere, pre-capitalist social forms, showing extra ordinary flexibility and powers of
adaptation, survived to a remarkable extent. One reason was the resistance to
transformation to the expropriation of material, social and cultural values by certain
African peoples.
The high tide of colonialism in Africa came between the two world wars, an era when
capitalist trade growth internationally was fitful and often problematic..
The result was a dual economy of “tradition and ‘modernity’. Marxists generally speak
of the articulation of different modes of production in which western-based capitalism
becomes increasingly dominant.
At the heart of the economic task of the colonial state lay the problem of labour. To open
Africa to effective capital penetration, the most central issue which underlay all others,
and which to some extent explains the need for conquest itself, was to prize open the
labour resources of the continent, to redirect them functionally, socially and
geographically in order to create surplus from which capital could benefit. Even the
basic requirement of improved transport, road and railway construction, was ultimately
related to the urgency for releasing human labour used in porterage to other forms of
productive labour. The conquest enabled labour to be made available to the benefit of
Western business and the sustenance of the colonial administration.
1. The Era of Force and Chartered Companies
The first two decades of the 20th century have some unity in African history as the era of
force, a period of raw and brutal intrusion by the developing colonial state into the lives
of Africans. The use of force must be stressed first in the establishment of colonial
domination politically. The use of force among many African peoples had a goal of not
only recognizing of a flag sovereignty but the systematic payment of tribute in the form
of taxes and labour. By 1914 when World War 1 broke out, colonial expeditions had
generally accomplished their goals.
The economic system of early colonialism in Africa rested on compulsion in most
regions. In virtually every territory, the 1900s and 1910s were the most intense phase of
forced taxation, forced cultivation and forced labour. It was only through the widespread
use of forced labour that the characteristic essential requirements of the colonial systems
could at first be met. Men were needed everywhere to construct and maintain roads and
railroads.
The ruthless application of force and the opening up of hinterlands gave way to a
particularly effective, concentrated system of exploitation. This system attracted
investments from big European monopolies of which chartered companies were part.
These companies controlled more than half of the commoditised economy in the inter-
war period Africa. A complex and occasionally changing system of regional zones
subdivided parts of Africa for economic purposes into areas that produced particular cash
crops, migrant labour or food crops for the mines and towns. In many parts of Africa the
crude commercial motives for conquest had brought the grant of charters to private firms
for all administrative and economic authority. They did the dirty work of subjugating the
territory. Both the French and the British granted most of their territories to concessions
companies at first e.g. in Kenya and Uganda there was the imperial British E.A.
Company and Royal Niger Company in Eastern Nigeria. Such a system however proved
unworkable on the whole and many of the charters were quickly withdrawn. The
companies were unable to function profitably while maintaining and extending an
administration.
2. Mines
For western capital, especially big finance capital, by far the most attractive prospect held
out by the conquest of Africa was its mineral resources. Major mineral areas in Africa
included the gold fields of Gold Coast (Now Ghana). Tin in Northern Nigeria and
Copper in the Katanga province of the Congo.
The problem of obtaining labour to work on the mines was great. In the earliest phase of
development, the state coerced men to the mines. Later other experiments were enacted
for the recruitment of migrant workers from hundreds of miles away. These migrant
labourers were normally brought in on a short-term contract basis. In areas where
minerals were mined, the administrative and generally the economy were entirely
dependent on such mineral production. Where mining operations were predominant
therefore, they invariably played a central role in the process of capital penetration in
colonial Africa. They ensured the prevalence of full-scale capitalist production relations.
A wage-labour force came to the mines through its need for cash as well. The mines had
a crucial role to play in the proletarianisation of the peasantry as well as intensifying the
conditions through which the cash economy and market demands penetrated the
countryside.
3. White Settlers
In the absence of mineral prospects, colonialism and capitalism had to turn to agriculture
and the African peasantry for the production of wealth. Plans for agriculture were
generally linked to plans for the settlement of agriculturists from the metropole. White
settlement colonies and plantation agriculture had a lengthy and profitable history in
other parts of the world. Settlers from the mother country were likely to retain a myriad
of ties to it and they shared deeply internalized capitalist values that radiated out to the
conquered African population. Ideal colonial collaborators and the settlers shared in the
tasks of local administration, justice and defence, easing the burdens of the state. Rich
settlers had excellent connections at home, notably in Britain. From the colonial point of
view however, there proved to be considerable negative aspects of the settlers. They
required large-scale infrastructural expenditures in the form of social services and
economic assistance.
Their total dependence on colonial political domination and their tiny numbers created
among them an intense and uncompromising racism that outdid that of the administrators
or merchants and deeply antagonized Africans. The settlers aspired to be capitalist
farmers requiring vast outlays of land and the subordination of a great deal of cheap and
coerced labour. They also required subsidies and price supports from the state that
drained the colonial treasuries. Kenya is normally seen as one classic “white man’s
colony”. Despite their tiny numbers, the settlers had acquired an important position as a
pressure group and always asked for formal representation within the government.
4. Lords and Chiefs
Where they appeared as obvious alternatives to settlers in certain parts of Africa, the
colonial regimes transformed native aristocracies into capitalist farmers and improving
landlords. Such aristocracies had often been able to command tribute, tax and labour
from the dominated population in the past. In sub-Saharan Africa the potential for
pursuing such a strategy lay largely within British domains, which included the most
populous and stratified social formations in Africa as a whole. A classic case was the
Island of Zanzibar where the Sultans presided over a class of Arab-or arabised landlords
whose wealth derived from the slave-based production and export of cloves. The British,
after the proclamation of a protectorate in Zanzibar, were anxious that this high value
export crop should continue to flourish. Another example where such goals were pursued
include Buganda.
On the whole the strategy of working through an African aristocracy failed and was fairly
swiftly abandoned. The basis of authority, political and economic, of the African ruling
classes over the free peasantry was very different from that of improving European
landlords and they were unable to enforce a transition to capitalist agriculture,
particularly when it was coupled with the abolition of slavery.
5. Peasant Production
The real motor force of capital penetration in colonial Africa, mining excluded proved to
be peasant-grown cash crops. Given the alternatives the African cultivator faced during
the first half of the twentieth century, this was generally the most attractive. In
comparison with settler agriculture, the development of peasant commodity production
required much less effort and social outlay from the colonial regimes. Peasants were
actually more productive in per-acre use of the land. Often, peasants initially produced
cash crops in response to the regime of force and its tax demands. Chiefs, notables and
household heads pressed those under their control to produce. This gave way to
production that operated more freely in terms of the market mechanism: producers sold to
traders because they needed cash to survive. They could no longer withdraw from
commercial interchange.
What need to be pointed out is that what so sharply characterized the colonial era in
Africa was the continued dominance of merchant capital, acting now entirely in harness
to financially consolidated, cartelized and concentrated industrial capital in Europe.
Massive outpouring of peasant surplus and capital did not thrust towards the immediate
dissolution of existing productive forms, but instead intensified the web of traders and
middlemen’s activities on an unprecedented scale. The peasant farmer continued to
invest greatly in the purchase of land or equipment. The latter further entrapped him in
capitalist forms of trade and exchange.
The human links in this dense chain of traders and middlemen were very often foreigners.
The colonial economies attracted commercial pioneers from throughout the world eg.
from Greeks, Jews, Lebanese and Indians. With their strong kin networks for instance
and spreading through the caste system, the Indians rapidly developed trading systems
which played the central role in the commercialization of rural Uganda, Kenya and
Tanganyika.
Most of the profits creamed from the surplus of peasant production, however, accrued to
a small number of monopoly firms who generally controlled the credit of the smaller
traders. While the formation of such firms as Unilever, apparently belonged to the most
sophisticated trends in world capitalist development, their continued hegemony in Africa
depended on commercial, rather than productive relations, on peasant individuation and
intensified cash nexus.
6. The Colonial State
Colonial administration was shaped to the needs of the material conditions of the African
colonies as seen from the metropolis. Initially after the conquest, the administrators had a
strong military character. Individual officers had enormous discretionary powers and
were often eccentrics and adventurers. In time the systems became increasingly
bureaucratized with larger and more specialized sources emanating from the colonial
capitals. Yet in the countryside a small number of all-purpose local administrators still
retained a great deal of authority, especially in assessing politically the balance of social
forces.
From the above discussion, it should be clear that the state intervened crucially and
repeatedly to promote capitalist enterprise through policies regarding labour, taxation,
land and business. The state mediated between the needs of a variety of metropolitan
interests, occasionally conflicting.
The colonialists saw themselves as paternalists, bureaucratic dictators, yet they relied on
creating a class of intermediaries who could effectively intervene in the daily lives of
Africans. This meant, in the countryside, the recognition of the colonial chiefs whose
primary function was to collect taxes and to preserve administrative control. It should
however be pointed out that on most occasions, African intermediaries of the old
‘comparative’ type were deliberately rejected by the colonial powers as principal bearers
of intruding capitalist values, political or economic. In the economic sphere they were
out distanced by Indians, Lebanese and other immigrants who carried little political
weight while the framework of indirect rule was deliberately designed to exclude them.
Yet all the other potential agents of a new society; accumulating peasants, white settlers,
old ruling classes etc also presented problems as much as opportunities for capital.
Titany answered the question on December 8, 2021 at 09:17