Bruce Gillies’ paper The Case for Colonialism provoked a storm and resulted in something not seen since Galileo and Lysenko: a double-blind, peer-reviewed scientific paper was memory-holed under threat of violence. That this dangerously regressive step went almost unremarked apart from near-universal approval from the academic establishment is testament to the New Dark Age on whose edge we teeter.
What was so heretical about Gillies’ paper? Merely that it argued that colonialism was not a universal evil, and that, in some instances, some developing nations today might benefit from a managed, temporary, return to colonial-like oversight of at least some of their functions. A contentious argument, certainly, but the violent reaction spoke to something else entirely.
‘Colonialism’ is one of the greatest of Great Satans of modern times, invoked almost ritualistically by the left (and almost always accompanied by demands for ‘reparations’). The colonialists’ greatest sin, it seems, is that they were ‘racist’: the argument of the likes of Kenan Malik, writing for the Guardian (somewhat ironically, given its slave-owning origins).
For Malik, like so many others, “racism” is the supreme evil no matter what the consequences. The fact that these “racists”, in many parts of the world, brought peace and relative prosperity to the people they allegedly discriminated against, is irrelevant. It’s the thought that constitutes the crime; ignore the actions.
Yet, while colonialism left much to be desired, certainly, any honest appraisal of post-colonial Africa must ask if the continent is really better off since.
If [Malik] has the gumption, he might leave aside for a moment what happened during the colonial tenure and study what has happened since.
What does he make of the fact that “by the end of the 1980s not a single African head of state in three decades had allowed himself to be voted out of office. Of some 150 heads of state who had trodden the African stage, only six had voluntarily relinquished power”?
Or the fact that, in the Congo alone, in 1964, over a million people, virtually all civilians, died in sectarian strife. Nobody knows precisely how many more millions have died in the benighted country since. Or that Mobutu Sese Seko, prior to coming to power, had $6 in his bank account. By 1987 a team of editors and reporters from Fortune magazine disclosed that he was one of the richest men in the world at an estimated $5 billion.
Some of these native African leaders make even King Leopold of Belgium look like a humanitarian by comparison.
Jean Bedel Bokassa “combined not only extreme greed and personal violence…unsurpassed by any other African leader. His excesses included 17 wives, a score of mistresses and an official brood of 55 children … [He] also gained a reputation for cannibalism. Political prisoners … were routinely tortured on Bokassa’s orders, their cries clearly audible to nearby residents.” In an effort to compare himself to Napoleon, he declared himself an emperor and spent a large chunk of the national budget on his coronation while his people suffered and starved.
Or the fact that Uganda’s Idi Amin, in a bid to crush political opposition, ordered the gruesome deaths of thousands of alleged opponents at the hands of his “death squads”. “The Chief Justice was dragged away from the High Court never to be seen again. The university’s Vice Chancellor disappeared. The bullet-riddled body of an Anglican Archbishop, still in ecclesiastical robes, was dumped at the mortuary of a Kampala hospital. One of Amin’s former wives was found with her limbs dismembered in the boot of a car. Amin was widely believed to perform blood rituals over the bodies of his victims.” He was heard on several occasions boasting about his penchant for eating human flesh.
Or the fact that foreign researcher Robert Klintberg reported on oil-rich Equatorial Guinea as being “a land of fear and devastation no better than a concentration camp – the ‘cottage industry Dachau of Africa’.” Under Macias Nguema, more than half of the population was either killed or fled into exile. Finally deposed by his nephew, Obiang was indicted for the murder of 80,000 people. The plunder continued.
Many African states have been independent now for decades. Far from improving their lot, they’re getting worse.
In Nigeria, between 1988 and 1993, an official report estimated $12.2 billion was “diverted” from the fiscus. In 1990, the United Nations concluded that Nigeria had one of the worst records for human deprivation of any country in the developing world.
As for the woke students campaigning to tear down a statue of Cecil Rhodes at Oxford:
But as far as I know, Rhodes never stole from anyone and never killed anyone, and he certainly didn’t eat anyone. I know he did use his money and military muscle to stop slavery and intertribal slaughter. And I know he plowed most of his fortune into building roads, railways, educational facilities and other infrastructure needed to transform a wilderness into a developed country. It looks to me like his generosity of spirit is reflected in the Rhodes scholarships he provided for, aimed at nurturing the talents of a select few from across the racial divides in a bid to make the world he was leaving a better place.
But, for all the fury over Gillies’ Case for Colonialism, a new generation of African leaders are blindly and greedily signing up for another sort of colonialism altogether.
The story of the white man in Africa is one of damned if you do, damned if you don’t. The Europeans have taken their lumps and left. The Chinese are here now, and they are not well-known for being nice to the natives.
Takimag
