By HOWARD W. FRENCH Dec. 2, 2014 6:28 p.m. ET Around the year 150 B.C., a Roman politician named Marcus Porcius Cato displayed a fresh fig before his Senate colleagues, which he said had been picked in Carthage just three days before. The point was to demonstrate that there was great agricultural wealth just across the narrow Mediterranean, and that the subjugation of their longtime rival would at last clear the way for Rome’s appropriation of it. Within 200 years, through conquest and colonization, North Africa, including Egypt, was supplying as much as 300,000 tons of corn per year to feed the Roman Empire. Figs were thrown in as a bonus. Fast forward roughly 16 centuries and one finds another budding empire, that of late-15th century Portugal, trading slaves taken from West Africa’s Benin coast and selling them in exchange for gold at a place called El Mina (the Mine) in present-day Ghana. Within little more than two decades, the gold production there accounted for a very substantial portion of the world supply and helped finance Portugal’s subsequent conquests in Asia. A little more than a century later, by which time European sea captains were making frequent trips around the southern tip of Africa on their way to the East, Table Bay, near the Cape of Good Hope, became a favored port of call, especially for English and Dutch ships. A small community of European settlers began to form there, and as their numbers grew, tensions rose with the native population of Khoikhoi. It culminated in a battle in 1659, in which the local inhabitants drove the settlers from five farms. In the negotiations that ensued, a Dutch participant recorded the Khoikhois’ grievance: “They spoke for a long time about our taking every day for our own use more of the land which had belonged to them from all ages, and on which they were accustomed to pasture their cattle. They also asked whether, if they were to come to Holland, they would be permitted to act in a similar manner?” No answer was recorded, although what followed serves up a rejoinder of sorts. A little more than 100 years later, the Cape Colony had gone from a settlement that measured 6 miles by 2 miles to cover an area of 110,000 square miles. The newcomers had reached clear across to the east of the country that is now South Africa. Stories like these, drawn from Martin Meredith ’s new book, “The Fortunes of Africa: A 5,000-Year History of Wealth, Greed, and Endeavor” are all used to drive home a powerful point. The history of this continent can be summed up in one word: plunder. As one learns from the author’s abundant examples, plunder can take many forms: slavery, expropriation of land and resources, various kinds of financial exploitation, and enlistment as fodder in other people’s imperial wars. Mr. Meredith points out that in World War I, some 150,000 Africans served on the Western Front, where 30,000 were killed in action. In World War II, nearly 400,000 Africans served in the British Army alone. Mr. Meredith’s accounting, which is encyclopedic and roughly chronological, hopscotching from region to region, lays bare a fundamental defect in the way we usually think of the continent. Africa is not and has never been a poor place. Quite the opposite. For ages it has been the source of fabulous wealth for others, yet seldom for its own peoples. Although foreign domination is the central theme of this book, it is not the sole explanation for this pattern of deprivation. Indeed one of the stories in Mr. Meredith’s book is about a 14th-century ruler from the Mali empire who may have been the richest man to ever live. In 1324, King Mansa Musa visited Cairo en route to Mecca with a caravan carrying so much gold, which he squandered in such quantities, that the price of the metal was depressed for 10 years on world markets. The Malians had been preoccupied with discovering what lay on the far shores of the Atlantic at least a century before Columbus, but profligacy like this was their undoing. Today, the author notes that “much of the wealth generated by foreign activity flows out of Africa to destinations abroad,” but adds that Africa’s own elites hold much of the continent’s wealth in offshore bank accounts and in foreign property, contributing little to local development. Even the longtime specialist is likely to learn lots of things from this work because of the extraordinary amount of ground the author covers. Yet the decision to cover virtually all of Africa across the ages necessitates a breathless pace and seldom affords time to pause for anything much deeper than an exposition of the basic facts. Another unfortunate and ironic shortcoming, given the author’s apparent sympathy for the continent, is the dearth of African characters. History is told here mainly through the experiences of famous white people, like Belgium’s monstrous king, Leopold, who regarded Africa as a “magnificent cake,” and the arch-imperialist and diamond baron, Cecil Rhodes, who explained his ruthlessness saying, “I would annex the planets if I could.” Despite this, there are gems of detail that crop up often enough to stop a reader on the page and to constantly reaffirm Mr. Meredith’s plunder thesis. Take this devastating example: On the eve of independence in the late 1950s, after centuries of taking and 70 years or so of colonial rule, sub-Saharan Africa’s 200 million people had only 8,000 secondary school graduates, most of which came from just two countries: Ghana and Nigeria. If the white man’s burden has been understood as the imperative duty of Europeans to share the fruits of Western civilization with Africans, it would be charitable to say they were taking their time. Mr. French teaches at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He is the author of “China’s Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa.”
Posted on: Fri, 05 Dec 2014 08:53:40 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015