Paper presented at an International Conference on Teaching and Propagating African History and Culture to the Diaspora and Teaching Diaspora History and Culture to Africa, organized by the Centre for Black and African Arts and Civilization (CBAAC) at the State University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, November 10-14, 2008.
Abstract
Coming on the heels of trans-Atlantic slavery, industrial revolution and colonialism, globalization is undoubtedly the fourth epoch of the modern time. The first epoch resulted in the depletion of Africa 's vibrant population and effectively halted its technological advancement. The second sets in motion the destruction of the first but also immediately influenced the third and invariably aided the pillaging of Africa 's natural and material resources. The fourth is here with us at its rampaging best. It incorporates all the pernicious attributes of its predecessors and therefore poised to cement the gains therein, which are never to the avail of Africa, because, all along, Africa has rarely been an instigating actor of epochs. While Africa has perpetually been at the receiving end of the attendant interplay of forces, the challenge of the new world order poses greater challenge to Africans within and outside the continent. The emerging wave of cultural imperialism has damning consequences for Africans at both economic and social fronts. Thus, this paper represents a modest contribution to this desirable intervention on cross-border exchanges. Through library and archival searches, it hopes to situate Africa 's dilemma of taking advantage of its vast human resources potentials by drawing inferences from the identified phases in history vis-à-vis experiences from other regions of the globe. It ultimately aims to offer useful insights into avoidable pitfalls in our quest to rewrite history and in our renewed bid to explore the diverse potentials in cross-border exchanges especially at this critical stage of African development.
Introduction
Globalization holds lofty potentials for humanity. With its banishment of time and space, integrative tendencies, capital flows, vast opportunities for crisscrossing and cross fertilization of ideas, diffusion of developmental initiatives and projects, abundance of migratory, highly denationalized and well skilled workforce (Williams, 2001, p99, Quattara, 1997); globalisation offers yet a fresh opportunity for solving Africa's multifaceted problems - social, economic, environmental, technological and even political. On the contrary, but for pockets of isolation, Sub Saharan Africa remains marginal to the global trends (Rugumamu, 2001, p1); playing the ‘last fiddle'; occupying the lowest rung of the ladder and has remained home to the “wretched of the earth”. In fact, no other region has suffered during this period of globalisation more than Africa as the continent is perennially assailed with myriads of problems ranging from heavy debts to unfavourable trade and myriads of conditionalities from multinational financial institutions, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (Mutethia, 2000, p1). In short, most African countries have palpably failed, or grossly unable, to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the globalized economy of the twenty first century: they receive little foreign investment, fail to produce many processed goods for export, and are less “wired” than almost any other region of the world (Herbst, 2005, p1).
The literature on globalisation and Africa is not scanty. But drawing historical parallels has seldom been of prime concern. Thus, epochal dimension of the phenomenon of globalisation has been grossly under examined. Perhaps, the point of departure is to ask the questions: what makes globalisation an epochal event? And, what has been the result of Africa 's encounter with previous epochs in the not too distant past? Indeed, the shaping and reshaping of the modern world; its human and material definition and redefinition; its physical outlook and behaviour are shaped by various historical events of epochal dimension, none of which has been directly instigated by Sub Saharan Africa. On the contrary, the continent has perpetually been the direct victim of these events, making it a spectator rather than the player, a pawn in the chessboard of other races and an underdog that seldom plays leading role in major world affairs (Oyebola, 1976). Understanding Africa's situation in the era of globalisation would be greatly enhanced by situating it within the content and context of the continent's encounters with previous epochal events, of which the important ones in the modern world are the trans Atlantic slave trade, colonialism and industrial revolution.
The arguments in this paper are therefore threefold: that epochal events are pivotal in the making of the world and Africa has rarely instigated any, and by implication, seldom enjoy sustainable benefits from therein; that globalisation is an epochal event and lastly, that there is the need for Sub-Saharan African to prevent history from repeating itself in its encounter with the current epoch as it has always been with the previous ones.
Understanding Epoch
Historical events are either episodic or epochal and the determination of what constitutes either is often a matter of interpretation and perception. However, the controversy over what constitutes an epoch seems to have been laid to rest by the five distinctive features offered by Peter Ekeh . First, in the Ekeh's exposition, is that epoch brings and consolidates monumental change into the society, which separates the future from the past in kind. Second is the introduction of formidable social formations and structures, which often becomes object of profound analysis long after. Third is that the social structures so brought up often have reverberating effects on human actions far beyond the lifespan of the epochal period. Third is that epoch is supra individual, and by extension, supra national. And lastly, epochal events succeed in rearranging the world's outlook (Ekeh, 1983, pp6-8).
The Ekenian clarification offers a veritable point of departure in the task of reviewing such events as the Trans Atlantic slave trade, colonialism, industrial revolution and globalization, which are considered epochal events and upon which this paper takes its character. The analysis is what follows.
The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade
The “discovery” of arable lands in the Americas by the Portuguese explorers; the decision to cultivate these lands for commercial purposes and the unreliability, or perhaps the fragility, of the population indigenous to the “new lands” to work on the plantations led to the uprooting of Black Africans from their ancestral homes in what is famously known as the trans-Atlantic slave trade. After the “discovery” of the fertile lands of the Americas suitable for cultivation of tropical agricultural products, the Portuguese faced the problem of labour to work on the farms. The indigenous inhabitant had proved, in few instances, too difficult (through resistance) to be used and, in many instances, too fragile (as evident in their dying from diseases brought from Europe ), to engage in prolonged work on the farm plantations (Onabamiro, 1983, Microsoft Encarta, 2006). The decision then was to look towards Africa , which was teeming with population of practical experience in agriculture, adapted to a tropical climate, resistant to tropical diseases, and abundantly endowed with physical strength that could be effectively deployed on plantations or in mines. Through the active connivance with local chiefs and warlords, the trade took place for over four centuries. In essence, the trans-Atlantic slave trade represents ingenuity of western power in solving a major problem of work force facing the emerging European empires in their newfound agricultural centres.
It must be noted however, that long before the commencement of what is known as the Trans Atlantic slave trade; man had been enslaving fellow man in Africa . Indeed, there was a system of domestic slavery in Africa and there was also the trans-Saharan slave trade, which had resulted in the transportation of Africans as slaves to the Middle East . But what make the Trans Atlantic different were its magnitude, intent and consequences. It was the largest and most prolonged forceful and brutish uprooting of a people from their ancestral home. It was motivated by greed and sustained by violence. It was an unequal trade, a shameful practice of man exchanging his kind for reflective mirrors and guns in a senseless barter of unequal value (Ojo, 2008:40, ( Rodney , 1972:109). The victims of this inhuman trade were not the slaves that reached their slaving posts alone; they included those killed in slave vessels on their way to Americas ; those killed during raids and those killed between capture and embarkation ( Davidson , 2005, Rodney , op.cit). This makes the actual figure of the victims quite impossible.
Table giving the numbers of slaves exported from various regions in Africa .
Trans-Atlantic Slave exports, 1650-1900
Region |
1650
to
1700 |
1700
to
1750 |
1750
to
1800 |
1800
to
1850 |
1850
to
1900 |
Total |
|
Sene-
gambia |
51,100 |
109,800 |
205,100 |
113,900 |
- |
479,900 |
Upper
Guinea |
4,100 |
20,000 |
210,900 |
160,100 |
16,100 |
411,200 |
Wind-
ward
Coast |
800 |
18,500 |
124,700 |
38,600 |
600 |
183,200 |
Gold
Coast |
85,800 |
374,100 |
507,100 |
68,600 |
- |
1,035,600 |
Bight
of
Benin |
246,800 |
708,200 |
515,000 |
520,300 |
25,900 |
2,016,200 |
Bight
of
Biafra |
108,900 |
205,200 |
695,900 |
446,400 |
7,300 |
1,463,700 |
West
Central |
? |
806,400 |
1,525,400 |
1,458,200 |
155,000 |
3,945,000 |
South
East |
? |
19,400 |
44,000 |
380,700 |
26,800 |
470,900 |
|
Total |
497,500 |
2,261,600 |
3,828,100 |
3,186,800 |
231,700 |
10,005,700 |
|
Source: Lovejoy , P (2000): Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa, Cambridge : Cambridge University Press |
|
The trans-Atlantic slave trade is an epochal event by all ramifications and the effects are positive and negative as well as physical and psychological. The positive effects are the monetary gains to the slave owners (inside and outside Africa ) who benefited immensely from the trade, for, while the slaves laboured and pined away in the plantations, the slave owners lived in opulence and their local collaborators revel in wealth. In short, the uncompensated labour of millions of slaves built up America 's wealth, as well as creating vast fortunes for English, French and Dutch slave traders. The negative effects have been well documented. They include the depletion of Africa 's vibrant population as shown in the table above. The d irect consequence of this massive depletion is arrest of possible technological advancement ( Rodney , op.cit), loss of identity ( Lovejoy , 2008, Thiaw, 2008) as well as cultural and spiritual disconnections (Olaniyan, 2007).
The profound effects are however located at the physical and psychological realms. Physically, the trade resulted in the dispersal of the Black race to the rest of the world in an irreversible manner to the extent that they form, in some cases, the majority in the new found home, which significantly resulted in re-configuration of the world. But the psychological effects are greater. The first is what can be described as the “plantation hangover”, which both descendants, (of slaves and slave owners) suffer from. The descendants of the slave owners, who find it difficult to accept the concept of equality of races, still see the descendants of slaves, just like their ancestors, from the prism of inferiority. This explains the glass ceiling placed on the black man in a white society. Today, the black man is regarded as “last-class” members in the world. The inferiority tag permanently placed on the black race continually defines its place in the world. The second, and perhaps the most pernicious, is a collective insult passed on the black race. No race has ever been so collectively insulted. Samplers: way back in 1865, Dean Farar , in its bid to justify slavery, had dismissed Africans as “invariable and expressionless,” whose minds are “characterized by a dead and blank uniformity” and who had “not originated a single discovery… not promulgated a single thought… not established a single institution… not hit upon a single invention” (quoted in Bewaji, 1985:322). Then came from Samuel Baker the verbiage that
Negroes seldom think of the future; they cultivate the ground at various seasons, but they limit their crops to their natural wants; therefore, an unexpected bad season reduces them to famine. They grow a variety of cereals, which, with a minimum of labour, yield upon their fertile soil a large return. Nothing would be easier than to double the production, but this would entail the necessity of extra storeroom, which means extra labour. Thus, with happy indifference, the native thinks lightly of tomorrow. He eats and drinks while his food lasts, and when famine arrives he endeavours to steal from his neighbours… Nothing is as distasteful to the Negro as regular daily labour, thus nothing that he possesses is durable. His dwelling is of straw or wattles, his crops suffice for support from hand to mouth; and as his forefathers worked only for themselves and not for posterity, so also does the Negro of today, Thus without foreign assistance, the Negro a thousand years hence will be no better than the Negro of today, as the Negro of today is in no superior position to that of his ancestors some thousand years ago (Cited by Blyden, 1975, p12).
Or the sweeping remarks of Hegel that
In Negro life, the life the characteristic point is the fact that consciousness has not yet attained to the realization of any substantial objective existence – as for example, God, or Law – in which the interest of man's volition is involved and in which he realizes his own being… The Negro exhibits the natural man in his completely wild and untamed state. We must lay aside all thought of reverence and morality – all that we call feeling – if we would rightly comprehend him; there is nothing harmonious with humanity to be found in this type of character (Hegel, 1991, p93, cited in Uroh, 2008, p133).
This collective insult still constitutes a major lens of viewing the black race till date. While the western powers gained materially from this epoch, the sub-Saharan Africa lost everything – their souls, their pride, identity, dignity and self-esteem. The epoch of slavery laid the foundation of the wealth of the western world, which invariably provided the launching pad for the industrial revolution.
The Epoch of Industrial Revolution
It is appropriate to label the fundamental changes that occurred in agriculture, textile and metal manufacture, transportation, economic policies and the social structure in England in the late 18 th and early 19 th centuries as a “revolution,” because it represented a sudden change in the way of doing things; but is it is grossly inappropriate to fix the year of commencement as 1760 for, what really happened was basically the bringing to fruition of the ideas and discoveries of those pioneers such as, Galileo, Bacon, Descartes and others of over two centuries earlier (Montagna, 2006, p1). The kernel of the industrial revolution were the sudden occurrence of structural advances in agricultural techniques and practices, which resulted in an increased supply of food and raw materials; changes in industrial organization and new technology, which resulted in increased production, efficiency and profits; and lastly, increase in commerce, foreign and domestic, which brought forth increase in wealth (ibid).
The industrial revolution remains the most significant epochal events in the modern world and perhaps, nothing has ever changed the world the more. It overturned not only traditional economies, but also whole societies. Changes in the economy brought about far-reaching changes in other spheres of life. Among its many fundamental changes include the movement of people to cities, the availability of a greater variety of material goods, and new ways of doing business. The Industrial Revolution was the first step in modern economic growth and development. Economic development was combined with superior military technology to make the nations of Europe and their cultural offshoots, such as the United States , the most powerful in the world (Toynbee, 1957, Ashton, 1969, Microsoft Encarta, 2006).
This important development took place outside the shores of Africa . Although Africans provided the manual labour that created the wealth that made the revolution realistic, yet, they were less visible in the arts of discovery and inventing, the hallmark of the industrial revolution. A major consequence of the industrial revolution to Africa is the replacement of the trans-Atlantic slavery with another form of slavery - colonialism - which was nothing but the scrambling for African land and its vast resources.
The Epoch of Colonialism
Discourse on colonialism falls into two schools of thought: episodic (dismissal) and epochal (acceptance). The dismissive nature of the episodic school lies in seeing colonialism as an issue of not so gargantuan importance as being portrayed by the colonizers and their ‘apologists'. To this school, colonialism neither defines nor redefines Africa . It was just a phase (that lasted only seventy five years) in African histories that stretch for centuries, if not millennia (Ade-Ajayi). But the school is basically being pragmatic and enmeshed in moral imperativeness. Africa 's first generation of historians saw a moral duty of challenging the western hack writers who had, arrogantly and without empirical backing, denied the existence of African history until the coming of the white race.
To counterbalance the episodic argument is Peter Ekeh 's seminal analysis of colonialism, which sees it as an event of epochal dimension, the effects of which continue to reverberate long after the official termination of the system. The Ekenian perspective is more practical and soaked in empiricism. It accepted colonialism as an event of gargantuan importance. And the practical evidence of this is the structures that sprout from therein, three of which Peter Ekeh mentioned as transformed, migrated and emergent (Ekeh, ibid).
But beyond Ekeh's identified social structure is the skewed integration of Africa into capitalist system in a way that made Africa a junior partner of suppliers of raw materials (Uroh, 2008). This is a direct fall out from the industrial revolution. The coming of the machine age had rendered the keeping and usage of African slaves economically senseless. With a general abolition of slavery, Africa started to be seen as a different resource – instead of slaves, the continent was being eyed for its land and minerals. The scramble for Africa was on, and its people would be coerced into 'employment' in mines and on plantations. But the plantations needed not be in far distance again. The natives could be made to work themselves out right in their own environment. All it takes is to take the products away from them for free or pittance and return same to them in a finished manner for much.
In all ramifications, colonialism is an historical event of epochal dimension. It was never instigated by Africa but it suffered its collateral damage.
The Epoch of Globalisation
Globalisation is what I would describe as the fourth epoch of the modern time. But a clarification needs be done. And it is that if globalization as historical process connotes the integration of people and economy around the world, then the concept is not entirely recent. For, down the ages, peoples in various empires, kingdoms and societies have been engaging in interactions with one another through trading, politics, war and diplomacy (Adeniran, 1982, Akpotor, 2000, 55). What is novel in the concept is the new form it has assumed, which increasingly coagulates political, economics, technological and cultural aspects of humanity into its corpus. It is in this sense that we can talk of modern form of globalization as against the old. In contradistinction to its precursor, contemporary globalization entails universalization of people, objects, events, practices and values beyond frontiers (Mazrui, 2001, Aiyedun, 2004:19, Aina, 2002) to the extent that what happens in one locality will have an immediate impact on another. It is, in the analysis of Quattara, a revolution that thrives in communication and transportation technology and the much improved availability of information, which makes country's economic success less a question of relative resource endowments or geographical location than it used to be in the past but more of perception of the orientation and predictability of economic policy (Quattara, op.cit).
Globalization is patently Eurocentric in the sense that the western powers are the driving force behind its process (Iwara, 2004, p22), and, in all material particular, its philosophy hinges on the imposition of a particular localism, particularly European's, on the whole; what Boaventura de Sauosa Santos, would capture, using English Language as a blueprint, as “the process by which a given local condition or entity succeeds its reach over the globe and, by doing so, develops the capacity to designate a rival social condition or entity as local” (Boaventura, 2002:41). It is in the light of this that globalisation has been seen as synonymous with imperialism. Basically however, globalisation by practice seems to incorporate the core values of previous epochs under consideration in this paper – slavery, technology and imperialism.
In spite of its Eurocentricism, globalisation, as argued heretofore, holds lofty potentials for man, particularly, the continent of Africa . With the global financial flow, access to world market, flow of skilled labour and technological advancement, humanity stands to gain. But this has been far from the reality. Such potentials are yet to accrue to Africa . The reasons are in what follows.
Africa's Problem with Globalisation
Globalisation has not really been to the avail of Africa , due to a combination of factors. In the first instance, globalization, in the analysis of Adebayo Williams , represents a post-nation-state phenomenon, coming as a force from the western world after the zenith of the nation-statehood had been reached with the full benefits therein attained. Unfortunately, African states have never fully attained nation-statehood; talk less of gaining its benefits, before being ‘frog-marched into the frontiers of the post-nation state phenomenon' ( Williams , 2000). Most African countries are still debating the existence of their statehood years after the attainment of juridical independence. In other words, states in Africa is still under formation, talk less of maturity. Second is the gulf of difference between the prescriptions and practice of globalisation which hinges on preaching the interrelationship of humanity on the one hand, but on the other, practices the domination of one value and one civilization. This tendency, described by Bolaji Akinyemi (2000) as “uni-globalization”, is responsible for the domination tendency of the gladiators of globalization. Giving fillips to this tendency are two personalities: Reading and Rothkopf, where the former lectures that “globalisation is not a neutral process in which Washington and Dakar participate equally” (Reading, 1996, p2) and the latter avers that
it is in the economic and political interests of the United States to ensure that if the world is moving toward a common language, it be English; that if the world is moving toward common telecommunications, safety, and quality standards, they be American; that if the world is becoming linked by television, radio, and music, the programming be American; and that if common values are being developed, they be values with which Americans are comfortable” (cited by Raufu, 2008, p)
Thirdly, globalization embodies eradication of national frontiers; making a fatal blow on the very idea of nation-state system, yet, states had hitherto played strategic roles in the transformation of the now developed states. A major prescription from the IMF and World Bank to African countries is the withdrawal of the state from the economy. This explains the very idea behind privatization and commercialization, code-named liberalization in most African countries. It is virtually impossible to achieve development outside states' active participation. The current instance of this is the intervention of the Bush administration in the current economic crisis facing the United States. Four, globalisation preaches equality, yet the gulf between the rich and the poor countries continues to widen to the extent that while the rich is becoming richer, the poor get poorer. And Africa is among the poor. This dilemma stared Nigeria's former President, Olusegun Obasanjo in the face when he averred at a meeting of fifteen developing countries in Egypt in year 2000 that “our societies are overwhelmed by the strident consequences of globalisation and the phenomenon of trade liberalization. The options open to us have narrowed as our increasingly shrinking world imposes on our countries a choice of integration or the severe conditions of marginalization and stagnation" (cited in Mutethia, op.cit) .
Last is cultural dislocation of Africa, which has continually engaged the attention of scholars. Specifically, long years of Africa's encounter with western power has adversely affected Africa's culture, putting Black Africa in a precarious situation, which Uroh likens to “a fish out of water … caught between the past he can hardly recall, a present he is ill-equipped to understand and participate in a future” that is far flung from him and which it can only “beholden in anticipation and trepidation” (Uroh, 2002).
A fundamental question raises itself here: given the fundamental contradictions and paradoxes of globalisation; and a history of unfavourable encounters with epochs, what options for Africa?
Changing the Course of History: Concluding Remarks
The first thing to note is that the supra-individual and supra-national nature of globalization makes participation in it a matter of willy-nilly. Thus, the argument is far from withholding participation. It is how to achieve a mutual benefit for Africa. Benefiting from the current epoch connotes re-making history, for, in the previous contacts, history was always been repeating against the black race.
Basically, the Black race is in dire need of leadership, cultural dialogue and cross border exchanges among Africans at home, in the Diaspora and other races in the globalised world. Active participation in globalisation requires leadership with vision and conviction, particularly of the Lee Kuan Yew and Mahanta Mohammed hues. In these two personalities, we see examples of leadership who domesticated globalisation to their countries' advantages. They refused to take the dictates of the IMF and World Bank, hook line and sinker. Unfortunately, the black race has not been blessed with such in recent times. What obtain are leaders without conviction who gleefully pander to the dictates of the IMF and World Bank. No country has been successfully governed by the Black man. Examples of long time Black dominated independent countries in the Americas are not encouraging. They are characterized by corruption and poverty. There is also the need for cultural reawakening, for, recent developments in countries in Asia have shown that culture is an integral part of development. Lastly, Africans cannot afford to live isolated existence. There is the need for interaction and diffusion of ideas with the Africans in the Diaspora and the rest of the world. Globalisation provides the opportunity for such interaction.
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