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  1. Home
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  3. The Cambridge History of Africa
  • Cited by 26
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
March 2008
Print publication year:
1986
Online ISBN:
9781139054614
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521225052
Subjects:
History, African History, Twentieth Century Regional History
Series:
The Cambridge History of Africa
Collection:
Cambridge Histories - Middle East & African Studies
Information

Book description

By 1905 most of Africa had been subjected to European rule; in the 1940s, the colonial regimes faced widespread and mounting opposition. Yet the period surveyed in this volume was no mere interlude of enforced quiescence. The cash nexus expanded hugely, as Africans came to depend for access to household necessities upon the export overseas of primary products. The impact of white rule on African health and welfare was extremely uneven, and African lives were stunted by the labour requirements of capitalist enterprise. Many Africans suffered greatly in the First World War and in the world depression of the 1930s. By 1940 a majority of Africans were either Muslim or Christian. Literate Africans developed new solidarities: tribal, territorial, regional and Pan-African. Meanwhile, the colonial powers were themselves improving their understanding of Africa and trying to frame policies accordingly. Co-operation with indigenous rulers often seemed the best way to retain control at minimum cost, but the search for revenue entailed disruptive economic change.

Reviews

"Thus C.C. Wrigley provides a thoughtful and challenging analysis of the economic aspects in chapter 2, and the two major religions. Christianity and Islam are similarly presented in chapters 3 and 4 by Richard Gray and C.C. Stewart respectively. Most praise, however, goes to Andrew Roberts, who has not only provided skilful editorship, but two general chapters which cannot have been easy to write, since few historians are given to making worthwhile generalisations ranging over a whole continent. But he has been bold enough to take on the task, and has produced in chapter 1, on the Imperial mind, a caustic but judicious assessment of the impact of imperialism in Africa and in chapter 5, on African cross-currents, a splendid overview of African reactions." Freda Harcourt, HISTORY, June 1989.

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Contents

Contents
  • 1 - The imperial mind
    pp 24-76
  • View abstract

    Summary

    In 1913, Africa as a whole accounted for about 7 per cent and 10 per cent respectively of the external trade of Britain and France. By and large, the overriding concern of the colonial powers was to prevent their colonial possessions becoming financial burdens to the metropolis. In France, a colonial ministry had been created in 1894, but its responsibilities in Africa were confined to West Africa, Equatorial Africa, French Somaliland and Madagascar. The economic depression of the 1930s was a new stimulus to reappraise imperial attitudes to Africa. The trend towards imperial protection in economic policy accelerated the growth of trade between Africa and the metropolitan powers. This was most marked in France: Africa's share of her external trade rose from about one-tenth in the 1920s to over one-fifth by 1935. The involvement of rural Africa in the operations of capitalist enterprise was a major theme of social research in the 1930s.
  • 2 - Aspects of economic history
    pp 77-139
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter summarises the economic changes that took place in Africa. Half a century or more of active 'legitimate' commerce had pre-adapted the peoples of West Africa in varying degrees to the twentieth-century type of exchange economy. Gold production in South Africa represented over half of the world output in the 1920s, though it declined to about a third in the next decade. In East Africa, moreover, European artisans and small traders were confronted by unbeatable Asian competitors. The forced cultivation of cotton by peasant farmers in German East Africa was the trigger for the great Maji Maji revolt at the beginning of post-war period. Extension of the market had greatly enhanced the value of the marginal product of Africa's land and labour, but physical productivity had hardly altered. The ox-drawn plough had been widely adopted by African farmers in South Africa, but elsewhere they had rarely found it feasible or profitable.
  • 3 - Christianity
    pp 140-190
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Apart from the Coptic Church in Ethiopia and Egypt and the established settlements of Christian whites in North and South Africa and of Christian Creoles in Freetown, Christian influence in Africa was still largely restricted to a thin scatter of missionary outposts. Some of the most notable Christian advances had been made in the absence of foreign missionaries, and the future development and maturity of the indigenous churches would largely depend on the elimination of missionary control and paternalism. The pioneer pace-setters throughout the nineteenth century had been the great Protestant missionary societies, many of them originating from the evangelical revival at the end of the eighteenth century. With their Pan-African vision, the South African Ethiopians quickly established contact with black churches in the United States. The rapid Catholic expansion into tropical Africa which marked the closing decades of the nineteenth century was a direct consequence of the major reorganisation achieved earlier in the century.
  • 4 - Islam
    pp 191-222
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Islam was still a new faith when it was carried across North Africa and down the East African coast. The particular adaptations of Islam in sub-Saharan Africa were typical of the variety of Muslim communities on other frontiers of the Islamic world. Islam had spread along trade routes into the West African rain forest, as in Asante, and in south-western Nigeria it was well established by 1905 in several Yoruba towns. On the eastern fringes of Ethiopia, Islam had long been dominant, and there was another string of Islamic communities along the East African coast, from the Horn to the Portuguese colony of Mozambique. Appeal to jihad against backsliders and infidels was frequently synonymous with reform and expansion in Islamic polities during the nineteenth century in Africa. The four regions in which militant Muslim resistance to colonial rule proved to be the most determined, the Sudan, Somaliland, Libya and Morocco, were Islamic states flourished at the time of European conquest.
  • 5 - African cross-currents
    pp 223-266
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter describes the circulation of ideas among Africans south of the Sahara, and explores those ideas which travelled across the frontiers. The great expansion of trade in much of sub-Saharan Africa during the nineteenth century had caused free Africans to move further from home than ever before. Languages were learned, and some, such as Hausa, Swahili or Lingala, became lingua francas. Religious cults acquired new followings; wars of conquest extended fields of political allegiance. Colonial conditions generated new routes for the circulation of people and ideas; they also fostered new channels of expression. Colonial rule and capitalism created opportunities for some, but for many they disrupted accustomed ways of earning a livelihood; they spread disease and aggravated jealousy and greed. Christianity claimed to offer salvation to all, but in practice could easily seem indifferent to African worries, contemptuous of African custom, and preoccupied with perpetuating white domination.
  • 6 - The Maghrib
    pp 267-328
  • View abstract

    Summary

    In 1905 the Maghrib was sharply divided. Although Algeria had been French since its conquest in the 1830s and 1840s, Morocco was still an independent state, and Libya still a province of the Ottoman Empire. By 1914 Morocco had become a second French protectorate, at the price of territorial concessions to Spain in the north and south. By the First World War, land laws for public and private property had enabled the French to appropriate about half of the total area of Algeria north of the Sahara. The bulk of this land belonged to the state or the communes, and consisted of forest and waste. By 1905 the vine was well established, and wheat-growing by the dry-farming methods of North America was beginning. In the decade before the First World War, the French presence led to conflict as much between Tunisians as between Tunisians and French.
  • 7 - French black Africa
    pp 329-398
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The partition of Africa had left France in nominal possession of most of the region between the Sahara and the Congo river. The main lines of economic strategy had been shaped by the 'colonial party', a parliamentary cross-section of diverse elements. On 3 August 1914 Germany declared war on France; the next day, Britain declared war on Germany. In Togo, the conflict was soon over. As to the overall demographic effects of famine and disease in French black Africa, it is reasonably clear that total population declined between 1900 and 1910. The economic boom had contradictory results in France and Africa. While colonial firms made swift progress, Africans endured harsh exploitation without benefiting from the dynamic effects of inflation. The traumatic experience of the First World War and the profound upheavals caused by the depression had transformed the relations of French Africa with the outside world and had accordingly modified its internal structures.
  • 8 - British West Africa and Liberia
    pp 399-459
    • By D. C. Dorward, La Trobe University, Bundoora, Victoria, Australia
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter focuses on a few parts of West Africa, where by 1918 English was established as the principal language of government. The British West African possessions were constitutionally rather untidy multiple dependencies, consisting of older coastal settled colonies linked to larger hinterland protectorates. Rebellions in German East Africa and South West Africa, and scandals concerning the cruelty and immorality of officials in Togo and Kamerun, had focused attention on the need for reform. Economic development was often achieved at a considerable cost in African land and labour. The end of the First World War brought a short-lived boom, fed by high prices for West African commodities and the increased availability of shipping. Between 1922 and 1929 the income terms of trade gradually recovered throughout British West Africa, thereby increasing colonial customs revenues. Anglo-Liberian tensions subsided in 1917, when Liberia dutifully followed the United States into war against Germany.
  • 9 - Belgian Africa
    pp 460-493
  • View abstract

    Summary

    In 1908 the Belgian state took over from Leopold II responsibility for the former Congo Independent State. This huge territory encompassed great ecological contrasts: savanna and woodland in the north and south, equatorial rainforest in the centre, and high mountains and plateaux in the east and south-east. In Belgian Africa the legislative and executive powers were not responsible to the society they governed: this was as true of Belgian settlers as of Africans. The First World War profoundly altered the relationship between Belgium and the Belgian Congo. Belgium herself was almost entirely occupied by Germany throughout the war; her colony took on a vital strategic role. Belgian capital took advantage of the transfer at par of a weak currency into an expanding economy, and realised profits in a strong currency. It was African farmers who suffered most from the depression. By 1935 prices paid to cash-crop producers were about half what they had been in 1929.
  • 10 - Portuguese Africa
    pp 494-543
  • View abstract

    Summary

    At the beginning of the twentieth century Portugal was an underdeveloped country whose economy was perhaps as typical of the Africa she was purporting to civilise as of Europe. Idealism is a marked trait in Portuguese political thought. In 1908, British and South African capital established the Nyassa Consolidated company, which took control of the chartered company and provided it with funds. The aim of this consortium was to obtain contract labour for South Africa. After 1910, when Angola temporarily suspended the recruitment of labour for planters in São Tomé, the latter had been allowed to recruit labourers in Mozambique. By the end of the nineteenth century São Tomé and Principe were mainly devoted to the production of cocoa and coffee. The influence of the Cape Verde islands continued to be more important than that of Portugal. Many poor Cape Verdeans came to Guiné to plant gardens or become artisans, while the administration was also largely staffed by islanders.
  • 11 - Southern Africa
    pp 544-601
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Geographically, southern Africa encompasses huge contrasts. Its watershed, the Drakensberg range, falls abruptly to the east coast and causes monsoon rains to fall over Natal and the eastern Cape. The general election in 1910 brought into power a government headed by General Botha of the Transvaal. The most important way in which the government subsidised white enterprise was by helping to mobilise African labour while keeping down its price. In August 1914 the First World War broke out. South Africa, with a German colony on its borders, was at once involved, and the war aggravated the tensions within the Afrikaner community. Between August and October 1915 a contingent of white South Africans left for the Western Front. The middle and later 1920s were a period of slow growth in the South African economy. Goldmining became more important than ever to the country's economy.
  • 12 - British Central Africa
    pp 602-648
  • View abstract

    Summary

    At the beginning of the twentieth century the main engine of change in Central Africa was the British South Africa Company, founded by Cecil Rhodes. In 1889 it had received from the British government a charter to exercise powers of administration in the region. The birth of the new economy was associated with the emergence of new forms of racial and social division. For the infant settler communities, racial dominance was as much a matter of economic necessity as of cultural preference. The intensity and persistence of the First World War affected families far from the battle-front. As the price of imported goods became prohibitive, bark cloth replaced mass-produced textiles in many homes and locally smelted hoes reappeared. In the decade before 1923 the main issue of white politics in the Rhodesias was the creation of a new form of government to replace chartered company rule.
  • 13 - East Africa
    pp 649-701
  • View abstract

    Summary

    By 1905, the British and the Germans had occupied several strategic points in East Africa. The expansion of trade in the nineteenth century quickened the flow of Arab immigrants and also prompted Indian traders to settle among the black, and mostly Muslim, Swahili-speakers of the East African littoral. Between 1905 and the outbreak of the First World War, the colonial governments in East Africa extended their grasp over most of the region. In 1905 Uganda and the East Africa Protectorate were transferred from the care of the Foreign Office to that of the Colonial Office. Up to 1914, the exports of Uganda and the East Africa Protectorate came almost entirely from African producers. The depression halted the net growth of the European community, but emigration was offset by a continuing influx of German smallholders, which in turn reinforced the solidarity of British officials and settlers.
  • 14 - Ethiopia and the Horn
    pp 702-741
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Ten years after defeating the Italians at Adowa in 1896, the Christian monarchy of Ethiopia was more powerful than it had been at any time since the fifteenth century. The provinces north of the capital, Addis Ababa, had long been Christian, and there Muslims tended to be landless traders. Exemption from all taxes was granted to veterans and other soldiers, governors and their agents, and local Oromo, Walamo and other notables, who had allied with the emperor Menelik and his generals. Until the 1920s, European control in the Horn of Africa was largely confined to a few seaports: Djibouti, Zeila, Berbera, Mogadishu and Brava. The advent of Fascism made a more immediate impact on Italian Somaliland. Of its million or so inhabitants, perhaps one-tenth were cultivators, and these were concentrated near the Benadir coast. Within the frontiers of Italian East Africa, new administrative borders were drawn in order to encourage regional affinities and undermine loyalties to the Ethiopian Empire.
  • 15 - Egypt and the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan
    pp 742-787
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The importance of Egypt to Britain's world power seemed to increase with each year of occupation, and was formally recognised in the Entente Cordiale of 1904. The development of Egyptian politics between 1905 and the outbreak of the First World War was frustrated by a lack of unity in the face of the all-pervasive fact of British occupation, and by a lack of mass involvement. Egypt became a base for large Allied armies, the presence of which produced economic dislocation and its inevitable social consequences. The suppression of the 1919 revolt was followed by a period of Anglo-Egyptian negotiations. But the aims of British imperialism and Egyptian nationalism were incompatible, and Zaghlūl barred the way of agreement between the British and any Egyptian ministry. After about 1920, the British rulers of the Sudan became intensely concerned to control its long-term socio-political development.
  • Bibliographical Essays
    pp 788-879
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This bibliography presents a list of topics that helps the reader to understand the impact of white rule on African health and welfare. By 1905 most of Africa had been subjected to European rule. Many Africans suffered greatly in the First World War and in the world depression of the 1930s. Some of the topics described in the bibliography include: the imperial mind, aspects of economic history, Christianity, Islam and French Black Africa. The structure and personnel of British government in Africa before 1914 have been vividly portrayed by Gann and Duignan. Government records are of exceptional importance for a period in which governments played so large a part in the cash economy. Recent concern to integrate economic and political history has been specially fruitful in the study of African labour, and has also begun to relate this to agricultural history. Evidence relating to the activity of expatriate Christian missionaries in Africa is extensive, well-preserved and accessible.

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