Shedding Light on the Dark Continent

John Reader’s new ‘biography’ of Africa magnificently researched

AFRICA – A Biography of the Continent
By John Reader
Knopf, 1998, 801 pages
$35.00 (U.S.)
Review by David Kilgour

A condensed version of this review was published in the Ottawa Citizen, February 14, 1999, Page C16

John Reader travelled the continent for decades as a writer and photojournalist, but it is his research skills that shine in this comprehensive study of an important part of the world. Not surprisingly, his thesis is that the peoples of Africa have been misunderstood and exploited, primarily by Europeans, during five centuries of contact.

Africa asserts that it was early African emigrants who crossed the Suez isthmus and initially peopled the rest of the world. Europeans returned in the fifteenth century, but were mostly kept away until much later by diseases. These and other problems held the population of the continent to about 47 million by 1500, compared to just over 300 million out-of-Africa. Even today, as Africa’s inhabitants approach 900 million in number, only an estimated one-fifth of their land suitable for agriculture is under production.

Reader chronicles the development of various civilizations, including how the Bantu-speaking peoples moved beyond present-day Nigeria and Cameroon to colonize most of the sub-Saharan region. For various reasons, the first sophisticated indigenous state arose in what later became Ethiopia.

Much of the book necessarily deals with foreign influences, which began in the 1440s when a thousand men, women and children were shipped to Portugal. From then until almost the end of the nineteenth century, the European fondness for Caribbean sugar drove the slave trade. More than nine million Africans were taken across the Atlantic as slaves, while at least another million did not survive the journey.

As early as the 1650s in what became South Africa, the land-use practices of increasing numbers of Dutch settlers clashed with those of indigenous neighbours. The British took control of the Cape of Good Hope in 1866 and sent pioneers to its eastern frontier.

The later discovery of diamonds and gold caused miners like Cecil Rhodes to demand labour compounds and pass laws, which became a foundation for the apartheid system formalized after 1948.

Scramble Period

Reader argues that King Leopold II of Belgium began the process by which the continent was sliced up like a colossal cake by European governments. Leopold secured for his personal account the Congo Free State, a vast resource-rich part of central Africa. The horrifically brutal conduct of his agents there, particularly in respect of mandatory rubber quotas applied to local residents, was finally stopped when the European public saw grisly photographs of their victims.

No African leader was invited to attend the Berlin Conference in 1884-85 where the continent was parcelled out. National boundaries, as Reader notes, cut through fully 177 ethnic communities. Yet new technologies, including a new machine gun, combined with ecological disasters such as drought, disease and a cattle plague, enabled the colonial powers to maintain their rule. The European use of indirect rule through local kingdoms and favoured communities helped them too.

The inevitable revolt against foreign domination finally began in present-day Tanzania and southwestern Africa, but it was put down ruthlessly in what proved to be a foretaste of methods used in the Boer and First World Wars: In a campaign to end what became guerrilla warfare, British soldiers burned Boer farms and herded their families into concentration camps, where 27,927 perished, virtually all of them women and children.

Modern Africa

A long overdue period of peace lasted until the next war, with the priority of some colonial regimes in those years being greater economic self-sufficiency. One feature of European paternalism was the promotion of tribalism; in hindsight, its most lethal application was perhaps anticipated in Rwanda during 1926 when foreign administrators required all residents to carry identity cards specifying to which tribe they belonged. Indigenous elites, often educated in Europe, emerged.

World War II provided a decisive blow to colonialism in Africa, partly because of American enthusiasm for decolonization.

By the 1960s, the tide of decolonization was sweeping the continent. Reader notes that because of their troubled histories, more than 70 coups had occurred in 32 of these newly-free nations as of last year. There was also the horror of the Rwandan genocide in April 1994, which was offset to a degree by the general euphoria worldwide about the non-racial democracy created the same month in South Africa. The book ends on this note, although it might be better if it had included a section on the prospects for the continent in the 21st century.

Overall, the book is excellent. Canadians can learn much from it about ourselves; in a shrunken world, moreover, we ultimately share the successes and problems of Africans.

David Kilgour is Secretary of State for Latin America and Africa. His most recent publication was a contribution to La Mission au Rwanda by Francois Bugingo (1997), Editors Liber, Montreal.