By Fred Bridgland
Adventure and abundant natural resources brought the early European settlers to Africa – and the same goes for many subsequent generations of fortune-hunters to this very day.
The benefits that have accrued to the indigenous peoples from the five centuries of rapine since the Portuguese first settled west central Africa are subjects of intense and widespread debate in modern Africa. But, undoubtedly, one consequence of Europe's lust for wealth has been lives of extreme nastiness, brutality and brevity for countless black Africans.
The early Portuguese in Angola set the general tone, exploiting the most obvious resource: African flesh. Some four million Africans were exported as slaves to the Americas; but it has been estimated that another nine million died during the march to the coast from the interior and while waiting to be herded on to ships.
Portugal and the Roman Catholic Church, which closely followed the flag, argued that the slave trade was spiritually beneficial. Both insisted that slaves be baptised before crossing the Atlantic in chains. On the wharfs at Luanda, the Angolan capital, as late as 1870 there could still be seen a marble chair in which the bishop had sat and baptised by boatloads the poor unfortunates. The Portuguese collected their tax, the clergyman his fee, and the Africans had their introduction to the white man's religion and civilisation. There were also vast forests and immense mineral riches waiting to be exploited, with labour provided by such Africans who had not been shipped to Brazil and the US.
Mineral wealth was the foundation of colonial economies throughout Africa. By the time of independence, in the 1960s, the development plans of many African states were dependent upon the mines developed in the colonial era, the foremost being Congo, Gabon, Ghana, Mali, Sierra Leone, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
Minerals financed South Africa's racial supremacy, first under the British and then the Afrikaners. The wealth discovered was enormous – chrome, coal, iron ore, platinum, manganese, nickel, copper, diamonds and, above all, gold. More than half of all the gold ever mined has come from within a couple of hundred miles of Johannesburg, more than 40,000 tonnes.
But before the gold rush to Johannesburg there was the diamond rush to Kimberley, in Tswana and Griqua territory but which the British immediately annexed upon realising there was a diamond pipe which would prove the richest in the world . The Kimberley diamond pipe is thought to descend nearly 100 miles into the Earth.
Thus began the black labour system that would be the necessary concomitant of white European exploitation of Africa's mineral riches. And with it the British created, in 1872, the pass system that would become the method of white control of black labourers and their families. The origins of apartheid lay here. Blacks were confined to compounds and those found without passes were punished by fines and six lashes each. Ninety per cent of the lands beyond Kimberley were given to white settlers: only 10% was reserved for the indigenous peoples. The hundreds of diggers and small companies were progressively incorporated by Cecil Rhodes into De Beers Consolidated Mines Ltd, which became, and remains, the biggest diamond mining company in the world, although since a black government came to power 11 years ago it has shifted its headquarters from Johannesburg to London.
When gold was discovered on the Witwatersrand in 1885, and Johannesburg was established, the labour methods developed at Kimberley were transferred to the richest gold seams in the world, running through a 250-mile arc, where, at its height, 700,000 black miners were working to fuel white wealth. South Africa still has immense gold riches, but the great mining companies now have to dig ever deeper and at ever greater expense to reach the lodes. Some mines are so deep that Africans at the rock faces wear special waistcoats packed with ice to counteract the heat. Although safety standards have improved, African miners still die in great numbers.
As South Africa's accessible gold reserves began to dwindle, a new source of immense mineral wealth was discovered in another great arc, sweeping 300 miles from west to east, some 50 miles north of Johannesburg. There lie around 90% of the world's known reserves of platinum and related metals such as nickel, palladium and rhodium, enough to sustain current rates of production for 1000 years. The platinum group of metals recently overtook gold as South Africa's biggest mineral earner.
While South Africa proved a true Eldorado, huge wealth was also being exploited elsewhere on the continent.
Two thousand miles to the north, the Congo, a million square miles of rich forests, fertile land, abundant water and exquisite wildlife, sat above fabled riches – gold, diamonds, cobalt, oil, uranium, tin and copper.
Belgium's King Leopold II won control of an area the size of western Europe in 1885 and embarked on three decades of plunder from which the Congo has not recovered. It became a forced labour camp where Leopold's thugs forced people from more than 200 ethnic groups to extract rubber, hardwoods and ivory to build fabulous wealth in Brussels while impoverishing their own native heath. "We must obtain a slice of this magnificent African cake and diffuse the light of civilisation among the natives," Leopold told his backers. In reality, wrote Joseph Conrad, the King of the Belgians' activities amounted to "the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience".
Leopold divided the Congo into concessions where task masters shot natives who failed to meet their daily targets. Soldiers had to cut off the hands and ears of men, women and children they had killed and present them to their commanders who matched them against the number of cartridges issued to ensure no waste.
Roger Casement, British consul for 11 years in the Congo, reported to Whitehall that the population of one region had been cut from 40,000 to 1000. Casement, later to be executed for supporting Irish rebellion, said Leopold's men had killed or mutilated 6000 people in the region in six months. Prior to the Belgians' arrival, Congo's population was estimated at 20 million. A 1911 census revealed that only 8.5m were left.
When Leopold died, a scramble for the Congo's minerals began that has continued to this day and which has resulted in internal wars that in the past two decades have taken four million lives – "wars of poor people against miserable people", as one diplomat put it. "The heart of darkness" was how Conrad described the Congo. The heart of sadness is more apposite.
There are dozens of other Congos in Africa; places blessed with immeasurable natural resources and cursed with immense and terrible poverty, problems so complex that they may only be exacerbated by the simplistic political solutions of the well meaning.
The latest scramble in Africa is for oil. The reserves, for which Western oil companies pay hundreds of millions of pounds in "signing bonuses" merely for the right to sink exploration wells, may eventually match the Middle East's. The US expects to import 25% of its oil from Africa within 10 years. Thanks to oil, Angola's economy is growing at 15% a year, yet the UN says it is the worst place on Earth to be a child. The discovery of oil in south central Sudan has fuelled the killings in Darfur which humanitarian organisations say amounts to genocide.
In the late 1980s, Chad was ranked as one of the five poorest countries on Earth, dependent on cotton exports and scrawny cattle herds. Then oil was discovered in the Doba Basin, and Houston moved to Chad, establishing a walled compound to which bacon, eggs and other necessities are imported. The first crude oil began flowing from Chad two years ago along a 700-mile, £3 billion pipeline, ending at a tanker loading terminal seven miles off the coast of Cameroon, en route to the US. The pipeline is the biggest single ever investment project in Africa. As oil flowed last year, Chad's gross domestic product grew 40%. This year it will grow 55% and even more next year.
Nevertheless, more than seven million of Chad's nine million people live on less than a dollar a day. Most of the oil proceeds go into the coffers of US oil companies and their Malaysian partners and into the offshore bank accounts of President Idriss Déby and his relatives and ministers. Déby rigs votes, with French help. Little wonder that the military attempted a coup last year.
The history of "black gold" in Africa so far is that it curses the poor who, in some parts, describe oil as "the Devil's gold". Déby used his first $4.5m cheque from the US, which had it earmarked for power generators, water pumps and road construction, to buy weapons.
Distressingly, oil wealth tends to bust African countries' budgets and necessitate food aid, as in Angola, Chad and Sudan. As the crude oil begins to gush, everyone suddenly thinks their country is richer than it really is, so politicians spend fortunes on useless prestige projects while the populace clamours for handouts. None of the high spending gets cut back during cyclical oil price slumps, so the lucky petro-states end up in horrific debt.
In Chad, hopes have evaporated for a rush of new jobs. Some 3500 locals were hired for initial construction work. But now that the oil is pumping out of Chad, barely 1000 workers are needed. A shanty town has grown up around the ExxonMobil walled base at Kom. The presence of rich foreigners has tripled the price of basic foods and even the prostitutes in the corrugated iron brothels have raised their prices.
It is a bleak picture repeated almost everywhere. General Francisco Franco ran Spain's only sub-Saharan territory, Equatorial Guinea, much as Leopold ran the Congo. But tiny Equatorial Guinea has new oil wealth that has seen it dubbed the Kuwait of Africa, with an average per capita income greater than that of Saudi Arabia. Its people, nevertheless, remain among the poorest on Earth because President Teodoro Nguema and his family siphon off most of the income with the co-operation of US oil companies. A US Senate investigation found that hundreds of millions of Equatorial Guinea's oil dollars have been laundered through Riggs Bank in Washington, in a complex web of 60 accounts belonging to Nguema and his family.
Sarah Wykes, of the anti-corruption organisation Global Witness, said: "Although Equatorial Guinea has the world's fastest-growing economy on paper [an annual GDP growth of 65% a year], its human development is actually going backwards. Now we know why: the money is offshore, out of sight and out of control."
Thomas Walde, until recently professor of energy studies at Dundee University, was a UN official to Equatorial Guinea. "It was pit of gangsters," he said. "The agriculture minister approached me with a problem. A ship had docked from the World Food Programme loaded with donated grain for the hungry. But the minister had requisitioned the grain for himself and wanted my advice on how and where to sell it for maximum profit."
On paper, Africans ought to be thriving, given their continent's vast resources. But try telling that to Angolan slum dwellers and shoeless peasants in Equatorial Guinea. Chad's oil creates more jobs in the US, Europe and Malaysia than it does there. The looting begun by the Portuguese 500 years ago continues.
05 June 2005
http://www.sundayherald.com/50112
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