social and economic revolution. White resistance,
with their control of the armed forces, especially
if they were backed by the colonial power, as
the French settlers were in Algeria, was an enor-
mous obstacle to independence with majority
rule. The large increase of white settlers after the
Second World War, soaring in British Rhodesia
from 55,400 to 160,000, in Northern Rhodesia
from 9,900 to 50,000, in Kenya from 18,000 to
42,000, in Portuguese Angola from 30,000 to
80,000, in Mozambique from 10,000 to 50,000
and in the Belgian Congo from 18,600 to 77,000,
created interest groups not easily set aside. Not
surprisingly, the white settler colonies were the
last to gain independence – Mozambique (1975),
Angola (1975), Zimbabwe (1980), Namibia
(1989) – while majority rule in South Africa in
1992 had not yet been established.
In the colonies where the whites were most
numerous the black majority resorted to arms. In
Algeria, Rhodesia, Angola and Mozambique
there was no bloodless transfer of power. The
history of European colonialism in the various
African countries and their emergence to inde-
pendence has some common features but is also
distinctive for each region and country.
How can a balance sheet of European colonial-
ism in Africa be set out? The question is unanswer-
able. The link between Africa and the rest of the
industrialised world in the twentieth century
was bound to bring about a transformation of
African society, African economic development
and, indeed, every aspect of African life. The ques-
tion might better be posed thus: how far did the
colonial era facilitate the transformation to the
benefit of the African peoples? Education and tech-
nical training were one key aspect and both were
woefully inadequate, yet a base was created that
generally made rapid expansion possible after inde-
pendence. Medical advances and the control or
eradication of diseases were an obvious benefit
derived from colonial administration. But undeni-
ably the main purpose of colonial rule was to profit
from the links with Africa and to enhance the
European nation’s own wealth and power.
Missionaries and others too acted out of a sense of
genuine paternalism but in the last resort the lives
of the African peoples were shaped by the eco-
nomic needs of the colonial power and by the
political, administrative, economic and social con-
ditions created by the interplay of European gov-
ernments, colonial bureaucracies, trading compan-
ies, merchants, white farming settlers, skilled white
professionals and workers. In this process, the
rivalries of the European nations and their respec-
tive strengths decided the geographical colonial
entity, not ethnic affinities or the vestiges of
former African empires. These were obliterated.
The Africans were not a homogeneous group
either, but themselves varied in beliefs and in their
roles in society.
When the Europeans expanded all over Africa
in the nineteenth century, African textiles, pottery,
and weapons comparable to artefacts from
pre-industrial societies were mismatched with
European market needs. Some were carried off to
London, Paris and Brussels as artistic curios and
housed in museums. Africa’s ‘export trade’ had
early on consisted of minerals, above all gold, and
agricultural produce, tobacco, salt, spices, cotton
and later palm oil from the Niger delta. Not all
agricultural produce was indigenous to Africa.
Cacao was introduced by missionaries in the
1860s and in the twentieth century became the
Gold Coast’s principal export. Manufacturing
industries in Europe found markets in the colonies
for their goods, but except in South Africa no sub-
stantial manufacturing industries developed in the
European colonies despite the abundance of cheap
black labour. The Europeans gained virtual
monopolies of trade; inland, with territorial occu-
pation, they replaced the African merchants who
had previously controlled trade to the coast. The
African capitalists who did emerge were few
and were dependent on Europeans in powerful
trading-company monopolies. European capital
abroad was more profitably invested in the boom-
ing white industrial societies of Europe and the
Americas, which were already technologically
advanced. Investment in Africa flowed into rapidly
expanding mineral and plantation resources that
required a large unskilled labour input and rela-
tively little skilled labour. Ideology and racism
played a role in this too. Black Africans, with few