SPEECH
BY A.D.HARVEY OPPOSING THE MOTION "THIS HOUSE BELIEVES AFRICA'S
PROBLEMS ARE EMPIRE'S FAULT" AT THE DURHAM UNION SOCIETY, 27th NOVEMBER 2009.
Mr. President,
It is a very great honour to be asked to
speak at this august and honourable house this evening, even though in opposing
this motion all I will be doing is simply stating - in Basil Fawty's immortal phrase - "the bleeding obvious".
It was Lord Curzon who stated
"Wherever the Empire has extended its borders, there misery and
oppression, anarchy and destitution, superstition and bigotry have tended to
disappear, and have been replaced by peace, justice, prosperity, humanity and
freedom of thought, speech and action".
He was right of course. Prior to the
establishment of the great European Empires in Africa during the later half of the 19th
century life for the average Black person in Sub-Saharan Africa was literally
nasty, brutish and short. It was the Dark Continent indeed. Apart from a few
coastal areas colonised by European nations - the Portuguese along the Angolan
and Mozambiquen coasts, the Dutch and British in the Cape, and the French in North-West
Africa - there were no hospitals or health services of any form, there were no
educational institutions, there were no tarmaced
roads and there was no manufacturing industry. There wasn't even any written
language, nor such a simple device as a button to
fasten clothes.
But what failed to exist even more
fundamentally then anything else was any form of a functioning state.
Sub-Saharan Africa consisted purely of wandering and warring tribal clans, ruled over
by strongmen (be they called chiefs or kings, or sometimes even emperors) who
had risen to the top purely by the force of arms. In most cases these tribal
chiefs were despotic tyrants, who rarely hesitated to eliminate - often in the
most sadistic fashion - all those who opposed them, or who were even suspected
of opposing them! But it was their treatment of women which was the most
unforgivable aspect of their rule in the eyes of all civilised people; it was
not only that they were treated as mere chattels - semi-slaves - but were also
often subjected to the most painful and humiliating of practices, female
circumcision. Adolescent boys didn't fair much better however; they had to
undergo weird tribal initiation ceremonies which not infrequently resulted in
the deaths of those who did not achieve the required standards.
One even worse evil still remained in
Sub-Saharan Africa prior to the establishment of the great European Empires
however. Slavery. Although slavery had been abolished in the West a century
earlier (and never forget that it was the triumphant tribal chiefs of West
Africa who sold their vanquished foes to Western slave traders!), with the
Royal Navy patrolling the West African coast to prevent any resumption of this
illegal practice, in East Africa the slave trade still flourished, with the
likes of the Black Muslim Tippu Tip eagerly rounding
up unfortunates for deportation to the Arabian slave-markets.
It was simply a case of "survival of
the most ruthless" everywhere in Sub-Saharan Africa before the arrival of
European settlers and administrators. The Bushmen (the San) were practically
obliterated in the Kalahari prior to the arrival of the Dutch to the Cape in
1652, and other relatively peaceful tribes such as the Igbo in Nigeria, the
Kikuyu in Kenya, the Tswana of Southern Africa and the Shona
of what was once Rhodesia, also suffered at the hands of more warlike and
vicious attackers such as the Hausa, Yoraba, Masai, Zulus and Matabele.
Undoubtedly other smaller peaceful tribes were completely wiped out in the
centuries prior.
Happily all this sad and sorry state of
affairs was soon to change however, as from the early part of the 19th
century Europeans were to take an increasingly benevolent interest in the
"Dark
Continent". First adventurers such as Mungo
Park, Cameron, Burton, Speke and Bourgnis-Desbordes
opened up the dark interior, then missionaries such as David Livingstone,
Robert Moffatt and Albert Schweitzer brought Christian
caring and compassion, next came traders and explorers such as Charles Rudd and
Henry Morton Stanley who established mutually beneficial commercial links with
Europe, thus substituting peaceful trading for incessant war, and finally came
the Imperial administrators such as Rhodes, Lugard,
Goldie and Brazza who established the infrastructure
of the modern world, together with countless other minor philanthropic colonial
administrators.
Where previously there had simply been
barren bush, new and vibrant cities such as Salisbury, Nairobi, Brazzaville and Leopoldville sprang up within a few short
decades, complete with all the modern manifestations of their European
counterparts such as stable brick buildings, tarmaced
roads, piped water and sewerage systems. Hospitals and other health
institutions were rapidly built, which catered not only for the European
colonists, but increasingly for the indigenous populations as well. Schools and
colleges were established, firstly by the churches and missionaries, and then
by the colonial administrations.
But it was not only the colonial settlers
who benefited from this sudden transportation of the structures of civilisation
to the "Dark Continent" - the local Black peoples benefited
vastly more. Not only did they suddenly have the advantage of modern medical
services to eradicate tropical diseases and early deaths, but the establishment
of the rule of law by the introduction of the European justice systems meant
that tribal warfare and mass exterminations were eliminated. As a result the
Black populations increased exponentially (e.g. the Black population of the
erstwhile Rhodesia was estimated at only a quarter of a million in 1890 -
roughly the same as the White population at the time of UDI barely 75 years
later in 1965 - whereas the Black population was then estimated at 6 million!).
But it was probably Black women who benefited most from the advent of European
colonial rule, as their oppression was ended through the establishment of
sexual equality, and the obscenity of female circumcision was outlawed. Another
often overlooked beneficiary of European Imperial rule was the precious
wildlife of the African continent, and indeed our common environmental
inheritance as a whole. Prior to the coming of the European Empires the
wildlife of Africa was hunted indiscriminately, with no legal safeguards put in
place to protect the environment, so never forget that it was that man often
demonised as a puritanical backwoodsman, Paul Kruger, who had the vision and
foresight to establish the world's first protected wildlife park - the Kruger
National Park.
If there was one colonial power against
whom this motion might have some form of validity then it was Germany, for their genocide campaign
against the Herero people was surely unforgivable. It must equally be born in
mind, however, that the Herero people became truly grateful to Jan Smuts' South
African government as a result of its military action in liberating them from
oppressive German rule in 1914, and indeed were thereafter the most supportive
indigenous people of South-West Africa towards continued White South African
administration. Furthermore it should be remembered that both during WWI and
WWII the Black peoples of Africa flocked to the British and French colours in order
to fight against German militarism in SWA and Tanganyika etc., and against
Italian fascism in the then Abyssinia. They surely would not have done so if
the essence of this motion was correct.
Alas after WWII this whole increasingly
improving and hopeful situation in the African continent came to a rapid end,
as one European power after another abandoned their colonial responsibilities
and succumbed to the demands of African Nationalism - in reality a return to
tribal despotic rule. The results are crystal clear for all to see - Amin, Boukassa, Gowan, Mugabe and Mandela to name but a few. During the
late 1960s a mainly suppressed Italian film called Africa Addio appeared,
which showed the reality of post-colonial Africa. I will recount but two cameo scenes from
this film which stick in my mind. The first was the mass slaughter of
Arab-descended citizens on the beaches of Zanzibar, and the other was the sadistic
killing of wildlife in the previously protected Kenyan national parks. Within
just a few short years of the disappearance of the European Imperial powers
Africa once again become the "Dark Continent" - the Congo, Biafra,
Somalia, Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe, Dafur, do I need to
say any more? And before you even try to blame these tragedies upon previous
colonial rule let me remind you that two of the worst affected African states
over recent years - Ethiopia and Liberia - were never realistically part of any
European Empires! I had the very great privilege of being able to meet the Hon.
Ian Douglas Smith during the final few years of his life. He stated openly that
Blacks were often approaching him in the streets of Zimbabwe to say things like "I wish
you were still in charge, for at least then our children didn't go to bed
hungry". I believed him.
As can be seen therefore, Africa’s problems were not the fault
of the European Empires, but in fact were the fault of the complete antithesis
of this: they were caused by the reprehensible abandonment of Empire. I
therefore make no apologies whatsoever for the actions of my grandparents' and
great-grandparents' generations in establishing their Empires in the African
continent. They were prepared honourably to "take up the White Man's
burden" and to assist the sorry peoples of that continent and to help
defend our common environmental inheritance. What I do apologise to the Black
peoples of Africa for, however, is the way in which my parents' generation
betrayed their responsibilities and abandoned the continent to the retrograde
situation which alas is now all too clear for us all to see.
A few months ago an excellent series was
shown on Channel 4 entitled "On Tour with the Queen". This was
presented by a West Indian gentleman by the name of Kwame
Kwei-Armah. He quite clearly had a pre-set agenda to
show how much better Britain's former colonies were since
achieving independence. What he discovered, however, was a revelation, for
practically everywhere that he went (admitted mainly in the West Indies and the Pacific, and only to Uganda in Africa) the local peoples almost to a
man and woman stated that life was far better for them under British colonial
rule, and that they wished that somehow the British would return. Mr. Kwei-Armah had the journalistic honesty to report what he
found rather than what he expected to find. I beg my opponents in this debate
therefore to consider everything which I have said, and to have the equal
intellectual honesty to admit that in proposing this motion they are wrong.