A hundred years ago Marlow, the steamboat captain in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, mused about the rape of the Congo, then in full fury under the Belgian King Leopold.
The conquest of the Earth, which “mostly means taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much”.
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was an anguished cry against colonialism; not, as many believe, a portrait of the inherent savagery of Africa.
A best-selling book that restores Leopold’s holocaust in the Congo to memory was published in the United States in 1998.
Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild reminds the world of a statistic that has long slipped from collective memory: that up to 10-million people died in the terror that was unleashed between 1890 and 1908 in a frantic quest for rubber production.
“Globalisation” has become the buzzword to describe the essential feature of the world economy today, but Africa can say that it has seen it all before – on Leopold’s jungle plantations. “The horror, the horror”, the immortal line from Heart of Darkness, owes its anguish to the invention of the pneumatic tire.
The demand for inflatable rubber was driven firstly by the bicycle and then by the automobile, the moving contraption that more than anything else shaped the landscape and lifestyle of the 20th century.
The severed hands and burnt villages of Africans were not a throwback to a dark past, but a buried cost of the advent of the modern era.
But globalisation did not come cheap for the European powers. Colonialism corrupted; it destroyed the moral fabric of the coloniser.
The Nazi genocide would not have been possible without a belief in the innate inferiority of races, a view that was imbibed in the colonial experience, intoxicating the white race into a reverie that it only woke up from in 1945.
Who will remember that there was a dress rehearsal for the Holocaust only a generation earlier when the German army under General Lothar von Trotha attempted a “final solution” against the Herero people in the Namibian desert?
And it was a global movement, following a global war fought on the principles of universal human rights and democracy, that spurred the anti-colonial struggles throughout the world after 1945.
Sadly, the dream of Uhuru withered quickly, dragged down by the meaningless construction that was the post-colonial state and undermined by the exigencies of the Cold War.
Africa became a hotbed of proxy wars fought on behalf of the Soviet and American empires in which the African elites sold their continent for a brass farthing.
In Taiwan, Japan and South Korea, the bulwarks imposed against communism were growth and prosperity, convincing people that capitalism could deliver more than socialism. In Africa, the West ladled out “development” money to foster a class of pro-Western kleptocrats.
Then the Berlin Wall came down and history was declared to be at an end, the world to be one big supermarket. And some of the best business to be done in Africa was the business of war: looting, profiteering, the control of smuggling routes and the extraction of wealth for foreign multinationals.
One could look at the century and lament that we have not progressed since Leopold: that the genocide of 1900 was, if anything, less brutal than that of Rwanda in 1994, and that Mobutu Sese Seko, Idi Amin and Sani Abacha were more disastrous for Africa than Leopold.
Today, Leopold’s Congo is breaking up. Angola, Sierra Leone and Liberia have grown depraved by war. Even a relatively wealthy country like Kenya has been reduced to what the writer Ngugi wa Thiongo calls “10 millionaires and 10- million poor” – an unaccountable elite who live on the bribes of foreigners, send their children to private schools and clinics, and travel by helicopter while their people scavenge on rubbish dumps.
Yet it is not hopeless. If one thing emerged from the 20th century it is that Africa won the moral argument. The battle against racism ranks as one of the great progressive leaps of our time. Now the moral victors of the 20th century must drive home that advantage to become the material beneficiaries of the 21st.
The argument is simple: you cannot lop off such a huge proportion of humanity and deny them the peace and prosperity that Western Europeans and Americans demand as a right.
Africa’s challenge is to reinvent itself in much the same way as the colonial powers reinvented it at the end of the 19th century, but this time from the ground up. The battle will be to overcome vested elites, warlords, Western bankers, tribalists and arms dealers.
There is hope, new stirrings of optimism in which our own country is a prime advocate, that the long night is passing. The hardiness and ingenuity of Africa’s people can and must triumph because the alternative is so appalling.
Many believe that Africa has grown marginal to the world economy. We do not agree. Our continent will be central to the history of the 21st century precisely because the most critical challenge facing the human race will be finding the way to accommodate those whom globalisation has most severely marginalised.