The Fortunes of Africa: A 5,000 Year History of Wealth, Greed and Endeavour

by Martin Meredith

  The whites, too, though a privileged community, had their role clearly defined. White settlers were not encouraged. Except in the eastern Kivu region and in Katanga, few actually owned land. Nor were artisans wanted. To prevent their arrival, the government required emigrants to the Congo to post large financial bonds. Nor were government officials or Belgian employees on contract persuaded to regard the Congo as a permanent posting.

  In post-war years, as the economy boomed, a small black elite – évolués, as they were called – nevertheless emerged. But the évolués were an elite concerned only with demanding more rights and an end to discrimination for themselves. Reluctant to concede any real change, Brussels devised a number of half-hearted schemes which gained little support. In 1948, Africans who were literate, of good behaviour and free from such malpractices as polygamy and sorcery, were entitled to apply for a Carte du Mérite Civique. But since the carte brought no precise benefits, relatively few Congolese bothered to get one. After years of debate and prevarication, the government established by decree a new status, immatriculation, which simply gave certain évolués the same juridical rights as whites: they could be tried in the same courts but social and economic barriers remained.

  To reach this elevated status, an applicant had to satisfy Belgian officials that not only did he have the appropriate European education but that ‘he is penetrated with European civilisation and conforms to it’, a hurdle that many whites would undoubtedly have failed to pass. In the course of their enquiries, the officials would make the most detailed examination of a candidate’s lifestyle, interrogating him about his relationship with his wife and friends and descending in a group on his house for inspection. A young postal clerk, Patrice Lumumba, later described the procedure in his book, Le Congo, Terre d’Avenir: ‘Every room in the house, from the living room, bedroom and kitchen to the bathroom, are explored from top to bottom, in order to uncover anything which is incompatible with the requirements of civilised life.’ As an attempt to show Belgian goodwill, the immatriculation decree, introduced in 1952, was an unqualified failure.

  For as long as the Congo could be kept in isolation from the rest of the world, the Belgians expected that their paternal system of government providing, as it did, mass primary education, industrial skills, economic opportunities and social services, would satisfy what thirst the Congolese had for advancement. Certainly, by reputation, the Congo was a stable and prosperous haven untroubled by any kind of political ferment.

  As the poorest country in Europe, Portugal could not afford to expend much effort on developing its African empire. Portugal’s dictator, António de Oliveira Salazar, liked to boast about Portugal’s role as ‘a great colonial power’ and to remind the public of its ‘civilising mission’ in Africa dating back 400 years. But in reality, Angola and Mozambique (Portuguese East Africa) were backward colonies, starved of funds and used as a dumping ground for thousands of poor illiterate peasants and unskilled labourers desperate to escape from poverty in Portugal. When the first overall development plans for Angola and Mozambique were launched in 1953, they included nothing for education and social services. Salazar’s dictatorship was as repressive in the colonies as in metropolitan Portugal. Political activity was tightly controlled; critics and dissidents of any kind were dealt with ruthlessly; anyone suspected of agitation was either imprisoned or sent to a penal colony or into exile.

  Seen from Lisbon, the main function of the African population was to provide labour and pay taxes, and in the post-war era, officials at the Ministrio das Colónias saw no reason for any change. For six months every year, African men were conscripted to work for the government or for private employers, on plantations, on roads, on mines, sometimes hundreds of miles from their homes, unless they could prove they were otherwise gainfully employed. The conditions in which they were forced to live were often wretched, made worse at times by corrupt officials and employers who openly flouted the law. Practices such as the use of child labour, wage frauds, corporal punishment and bribery were well known in Lisbon, but little effort was made to rectify them. In 1947, a senior official in the colonial administration, Henrique Galvão, reported to the National Assembly in Lisbon on the damage caused by government policies. Whole areas of Angola and Mozambique, he warned, were being depopulated as African men crossed the borders to neighbouring territories in search of a better life. ‘One sees only the pitiful, the old, the sick, and women and children.’

  A fortunate minority escaped from this underworld – the regime do indigenato, as it was called. Provided that an African man was literate in Portuguese (only 1 per cent were), belonged to the Christian faith, had a sufficient income and was willing to abandon native customs such as polygamy, he could apply to a government tribunal for the status of civilisado or, as it was later termed, assimilado. If he passed scrutiny, he could assume full citizenship, alongside whites and mestiços. By 1950, the number of civilisados in Angola was about 30,000 and in Mozambique about 4,300, a tiny fraction of the black population, but for the Portuguese proof that they were fulfilling their historic mission.

  Italy’s former empire after the war was dismembered and parcelled out to caretaker governments. In Libya, a British military administration supported claims to leadership made by the head of the Sanusi brotherhood, Idris al-Sanusi, a grandson of the founder of the Sanusiyya, who had sided with the British against the Italians during the war. In 1951, under United Nations’ auspices, a constituent assembly chose Idris as king of a federal union of Cyrenaica, Tripolitania and the Fezzan; and later in the year, the kingdom of Libya gained independence. A poverty-stricken state, Libya was heavily dependent on British and American aid.

  Eritrea was also placed provisionally under the control of a British military administration, but its future, given to the United Nations to decide, proved difficult to resolve. Ethiopia, as Abyssinia was called in the post-war era, laid claim to Eritrea on the grounds that historically the territory, or parts of it, had previously belonged to the empire. For strategic reasons, too, Haile Selassie was keen to gain control over the Eritrean ports of Assab and Massawa to give Ethiopia direct access to the outside world.

  The Eritreans themselves, numbering about three million, were divided over the issue. The Christian half of the population, mostly Tigrayans who inhabited the highlands surrounding the capital, Asmara, tended to support unification with Ethiopia, with which they had religious and ethnic ties. The Muslim half of the population, also found in the highlands but mainly occupying the harsh desert region along the Red Sea coast and the western lowlands, tended to favour independence.

  As a compromise, the UN devised a form of federation under which the Ethiopian government was given control of foreign affairs, defence, finance, commerce and ports, while Eritrea was allowed its own elected government and assembly. Eritrea was also permitted to have its own flag and official languages, Tigrinya and Arabic. Shortly before the British departed in 1952, an election held under their auspices resulted in a roughly equal division of votes between Christian and Muslim, but left a unionist party with a majority. From the outset, Haile Selassie looked on the federation as nothing more than a step towards unification.

  In Somalia, after an interim period of British rule, the Italians in 1950 were given a ten-year mandate by the UN to prepare the territory for independence. Britain undertook a similar programme in British Somaliland. The overriding ambition of Somali nationalists in the post-war era was not only to unite the territories of Somalia and Somaliland once colonial rule had come to an end but to recover the ‘lost lands’ of the Ogaden, French Somaliland and Kenya’s Northern Frontier District, where about a third of the four million Somalis lived.

  Thus, Africa entered the post-war era mostly under the control of four European colonial powers – Britain, France, Belgium and Portugal – all assuming that the trajectories they had chosen for their African colonies would last for decades to come. No one expected them to be knocked off course so soon.


  59

  REVOLUTION ON THE NILE

  Egypt was left in ferment as a result of the Second World War. King Farouk and his ministers tried to remain neutral and refused to declare war on Germany, but Britain, invoking the 1936 treaty, used Egypt as the headquarters of a massive military effort to fend off Italian and German attempts to invade from Cyrenaica and gain control of the Suez Canal and the rest of the Middle East. As 100,000 Allied troops descended on Cairo, anti-British resentment stirred anew. There was particular anger when Britain’s war leader Winston Churchill declared that Egypt was ‘under British protection’. Further friction followed. In 1942, when Farouk obstructed the appointment of a prime minister whom Britain wanted, the British ambassador, Sir Miles Lampson, gave orders for British troops, tanks and armoured cars to surround the Abdin palace and then marched in himself to present Farouk with a letter of abdication. Farouk swiftly capitulated. Lampson saw it as a victory. But most Egyptians were outraged at the humiliation of their king. The Wafd government that the British went on to install was soon mired in partisan politics, malpractice and corruption, causing further public disillusionment. Wartime food shortages and soaring prices added to the mix of popular grievances.

  In 1946, the British army withdrew from its command post in the Citadel and from other bases around Cairo and Alexandria and concentrated its forces in the Suez Canal zone. During the war it had become the largest overseas military base in the world – a huge complex of dockyards, airfields, warehouses and barracks that stretched along the Suez Canal for two-thirds of its length and covered more than 9,000 square miles. The area included three major cities – Port Said, Ismailia and Suez – where one million Egyptians lived. In the post-war era, Britain’s military chiefs regarded the Canal zone, with its dominant position at the crossroads of Europe, Asia and Africa, as an indispensable part of their global interests. Some 80,000 troops were stationed there.

  But Britain’s continued presence in the Canal zone became a festering sore for the Egyptians. What was especially aggravating was that under the terms of the 1936 treaty, the British were supposed to restrict their Suez garrison to no more than 10,000 men. There were constant demands for Britain to evacuate not only Egypt but also Sudan, which Egyptians claimed as part of their own empire but which Britain had run since 1899, nominally as a condominium.

  Apart from sharing a common hostility towards Britain, however, Egypt’s rival factions were perpetually embroiled in internecine struggles. In the post-war era, Cairo became a cauldron of conspiracy, assassination, rioting, strikes and press agitation, as nationalists, royalists, communists and the Muslim Brotherhood competed for ascendency. Among the assassination victims were two prime ministers, a Wafd party leader and Hasan al-Banna, the Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood. In rural areas, there were gusts of violence as impoverished peasants rebelled against feudal landowners. Youth groups, students and workers took to the streets, leaving the old establishment at a loss as to how to impose control.

  Nor did Farouk offer any leadership. Still in his twenties, he had become an inveterate playboy, obese and balding, addicted to pleasure-seeking. One of the richest men in the world, his fortune included the largest landholding in Egypt, four palaces, two yachts, thirteen private aircraft and two hundred cars. While Egypt teetered on the brink of collapse, Farouk shuffled prime ministers and cabinets, but otherwise devoted himself to spending sprees, gambling sessions and an endless procession of mistresses.

  Egypt’s woes were compounded in 1948 when the Egyptian army suffered a humiliating defeat in the Arab–Israeli conflict over Palestine. Blaming the defeat on the corruption and incompetence of Farouk’s high command, a group of young officers formed a clandestine network within the army called the Society of Free Officers – Dhobat el-Ahrar – determined to establish a new political order. Their leader, Colonel Gamel Abdul Nasser, was a taciturn, studious officer with a secretive nature and a talent for intrigue, driven by fierce personal ambition. Initially, the principal aim of the Free Officers was to rid Egypt of Britain’s military presence, but they soon became convinced of the need to remove Farouk as well. Farouk had come to represent the old imperialism as much as the British.

  After several years of fruitless negotiations over the evacuation of British troops, the Egyptian government decided to take unilateral action, announcing in October 1951 the abrogation of the 1936 treaty and the 1899 agreement establishing the Sudan condominium. With the connivance of the authorities in Cairo, guerrilla attacks were launched against British targets in the Canal zone. Armed clashes between guerrilla squads and British army units continued for month after month. In January 1952, British forces in Ismailia bombarded an Egyptian police compound, killing more than fifty defenders. The next day, enraged mobs in Cairo destroyed some 750 foreign properties, including landmarks such as the legendary Shepheard’s Hotel.

  Amid the mayhem, Farouk remained untroubled about his hold on power, confident that the army command could cope with any challenge. In July 1952, to escape the heat and hubbub of Cairo, he decamped with his family and household staff to the Montazah palace on the beachfront at Alexandria, intending to stay there for the summer. One evening, while enjoying a gambling session with rich socialites, he was called away for a telephone conversation with his prime minister who warned him that a small group of dissident officers within the army was planning a coup d’état. When told of the identity of the plotters, Farouk laughed. ‘A bunch of pimps,’ he scoffed, and went back to the gaming table.

  The Free Officers’ coup on the night of 22 July 1952 was accomplished with little resistance. In a radio broadcast, they announced they had seized power in order to purge the army and the country of ‘traitors and weaklings’. With his palace in Alexandria surrounded by troops, Farouk signed an act of abdication and was sent into exile in Europe.

  Little was known about the group of officers who had taken control. But in historical terms, the changes wrought by the army coup in 1952 were revolutionary. It not only brought an end to the 140-year-old Turkish dynasty founded by Farouk’s great-great-grandfather; it meant that for the first time since the Persian conquest twenty-five centuries before, Egypt was ruled by native Egyptians.

  The Free Officers initially claimed that their objectives were limited to ridding Egypt of the old corrupt elite and introducing reforms to break up their large landholdings. But they soon began to entrench themselves in power, laying the foundations of an army dictatorship. With Nasser as chairman, a Revolutionary Command Council abolished the monarchy, set up a republic, banned political parties and ruthlessly suppressed rival groups including the communists, ultra-nationalists and the Muslim Brotherhood. In similar fashion, they purged trade unions, student organisations, the media, professional syndicates and religious organisations of opposition elements.

  Nasser also moved decisively to obtain Britain’s withdrawal from the Canal zone and from Sudan. In October 1954, he reached an agreement requiring all British troops to depart from their Suez base by June 1956. The agreement marked another milestone in Egypt’s history. For the first time since 1882, there would be no British garrison on Egyptian soil. And for the first time in twenty-five centuries, it would have complete national sovereignty.

  In negotiations over the future of Sudan, Nasser initially hoped to press Egypt’s claim to full control. But Britain, aware of the rising tide of Sudanese nationalism, insisted on the right of the Sudanese to decide their own future. Nasser eventually accepted the need for self-determination, expecting that, when the time came, the Sudanese would favour linking up with Egypt. In February 1953, he reached an agreement that allowed Sudan a three-year period of internal self-government; the Sudanese would then decide whether they wanted a union with Egypt or full independence.

  The rapid pace of change carried inherent dangers. Sudan was a country of two halves, governed for most of the colonial era by two separate British administrations, one which dealt with the relatively advanced north, the other wi
th the remote and backward provinces of the south. The two halves were different in every way: the north was hot, dry, partly desert, inhabited by Arabic-speaking Muslims who accounted for three-quarters of the population; the south was green, fertile, with a high rainfall, populated by diverse black tribes, speaking a multitude of languages, adhering mostly to traditional religions but including a small Christian minority that had graduated from mission schools. Historical links between the north and the south provided a source of friction. In the south, the northern plunder for slaves and ivory in the nineteenth century had left a legacy of bitterness and hatred towards the north. Northerners still tended to treat southerners as contemptuously as they had done in the past, referring to them as abid – slaves.

  Only in 1946, when ample time still seemed to be available, did the British begin the process of integration, hoping that the north and the south would eventually form an equal partnership. From the outset, southern politicians expressed fears that northerners, because of their greater experience and sophistication, would soon dominate and exploit the south. The south was ill-prepared for self-government. There were no organised political parties there until 1953. When negotiations over self-government for Sudan were conducted in 1953, southerners were neither represented nor consulted. Southern anxiety about northern domination grew when new civil service appointments, replacing British officials with Sudanese, were made in 1954. Out of a total of some 800 senior posts, only six were awarded to southerners. The presence of northern administrators in the south, often abusive in their dealings with the local population, soon rekindled old resentments. In August 1955, southern troops in Equatoria mutinied against northern officers; northern officials and traders were hunted down and several hundred were killed. When Sudan voted for independence on 1 January 1956, the occasion was greeted with jubilation by northerners but apprehension and fear in the south.