False Economy - Alan Beattie [114]
But not all colonies were treated the same way, even within the same empire. Africa was never occupied to the same extent that Asian colonies such as India or the Dutch East Indies were. The tropical climate and the endemic diseases were inhospitable to Europeans, the notable exception being right at the southern tip. South Africa, the one region of Mediterranean-style climate south of the Sahara, was heavily settled by the Dutch, and subsequently by the British.
Yellow fever, malaria, and other tropical diseases wiped out a large proportion of European soldiers and colonialists who tried to settle in sub-Saharan Africa. When, for example, the West African settlement of Sierra Leone was established as a home for freed slaves at the end of the eighteenth century, there were high hopes that it might form a thriving British colony. The requisite trading operation was formed, known first as St. George's Bay Company, and then as the Sierra Leone Company. It brought there a number of freed African slaves from North America who had fought on the British side in the American revolutionary war in return for their freedom.
But even compared to India, which came liberally endowed with its own supply of heat and mosquitoes and was not exactly a sanatorium for Europeans, conditions in tropical Africa were deadly. Nearly three-quarters of the European settlers died in the first year of the Sierra Leone Company, in 1792—1793. An expedition by the Scottish explorer Mungo Park in 1805, to chart the course of the Niger River in West Africa, lost a sizable majority of its number to disease before the party had even completed the first overland leg of the journey. The public back home was aware of the calamitous impact of Africa on health, and willingness to settle there was correspondingly lacking. One reason that Britain developed Australia as a penal colony was that West Africa was rejected as being too unhealthy, even for prisoners.
So instead of establishing large, permanent colonies, the dominant modus operandi of Europeans in Africa became to grab the resources and go. They had, of course, centuries of experience of treating Africa like this, thanks to the slave trade. The effect of the trade, apart from the disastrous effect on societies of taking away huge numbers of their young and productive members, was to encourage destructive and exploitative relationships between local kingdoms (who sought to capture enemies to sell as slaves to the traders) and to firmly entrench the European stereotype that Africa was a dark, primitive continent whose riches were theirs to plunder.
The functional names that were given to the colonies reveal this all too clearly: the Gold Coast (now Ghana); the Ivory Coast (still Cote d'lvoire). The imperial "scramble for Africa" in the late nineteenth century resulted in the continent's being divided between the competing European powers, rather than just trading gold, diamonds, and slaves on the coasts as hitherto. But the European approach was often the same. Much of Africa was simply commandeered as sources of basic commodities. As well as the traditional metals and minerals, Europe imported the likes of groundnut oil from Nigeria for use as a machine lubricant, and timber from Cote d'lvoire. Perhaps the very worst case was the Belgian rule of the Congo, in Central Africa, in the late nineteenth century—though it would be more accurate to say King Leopold lis ownership of the Congo, since it was a personal possession of the Belgian monarch rather than a colony of the state. Congolese were forced to produce rubber, and, if they failed