Reality Check: Europeans United a Divided, Imploding Africa

Time to sober up. Europeans united Africa. Here is how.

You have probably been in a class or been bombarded with tales of how old white men sat at the 1884 Berlin Conference to carve up Africa greedily among themselves. 

That conference is also the genesis of Africa’s ills today and then, some say. 

It’s time to revisit this and set a few records straight. Europeans actually united Africa. 

At the time of the partition, Africa had over 10,000 polities or what you would call nations if they were allowed to morph into today’s Westphalian style countries. See the Murdock Ethnic Map for reference.

How does one divide 10,000 into about 40 parts? And what would Africa be if those zillion ethnic groups were left to their devices?

If countries were to be made from Africa's ethnic groups - United? 

The partition did not also disrupt a united Africa or any wholesome kingdoms, if we can trace the last time Africa was more divided it would have to be just before Africa was carved up among Europeans. In fact, Europeans had to create chieftainships in places where there were none such as in the acephalous villages of the Igbos in Southern Nigeria.

The French imposed chef de cantons who were mere clerks. Today Africans deeply respect traditional authority and rally around their chiefs, which is a unifying factor and also a product of the partition and of course Frederik Lugard. (See: The Fate of Africa: From the Hopes of Freedom to the Heart of Despair, by. Martin Meredith. New York: PublicAffairs. 2005.) 

To understand this, we need to go back, way back to the beginning of the 1800s and start in South Africa.

Shaka Zulu was rising and militarizing the Zulu Kingdom this, though contested (see The Cobbing Controversy), sparked chaos in Southern Africa -a period known as the Mfecane. It can be argued that it was the first major widespread war as it saw up to 2 million Africans die as tribes fleeing from Shaka Zulu invaded/pillaged/ran over others as they themselves fled northwards.

The Mfecane saw Zwangendaba's men reaching as far as northern Malawi, conquering local tribes there. All this was before 1840. I should know because my own tribe’s kingdom was subjugated by these marauding Ngonis and it took the British to restore the Chikulamayembe Kingdom in the first decade of the 1900s and prevent the warlike Ngonis from finishing off my tribesmen. They had already killed off most men and taken over land and women.

My own tribe - the Tumbuka - had arrived in what is now Malawi at the end of the 1700s. There were frequent wars and a genocide was instituted by the other newly arrived tribed in Malawi that saw the elimination of the original inhabitants of the land, the Akafula people.

This answers part of the question I posed above, if Africa was left alone, tribes like mine would have simply have been eliminated and enslaved or as the Akafula/Batwas/Twa saw, simply genocided out of the equation.

After 1840, we know through David Livingstone’s journals that the whole place was either decimated by slave raiders, tribal war and general chaos. Bodies were flowing down the Zambezi as Bantu killed Bantu all along the Zambezi deep into Manyuema or what is now Congo.  (See:  2003 — INTO AFRICA: The Epic Adventures of Stanley & Livingstone. Martin Dugard)

After the partition - bad? 

There were wars in Ethiopia and there was strife everywhere, after all the movement of Africans about the continent before European contact was all about conquest and fleeing from conquest.

The partition did not split Africa up. It united a broken continent. And with resources fast disappearing with the explosion of population in the 1800s, the partition of Africa might have prevented major disaster in Africa.

It is not like the partitioned also disturbed a rich Africa either. The population of Africa only started exploding circa 1800 following the introduction of maize by the Portuguese. Maize meant that Bantu Africans did not have to rely on poor grain and starting sustaining more numbers. 

Here is where I will insert my disclaimer. Yes, the borders the Europeans imposed on Africa are arbitrary and they have resulted in grouping incompatible groups such as the Kikuyu and Luo under one nation or splitting groups such as the Chewa between three nations (Mozambique, Zambia and Malawi).

While this has been blamed on some conflicts, it is not like Africans are not independent and cannot go back to their old ‘borders’ if they want.

Oversimplified Map of Ethnic Africa

I have also deliberately left out the atrocities and pain inflicted by Europeans on Africans with their colonialism/exploitation that followed. That is for another day, today I sought to zoom in on the question of Africa as being more united following the partition and not divided.

So when fake Pan-Africanists invoke the Berlin Conference to try to deflect from the fact that they cannot lift Africa out of poverty or ignorance, show them this.