2. Empires of the Mind

In a speech delivered in October 2022 to aspiring European diplomats at the College of Europe in Bruges, the European Union High Representative for Foreign Affairs, Josep Borrell, used an analogy that appears to reflect the views of many European leaders today. “Europe is a garden. We have built a garden. Everything works”, he quipped, going on to say that by comparison, the rest of the world is not a garden. “Most of the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden” (Borrell, 2022).

While intending to illustrate global dynamics, Mr Borrell’s unfortunate garden-jungle analogy instead reinforces a troubling and outdated notion of otherness. Reducing vast and diverse regions of the world to a naïve metaphor of ‘jungle’ not only oversimplifies the complexities of many societies but also reinforces racial stereotypes that have long been condemned. Such reductionist rhetoric disregards the rich cultures, histories, and contributions of nations outside Europe, painting them as inherently chaotic and needing European guidance. In an era where inclusivity and understanding should be our guiding principles, Mr Borrell’s words fall short and risk perpetuating harmful divisions and a narrative rooted in colonial attitudes and cemented over centuries.

In the late nineteenth century, European countries, notably Britain and France, attempted to create ideologies that backhandedly justified their penetration into Africa and their presence on the continent. They persuaded Africans to accept European rule as beneficial. In collaboration with Christian missionaries, the colonial project pushed ideologies that framed Africa as a continent with a backward past. As a result, Africans became ashamed of their history (Ekeh, 1975).

Missionaries openly told Africans that ancestor worship was terrible and that they should cut themselves loose from their ‘evil’ past and embrace the present in the new symbolisms of Christianity and Western culture. Indeed, Africans were told that the colonisers and missionaries came to save them, sometimes despite themselves, from their past (Ekeh, 1975).

Thus, a distressing pattern emerged that persists to this day: African history is maligned, extending even to its ancient city-state civilisations. At the same time, perceived shortcomings in contemporary Africa’s development are amplified. Undoubtedly, the colossal scale of the European colonial project has cast a long shadow, causing the substantial contributions of Africans to be minimised. At the same time, the triumphs of Europe take centre stage.

This discourse legitimised Europeans’ downgrading of African contributions, casting the European coloniser as a benevolent ruler who graciously filled a void and brought Africa ‘into light and history’ (Ekeh, 1975).

The argument that European rule brought benefits is the standard justification for the presence of Europeans in Africa, from the Portuguese rape of Angolan resources to the godfather image of the French in the Ivory Coast or the British installation of surreptitious indirect rule in Kenya and Nigeria. It’s an argument that pays little regard to the devastating impact of European colonial governments or the imposition of new credos through missionary activities throughout Africa. Colonial accounts were always presented in ways that showed that goods and produce in the colonies were ‘bought’ at reasonable prices when, in reality, the colonial market was monopolistic.

In the essay “Why Africa is not Poor”, Frankema (2021) presents three arguments to explain the development of the prevailing narratives about colonisation.

Ekeh’s (1975) views are useful for understanding complexity. Ekeh explains the main sphere of influence in contemporary post-colonial Africa: the cadre of colonial administrators, primarily drawn from the rising bourgeois class in Europe and the African bourgeois class born out of the colonial experience itself. The intricate dynamics between these two publics underlie many of Africa’s political challenges.

On the European side, the expansion of Europe and the colonisation of Africa are linked to the bourgeois class’s attempt to acquire political power through colonisation commensurate with and to consolidate its power at home. The Europeans gained so much from the expansion and colonisation that the elite class justified their imperial expansion as beneficial to all the colonising nations and all taxpayers in Europe. In Ekeh’s own words:

The European bourgeois colonisers of Africa were also confronted with formidable problems in their conquest and rule. Although their superior technology, plus the fact that African political life had been softened by the slave trade that ravaged the continent in the previous three centuries, facilitated their conquest, the successful colonisation of Africa was achieved more by the colonisers’ ideological justification of their rule than by the sheer brutality of arms. (Ekeh, 1975)

Language was a critical tool that Europe used to impress its superiority on Africans. In the case of the French, a founder of the Alliance Française, Mr Pierre Foncin, has noted that it was “necessary to attach the colonies to the Metropole by an exceptional psychological bond against the day when their progressive emancipation ends that they be and they remain French in language, thought and spirit” (IOL, 2017).

Using political and economic leverage, Europe simultaneously and consciously created empires of the mind through language, ideologies, and practices, empires that were in tune with their worldview and practical needs.

Enduring praise of colonial legacy is not only discernible in prominent European voices. Just before turning 82, the renowned African writer Chinua Achebe penned a poignant reflection on the Biafran conflict that fractured Nigeria from 1967 to 1970. His book, “There Was a Country” (Achebe, 2013), despite primarily delving into his personal experiences during the war, also serves as an extended contemplation on Nigeria’s history and the underlying causes of its fragility as a nation. Achebe’s analysis of the failings of Nigeria’s political leadership is not unfamiliar, but what stands out is his unexpected assertion that a significant factor in the nation’s vulnerability was its rejection of much of the colonial legacy inherited from the British. Interestingly, Achebe, celebrated for his anti-colonial stance, contends in his final work that certain aspects of colonialism in the lower Niger River region have left enduring and meaningful legacies.

There are many facets to understanding the depth of the colonial legacy’s impact on African languages. As renowned Kenyan author and academic Professor Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o said in a 2017 lecture: “African languages were central in African scholarship, development and its relationship to the diaspora and the world. … African languages were not a lower rung on the ladder to an English heaven but equal partners in constructing a common but multilingual heaven” (IOL, 2017).

How does this square with the fact that the continent has embraced European languages, spoken and used by only 10 per cent of the population, as the language of power, commerce, education, law, and justice? According to wa Thiong’o, “In any independent African nation today, the majority are rendered linguistically deaf and mute by government policies that have set European languages as the normative measure of worth in every aspect of national life” (IOL, 2017).

Kwame Nkrumah, the first prime minister and president of Ghana, thinks this erasure of African language and identity is not a consequence of history but a fulfilment of a conscious imperial design and a long history of conquest (Hunter, 2017). Ireland, England’s first colony, was the historical nursery of power relations patterns that the British would reproduce in Asia and Africa. Similarly, Imperial Japan made Koreans take on Japanese names and language when it annexed Korea in 1910, a policy that was only reversed after the defeat of Japanese colonialism, and when the United States of America (USA) annexed Hawaii, it banned the use of the Hawaiian language until 1978. In all such cases of colonial conquest, language was meant to complete what the sword had started, to do to the mind what the sword had done to the body (IOL, 2017).

Europeans gave Africans accents in exchange for their access to resources. Put differently, Europeans descended on resources while African intellectuals and leaders were busy perfecting their accents. This is the unfortunate story of the post-colonial Africa. However, African languages have refused to die.

In Africa today, intellectuals and opinion makers act like African languages threaten European ones. wa Thiong’o continues: “Whatever the explanations, origins, and processes, the resulting empires of the mind still negatively impact Africa and the developing world with corporate rule. Since the middle class in Africa talks and behaves as if it is needed, its shopping habits its goals, however self-serving, servile, and ultimately suicidal, are identical with the goals of the nation; when they talk about the national and official languages, they mean the language spoken and understood by the schooled middle class” (IOL, 2017).

The perspective on colonialism as a good influence is resurfacing in a contemporary context where certain conservative scholars from metropolitan areas of the empire advocate for a “balance sheet of the empire”, aiming to assess the pros and cons of colonialism. Some within Africa also embrace a revisionist stance. For instance, Helen Zille, a prominent white figure in South Africa’s opposition Democratic Alliance party, stirred controversy by asserting that apartheid and colonialism had positive aspects, attributing infrastructure and governance systems that black Africans currently utilise to colonial legacy (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2021).

At the same time, Africa’s economic and political misfortunes get blamed on the victims. Elusive development and disorder are said to be the norm in Africa. Influential commentators blame African leadership for mismanaging African economies without acknowledging that colonialism and contemporary mechanisms derived from colonialism have a role in this drama. There is little argument that African leaders have contributed to some sour development, notably due to corruption. However, the real problems in Africa are structural, systemic, and institutional.

These narratives about Africa have persisted because the embedded mindsets underpinning them translate an iconic representation of Africa that largely ignores context. These mindsets create a gap between perception and reality regarding the transformative potential of the continent.

For example, Lopes and Kararach (2020) show that historically, Africa has been portrayed through an accepted view that minimises the continent’s proper size and developmental achievements—quite literally. Mercator’s 1569 cartographic depiction of the world, which became one of the most influential and widely circulated world maps in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, shrinks Africa, projecting its over 30-million square kilometre land mass into the equivalent size of Greenland—a distortion of roughly 14 times.

Arno Peters, who provided an alternative way of mapping the world to correct for what he perceived as the inaccuracy and racism being projected by the Mercator map in 1967, explains:

Africa is easily as big as India, China, the US, and most of Europe combined. Africa’s blue economy is even bigger than its land mass. The maritime zones under Africa’s jurisdiction alone total about 13 million square kilometres, including territorial seas and approximately 6.5 million square kilometres of the continental shelf. (ECA, 2016)

While the initial projections of the Mercator map were created for navigation purposes to help early sailors calculate angles and accuracy, the map, unfortunately, became globally recognised, adorning the background of daily TV news, homes, schools, and the cover of many atlases. With these distortions intact, Google still uses such map as a basis of web projection, unwittingly reinforcing Western colonial attitudes towards Africa and an image of European dominance (Peters, 1993; Henderson & Waterstone, 2009).

In 1992, Saarinen conducted a study that attempted to investigate how people view the world, and his findings suggested a diminished view of the size and importance of Africa (Meffe, 2013). Meanwhile, Kai Kruse also attempted to address what he called ‘rampant immappancy’ and the extent to which the Mercator projection distorts the relative sizes of countries with a simple graphic illustration to depict just how ‘immense’ Africa is (The Economist, 2010).

This parody of misconceptions about Africa continues today, and these narratives can be summed up into three elements. First, geography does not reflect the actual spatial coverage of human activity. Second, the economy needs to capture true resource endowments and layers of complexity that a set of established key performance indicators like GDP cannot determine. Lopes and Hirsch (2021) argue that “If the real GDP were known, Africa would represent a bigger economy than India (with a larger population still), its debt-to-GDP ratio would diminish, and its consumer market would be resized considerably. Africa could qualify besides the G20, for a seat at the G7, G20, and other fora as a continent, the same way the EU does”.

Third, demographics underestimate the current population boom that positions the African continent as the reservoir of youth globally while the rest of the world is ageing fast.

Samuel Makinda, Professor of International Relations & Security Studies at Murdoch University, sums it up as follows:

Consequently, modern-day misperceptions about Africa not only concern the injustices of current cartography or erroneous views portrayed in contemporary literature or arts. They also permeate risk perceptions, levels of conflict, problems of political stability, and other spheres of human existence. Indeed, the global perception of Africa continues to be of a continent beset by crisis and as a risky environment for making investments. It is due, in no more part, to the nature of African conflicts and their world exposures, which attracts a different perception of endemic malaise. (Makinda, 2012)

The parody of colonial attitudes is perpetuated in the way that multilateral institutions, particularly the Bretton Woods institutions, continue to refer to ‘Africa’ in dealings with sub-Saharan Africa. Most analysts and scholars have made statements about Africa as a whole while only dealing with a portion of the continent. These and other simplistic reductions of the continent need to be revised. As Lopes and Hirsch put it:

The colonial legacy of dividing Africa between black (in French, the expression ‘Afrique Noire’ is still used) and white endures. Even after the end of apartheid in South Africa, the country was not treated statistically as part of Africa, a remnant of the ‘White Africa’. North Africa suffers from the same categorisation issue, being lumped together with the Middle East. These inconsistencies extend to the inclusion sometimes of Arab League countries such as Djibouti, Comoros or Mauritania as part of North Africa. (Lopes & Hirsch, 2021)

Geography is indeed another flimsy excuse that Afro-pessimists use to discredit Africa. Nevertheless, we should understand that geography often is a by-product of politics and history. The fact that original Arabs came from the Arabian Peninsula and their language became an instrument to consolidate national identities is unquestionable. However, there is a strong pushback from the authentic Maghreb Amazigh culture, with a revival of local identity sentiments that have required constitutional changes in countries such as Morocco and Algeria to accommodate such demands, not to mention the fracturing of Sudan, that can be traced to similar identity issues.

Lopes and Hirsch (2021) lament that the prevailing negative narrative around Africa is frustrating and often racist; however, even more concerning than this is the risk that the narrative completely clouds our understanding of what is happening.

Ali Mazrui, a famous Kenyan academic known for debating the African condition, enraged many when he contested the depiction of Africa in a PBS documentary “Wonders of the African World”, anchored by a prominent African-American scholar, Henry Gates. According to Mazrui, Gates was a Black Orientalist due to his condescending, paternalistic, ideologically selective, superficial, and uninformed description of the continent. According to Ali, Orientalism refers to “the strange combination of cultural condescension, paternalistic possessiveness and ulterior selectivity shown by certain Western scholars towards non-Western societies in Asia, ‘the Middle East’ and Africa. Indeed, the concept of the Middle East, which is so Eurocentric, was born out of Orientalism” (Mazrui, 2000).

The Black Orientalist has a love-hate relationship with Africa that borders on derision, self-hate, masochism, and disdain, no less than ignorance, curiosity, and fascination. Black Orientalists generally play to the European gallery and are unwilling to understand Africa in its multifaceted and multidimensional capacity. Mazrui (2000 and 2013) argues that Black Orientalists invest minimal time and intellectual energy in understanding the continent’s history, skim the surface, and declare themselves experts.

The colonial mentality also manifests itself in the risk perceptions associated with Africa. These can have real-world impacts. For example, the subjective assessments of credit rating agencies can affect government borrowing costs, resulting in capital flight and currency weakness. Although rating agencies insist that their ratings are opinions and not recommendations to buy, sell, or hold a security, ratings impact the conditions under which borrowers access debt markets. To date, the interest rates for borrowing from global financial markets are substantially higher for African countries than for economies in other regions. Yet these ratings demonstrate bias, unreliable methodologies, and a lack of understanding of African economic intricacies. Furthermore, the oligopolistic nature of the ‘big three’ rating agencies reinforces patterns of established corporations and interests rather than new entrants (Chirikure et al., 2022).

Consequently, in numerous African economies, the most significant and rapidly expanding spending segment pertains to interest repayments, where interest rates on ten-year government bonds range from 5 per cent to 16 per cent, in contrast to the near-zero or negative rates observed in European or American regions. The elevated interest rates Africans bear can be partially attributed to a discrepancy between the duration of the financial instrument and its utilisation, which might involve funding for long-term infrastructure endeavours. Given the governance dominance of powerful economies, African countries need more control over their market borrowing costs.

Over the last decade, several African countries have witnessed credit rating downgrades. Even as they responded to the COVID-19 pandemic, countries such as Botswana, Mauritius, Nigeria, and South Africa were downgraded, causing bond interest rates to spike. This meant governments were required to pay more on the same debt they owed. In addition, participation in relief programmes, such as the Debt Service Suspension Initiative initiated at the onset of the pandemic, fuelled fears of credit rating downgrades. Instead of doing what may have been best for the health of their populations or economic recovery from the pandemic, some governments thus prioritised debt repayments out of fear of being downgraded.

In his remarkable book, “Born in Blackness”, Howard French (2021) gives a candid account of the colonial narrative experienced by Africans in the modern world. He narrates that traditional accounts have accorded primacy to Europe’s fifteenth-century Age of Discovery and the long-yearned-for maritime connection it established between West and East. Paired with this historic feat sits the momentous, if accidental, find of what came to be known as the New World.

At its core, Howard’s book eloquently traces the intertwined and sorrowful narrative that binds Africa and Europe, stemming from the geopolitical clashes of the fifteenth century. These Afro-European encounters set Europeans on a trajectory driven westward, leading their continent to eventually surpass Asia and the Islamic world regarding wealth and influence. This ascent, however, was not a result of inherent European traits signifying superiority but rather hinged to a significant extent on Europe’s intricate economic and political ties with Africa. Undoubtedly, the crux of this matter lies in the extensive, enduring transatlantic slave trade. Over centuries, enslaved Africans toiled in vast numbers in the New World, cultivating valuable crops like sugar, tobacco, and cotton on the plantations and helping to build European wealth. As late as the 1530s, well after the commencement of Portugal’s more famous spice trade with Asia, Lisbon still recognised Africa as the leading driver of all that was new. João de Barros, a counsellor to that country’s crown, for example, wrote: “I do not know in this Kingdom a yoke of land, toll, tithe, excise or any other Royal tax more reliable … than the profits of commerce in Guinea” (French, 2021).

However, as remarkable as Barros’s acknowledgement of African vitality was, his omission of slavery as a pillar of the relationship may have been the first time that the centrality of black bondage to epochal social and economic change was denied or glossed over in an informed account of the experience of modernity in the West. It would not be the last.

French continues that when Barros was writing, Portugal overwhelmingly dominated Europe’s trade in Africans, and slavery was beginning to rival gold as Portugal’s most lucrative source of African bounty. By then, it was already on its way to becoming the foundation of a new economic system based on plantation agriculture that, over time, would generate far more wealth for Europe than African gold or, for that matter, Asia’s famously coveted silks and spices.

Like an updated Barros, Malachy Postlethwayt, a leading eighteenth-century British expert on commerce, called the rents and revenues of plantation slave labour “the fundamental prop and support” of his country’s prosperity and social effervescence. The British Empire, then in full flower, he described as “a magnificent superstructure of American commerce and naval power [built] on an African foundation” (French, 2021).

Around the same time, a prominent French thinker, Guillaume-Thomas François de Raynal, described Europe’s plantations, worked by enslaved Africans, as “the principal cause of the rapid motion which now agitates the universe” (French, 2021). Daniel Defoe, the English author of Robinson Crusoe, but also a trader, pamphleteer, and spy, bested them both when he wrote: “No African trade, no negroes; no negroes, no sugars, gingers, indices, etc.; no sugar, etc. no islands no continent, no continent, no trade” (French, 2021).

French (2021) explains that through the development of plantation agriculture and a succession of history-altering commercial crops, including tobacco, coffee, cacao, indigo, rice, and sugar, Europe’s deep and often brutal ties with Africa birthed a genuinely global capitalist economy. Slave-grown sugar hastened the coming together of the processes we call industrialisation. This link to Africa radically transformed diets, making much higher worker productivity possible. Moreover, in doing so, sugar completely revolutionised European society. Indirectly, it played a critical but largely uncredited role in anchoring democracy on that continent.

Thanks to sugar’s wake, French (2021) demonstrates that cotton grown by enslaved people in the American South helped launch formal industrialisation and an immense second wave of consumerism. After plentiful calories, abundant and varied clothing for the masses became a reality for the first time in human history. As revealed here, the scale and the scope of the American antebellum cotton boom, which made this possible, were nothing short of astonishing. It made the value derived from the trade and ownership of enslaved people in America alone, as distinct from the cotton and other products they produced, more significant than that of the country’s factories, railroads, and canals combined.

“Born in Blackness” (French, 2021) is partly an account of forgotten European contests over control of the African bounty that built the modern world. Spain and Portugal waged fierce naval battles in West Africa over access to gold. Holland and Portugal then unified with Spain and fought something short of a world war in the seventeenth century, with control of trade in the wealthiest sources of enslaved people in Africa, present-day Congo and Angola, flipping back and forth between them. On the far side of the Atlantic, Brazil, the biggest producer of slave-grown sugar in the early seventeenth century, was caught up in this same struggle.

As much as Howard French writes a story of a classical military struggle for control of the wealthiest plantation lands and the most prolific sources of enslaved people and of the economic miracles they produced at different stages of this history, his is also an account of another kind of conflict altogether, both unconventional and ceaseless: a war on Blacks themselves. This war, conservatively speaking, continued until the end of Jim Crow in America, where his book concludes. French highlights that during this time, the strategy was to beat Africans into submission and encourage Africans to enslave one another as well as to recruit Blacks as proxies and auxiliaries and secure territories from native populations of the New World or joust with European rivals in the Americas. This systematically undermined the possibility of Africans exercising agency, an attitude that still lingers.

Most sources estimate the number of Africans brought to the Americas to be hovering around 12–13 million. Lost in this atrocious but far too neat accounting is the likelihood that another 6 million Africans were killed in or near their homelands during the hunt for people to enslave. Estimates vary, but between 5 per cent and 40 per cent would have perished during brutal overland treks to the coast or while being held, often for months, in barracoons or holding pens as they awaited embarkation on slave ships. Furthermore, another 10 per cent of those taken aboard died at sea during an Atlantic transit, constituting an extreme mental and physical test for all those subjected to it. When one considers that Africa’s total population in the mid-nineteenth century was probably around 100 million, one begins to gauge the enormity of the demographic assault that the slave trade represented (French, 2021).

The pivotal decades of interaction between Africa and Europe have laid the groundwork for the emergence of the modern world and the growth of the Western sphere. Remarkably absent from most accounts of Western history, these years have been overlooked for their profound impact on Africa’s present condition. Western culture has diligently propagated notions of pre-colonial Africa as a realm characterised by unalloyed primitivism and an absence of human potential for progress. Consequently, the transition from a state perceived as savage to one of enslavement, marked by the seemingly unbroken trajectory from the Iberian-driven ‘discovery’ of sub-Saharan Africa to the initiation of the slave trade in the New World, often requires little explanation for many.

The origin of Africa’s modern history as a strategically disputed landmass, characterised by fragmented territories divided by foreign interests, can be traced back to the pivotal year 1884 when the renowned Berlin Conference took place in Germany. At that time, European influence on the continent was limited, encompassing only around 10 per cent, primarily concentrated in the northern and southern extremities. However, by 1914, as a direct consequence of decisions made during the Berlin Conference, European monarchs and leaders had gained control over more than 90 per cent of Africa, with the borders they delineated during this conference continuing to shape much of the continent today.

This acquisition of territory by European nations largely disregarded the rich tapestry of African history, the legacies of indigenous empires, and pre-existing states. The intricate web of local languages was overlooked as regions were divided and subdivided, with scant regard for long-standing patterns of regional identity, trade, and even deep-seated ethnic tensions. The absence of meaningful consultation with Africans themselves further exacerbated the impact, giving rise to many weak and often dysfunctional states marked by inter-ethnic conflicts and communities needlessly divided by arbitrary borders. Others with little common ground were forced into unnatural coexistence.

While this legacy is undoubtedly damaging, it was preceded by an even more consequential and deadly scramble for Africa over several centuries, the ramifications of which remain largely unexplored and incompletely understood, even by experts. Driven primarily by the slave trade, the upheaval of these years manifested in various forms, starting with notable sea battles between Spain and Portugal along the Gold Coast in the late fifteenth century as they vied to secure control over the region’s lucrative gold resources. In the seventeenth century, competition among European powers for supremacy over Africa intensified, driven by the wealth generated from labour on New World plantations. The extended contest in the South Atlantic, almost a quasi-world war in its complexity, engaged diverse alliances involving European and African states and their Brazilian counterparts.

Understanding the intricate dynamics and multifaceted nature of these historical struggles is crucial to unpick the complex fabric of Africa’s past and its enduring impact on the present-day geopolitical landscape.

Within the customary accounts that trace the history of the modern world, academic establishments in Western countries have yet to acknowledge the significant contributions of Africa or its people. Olivette Otele, in her book “African Europeans: An Untold History” (2019), examines this oversight and describes how the definition of European and African evolved in Europe. It was not until a bold doctoral candidate from Trinidad challenged this prevailing narrative that the profound impact of Africa and its consequential slave plantation agriculture in the Caribbean was recognised. Otele (2019) asserts that the West’s explosion of wealth in the nineteenth century, coupled with its swift industrialisation, owed a substantial debt to these interconnected factors.

Some individuals, notably Eltis and Engerman (2000) and Nunn (2008), have vehemently argued that the profitability of the slave trade was relatively marginal and thus incapable of exerting a decisive influence on the rapid ascent of England or Europe. However, these arguments fail to address a fundamental question. Otele (2019) asks why the powers of the Old Continent invested such extensive efforts, over a prolonged period and at great human and financial expense, in asserting dominion over both the primary sources of enslaved individuals in Africa and the destinations where they were sent to labour on plantations in the Americas. This commitment seems incongruent with the assertion that slavery held mere incidental significance in Europe’s prosperity and the emergence of its New World colonies.

Otele’s scholarship has also cast a critical light on the conventional understanding of the influence of the colonised. She pointed out that the rise of a colonised elite, often attributed to colonial officers’ deliberate strategies to establish intermediaries, perpetuated an oversight of the broader colonial impact. Further and more detailed study of this elite’s effect on colonisers in Africa and Europe remains to be carried out.

Furthermore, Otele’s work delved into the dynamic interplay between colonisers and colonised individuals, highlighting instances where mutual influence was apparent. Establishing institutions like the Seminar for Oriental Languages in Berlin signalled Europe’s early interest in understanding Africa. This interest eventually paved the way for the launch of the Colonial Institute in Hamburg. African diaspora figures like Cameroonian Njo Dibone contributed to the burgeoning field of African Studies in Germany, collaborating with scholars such as Carl Meinhof, an expert in African linguistics (Otele, 2019).

Otele also emphasised the underexplored contributions of African women within Europe during this period. While the roles of African American women in France are often discussed, Otele drew attention to the underestimation of black women’s impact on anti-colonial movements. She highlighted the activism of figures like Paulette Nardal and her sisters, who were pivotal in shaping discussions on race, class, and gender. Their efforts and others laid the foundation for critical papers and journals that explored race consciousness, challenged stereotypes, and fostered dialogue across racial, class, and gender divides.

Otele’s historical research has illuminated the often-neglected narratives that have shaped the complex interactions between Europe, Africa, and its diaspora. Her work has revealed the interconnectedness of these histories and challenged traditional accounts by highlighting the multifaceted contributions and influences that have played a crucial role in shaping the modern world.

Peter Ekeh (1975) helps us understand the enduring nature of the dualities that Otele’s work exposes. His theoretical exploration of colonialism and its impact on African societies introduce the concept of two distinct public spheres—the primordial and the civic. Emerging from the legacy of European colonialism, these two publics exhibit contrasting dispositions and moral attitudes. The primordial public is akin to ethnic groups, nurturing sentiments and vulnerabilities, while the civic public encompasses the state and its bureaucracies, often viewed as exploitable. However, the intricate interplay of values within these publics has evolved into a complex dynamic in contemporary Africa.

Ekeh’s analysis challenges the Western-centric view of politics, emphasising that a direct extension of Western conceptions of Africa can lead to conceptual and theoretical pitfalls. He proposes a nuanced perspective, highlighting the presence of two public realms in post-colonial Africa, each with distinct moral connections to the private sphere. The primordial public is deeply intertwined with primordial groups, sentiments, and actions, aligning its moral imperatives with those of the private realm. In contrast, historically tied to the colonial administration and popular politics, the civic public lacks such moral linkages, existing as an amoral entity characterised by civil structures like the military, civil service, and police.

Of particular significance is Ekeh’s observation that African politics is characterised by a unique convergence of actors operating within both the primordial and civic publics. This dialectical relationship generates the distinct political complexities that define African political landscapes, offering insight into the multifaceted nature of the continent’s socio-political interactions.

Furthermore, Ekeh delves into the differentiation between the ‘native’ and Westernised public, shedding light on the dichotomy within African societies and their interactions with external influences. This perspective enriches our understanding of the interplay between colonial legacies, traditional values, and evolving political dynamics in post-colonial Africa.

The hierarchical distinction between Westernised and ‘native’ sectors reached its zenith in the doctrine of indirect rule. Interestingly, the impact was more pronounced on Western-educated Africans, who became unwitting victims of this dichotomy. Africa’s bourgeois class embraced colonial ideologies that sought to legitimise foreign dominion, and this underpins their belief systems. African bourgeois ideologies had a dual aim: to replace colonial rulers and assert control over their people. Both ideologies targeted the African masses, with the first, termed anti-colonial ideology, being wielded during colonial times against alien rulers. The second set, focused on legitimation, gained prominence in post-colonial African politics (Ekeh, 1975).

In post-colonial African nations, western-educated Africans, or the African bourgeoisie, have diligently showcased their education and administrative competence, striving to demonstrate equivalence, but never superiority, to their former colonisers. This ideology of high African standards originated during the struggle for independence. African leaders during this period boasted of their qualifications and capacity, paralleling English or French colonisers, emphasising their potential for ‘democratic’ rule and administrative efficiency akin to that in Britain or France (Ekeh, 1975).

The perspectives of Amilcar Cabral and Frantz Fanon (Quinn, 2017) on culture, psychology, and the colonised’s attitude towards submission from the 1960s and 1970s provide rare insight into these post-colonial ideologies. Firoze Manji’s analysis in 2017 sheds light on the profound influence that Cabral and Fanon had on global and national liberation movements, resonating to this day in South Africa, the US, and Palestine. Manji highlights that Cabral’s perspective underscores the crucial role of culture in the dehumanisation process driven by capitalism’s expansion. The obliteration or transformation of colonised cultures becomes pivotal to suppressing resistance and asserting dominance, as culture encapsulates history and humanity. Cabral and Fanon both emphasise that culture is not just an artistic manifestation but a historical expression and a powerful tool for liberation and resistance. This intrinsic subversive quality of culture counters the prevailing views of Enlightenment philosophers like Hegel, who wrongly deemed Africans as devoid of history.

Manji’s analysis continues, shedding light on the systematic eradication of cultures, languages, histories, and creative capacities inflicted by European colonisers, enslavers, and the emerging capitalist class. This brutal process, from the transatlantic slave trade to imperial expansions, aimed to portray Africans as sub-human, justifying atrocities like genocide, enslavement, land confiscation, and cultural annihilation. Cabral reveals that imperialism forced people to abandon their history and embrace a foreign narrative, perpetuating a cycle of cultural suppression.

Cabral aptly recognises that maintaining domination necessitates perpetually repressing the cultural life of the colonised. This repression is evidenced through taxation, forced labour, economic exclusion, and the establishment of native authorities. Cabral further emphasises that while some instances, notably genocides, eliminated significant portions of the population, systematic cultural repression remained a crucial tool for maintaining dominance in the colonial context.

In essence, Cabral and Fanon’s insights illustrate the pivotal role of culture in the psychology of submission and resistance among the colonised. Their perspectives unveil colonisers’ deliberate and calculated efforts to eradicate cultural identities while underscoring the indomitable power of culture as a driving force for liberation and resistance against oppressive colonial forces (Manji, 2017). In Cabral’s words:

The ideal for foreign domination, whether imperialist or not, would be to choose: either to liquidate practically all the population of the dominated country, thereby eliminating the possibilities for cultural resistance or to succeed in imposing itself without damage to the culture of the dominated people—that is, to harmonise economic and political domination of these people with their cultural personality. (Cabral, 1973)

The use of violence to dominate a people is, argued Cabral, “above all, to take up arms to destroy, or at least neutralise and to paralyse their cultural life. For as long as part of that people have a cultural life, foreign domination cannot be assured of its perpetuation” (Cabral, 1973).

By denying the historical development of the dominated people, imperialism necessarily denies their cultural development, which is why it requires cultural oppression and an attempt at liquidating the essential elements of the culture of the dominated people.

Amid the complexities of colonial Africa, Amilcar Cabral and Frantz Fanon delve into the intricate relationship between culture, freedom, and colonial domination. Cabral’s assessment unveils the harsh reality of Portuguese colonial laws, designating nearly the entire African population as ‘uncivilised’, subjecting them to colonial administration and settlers’ whims. Nevertheless, Cabral contemplates the potential detachment of culture from emancipation, urging his party to recognise their humanity beyond their African identity. He emphasises aligning African interests with universal human values to transcend localised limitations.

This stance contrasts with the Negritude movement, championed by figures like Léopold Sédar Senghor and Aimé Césaire, which, while empowering, also veered into depoliticising cultural identity. Fanon astutely notes the Eurocentric construction of the ‘Negro’ by the white man while emphasising that it is the colonised who shape Negritude. Fanon’s insight reflects the complexity of culture’s relationship with identity and resistance, revealing that cultural revival should not cling to tradition at the cost of historical progress.

Both authors recognise the insidious impact of colonialism on culture. Cabral underscores that the colonial state’s core mission was to perpetuate dehumanisation, necessitating the separation of culture from liberation. Fanon observes how colonialism distorts and damages the history of the colonised, creating an intricate struggle between retaining the heritage and forging a contemporary path.

The post-colonial era presents its challenges. Neocolonial regimes emerged, often subduing emancipatory movements, and blurring the line between colonial and post-independence structures. The depoliticisation of culture coincided with the rise of neoliberalism, atomising society and subverting collective action. The corporate media’s dominance and NGO proliferation further contribute to cultural dilution and socioeconomic inequality.

In this complex tapestry, the voices of young generations rise, fighting against historical erasure. Fanon’s notion that each generation must discover its mission resonates as underdeveloped countries grapple with preserving heritage while forging a progressive path. Amid these challenges, Cabral’s call for cultural resurgence rests with the masses as the true bearers of culture and history, emphasising their role in shaping a future transcending colonial legacy.

During the early stages of international development theorisation, the concepts used by prominent organisations such as the United Nations and the International Labour Organization were tainted by colonial language. Notably, the League of Nations championed the perpetuation of colonisation under the guise of a ‘sacred mission of civilisation’. This justification exemplified the colonial powers’ attempt to legitimise their expansionist agendas by portraying their actions as benevolent efforts to uplift and civilise the colonised territories. These international bodies’ use of such language reflects the complex interplay between rhetoric, power dynamics, and ideological underpinnings that shaped the discourse of development and colonialism during that era.

In economics, the same lens was used.

In the 1950s and 1960s, classical and neoclassical economists shaped the discourse surrounding development, while the treatment of Africa in global agreements and systems revealed underlying colonial attitudes. Over nearly three decades, prevailing policies were guided by neoclassical economic principles, particularly as modernised by the Washington Consensus. This ‘consensus’ referred to ideas embraced by influential figures within Washington’s power circles, including the United States Congress and Administration and institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, supported by prominent economists and think tanks (Lopes, 2019).

The core tenets of pure neoclassical economics encompassed a steadfast belief in the ‘invisible hand’ of the market, the rationality of economic agents’ decisions, and a minimalist approach to state intervention in economies. The decline of development economics as a distinct field, previously dominated by theories such as the Dependency School, stood in stark contrast to neoclassical economics and its emphasis on methodological individualism. Many newly independent African governments, for instance, aimed to foster industrialisation, boost local production, curtail imports, enhance employment opportunities, elevate living standards, and challenge the trade patterns encapsulated in the Prebisch-Singer hypothesis (which posits that countries exporting commodities and importing manufactured goods will have unfavourable trade terms).

In analysing the marginalisation of Africa in international discourse, Adams Oloo (2016) highlights Africa’s underrepresentation in global politics, particularly within international organisations, and underscores the challenges of effective African influence. Notably, despite increased quotas and voice for Africa in these bodies, meaningful representation remains elusive, with significant decisions often reflecting the interests of powerful nations rather than equitable global consensus. This is exemplified by the Bretton Woods institutions, initially designed to serve global interests but often swayed by the agendas of dominant powers like the United States and its allies. Oloo further examines the disparities in representation within organisations like the UN, where African populations disproportionately impacted by decisions often lack proportional voting influence.

Moreover, as Adebajo and Whiteman (2012) explored, the historical context of Europe’s relationship with Africa reveals a complex legacy of colonial exploitation and economic dependency. The Euro-African relationship traces back to a colonial past marked by asymmetrical trade relationships. Africa exported raw materials to Europe for financial assistance and preferential access to European markets. While initiatives like the Lomé Convention appeared progressive, they often perpetuated structural dependence, hindering African industrialisation and genuine economic development. The association status of former colonies within the European Economic Community (EEC) further perpetuated neocolonial dynamics, with France exerting significant influence over policies and relationships with African states.

These historical dynamics and the discourse on African marginalisation in international relations resonate with Cabral and Fanon’s critiques of colonial attitudes, cultural disempowerment, and struggles for genuine self-determination. Both Cabral and Fanon emphasised the need for African agency, unity, and the restoration of cultural identity to counter the dehumanising effects of colonialism. The challenges faced by Africa in international arenas reflect more significant issues of power imbalances, neocolonial legacies, and the quest for equitable representation—themes central to the works of Cabral, Fanon, and the analyses presented by Oloo, Adebajo, and Whiteman.

Adebajo and Whiteman (2012) highlight the enduring imbalance in EU-Africa trade relations, perpetuating Africa’s export of primary products and discouraging industrialisation due to EU competition. Despite evolving through Lomé agreements, the EU’s neoliberal shift in Lomé III led to conditionality imposed by international financial institutions, hindering the autonomy of African, Caribbean, and Pacific (ACP) countries. While aimed at enhancing European capital, the Cotonou Agreement disrupted Africa’s regional integration efforts by fragmenting trade policies. The EU’s divide-and-rule approach is mirrored in the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) concluded in 2007 (see Chap. 8). While the EU touts benefits like increased investment and technology transfer, Adebajo and Whiteman critique that, by and large, trade relations have undermined regional integration and perpetuated colonial legacies. This is a reading that mirrors the neocolonial dynamics explored by Ochieng and Sharman (2004) and Kamidza (2014).

However, the EU’s influence also compels African leaders to prioritise regional integration. The AU’s resemblance to the EU’s institutions raises questions about whether the European model can guide African development, considering historical and structural disparities. The struggle for an equitable partnership persists as African nations seek to reconfigure their relationship with the EU.