In my 84th serial, I elucidated on the Arab Slave trade and linked it to internal colonialists in the country. Indeed, the Arab slave trade was the forerunner of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. As I have adequately documented in my Patrons of Poverty, the European slave trade was no less evil. Through and through, it was heartbreaking.

Throughout the sixteenth century, about 13000 slaves were exported to Europe and America annually, and this number more than doubled to 27000 subsequently.

British involvement in the human trade in the 18th century increased the number to an estimated 70,000 slaves taken away to North America. Between 1780 and 1863, black slaves in the United States numbered about 4 million, while the total number of slaves in the Americas was put at between 15 and 20 million. France’s gain from slavery testifies to the volume of exploitation of blacks. In the French colony of Haiti, slave labour output constituted two-fifths of France’s overseas trade (for greater details, see Patrons of Poverty, 2015).

From the European slave trade, Africa came under the yoke of colonial rule. As I have observed elsewhere, “Colonialism in the annals of Africa represents a phase of social violence, in which Africa was subjugated to the formal political and economic rule of the West. Economically, the rule was far-reaching as it was a period in which the politics and policies of the colonising powers were brazenly determined by economic interests. The entire colonies were forced to produce cash crops and mine natural mineral resources to the benefit of the colonising economy.”

In both British and French colonies of West Africa, production relations were structured to maximise gains. The consequence was the extroversion of the economy. For example, Senegal’s over-reliance on groundnut production led to neglect in the production of its staple, rice, which it had to import from French Indo-China, now Vietnam. Similarly, British-Gambia also imported rice from India. This is partly the provenance of today’s food crisis. Between the 1880s and 1990s, Africa was under various forms of colonial rule. South Africa came under black majority rule only in 1994.

Political independence meant nothing without economic freedom, Kwame Nkrumah had echoed. Post-colonial black Africans have been subjected to neocolonialism. It does not exist in the past, but living amongst us with sundry collaborators. In the words of Nkrumah,

“Neo-colonialism is a greater danger to independent countries than is colonialism. Colonialism is crude, essentially overt, and apt to be overcome by a purposeful concert of national effort. In neo-colonialism, however, the people are divided from their leaders and, instead of providing true leadership and guidance which is informed at every point by the ideal of the general welfare, leaders come to neglect the very people who put them in power and incautiously become instruments of suppression on behalf of the neo-colonialists.”

Neo-colonialism is the continuation of colonial control by proxy, mainly indigenous elite subservient to the erstwhile colonial masters in London, Paris, Berlin, Brussels, Lisbon, Madrid and Washington. France has military garrisons in virtually all of its former colonies in West Africa. London regards Nigeria as its backyard. You needed to feel the frenzy at the British and Commonwealth Office when the dictatorial Abacha regime played the French card.

This neo-colonial control of African countries has arrested the historical march by Africans to free themselves from pre-history. Neocolonialism is somewhat consubstantial with imperialism, which is itself a system of external domination of one country by another, mostly great powers. Imperialism, as a complex, rules the global jungle. To ignore the overarching externality of the African condition is to partly ignore its solution.

Another form of slavery is the trap of ‘magical consciousness’ (MC) in ways Paolo Freire conceives of it. MC “simply apprehends facts and attributes to them a superior power by which it is controlled and to which it must therefore submit…is characterised by fatalism, which leads men to fold their arms, resigned to the impossibility of resisting the power of facts.” It is the opposite of critical consciousness that takes a critical view of phenomena, interrogating causality in order to understand reality. This is an endemic disease among us, and as Nkrumah rightly notes, “Religion is an instrument of bourgeois social reaction”, which imperialists have used effectively in the exploitation of Africans. As an opium, hegemonic forces in Nigeria have also used it as a tool for perpetuating domination and extracting political advantages.  

Today, imperialism has entered into a new face, carrying along its umbilical cords. This time led by a rogue America, which has been a dominant power since the end of the imperialist war of the mid-nineteenth century, which is often dubbed World War II. Mr President, Nigeria has been drawn into its vortex as a new colony after the ‘flag independence’ of 1960 due to the irresponsibility of its governing elite. Elsewhere, other redemptive forces are resisting this new scourge. I shall address this under the title “new imperialism” next week.

Prof Akhaine lectures at the Department of Political Science, Lagos State University.