Roberts A.D. The Cambridge History of Africa, Volume 7: from 1905 to 1940
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THE COURSE OF CHANGE
as wage labourers and as consumers of state services, but they also
came under especially heavy pressure
to
be peasants
or
wage
earners, to reshape their lives to the often oppressive demands of
the market economy. From 1914 to 1920 a rising price level was
unusually combined with deteriorating terms of
trade,
so that the
pressures intensified while the benefits were less. The commodity
boom broke in the summer
of
1920 and was followed by a brief
but very sharp recession. By the middle 1920s there had been
a
partial recovery, but the terms of trade were not restored to the
1913 level in our period, perhaps not at any time since.
45
By now
vast new supplies
of
food and raw materials were pouring into
the industrial countries from the farming and mineral regions
opened up by the heavy capital outlays
of
the pre-war decade.
Lord Lugard's 'dual mandate', one side of which proclaimed the
duty of the colonial powers to make Africa's resources available
to'
the world',
was
partly obsolete when it
was
publicly formulated
in 1922, by which time the world's appetite for Africa's wealth
had markedly abated.
This temporary decline in Africa's commercial fortunes has
to
be related to the characteristic colonial ideology of the 1920s: the
complex
of
ideas summed
up in the
term 'indirect rule',
the
insistence that Africans should 'develop along their own lines',
even if this meant that in most accepted senses of the word they
would hardly develop
at
all. The relationship was
of
course
permissive,
not
determinant. Officials who
at
heart preferred
social stability to economic growth were more likely to have their
way when external conditions made rapid growth
in
any case
unattainable. For example, the contrast which has often been seen
between the aggressive developmentalism of the German rulers
of Tanganyika and the paternalist inertia of their British successors
is
a
contrast of economic epochs
at
least as much as of colonial
cultures; few capitalists would have rushed to invest in the wastes
of Tanganyika in the inter-war years even if its government had
been more eager to receive them; and, conversely,
it
was British
45
This is the result of G. K. Helleiner's calculations for Nigeria, presented in his Peasant
agriculture,
government
and economic growth in Nigeria (Homewood, III., 1966), appendix A,
table 1VA.6. There
is
no systematic index
of
the terms
of
trade for any other African
country before the Second World War, but preliminary calculations
for
East Africa
suggest that, while the general pattern was similar, the 1913 peak was not quite
so
dominant.
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ASPECTS OF ECONOMIC HISTORY
Tanganyikans whose initiative,
in the
very different conditions
created by the Second World War, led to that
reductio ad absurdum
of developmentalism, the Groundnut Scheme
of
1947.
So long
as the
1920s lasted, commodity prices were good
enough
to
attract
a
modest flow
of
capital
to
the more favoured
regions
of
Africa and
to
make more Africans willing partners
in
the international exchange economy. But between 1929 and 1933
nearly all prices, except that of gold, fell to unprecedented depths,
some export commodities losing more than half their average
value
in
that period. Partial recovery
in the
mid-1930s
was
followed by a renewed collapse in 1938, and the outbreak of war,
with restrictions
on
shipping
and
loss
of
European markets
initially made matters worse still. Moreover, primary producers
suffered even more heavily than industrial workers from
the
economic sickness
of the
time,
and
Africa's terms
of
trade
worsened still further, reaching their lowest point ever about the
middle
of
the Second World War. And
so
our period ended
in
deepening gloom.
The gloom was not caused only by the periodic ebb tide of the
world capitalist economy. There were more fundamental reasons
why
the
first two
or
three decades
of
colonial rule should have
been
an
' age
of
improvement'
but
the next two decades
a
time
of doubt and discontent. The colonial stimulus worked, we have
suggested,
by
creating the conditions
for
the fuller employment
of both land
and
labour. Once
the
slack
of the
pre-colonial
economy had been taken up, progress slowed towards
a
halt.
46
Production
for
export
did
increase during
the
1930s, because
governments brought greater pressure
to
bear
on
the people
in
order
to
sustain their revenues, because
the
people themselves
sought
to
sustain what
had
become
a
customary level
of
con-
sumption,
and
because
in the
case
of
tree-crops
and
mines
the
greater part
of
the production costs
had
already been incurred.
But expansion was achieved with
a
growing sense
of
strain and
the limits
of
the process were
in
sight.
The
limits were both
structural
and
technological. Wage labour
and
production
for
distant markets
had
been superimposed upon,
but had not
46
The
most ambitious econometric study, Robert Szereszewski's
Structural changes
in
the
economy
of
Ghana,
iSpi—ipn (London, 1965) suggests that the decisive period
was
the quarter-century before 1914 and that thereafter (p.92) the pace of structural change
was 'rather slow' until the mid-1950s.
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THE COURSE OF CHANGE
superseded, older systems of local and domestic economy. Exten-
sion of the market had greatly enhanced the value of the marginal
product of Africa's land and labour, but physical productivity had
hardly altered. The ox-drawn plough had been widely adopted by
African farmers in South Africa, but elsewhere they had rarely
found it feasible or profitable. Mechanisation was not very far
advanced even on white-settler farms and was unknown on
African holdings. Secondary industry made some headway in
South Africa, where the foundations even of heavy industry were
being laid in the prosperous 1930s. But elsewhere manufacturing
did not go beyond the elementary processing of agricultural
products, with here and there a plant for the production of lager
beer, soft drinks or cigarettes, though the necessary repair
workshops run by the railways, the posts and telegraphs and the
public works departments should be mentioned as important
nurseries of the basic engineering skills. The fundamental reason
for the failure to move out of the extractive phase of development
was not technical or political but economic: outside South Africa
purchasing power was too small to warrant the local establishment
of forms of production whose virtue lies in the economies of scale.
Advanced technology could have been hired or bought, skills
could have been imparted if it had been worth while to impart
them, and political considerations were relevant only in that the
economic impediments could not have been overcome except by
tariff protection or other forms of state assistance, to offer which
would have been inconsistent with the basic objectives and
philosophies of the colonial regimes.
The admission that African societies, even towards the end of
our period, were still too poor to provide an adequate base for
local industrial development concedes that the gains accruing to
the mass of the people from the systems of exchange described
in this chapter were not remarkable. The gains, however, did not
consist solely of an increased supply of consumer goods but also
of the extension of public services, especially in the fields of
education and health. These services were provided mainly
through the agency of the missionary societies, the resources
being provided partly by the contributions of the people them-
selves, partly by the Christian congregations of Europe and
America (easily the most important donors of 'aid' in this
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ASPECTS OF ECONOMIC HISTORY
period)
47
and partly by subventions from the colonial state, which
of course was
in
the main merely returning part
of
the money
levied in direct and indirect taxation. (The Colonial Development
Act
of
1929 may be a landmark in the history of British colonial
policy, but its impact was barely perceptible, and in any case the
scope of the term ' development' was still narrowly economic;
it
was only
in
1940 that the words 'and welfare' were added
to
legislation
of
this kind.
48
)
Education
was
regarded instrumentally
by
most
of
those
concerned: by governments as
a
way
of
meeting their own and
the commercial organisations' need
for
employees who were
literate, numerate, disciplined and not prohibitively expensive; by
teachers for similar reasons and often also to help in propagating
the message
of
salvation; by pupils and their parents as
a
means
of personal
and
group advancement.
Yet the
extension
of
knowledge must surely be seen as one of the most valuable fruits
of economic progress, and
not
just
as
one
of
its most crucial
preconditions. Better health was even more obviously an intrinsic
good,
and
hospitals and rural dispensaries, inadequate though
they were, received the most unambiguous welcome
of
all the
twentieth-century innovations.
Hardly any African would doubt that, other things being equal,
an increase in the quantity of life is to be desired above all other
ends.
Demography is therefore the most important measure of the
success of any economic system. Unfortunately, however, there
is the usual lack of hard figures. Though most of the administra-
tions conducted periodic 'censuses' they did not have the means
to make genuine
and
comprehensive counts
of a
suspicious
population, and registration of births and deaths, if attempted at
all,
was hopelessly incomplete. Each census usually showed a large
increase on the previous one, but improved recording certainly
accounted for part of the increase and
it
is difficult to know how
large
a
part. After 1945,
in
some though
by no
means
all
territories, census-taking became thorough
and
sophisticated
47
This assertion
is
made confidently, although
the
financial aspect
of
the
missionary
effort
has
received little scholarly attention,
and
there appears
to be no
systematic
estimate
of
the
cash investment.
48
Between
1929 and 1938
British colonial Africa received from
the
Colonial Develop-
ment Fund some £2.4111
as
grants
and
£i.6m
as
loans
(of
which most were remitted
under
the 1940 Act).
These moneys were chiefly devoted
to the
improvement
of
water
supplies,
the
prevention
of
soil erosion
and the
expansion
of
transport facilities.
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THE COURSE OF CHANGE
enough
for
the general trend
of
African population
to
become
clear; by the time of independence
it
was growing fast, often
at
more than 2 per cent per annum, in
a
few areas at as much as
3
per cent;
in
other words Africa was
by
then experiencing
the
population explosion that was convulsing the rest
of
the Third
World. But exactly when the upsurge began
is
still uncertain.
Some trust can probably be reposed
in
the figures from South
Africa, which show that African population almost doubled in the
first thirty yeajrs of this century; but the South African experience
was certainly atypical, and for the rest we have to rely mainly on
circumstantial reasoning.
The general pattern
of
pre-colonial African demography was
that which would
be
expected
in
rural societies with simple
technologies and no knowledge of scientific medicine. Mortality
and fertility rates were both very high, and some ' normal' excess
of births was offset by periodic disasters. There was probably
a
long-term upward trend but
it
was very slow. And whatever
growth there may have been was checked in many areas, especially
in East
and
Central Africa,
by the
unheard-of disasters that
immediately preceded the colonial conquest. The conquest
itself,
though for the conquerors
it
consisted only of minor campaigns
and punitive expeditions, was for many African communities the
most violent event in their historical experience, and the revolts
that followed, notably those against the Germans
in
East and
South West Africa
at
the beginning
of
our period, led
to
very
heavy loss of life. Then, when things seemed at last to be settling
down, there began the great conflict which from Africa's point
of view was the last act of the Scramble. In Cameroun, in South
West Africa and most of
all
in East Africa the conquerors fought
with one another on African soil, with African auxiliaries and with
calamitous results. In East Africa the British alone recruited nearly
a million troops and'
carriers',
of whom, according to conservative
official figures, not less than a hundred thousand died, nearly all
from disease and malnutrition.
This war service was
in
fact only the heaviest
of
many lethal
burdens laid on the African peoples in the first decades of colonial
rule.
Those who died
in
battle, whether fighting against
the
colonialists
or
against one another
at
their behest, were few
in
comparison
to
those
who
succumbed
or
were permanently
enfeebled while engaged
in
arduous labour
in
unaccustomed
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ASPECTS OF ECONOMIC HISTORY
climates, sustained by inadequate quantities
of
unfamiliar food,
and exposed to a new range of
diseases.
Most notorious, because
of the accompanying brutalities, was the fate
of
those who had
to ransack the forests for wild rubber in King Leopold's Congo.
That scandal was passing its peak as our period opened, but the
tribulations of the concession-ridden French section of
the
Congo
basin, as of Angola, would get worse for some time to come. On
a smaller scale, there were many deaths among
the
highland
Kikuyu recruited for unsuccessful plantations on the Kenya coast,
and many more among the railway-building gangs of Gabon and
the Ivory Coast. And worse than any of the direct consequences
of the conquest were the results of the sudden increase in human
and animal movements that preceded and accompanied
it; for
these opened the way for the agencies of disease to spread among
populations not inured
to
them. Smallpox and bubonic plague
were not new to Africa, but there is every reason to believe that
their incidence greatly increased in the latter part of the nineteenth
century
and the
early years
of
the twentieth,
as did
measles,
tuberculosis
and in
some savanna countries sandfly fever and
cerebrospinal meningitis. Venereal diseases likewise multiplied,
becoming almost pandemic in the regions of most extreme social
disruption; they are held responsible for the belt of unusually low
fertility that extended, during
and
even beyond
the
colonial
period, over the northern part
of
the Congo basin. The worst
single demographic disaster occurred when the tsetse flies native
to the northern shores
of
Lake Victoria became infected with
a
virulent strain of human trypanosomiasis, and before the outbreak
died away, mainly through the forced evacuation of the affected
islands and coastlands, very large numbers of people — 300,000
is the usually accepted figure for Uganda — had died the miserable
death
of
sleeping-sickness victims during the first decade
of
the
century. More widespread and long-lasting were the effects
of
animal trypanosomiasis, which also took advantage of ecological
disarray
to
establish itself in vast tracts
of
former grazing land,
denying them
to
cattle and their human partners.
By
1905
the
herds were just beginning
to
recover from the great rinderpest
epidemic which swept through eastern Africa from Ethiopia
to
Natal
in the
1890s, reducing pastoralists
to
starvation
and
rendering mixed husbandmen
far
more vulnerable
to
the effects
of crop failure; but recovery was made slow by the attacks of other
136
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THE COURSE OF CHANGE
cattle plagues: foot-and-mouth, redwater, east-coast fever,
pleuropneumonia. And then came the culminating human disaster,
the influenza pandemic that was the last and worst consequence
of the conflict which the greed and stupidity of Europe's rulers
had wished upon the world. It may well be that
2
per cent or more
of Africa's population perished in 1918-19 from this cause alone.
Africa's peoples have great resilience, however, and there were
countervailing forces which gathered strength throughout the
colonial period. Even before 1914 the security of life had been
improved in some parts of Africa, and by no means all of it was
lethally affected (except through the influenza) by the European
war. Thereafter there were two decades of almost total peace. In
addition, the intruders were able to do something to combat the
diseases which their coming had helped to spread, and eventually
to produce a net gain in health. The scale and timing of the
improvement are hard to assess. Outside the towns — which were
actually healthier places than the countryside — skilled medical
help was very thinly spread; and in any case, apart from quinine,
certain remedies for dysentery and a very successful treatment for
yaws,
medical science had few specific remedies for Africa's ills
until after the Second World War. On the other hand the
administration did to some extent manage to curb the most lethal
epidemic diseases, vaccination playing some part in this, but
quarantines and destruction of plague-infected dwellings a greater
one.
Though epidemics of various sorts were reported year by
year by almost every territory throughout the period, mass
mortalities of the kind common in the previous half-century do
not seem to have occurred after 1920.
However, medicine and public health measures probably had
a less significant positive effect than a general improvement in the
standard of living that can be noticed in the more favoured
territories from the beginning of the period and in nearly all of
them by its half-way mark. Here again it is difficult to be very
specific. There was no general or radical change in housing or
other features of the economic environment. The rapid and
widespread increase in the use of washable cloth doubtless had
some effect on health; but the main improvement is likely to have
been in diet. After the early scandals and disasters, most labourers
in European employment were adequately and regularly, though
monotonously, fed. For those who stayed in the villages there
137
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ASPECTS OF ECONOMIC HISTORY
were some additions
to
the agricultural repertoire, notably the
New World plants, maize and cassava, which had been spreading
slowly into the interior since the sixteenth century but made rapid
headway
in the
twentieth. This
was not an
unequivocal
improvement, either agronomically
or
nutritionally —
if it
had
been,
it
would have been effected much sooner — but on balance
it made people's diet more secure. Temperate-zone crops such as
wheat and potatoes, together with woollen blankets, helped
to
make habitable
the
well-watered
and
malaria-free mountain
countries, where population grew especially fast. More generally,
the money incomes derived from
the
sale
of
crops
or
labour
enabled people to eat more meat and dried fish and so to correct
the protein deficiency that was the main drawback
to
life
in
the
moister lowlands. In the cattle countries, wherever the tsetse
fly
permitted, there was marked expansion
in
the latter part
of
the
period. Veterinary science had rather more
to
offer than human
medicine, and of course livestock breed faster than people, so that
in many areas the number of beasts per person was greater by the
1920s than
it had
ever been before; indeed, overgrazing was
becoming the most serious threat to ecological equilibrium.
So people on the whole were eating
a
little better, and there
were no longer years in which they did not eat at all. Thanks
to
the new means of transport, food could be moved into drought-
stricken areas,
if
necessary from outside Africa, and most people
had or could acquire enough money to buy it. Deaths from hunger
did not cease with the arrival
of
colonial government.
In
East
Africa, for instance, the administrations were unable
to
prevent
many thousands from perishing in 1919, when
a
severe drought
was added to the afflictions of that terrible time. But this was the
last disaster
of its
kind.
In the
early 1930s there were three
successive years
of
low rainfall and massive locust invasions
as
well,
but the
result was hardship
and
malnutrition,
not the
large-scale mortality that must have ensued at any earlier time.
For East and Central Africa, then,
the
outline story
is
that
between 1880 and 1920 there was almost certainly an overall loss
of population, but that this was rather more than made good by
unprecedented growth, probably averaging already between
1
and
1.5 per cent per annum, in the next two decades. In West Africa,
which had been exposed to the outer world for centuries, the most
difficult phase
of
biological adjustment was already over;
the
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THE COURSE OF CHANGE
colonial experience seems to have been a fairly steady acceleration
of an upward tendency which can be detected from the early
nineteenth century onwards and may have brought the annual
increase to 2 per cent by the end of our period. In the healthy
south too there was continuous expansion. So population was
nearly everywhere denser in 1940 than it had been in 190
5,
or in
1880.
49
But, apart from areas where alienations to white land-
owners had created artificial scarcity, it was only in a few special
districts — in south-east Nigeria, in some of the hill countries of
East Africa — that there was yet any real pressure on the land,
or any serious threat to the ancient assumption that everyone had
a right to enough land for his subsistence. That crucial change,
probably the most drastic of all the long-term consequences of
the colonial intervention, still lay in the future.
What is true in the demographic domain is true in other spheres
as well; the consequences of the major innovations made at and
just before the beginning of our period were only just beginning
to work themselves out by its end. Moreover, many of the
underlying long-term trends were masked by the effects of
international recession and of war. Histories have to stop some-
where, but an economic history which stops in the middle of the
colonial epoch is perhaps especially incomplete.
«' The total population of Africa in the 1930s is likely to have been between 130 and
160 million. Over 33 million lived in the countries of Mediterranean Africa, and almost
half of these were in Egypt. South of the Sahara, there were about 10 million in South
Africa, perhaps rather more in the Belgian Congo, and twice as many in Nigeria, as
also in French black Africa.
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CHAPTER
3
CHRISTIANITY
Apart from
the
Coptic Church
in
Ethiopia and Egypt and
the
established settlements
of
Christian whites
in
North and South
Africa and of Christian Creoles in Freetown, Monrovia and Cape
Palmas, Christian influence
in
Africa
at the
beginning
of the
twentieth century was still largely restricted
to a
thin scatter
of
missionary outposts. Already, however, there were some dramatic
exceptions
to
the overall lack
of
positive response, and already
these cases had illustrated
an
ironic and prophetic fact. Some of
the most notable Christian advances had been made in the absence
of foreign missionaries, and the future development and maturity
of the indigenous churches would largely depend on the elimina-
tion
of
missionary control
and
paternalism.
It was
while
the
missionaries had been excluded from Madagascar in the reign of
Ranavalona
I
(1828-61) that Malagasy Christians
had
laid
the
foundations for a conversion of the Merina kingdom so intensive
that
by
1913 visitors could report that 'probably
in no
country
in
the
world
are the
Christian Churches better attended'.
1
Similarly
in
Buganda, when
the
White Fathers temporarily
withdrew
in
1882,
the
young Catholic converts immediately
displayed that zeal and conviction which in less than a decade was
to carry them and their Anglican counterparts through persecution
to
a
position
of
power and dominance.
In
coastal West Africa,
where disease
and
mortality reduced
the
number
of
European
missionaries,
the
expansion
of
Christianity among
the
Fante,
Yoruba and Niger Delta peoples had been largely directed and
accomplished
by
African clerics and laity. Other Africans were
also beginning to
find
in Christianity fresh answers, often forgotten
or belittled
by
Western missionaries,
to
traditional spiritual
1
Anon., Madagascar for
Christ,
Being
a
joint report
of
simultaneous deputations from
the London Missionary Society, the Friends' Foreign Mission Association and the Paris
Missionary Society,
to
Madagascar, July
to
October, 1915 (London, 1913), 22.
140
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