GEN - Slavery myth the latest scam for African aid

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The Scotsman

Slavery myth the latest scam for African aid

Richard Dowden

THERE are many bogus fund-raising wheezes coming out of Africa these days. There has been a flood of letters to Britain from Ugandan crooks purporting to be Aids orphans begging for school fees.

Another trap comes from Nigeria in the form of a letter that tells you that there is a sum of several million dollars left over from a special account that needs to be transferred into a bank account in Europe.

The letter asks you to allow the sender to use your bank account as a conduit for the money in return for 20 per cent of it. So you supply them with your signature and the details of your bank account - and they empty it.

An even larger-scale wheeze is the demand for reparations for slavery, and Mary Robinson, the outgoing United Nations Commissioner for Human Rights, has fallen for it. She said last week in an interview in the Independent, that she hoped the demand for reparations, which will be made at the forthcoming conference on racism to be held in South Africa, would be resolved.

The attempt to beg money by playing on guilt over slavery and imperialism argues that between the 15th and 19th centuries Europeans enslaved millions of Africans and carried them off to America. That was a crime against humanity. Africa demands compensation for that and for colonial rule.

Don’t fall for this argument. The image of white people running round West Africa capturing Africans and dragging them in chains to the coast is entirely false. The slave business, from capture to sale at the coast, was in the hands of Africans. Almost all African societies practised slavery long before Europeans came to their shores.

Slaves were either captured in raids and war or were forced into slavery through poverty. The slave trade began when surplus slaves were sold to European traders in return for textiles, iron cars, booze and beads and taken to the New World to work the sugar plantations and farms.

The biggest exporters were the Portuguese, who carried away nearly five million, followed by the British, who took around 2.6 million. The number of people removed from Africa is estimated at 11 million to 12 million [not counting the millions transported to Arabia from central and East Africa to work as domestic slaves]. The European trade hugely increased the demand for slaves. No longer a by-product of war or poverty, slaves became the cause of war and banditry.

Yet it was always Africans who captured the slaves, took them to the coast and sold them to European traders. The European forts dotted along the West African coast were built not for protection against Africans but other Europeans. There is no record of these slave forts or the trading stations being attacked by Africans, but they often changed hands in wars between the British, Dutch and Portuguese. The local Africans who ran the slave trade always welcomed them.

African control of the trade is illustrated by the solidarity they showed when the European buyers offered too little. They simply refused to sell and the slave captains were forced to sit offshore with their food and water running short until they were prepared to raise their offers.

If there is a case for compensation, the victims of enslavement must be the slaves themselves, those transported to America. The perpetrators were the African kingdoms, such as the Ashante in Ghana, who captured and sold them. Any compensation, therefore, should be paid by West African states to African-Americans.

Colonialism, too, is problematical. On the eve of the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Omdurman in 1998, I asked the British ambassador to Sudan if he was going to apologise. It was a particularly vile affair. Thanks to the Maxim gun, several thousand Sudanese died, but only a handful of British soldiers. "Of course," said the ambassador cheerfully," and then I will apologise for building the roads, the railway, the schools, hospitals and the university."

Africa’s problems (some, but not all created or made worse by colonialism) cannot be solved by more money and certainly not by huge dollops of money given to its governments. Their record of using aid money to bring progress to their peoples is not good. They have stolen quite a lot of it. Yet many are demanding, as reparation for slavery and colonialism, a massive lump sum. This, they argue, will kick-start African economies, just as Marshall aid rebuilt Europe after the Second World War.

It sounds reasonable, but a closer look, however, shows that Africa has already had a Marshall plan several times over. At the end of the war Europe was prostrate, and some parts faced starvation. America gave Europe $13bn (£10bn) over three and a half years to jump-start its economy. Between the 1947 and 1952 the money was used to buy American food and American goods to rebuild shattered cities and industries. At today’s prices, the Marshall Plan would be worth $76bn (£53bn).

Had Marshall aid been distributed equally over the whole of Europe, each of its 264 million inhabitants would have got £34, or £206 at today’s prices. In fact some countries got more than others. Per capita, Britain and France got most: respectively £43 and £45 per head. Germans, the worst-off, received less than half that.

Between 1966 and 1998 Africa got £202bn (worth £292bn at 1997 prices), nearly four times the amount Europe got at the end of the war. Distributed evenly at today’s prices that would have given each African about £890 since 1968, about four times the amount each European received. But judged per year the figures are not so generous. If the Marshall Plan had been evenly distributed over its three-and-a-half years among Europe’s population, each would have got about £59 a year at today’s prices. Each African has received on average only £22 a year since 1968.

The problem is that the circumstances in Europe at the end of the war and Africa’s present misery have completely different causes. Marshall aid helped West Europe’s economy revive because, more important than the money, there was peace, order and a skilled workforce. Europe had a huge reservoir of skilled human capital waiting to be redeployed once factories and institutions were reconstructed.

Africa lacks all of these. Literacy rates are low, industries that were built up with aid in the 1960s and 1970s often collapsed through mismanagement and lack of skills. The parts of Africa that suffer real poverty have no culture of disciplined industrial work.

Justice, if that is what Mrs Robinson wants, might be done in a different way, righting a present injustice rather than past ones and actually giving Africa a chance to emerge from poverty.

For the foreseeable future Africa is an agricultural exporting country. Rather than a Marshall Aid plan for Africa, rich countries should look at the £254bn they gave away to their own agricultural industries last year, £199bn of it to farmers. That is only slightly less than the entire GNP of sub-Saharan Africa in 1998, and many times what Europe gives in aid to Africa. They close their own markets to African agricultural goods and sometimes even dump some of their subsidised food on Africa, damaging African agriculture further.

The rich countries that subsidise their own farmers are the same ones that insist African governments cut subsidies on food and force their farmers to pay the full costs of fuel, fertiliser and transport. If we want to help Africa, a little bit of well-targeted aid will be helpful, but it is far more important to give Africa the chance to earn its living in a fair marketplace.

Richard Dowden is Africa editor of the Economist.

-- Anonymous, March 30, 2001


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