Freedom frustrated by imperialism in Africa

Many outstanding leaders of African countries have been killed in assassinations linked to imperialist agencies. South African Communist Chris Hani, considered a likely successor to Nelson Mandela, is one such leader. Hani had toured the United States for the People's Weekly World in 1992, a year before he was assassinated in South Africa. File photo

By William Pomeroy

An unpleasant debate was stirred in Britain last month with the release by the Public Record Office of a report that had been held from public view for 50 years.

This is quite usual. Historians have to wait 30 to 50 years for the realease of secret documents considered too sensitive for publication when written or proposed.

It is believed that materials dating back to mid-Victorian times are still kept hidden in dusty Public Record alcoves.

The paper made available in January, leaving a bad taste, was a report and recommendations submitted in 1948 to the Atlee Labor government by Viscount General Bernard Montgomery, the British army commander in World War II.

It had been submitted following an extensive official trip to Africa in the autumn of 1947, and had been quickly buried because of its content that revealed Montgomery's racist frame of mind.

In it Montgomery called the African "a complete savage" who he said was incapable of developing the african continent.

The Montgomery trip was undertaken a decade before the first African country became independent (the British colony of Gold Coast, renamed Ghana) but calls for African freedom were becoming louder in both Britain and its colonies.

Montgomery viewed the African continent as a vast storehouse of rich resources which its inhabitants were unfit to rule over or develop.

That, he contended, could only be done by Britain and he proposed a "master plan" for the British colonies and their interests, which he recommended should be amalgamated into three large federations, in West, Central and East Africa.

Such a scheme was not to be for the benefit of the African people but was designed to create a huge reservoir of mineral wealth and of labor to make Britain prosperous.

That this report was rejected and tucked away by the colonial secretary in the Atlee government was less to do with any moral considerations about Montgomery's racist depictions of Africans than with imperialist calculations of profit margins. It was concluded that Africa was too poor as it stood to merit the "great expense of money and effort" that would be required to carry it out.

On its release, the 50-year old Montgomery report might have been received as little more than a curiosity, but, while being condemned by progressive and liberals for its imperialist viewpoint, it has been seized upon by British right wing and latter-day imperialist sectors as rational and far-sighted truism.

Pointing to present-day wars and misrules in Africa, they say that "Monty was right."

A leader of this pack has been the Murdoch-owned London Times which editorially declared the Montgomery report "A racist verdict that Africa has done its best to prove right."

Asserting that "so badly have Africans in fact ruled themselves that, were Monty alive today, he might be claiming that he saw the future more clearly than the decolonizers who were to pull Britain out of Africa," the Times referred to African rulers as a "roll-call of villains" among "this century's most murderous" (listing President Mengistu of Ethiopia along with Amin and Abacha) while others are termed "the rogue's gallery of incompetent, corrupt dictators," lumping Kwame Nkrumah with autocrats like Dr. Hastings Banda.

Commenting on the Montgomery idea of British colonial federations, Murdoch's Times said, "Britain could have ruled Africa better and left it better." This echoes right-wing proposals in Britain in recent years for western powers to return, take over and run the resource-rich African countries.

No one would deny that after 40 years of freedom and independence Africa remains as the continent of the greatest poverty and the least overall development in the world, but to blame this on the African people themselves, as General Montgomery and his apologists do, is a gross slander.

In truth, colonialism never left Africa, its presence remaining in both direct and indirect military intervention.

That kind of presence continued to the end of the apartheid rule in South Africa, an imperialist-backed aggressor system that ravaged Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, Zimbabwe and elsewhere, a wrecking of African development that persists in Angola through the UNITA monster imperialism created at that time.

The colonial imprint is especially evident in the artificial colonial boundaries that cut across tribal homelands and ethnic groups, and in the multiethnic colonial states set up in disregard of ethnic differences except for their use in divide and rule tactics and left behind as a minefield of antagonisms in the power structures of independent states.

Today's numerous wars in Africa, between states and within states, have these conditions as a basis, a problem only resolvable over time and perhaps through agreed geopolitical changes.

From this setting a "roll-call of villains" can certainly be culled from African leaders: they are those supported and bought with corruption in exchange for allowing unrestricted operation of western corporations, Mobutu of Zaire, Moi of Kenya, Amin of Uganda, Banda of Malawi, General Abacha and his military predecessors in Nigeria.

What Murdoch's Times and its ilk fail to mention in their sweeping dismissal of African leaders is that outstanding leaders did come forward in the past 40 years, and were removed from the scene by assassination, in most cases traceable to imperialist agencies - Patrice Lumumba in Congo, Amilcar Cabral in Guinea-Bissau, Eduardo Mondlane in Mozambique, Chris Hani in South Africa, while Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana was ousted by a western-backed coup.

Many others were gotten rid of by murder. Currently a western-backed campaign is under way to oust President Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe.

Mugabe and his government have evident faults but they are not the reason for the opposition which derives from Mugabe's declared policies of transferring thousands of white settler-owned farms holding the country's best land to land-hungry Africans and of enabling Africans to acquire at least a share in the 400 British and other western companies that dominate Zimbabwe's industrial and commercial economy.

To try to pin the relative failure of African development on the African people themselves is to ignore the deliberately designed massive lending operations in Africa by the World Bank, IMF and other western agencies.

These agencies provided the channels of corruption through which transnational companies gained free entry and which have left African burdened with nearly $300 billion in debt that makes development programs virtually impossible in most African countries.