## AFRICAN COLONIALISM; THE EFFECT ON CULTURAL, HERITAGE AND ECONOMY AT LARGE

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The questions remains that who are africans, who were we before the white people came, were we organised? were we coordinated, was there really any development in African before the white people came. This articles tries to talk about who Africans were before colonization and why we still remain the way we are today.

The question remains Does a master wants his freed slave to be better than him?

There a lot of people today who believes the colonization of Africa is a blessing to African, maybe African would have remained barbarians who are just a minority t the entire world itself. some even assumes if the westners did not come, we wont have upgraded our economy and technology but i put it to you that they re just mere assumptions. in the actual fact, most inventions in the world today were done by the blacks. This shows that the blacks are really great but we were made to feel inferior so as not to surpass our masters.

Who were Africans before colonization?

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Africa has been home to many peoples and cultures since ancient times. The African continent is thought to be the oldest inhabited continent on Earth and is believed to be the place where humans first originated. There is evidence of the evolution of the human species in eastern and southern Africa.

1. Agriculture
   In early Africa, there were vast amounts of land and only very small populations. It is thought that around 10 000 years ago humans gradually began to cultivate crops and domesticate animals. Such developments led to the establishment of more permanent settlements and a growth in population. Communities that cultivated crops were able to trade surplus (extra) crops with communities that still relied on hunting and gathering. It is thought that between 6000 BC and 4000 BC agriculture spread south of the Sahara Desert. Wheat, barley, sorghum and millet were the main agricultural crops and pre-colonial African societies often worked with metals such as tin and iron.

2. Religion
   There are many different indigenous African religious practices, although some share common elements. Many religions believe in one god, or in the presence of spirits. African have sacrificial believes and have a rich religious festival.

3. Trade
   The Sahara Desert divides the continent of Africa into North and sub-Saharan Africa. For many centuries the Sahara was almost impossible to cross. It is thought that the Persians introduced the camel into Egypt around 500 BC and trade then increased between regions to the north and south of the desert. Items traded included precious metals, salt and ivory. Slaves were also traded by indigenous peoples in pre-colonial Africa and many slaves were taken as a result of battles between kingdoms. It is thought that from around 870 AD slaves were traded between Arab traders and West African kingdoms.

4. Government

Before Africa was colonized, the continent was characterized by a large degree of pluralism and flexibility. The continent consisted not of closed reproducing entities, equipped with unique unchanging cultures, but of more fluid units that would readily incorporate outsiders (even whites) into the community as long as they accepted its customs, and where the sense of obligation and solidarity went beyond that of the nuclear family. An example of such inclusiveness were the Xhosa who limited Xhosadom not along ethnic or geographical lines but along political. All persons or groups who accepted the rule of the paramount chief became Xhosa. Pre-colonial African societies were of a highly varied nature. They could be either stateless, state run or kingdoms, but most were founded on the principles of communism in that they were self-governing, autonomous entities, and in that all members took part, directly or indirectly, in the daily running of the tribe. Land was held commonly and could not be bought or sold, although other things, such as cattle, were owned individually. In those societies that were not stateless, the chiefs ran the daily affairs of the tribe together with one or more councils.These councils simultaneously informed the chief, checked his powers and made policy by reaching unanimous decisions. If unanimity was not reached, a village assembly would be called to debate the issue and majority ruling would now apply. The chief would listen silently to all queries during such meetings and every male adult was free to criticize him. The role of the chief during such meetings was to sum up what had been said and attempt to form some consensus among the diverse opinions. Hence the chief did not rule or dictate but led by consensus. Many tribes, especially those that were stateless, had no central authority and no class system, and many of those that did could depose a chief that was thought to have abused his power. An overarching feature of pre-colonial Africa was that its societies were not designed to be the all-powerful entities that they are today, hence the abundance of confederation-type societies. One reason for this was that the villages and tribes commonly owned the land, a fact that undermined the basis for a market economy and a landed aristocracy, another that there was an abundance of available land to which dissatisfied individuals or groups could move.

1. SETTLEMENT AND ECONOMY
   The earliest humans were hunter gatherers who were living in small, family groupings. Even then there was considerable trade that could cover long distances. Archaeologists have found that evidence of trade in luxury items like precious metals and shells across the entirety of the continent. African economic history often focuses on explanations of poverty and obscures other aspects such as the achievements of African farmers, traders and states, including improvements in food security, and episodes of economic growth. African nations were not poor, they like in a compound like settlement, there was no separation between the poor and the rich, they all lived together as family. They bring farm produce in form of tax.

The colonization of Africa

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I only shared this picture to let us understand that Africans were not lacking behind. They were really afraid of our cultural values and lifestyle, all they did was to play a mind game on us. They captured us making us believe our religious are barbaric, our art and cultures was killed and we were forced to adopt their lifestyle.

The beginning of colonization in Africa

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Between the 1870s and 1900, Africa faced European imperialist aggression, diplomatic pressures, military invasions, and eventual conquest and colonization. At the same time, African societies put up various forms of resistance against the attempt to colonize their countries and impose foreign domination. By the early twentieth century, however, much of Africa, except Ethiopia and Liberia, had been colonized by European powers.

The European imperialist push into Africa was motivated by three main factors, economic, political, and social. It developed in the nineteenth century following the collapse of the profitability of the slave trade, its abolition and suppression, as well as the expansion of the European capitalist Industrial Revolution. The imperatives of capitalist industrialization—including the demand for assured sources of raw materials, the search for guaranteed markets and profitable investment outlets—spurred the European scramble and the partition and eventual conquest of Africa. Thus the primary motivation for European intrusion was economic.

The Scramble for Africa

But other factors played an important role in the process. The political impetus derived from the impact of inter-European power struggles and competition for preeminence. Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Portugal, and Spain were competing for power within European power politics. One way to demonstrate national preeminence was through the acquisition of territories around the world, including Africa. The social factor was the third major element. As a result of industrialization, major social problems grew in Europe: unemployment, poverty, homelessness, social displacement from rural areas, and so on. These social problems developed partly because not all people could be absorbed by the new capitalist industries. One way to resolve this problem was to acquire colonies and export this "surplus population." This led to the establishment of settler-colonies in Algeria, Tunisia, South Africa, Namibia, Angola, Mozambique, and central African areas like Zimbabwe and Zambia. Eventually the overriding economic factors led to the colonization of other parts of Africa.

The African Resistance

The European imperialist designs and pressures of the late nineteenth century provoked African political and diplomatic responses and eventually military resistance. During and after the Berlin Conference various European countries sent out agents to sign so-called treaties of protection with the leaders of African societies, states, kingdoms, decentralized societies, and empires. The differential interpretation of these treaties by the contending forces often led to conflict between both parties and eventually to military encounters. For Europeans, these treaties meant that Africans had signed away their sovereignties to European powers; but for Africans, the treaties were merely diplomatic and commercial friendship treaties. After discovering that they had in effect been defrauded and that the European powers now wanted to impose and exercise political authority in their lands, African rulers organized militarily to resist the seizure of their lands and the imposition of colonial domination.

This situation was compounded by commercial conflicts between Europeans and Africans. During the early phase of the rise of primary commodity commerce (erroneously referred to in the literature as "Legitimate Trade or Commerce"), Europeans got their supplies of trade goods like palm oil, cotton, palm kernel, rubber, and groundnut from African intermediaries, but as the scramble intensified, they wanted to bypass the African intermediaries and trade directly with sources of the trade goods. Naturally Africans resisted and insisted on the maintenance of a system of commercial interaction with foreigners which expressed their sovereignties as autonomous political and economic entities and actors. For their part, the European merchants and trading companies called on their home governments to intervene and impose "free trade," by force if necessary. It was these political, diplomatic, and commercial factors and contentions that led to the military conflicts and organized African resistance to European imperialism.

African military resistance took two main forms: guerrilla warfare and direct military engagement. While these were used as needed by African forces, the dominant type used depended on the political, social, and military organizations of the societies concerned. In general, small-scale societies, the decentralized societies (erroneously known as "stateless" societies), used guerrilla warfare because of their size and the absence of standing or professional armies. Instead of professional soldiers, small groups of organized fighters with a mastery of the terrain mounted resistance by using the classical guerrilla tactic of hit-and-run raids against stationary enemy forces. This was the approach used by the Igbo of southeastern Nigeria against the British. Even though the British imperialists swept through Igboland in three years, between 1900 and 1902, and despite the small scale of the societies, the Igbo put up protracted resistance. The resistance was diffuse and piecemeal, and therefore it was difficult to conquer them completely and declare absolute victory. Long after the British formally colonized Igboland, they had not fully mastered the territory.

Colonial Domination: Assimilation

The French, for their part, established a highly centralized administrative system that was influenced by their ideology of colonialism and their national tradition of extreme administrative centralism. Their colonial ideology explicitly claimed that they were on a "civilizing mission" to lift the benighted "natives" out of backwardness to the new status of civilized French Africans. To achieve this, the French used the policy of assimilation, whereby through acculturation and education and the fulfillment of some formal conditions, some "natives" would become evolved and civilized French Africans. In practice, the stringent conditions set for citizenship made it virtually impossible for most colonial subjects to become French citizens. For example, potential citizens were supposed to speak French fluently, to have served the French meritoriously, to have won an award, and so on. If they achieved French citizenship, they would have French rights and could only be tried by French courts, not under indigénat, the French colonial doctrine and legal practice whereby colonial "subjects" could be tried by French administrative officials or military commanders and sentenced to two years of forced labor without due process. However, since France would not provide the educational system to train all its colonized subjects to speak French and would not establish administrative and social systems to employ all its subjects, assimilation was more an imperialist political and ideological posture than a serious political objective.

Colonial Domination: Indirect Rule

In Nigeria, the Gold Coast in West Africa, and Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika in East Africa, for example, Britain organized its colonies at the central, provincial, and regional or district levels. There was usually a governor or governor-general in the colonial capital who governed along with an appointed executive council and a legislative council of appointed and selected local and foreign members. The governor was responsible to the colonial office and the colonial secretary in London, from whom laws, policies, and programs were received. He made some local laws and policies, however. Colonial policies and directives were implemented through a central administrative organization or a colonial secretariat, with officers responsible for different departments such as Revenue, Agriculture, Trade, Transport, Health, Education, Police, Prison, and so on.

The British colonies were often subdivided into provinces headed by provincial commissioners or residents, and then into districts headed by district officers or district commissioners. Laws and policies on taxation, public works, forced labor, mining, agricultural production, and other matters were made in London or in the colonial capital and then passed down to the lower administrative levels for enforcement.

The effect of African colonization

The economic goals of colonialism were simple: to provide maximum economic benefit to the colonizing power at the lowest possible price. As the effects of the Berlin Conference which establish the "rules" of the partition game became clear, those areas of Africa which had previously been developing significant trade and economies of their own were brought under the control of European economic policies. To the British, French, and Germans, the primary colonizing nations, the individual needs of their colonial subjects were not important. Instead the desire to "vertically
integrate" the colonies of Europe by controlling production from start to finish became the overriding goal of colonial agents.

Europe was still rapidly developing and therefore needed the raw materials that Africa had to offer. Prior to partition, the European powers had to contend with the varying moods of African governments that, although dependent of international trade, still exercised significant control over their economic development. These nations could produce what goods they desired, some for export and some for internal consumption. Colonialism forced these nations to produce solely for the export market, thereby keeping prices low for their European consumers. One good that stands out in the annals of colonial history is cotton. "The notion that West Africa could be a source for raw cotton was one that arose early and persisted late. The existence of European powers on the production certain goods was done to the exclusion of the practicality of the crop or the impact on the local economy.

Colonialism was not just about economic subjugation, but about the ability to wrest control of the local economy from African rulers. Improving the production methods or strengthening the economy was not important.
"The British opposed the general development of palm oil plantations in Nigeria, despite the fact that the collection method of production was wasteful and produced a poor quality of oil." 16 Colonial powers instituted
trade controls that limited colonial imports to those from the colonizing power and restricted exports to that same market. This reduced the freedom of choice in marketing goods that was previously available to commodities
producers. Taking this power away under the guise of colonial development made traditional rulers weaker because their power base was destroyed. Since Africans were not allowed to improve their methods or to market their
goods freely, they were forced into the colonial system. By insisting on the development of certain crops, Europeans undennined the existing economic power structure and made Africa totally reliant upon Europe for their economic destiny. Driven by outside forces, the local fanner was no longer able to decide for himself what crops to grow or what resources to cultivate. Instead, the decision was made for him in a predetermined market. Under the British for example, colonial economic policy reached far and wide. "few commodities escaped the 'long ann' of the British raw materials trade."

Colonialism completed the process of fully integrating Africa into the world economic system. Similar to the slave trade however, Africans were unequal partners in the arena of international trade and economics. Economic
theory dictates that the production of cash crops for overseas consumption invariably enriches the producer as well by utilizing surplus capacity. Under European imperial colonialism, however, these gains were drained off by colonial governments and "the economic well-being of Africa became sensitive to the rise and fall of the demand for these primary products and the movement of industrial prices, over neither of which she had any control. The individual subjects of the various colonial empires did experience some gains in wealth, income, and standard of living, but nothing comparable to the resources they developed. Africa was a net exporter of its wealth during this period.

The impact of colonialism affected Africans in other ways as well. While economic policies were designed to keep prices low, under colonialism, agriculture became increasingly commercialized. "The commercialization of land provided an avenue of escape for many of the males of the servile and cheap labor force in agriculture and added the price of land to the cost of production. Thus colonialism saw the rise of a large, landless class of laborers who traveled from place to place in search of work. It became easier to provide wage labor than to produce for the export market. It was certainly an easier and more secure way of obtaining money for taxes and for purchasing consumer goods. Colonialism also changed patterns of work and gender roles. The demands of the cash crop economy forced many women and children into the production system. "these women and children perfonned the bulk of the labor in farming enterprises that considerably enriched many owners. Colonialism and its economic demands irrevocably altered the social structure of many African societies and set the stage for later problems in African economic development.

Colonialism lasted in Africa for only a period of about eighty years. During that time, colonial governments built substantial infrastructure, introduced a cash crop system of agriculture, and changed the traditional standards of wealth and status. Education reforms were introduced and in many areas, modem state systems implemented. However, the long term economic impact of European development held some very negative consequences for Africa also. The infrastructure that was developed was designed to exploit the natural resources of the colonies. Also, the technological and industrial development that had been occurring in Africa was stalled by the imposition of colonialism. Prior to the partition of Africa, local production provided Africans with a wide variety of consumer goods.
The policies of colonialism forced the demise of African industry and created a reliance on imported goods from Europe.

Conclusion

As you today, we need to understand that we need to break our self from the thinking that we are been loved by the westerners. This people came, they destroyed us, destroyed our cultures, traditions, mode of operations, made us a permanent market to their product, all we have are given to them at cheap price and they sell back to us in an exorbitant price. All they care about is how they would milk us and drain us. They take the best among us away through grants, scholarship, reliefs, NGO and so many other programs.

Africa wake up from sleep! Africa we can be great again!! Africa let rebuild our self! Africans let us go back to Our root.