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From: Berhane Habtemariam (Berhane.Habtemariam@gmx.de)
Date: Wed Aug 04 2010 - 07:44:37 EDT
The new scramble for Africa begins
Modern imperialism on the resource-rich continent will be less benign than
old colonialism
Matthew Parris
04/08/2010
Fifty years ago the decolonisation of Africa began. The next half-century
may see the continent recolonised. But the new imperialism will be less
benign. Great powers aren't interested in administering wild places any
more, still less in settling them: just raping them. Black gangster
governments sponsored by self-interested Asian or Western powers could
become the central story in 21st-century African history.
Nature abhors a vacuum. Take Zimbabwe. In the Western news media the clichés
about Robert Mugabe's “despotism” roll, but this is a despotism crippled by
monumental incompetence. The BBC's audience must have been bemused in recent
weeks by John Simpson's reports from within a country where, as we are
always being reminded, the BBC is banned. I yield to none in my respect for
Mr Simpson's courage and ingenuity but only modest quantities of either will
have been required to enter the country, move within it or broadcast from
it.
Our own correspondent, Jonathan Clayton, was unluckier, but there are
journalists in Zimbabwe reporting what Mugabe would stop them reporting if
he could. It is chance whom his thugs stumble upon. They may be easily
capable of beating to a pulp those poor, anonymous Zimbabweans who cross
them, but when it comes to the apparatus of a modern state - effective
policing, surveillance, restriction of movement, or censorship which works -
the regime in Harare has plainly lost what control it ever had.
Zimbabwe is not Iraq. Any great power could pick a leader in Zimbabwe today,
send in a modest military support force to sustain him in power, and follow
this up with ten jumbo jets filled with economic, technical and political
advisers and half-a-billion-pound's-worth of reconstruction aid. Within a
couple of years the intervening power would be sponsoring something
tantamount to a puppet government there. In modern management-speak, there
exist bunches of low-hanging fruit, overlooked, on the African continent.
If Zimbabwe had oil the Americans would be plucking this fruit already. If
the country's mineral resources were greater, if the persistence of white
settlers there were not throwing an international spotlight on the news, and
if China were not embarrassed by Tibet and the forthcoming Olympics, I think
the argument in Bejing for sponsoring either Mugabe or the most amenable
available opposition leader would be strong.
It may yet prevail. I had just left school in Africa when Maoist China tried
something similar in the early 1970s, constructing a 1,160-mile railway from
Zambia to Dar-es-Salaam in Tanzania to transport copper to the Indian Ocean
port. But Tanzania's Julius Nyerere was wily, the construction proved
fraught with difficulty, and Chinese advisers and workers did not make
themselves popular with local people. China never recovered a decent return
on that economic and political investment. China may well yet do so,
however. Meanwhile, China's support for a vicious Sudanese regime in
Khartoum has been too widely commented on to need rehearsing. Hydrocarbons
are the prize.
But enough of China: simply a little hungrier, a little more opportunistic
and a little less scrupulous than some of its competitors. This is not about
China, but about vacuums into which, if Beijing does not move, then someone
else surely will. If modern British governments still had the stomach for
this kind of thing we could be more or less in charge of Sierra Leone today,
and accept northern Somaliland as a client state tomorrow.
The American neocons were unlucky in the pilot projects they chose. For
those seeking the creation of biddable states, Iraq and Afghanistan proved
among the least amenable places to pick. But there is something more than
the awful bloody nose received in both these Asian interventions, and
America's earlier disaster in Vietnam, that may have temporarily blocked
Western minds from thinking about neo-imperialist opportunities in
sub-Saharan Africa. It is the myth that black liberation movements were
formidable. They were not. They were no Vietcong or Algerian FLN. The lesson
from 20th- century sub-Saharan Africa is not how irresistible were the
forces faced by European imperialism, but how easily, and for how long, they
were resisted.
Remember that America was on the other side in this conflict, fanning the
flames of African nationalism and undermining the European powers. Yet
Belgium - Belgium - managed to hold on to a colony 76 times its size, the
Congo, from 1908 (after its rapine private ownership by King Leopold II)
until 1960. Contrary to widespread belief, Britain was never beaten by the
Mau Mau in Kenya, and in most of the African colonies and protectorates
relinquished between 1957 (Ghana) and 1968 (Swaziland) we had been meeting
little if any armed resistance. Britain was not drummed but shouted out of
Africa.
Portugal, meanwhile, hung on to two territories (now Angola and Mozambique)
the first twice the size of Texas, the second twice the size of California,
until 1975. For years an impoverished and virtually Third World European
tinpot dictatorship sustained two wars simultaneously against nationalist
insurgencies in both countries without going under. Meanwhile. a tiny force
of white renegades denied victory to Mugabe's Patriotic Front for nearly
eight years until 1980: yet there were 20 times as many blacks as whites in
Rhodesia, and the breakaway regime of Ian Smith was under international
economic siege throughout.
Why then did the great (and lesser) powers of the day turn their backs on
empire in Africa in the 20th century, and why in the 21st might their
successors return to an interest in acquiring political grip?
European imperial powers lost the will rather than the capacity to own and
govern overseas resources. A world in which all could buy and sell on the
global market was arriving. It is a world, however, which is now feeling the
pinch in the natural resources with which Africa is richly endowed.
Meanwhile, the continent is in many places run by outfits that resemble
gangs rather than governments. At their most dysfunctional (as in Congo)
this disintegration seriously impedes the extraction of resources, because
security, communications and infrastructure break down.
But a solution beckons: buy your own gang. You hardly need visit and are
certainly not required to administer the gang's territory. You simply give
it support, munitions, bribes and protection to keep the roads and airports
open; and it pays you with access to resources. You dress up the arrangement
as helping Africans to help themselves. The French, who have been doing this
in their former African possessions for years, lead the way. But it is when
China, then America, and perhaps even Russia or India follow, that the
scramble for Africa will truly be resumed.
Hypocrisy, they say, is the homage that vice pays to virtue. During the last
scramble for Africa, colonial administration was the homage greed paid to
responsibility. But greed may be less sentimental during the next. From a
resource-starved industrialised world in the 21st Century, reponsibility for
Africa will get no more than a passing nod.
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