 I think there has been a lot of discussion around history and the British Empire after the Black Lives Matter protests tore down the statue of Colston in Bristol earlier this year. Now there was a separate discussion earlier this morning on dealing with the question of racism today and how to fight it, but I think ultimately the position of Black people in this country, even the cause for their migration, or in the case of America, the forced migration and forced moving of Black people is obviously linked with Africa's history. So I think there's two broad questions that we need to ask and I'm hoping to answer over the course of this session, which is how was Africa plundered and how is it plundered today? Now within the field of development, development studies, an important question that often comes up is how is it that Africa is so resource rich yet materially poor? And in response to the poverty or underdevelopment perhaps of Africa, there are a few different replies that you often hear from the right wing. Now one is that Africa is poor because of something inherent in the people, you know, the way they are, they just cannot seem to move forward or progress, overcome things. Two is that Africa is poor because of corruption, bad governance that infects all of the institutions. And the third one you might hear is Africa is poor because of natural disaster. I think the reality of course is this is all the same thing and comes from the same viewpoint. And it's based on it somehow being the fault of the African people and that they must be inferior in some way. Therefore it can have nothing to do with the direct or indirect involvement of other states. And I'll just start by saying that this is not true. So the beginnings of European and British involvement in Africa come from a period where Britain and subsequently much of Europe was transitioning from feudalism to capitalism. In particular, the beginnings of capitalism allowed for more efficient technology and innovation. Britain's naval expansion was a huge step forward. By control of the seas, Britain and Europe took the first steps towards transforming several parts of Africa and also Asia into economic satellites. The evolution of European shipbuilding from the 16th century to the 19th century was also a logical consequence of this period, their monopoly of sea commerce which comes about. So the rise of capitalism involved then the direct occupation of other countries and indeed practically the whole of Africa which we'll come on to talk about. So Mark said that it is the colonies which have created world trade and world trade is the necessary condition for large scale machine industry. Now this concept of world trade and different countries being integrated into one system is an important one. I think that today it's quite hard to imagine life without world trade or indeed a global market but it didn't always exist. It was erected out of new economic conditions. Now when we talk about global trade people might bring up laws, trading regulations etc but all of this is a secondary part of the process. The global market does not exist because clever people invented it in their minds. International trading laws were a reflection of what had been born. The only international law that existed in this early period was essentially European law because it was whatever benefited the interests of the European law and class which was then the basis for imperialism and these new strong capitalist states anyway. So for example particularly during the period of slavery if the African slave was thrown overboard at sea the only legal problem that arose was whether or not the slave ship could claim compensation from the insurers. So clearly there was no international law from the point of view of all different states and certainly not Africans. Now the plunder of Africa does not start with direct colonial rule. It starts earlier as early as the 1470s in fact the Portuguese reached what became known as the Gold Coast which is Ghana and they called it the Gold Coast because gold is what they discovered. Eventually trade in humans as slaves became the most profitable work for both Britain and other European nations. So the slave trade was not only brutal for those who were forced to participate in it but it was also brutal for the development of the African population as a whole and it completely decimated it in fact and this gave a massive impetus to the development of capitalism. Eventually slavery came to an end but the abolition of slavery did not mark the end of the plunder of African people or indeed the African continent either. Quickly new needs developed as the industrial revolution was in full swing and there was growing competition between the European imperialist powers. So the Berlin Conference of 1884 resulted in what we now kind of describe and what is known as the scramble for Africa in which European powers conquered 40 African countries at a breakneck pace. Now empires existed before capitalism. Obviously the Roman Empire is a famous example of this but this idea of empire and the way it worked took on a new form with capitalism. So what is unique about capitalist imperialism is the domination of finance capital and its tendency towards monopoly. The emerging capitalist class was a class that possessed the means of production and invested in industry and production and out of industrial capital you have the emergence of finance capital. Once you have accumulation beyond a certain level you have these two sides industrialists who produce goods and the finance capitalists who give capital to the industrialists at a cost with interests etc but this is what allowed Britain and France and Holland and other places the ability to directly occupy territories and move around the world this domination of finance capital and this is why Lenin described imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism. In imperialism Lenin talks about capitalist states needing to have economic spheres of influence and this is what happened partially through the Berlin Conference they literally carved Africa up. All of the borders that they drew were in the interests of European imperialism ignoring whatever groups and civilizations already existed. By 1914 90% of Africa had been divided between seven European countries with only Liberia and Ethiopia remaining as independent nations. So capitalism's insatiable search for new profits is what led to colonialism and imperialism today is the highest stage of that colonialism did not stop and imperialism started it is the same system but one simply developed into the other. Justice slavery transitioned into transition into colonialism the same racist ideas that were used to justify slavery were then used to justify colonialism when we see this in the white man's burden and ideas that Africa was full of uncivilized Bushmen or however they described it. As the trade in humans became less profitable super exploitation of the land resources and people became a more attractive prospect for European capitalists. Now you cannot mark the start of capitalist imperialism with a date yes the Berlin conference was in 1884 but we can't look at history simply in this way it's not the case that slavery was ended by some good natured people they come to the conclusion that maybe we shouldn't do this and then some other bad people decided to come together to divide Africa up a couple of years later that's not how history works that's not how society works or develops. Slavery led to colonialism which leads to imperialism which brings us to today and we have to understand that process and they won't teach you it like that in history they say it was different people with different ideas but that's wrong it was the same system the same process and the same logic and that is how we understand it. Now although we can't look at specific laws or conventions or conferences as evidence of economic facts I think we can use it as different points in history that can express the forces that were at play so the dual mandate for example published in 1922 which comes out in defence and speaking about the necessity for new markets for Britain to expand into the world. In fact its intended purpose was to open up Africa to the civilized world and at the same time open the African mind to civilization so there are clearly a lot of racist myths surrounding why colonialism happened but I would say in some cases when you go directly to the source you actually find the truth and one direct source I want to talk about is Cecil Rhodes. Now Cecil Rhodes is a major figure from this period who you may have heard of in fact his statue sits above a college I think a building in Oxford and was also a part of it was also in the university in Cape Town in South Africa and there was a huge campaign and in South Africa Rhodes must fall and indeed that campaign has it is also taking place in Oxford and there have been a lot of protests around it this this figure this giant of imperialism that Tau was above people and Tau would above the South African people for so long now Cecil Rhodes helped and his he had a company called the British South Africa Company and they founded the Southern African territory of Rhodesia which is now Zimbabwe and Zambia and yes it was literally named after him in case that wasn't clear from his name in 1895 and he also founded the De Beers diamond firm I spoke earlier about how colonial companies have morphed into the same imperialism that we're seeing today and have morphed into multinationals that diamond firm that Cecil Rhodes created still exists it operates in 35 countries and mining takes place in Botswana and Namibia in South Africa from its inception up until the 21st century it actually controlled about 80 to 85 percent of the rough diamond distribution you know had a complete monopoly over that it's changed slightly over the last few years competition has dismantled its complete monopoly but that group still sells approximately 29.5 percent of the world's rough diamond production and I think that's just an astounding example of how these things develop and morph into each other it also has the same name from when it was first incorporated so there's not even been a small you know attempt of trying to modernize themselves I suppose but I'm going to speak more about thanks I'm going to speak more about this later the way these companies have developed and changed so what is it that Cecil you know why am I using Cecil Rhodes sorry is an example of you know what was the purpose of colonialism so there's a really great quote that he said that I think really sums this up for us he said that in order to save the 40 million inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war our colonial statesmen must acquire new lands for settling the surplus population of this country to provide new markets the empire as I have always said is a bread and butter question and I think this is a really good summary of how and why the empire came into being so we can see that the development of European capitalism was part of the same process in which Africa was underdeveloped and was plundered and was super exploited another great source I suppose on on British imperialism in particular and British control of colonialism in Africa is someone called Frederick Lagarde and he was the governor general of Nigeria he had many different titles and controlled many different lands that frankly he shouldn't have in Nigeria it was from 1914 to 1919 if you if you look on Wikipedia he's he's got the lovely title of explorer of Africa which is nice that that is his legacy and and he was also the main architect of the dual mandate which I was talking about earlier and I think he also explained the purpose I suppose of the of the British empire and of colonialism really well so he says let it be admitted at the outset that European brains capital and energy have not been and never will be expended in developing the resources of Africa from motives of pure philanthropy that Europe is in Africa for the mutual benefit of her own industrial classes so here you know we have it from the horse's mouth it was not in the interest of philanthropy despite the way it does try to be twisted even today by the apologists of imperialism and capitalism that oh no we went there to do good things and to build roads and whatnot it's it's a complete lie and we have to point that out after using first slavery after using slaves as a steroid injection for the birth of capitalism the emerging industrial revolution needed more resource and more markets and materials such as copper cotton rubber palm oil cocoa diamonds tea tin there's many many more were incredibly important something that European industry was growing more and more dependent on and so the European ruling class and the British ruling class needed these resources and had and were willing to go to extreme lengths to acquire them so they used the native peasants and workers in these African states to extract this because that was the cheapest form of labor for them they couldn't exactly ship people over slavery as I explained was no longer profitable for example the rainforest in Congo had some of the world's best sources on wild rubber on wild rubber trees and in Congo there was a brutal system of forced labor implemented if they refused to work they would be killed or tortured they were also known to chop off hands as a form of brutality imperial officers would pay the army soldiers for severed hands because it was proof that they had carried out this system of terror that they felt was so necessary and gum from Africa was also an important part in the textile industry so you can see how these two things are completely developed are completely connected rather the development of European capitalism and the plunder and exploitation of Africa and its resources CLR James who is a marxist famous marxist once remarked that the race question is subsidiary to the class question in politics and to think of imperialism in terms of race is disastrous but to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental is an error only less grave than to make it fundamental and I think what this means is clearly the oppression of black people we see we see still today in the west is linked to slavery is linked to this process but it is part of the global system the global capitalist system which exploited unused African countries with the same ideological defense that they did for slavery as well so the idea or myth rather of Africa being full of uncivilized bushmen is of course a part of this which I want to address I think ideas can be powerful but they have to be rooted in something and in this case they're rooted in the this dawn of capitalist society and the consequence was actually that entire African civilizations were destroyed rather than going to Africa to you know you know what I forgot on the quote that I mentioned earlier open the African mind up to civilization they did the exact opposite and destroyed any civilization in many places that did exist for example in 1897 Benin city which was a medieval city and in Nigeria was built to a scale comparable with the Great Wall of China and it was completely destroyed by British forces under Admiral Harry Rawson and you can actually see a collection of the famous Benin bronzes now in the British Museum in London which is which is lovely of course for those of you who are interested in that and why did they do this it's because in this place there were resources such as palm oil rubber ivory um and actually you know the British watched this state for a really long time and trying to figure out ways that they could you know make use of it one British consul Richard Burton actually visited Benin in 1862 and he described it as a place of gratuitous barbarity which stinks of death right and you know they came up with any justification possible when the bottom line is clearly they needed access to the resources and where they refused where the kind of the native population refused to work with the British on the terms that the British dictated they simply used brute force so on this issue with uh or this you know myth the racist idea of uncivilized Bushmen even if they were uncivilized Bushmen however you define that it does not justify colonialism it does not justify the brutal force with which they acted because actually colonialism included the burning down of homesteads and humiliation of different African civilizations and communities and we have to be really clear about that and first point out the lies and the hypocrisy of of the ruling class when talking about this topic so what was colonialism then well as I explained earlier several of the colonial trading companies that came to dominate had already had already had sorry African blood on their hands from participating in the slave trade themselves in the same way we see ex-colonial companies have transitioned into multinational corporations today the same took place in the transition from slavery to colonialism however there was a bit of a distinction clearly and how colonial economies then went on to work which I'm going to talk about now so the employee under colonialism was paid an extremely small wage a wage that was usually insufficient to even keep the worker physically alive and therefore they would typically have to grow food to survive and this amplified this applied sorry in particular to farm labor the plantation type to work in mines and also to certain forms of urban employment now at this stage the African under colonialism the African working class was also extremely small and very dispersed and this was due to multiple factors whilst capitalism exploits workers everywhere under colonialism European capitalists had this additional racial justification to to act in a particularly brutal way a particularly unjust way with the African worker and this was particularly bad in colonies where you had a white settler population where European settlers were in considerable numbers the conditions for African people was particularly brutal in Kenya for example Lord Delamere controlled 100,000 acres of Kenya's land and yet native Kenyans would have to carry a pass a Kipande pass which was just an identity document which featured you know basic personal details fingerprints employment history all of this they had to carry this pass around in their own country just to beg for a pitiful wage and some of the worst forms of brutal exploitation was was actually found in the southern parts of the continent and particularly in southern and southern Rhodesia so the regime was spurred on by racism because it ensured they would continue their profits on a really fantastic scale from the very beginning of the scramble for Africa huge fortunes were made from gold and diamonds particularly in southern Africa by people like Cecil Rhodes and we cannot underestimate the profits that were made from colonial rule so out of the total wealth produced in Congo in any given year during the colonial period more than one-third went out in the form of profits for big businesses and salaries for their expropriate staff sorry so the capitalist institution that came most directly in contact with an African worker or in a lot of cases peasant was the colonial trading company and that is to say the company that's job it was to move goods to and from colonies and you know also Lenin also spoke a lot about the monopolies needing to dominate everywhere to regulate production for the greatest level of profit and this is what was taking place the colonies were essentially forcing houses for monopoly profits and so I'll just give a typical example of how this would work so if we take Uganda which um I have to talk about because I'm half Ugandan but in Uganda yet say you had a Ugandan farmer who would grow cotton that cotton would then be transported to a factory an English factory in Lancashire or you know perhaps a British owned factory in in India and the Lancashire factory owner would also pay his workers as little as as little as possible but that exploitation was limited by some other factors the exploitation of the labor of the Ugandan peasant was unlimited because of the power of the colonial state and the power of the colonial regime which could ensure that the Ugandan workers were made to labor for incredibly incredibly long hours for very little and the other side to this is of course the price of the finished cotton shirt or whatever is developed would then be so high that if it was re-imported back into Uganda cotton in the form of the shirt would then have been too expensive it would have been too expensive for the um for the peasant or whoever the worker to have you know brought it back 20 minutes gone Fiona thanks however we must recognise that the worker in Britain clearly was not living a life of luxury the profits of the companies were never intended to give the working class in Britain an easy life and obviously a high proportion of factory workers were women and children many of whom were taken out of school at the earliest opportunities to boost the family's earning power and this aspect of the Ugandan commodities integration into the world market and the Ugandan working in peasant classes being unable to buy it back has not changed however there were different types of colonial regimes Uganda was technically a protectorate of the UK the British would export in others to be middlemen and administrate in other countries such as Kenya as I said you had white settler populations one of the Kenyan white settlers Colonel Grogan put it very bluntly speaking of the Kikuyu he said we have stolen his land now we must steal his limbs compulsory labor is the corollary of our occupation of the country so there's a long history of this brutality as part of the colonisation in Namibia which suffered from German imposition at first the German presence would negotiate with different tribes but when this took too long and the fighting started to be focused towards the German regime the Kaiser Wilhelm actually sent new orders and a new leader to this land this region of southwest Africa and this is a quote from the new leader who was speaking about the people that had basically focused their you know violence towards the Germans he says the Herrero people will have to leave the country if they refuse I will force them with cannons to do so within the German boundaries every Herrero with or without firearms with or without cattle will be shot and I won't accommodate women and children anymore I shall drive them back to their people or I shall give the order to shoot them and thousands of men and women were taken from their homes and shot and those who escaped were trapped in wastelands without food or water and they poisoned the world I'm just sharing this to show that everywhere you look in the colonial regime you see brutality and we have to remember these crimes of colonialism and imperialism any and all uprisings against the colonial regime were viciously repressed but colonialism did come to an end at a certain point from Ghana all the way to south Africa we saw incredible movements incredible revolutions against these brutal regimes the ruling class at a certain point had no choice but to abandon direct colonial rule and I think this is one of the greatest processes in human history however we must ask ourselves what did those revolutions achieve and I don't think there's a blanket approach necessarily to be had here and I cannot as a disclaimer speak about the ins and outs of every African country in their process of decolonisation because there were differences some movements attempted to overthrow capitalism and tried to plan the economy in a socialist direction some of these were viciously crushed overthrown and suffered from foreign imperialist coups Burkina Faso is a good example but some survived like in Zimbabwe which I want to talk about a bit now the colony of the then southern Rhodesia was ruled by a tightly knit white community of fewer than 250,000 people but the black population was five million now the path to independence in the southern African states was more difficult because of this white settler population which obviously was hostile to the idea of black majority rule and there are many guerrilla movements that developed in these places in these colonial countries and they were attracted to the russian and chinese models as well but eventually the independence of Zimbabwe was achieved via struggle but the leaders of the guerrilla movement entered into an agreement brokered by the british government known as the Lancaster house agreement and this agreement included a 10-year lock on the land issue which means that no land was to be expropriated and redistributed for 10 years now this is a failure of the movement of the revolution by refusing to solve the land question the leadership was refusing to solve a fundamental aspect of the colonial regime which impressed and exploited the masses and this problem is what Trotsky took up with his theory of the permanent revolution the theory holds that in economically backward nations the bourgeoisie are tied hand and foot to foreign imperialist interests and have no national bourgeois interest of their own for this reason this class cannot carry out a bourgeois democratic revolution the likes of which took place in france in 1789 because the rights to national independence free and fair elections and so on directly contradict its interests as an agent of foreign imperialism to win these basic democratic rights the working class can rely on only themselves and their power to transform society through proletarian revolution and a struggle for socialism and this is based on real events it was not an abstract theory of Trotsky's that he just thought up one day this is what the russian revolution found itself come up against in 1917 and overcame and this is something that countless movements in africa found themselves up against and due to a number of different factors were unable to overcome and so despite these great movements and great colonial revolutions after decolonisation many of these countries still find themselves trapped in poverty the colonies suffered from economies that were not diversified right this makes productivity quite difficult the prohibition of manufacturing industries was a key element of colonial rule and colonial policy colonialism essentially restructured their economies for high bulk low value exploitation of commodities and this lays the groundwork for future structural imbalance under capitalism of course this wouldn't be the case under socialism and so between 1945 and 1965 almost all european african colonies except angola and mozambique regained their independence and the war was a pivotal part of this process you also saw the rise of african nationalism which was growing and there was also the increased brutality of the war that was forcing production of cash crops on a much higher scale and actually those harsh conditions caused by the war led to the rise in trade unions being created in many in many countries in fact there was a general strike in nigeria in 1945 that include railway postal and other government workers which almost paralyzed the colonial regime you also had the u.s. supporting decolonisation because it would open up the colonies to free trade right essentially while british and european imperialism was declining american imperialism was rising they wanted a piece of the pie so the world bank was set up in 1944 just at the beginning of this decolonised process and since then the world bank and the imf have been responsible for advising and supposedly helping african states overcome debt and poverty um after colonialism the former colonial masters imposed a sum of 59 billion dollars in external public debt onto these new independent states and as early as the 1960s the imf and the world bank have been providing credit and and economic plans for the reduction of african sovereign debt but in this period essentially what you see happen is a simple change in face of the imperialists there was an oil crisis in the 1970s which led to a rise in inflation and western institutions started to lend money in increasing levels to poorer ex-colonial countries so the most advanced countries stopped buying primary goods from the developing developing economies and increased their interest rates on the loans given to them and this meant that the developing countries were forced to take out further loans with particular conditions and they were called structural adjustment programs which in a nutshell was privatisation so for decades this debt has mounted and paralysed african states tomah sankara is an iconic african revolutionary who spoke about this matter this is a quote from him he says where is imperialism look at your plates when you eat these imported grains of rice corn and millet that is imperialism so africa imports roughly 80 of its food it's the only continent which imports more food than it produces it spends billions and billions and billions of dollars every year on importing food and it also has the debt sankara said himself debts origins come from colonialism's origins those who lend us money are those who colonised us he also said he also said debt is a skillfully managed reconquest of africa intended to subjugate its growth and development through foreign rules thus each one of us becomes the financial slave which is to say a true slave of those who have been treacherous enough to put money in our countries with obligations for us to repay now this is not just a problem of the 80s a problem of a long time ago in 2016 angola spent nearly six times as much servicing its external debt as it did on public healthcare today china is the continent's biggest bilateral creditor right it signed loans worth more than 146 billion dollars to african governments since 2000 chinese companies to be more specific chinese companies have invested approximately five billion dollars in the sudanese oil industry two billion has been lent to angola 300 million 300 million dollars has been invested in zambian copper mines it goes on and on and on what is this if not an empire what is this if not imperialism colonialism all of this flows from the same thing and it's not just the debt they have to contend with we talk about the the EU the EU's border tariff and the policies that come with it i just want to talk really briefly about the common agricultural policy the cap which takes up just over a third of the EU budget and it gives out billions of euros to EU's biggest landowners at the expense of millions of the poorest farmers in africa you know according to the EU its main goal is helping farmers with income support and the common agricultural policy ensures sustainable rural development according to the specific needs in each EU country but the translation is that the EU farmers have their produce you know huge landowners they have their produce fixed at guaranteed price um for example the price of sugar for an EU farmer is three times that of the world price and the direct comparison for any independent african state is they lose out on millions and millions of dollars around 71 of the EU's agricultural imports originate from these developing countries but then there's a huge distortion between the price paid to the producer and the price paid by the consumer and there are countless examples of this in 2014 in africa which you could consider you know the home of coffee maybe perhaps in some ways africa earned just £1.5 billion from the crop from the crop sorry but germany by comparison which is a leading processor managed to earn nearly double that from coffee re-exports so what this shows us is that the domination of the metropolitan countries is if anything still greater than in the past the only difference is that the old direct military bureaucratic control by individual colonial masters has been substituted by the collective domination of the colonial world by a handful of wealthy exploiter states through the mechanism of the world market island was britain's first colony colony and james connelly the great irish marxist said it best he said if you remove the english army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over dublin castle unless you set about the organization of the socialist republic your efforts will be in vain england will still rule you she would rule you through her capitalists through her landlords through her financiers and through the whole array of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted in this country and watered with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs and that can definitely be applied to the situation that african states are facing today so just to come to an end to this and um sum up i suppose what next what how do we fight imperialism in africa today and what is the situation well first i'd say that the african masses are moving already we saw an incredible revolution in sudan last year the overthrow of mugabi and we heard about um the protests in nigeria that are taking place right now particularly from the youth but all of these movements are coming up against the limits of capitalism some of you might have come to this session wondering how can i fight imperialism how can i be a part of the struggle and that's a good thing to think because there is an idea that we should watch passively from the sideline for example if there's a revolution in sudan that has a leadership that is bourgeois we aren't allowed to comment in britain and i think clearly no one has the right to lecture but we are all comrades in struggle and it's the same fight and the same struggle that is taking place on different fronts or let's look at it another way what would the socialist unification of the african continent mean it already has immense natural resources that could be used and developed to improve the conditions of life everywhere the more advanced countries in africa could cooperate and lend support but this doesn't make sense and wouldn't be possible with the presence of EU imperialism and western imperialism trying to destroy that so we have to take part to destroy our imperialist powers otherwise these revolutions will be isolated and if they are isolated they cannot be successful and this is part of the tragedy of um of tomas sankara and bikini britain is a key imperialist power in the world and we can overthrow it is literally on our doorstep if we took over the banks here we have a massive weapon against imperialism on the global stage so the working class today in africa is bigger and stronger than it has ever been and it is using class struggle as its weapon in zimbabwe as part of the overthrow of migabi there was a powerful general strike and we have to amplify and pay attention to that we saw the same thing in sudan that incredible revolution that was spurred on by a general strike and this is a powerful thing that can spread you can bet that once the fire of revolution is sparked in one country it will spread throughout the continent in fact the movement in zimbabwe had a huge impact on yuganda and and worried the yugandan ruling class and miscellany immediately started to raise the wages of the police and different forces in yuganda because he was worried about the impact that the masses in zimbabwe could have but i would say migabi okay he's gone miscellany's all these people represent an old dying layer of the independence movement who once commanded respect is particularly from the youth but this is slowly and they have slowly unveiled themselves to be equally reprehensible reprehensible criminals who are also upholding a system of exploitation and this is a reflection of the crisis of capitalism and the legacy of british imperialism and colonialism there is a burning unrest amongst the masses that is bound to express itself soon and just to finish i would say that we will see these anti-colonial revolutions return on a higher scale that will finally rid africa of the stranglehold of imperialism and of capitalism and that will be part of the worldwide international socialist revolution thank you