By OSVALDO COGGIOLA*
The conquest of Africa by European powers was anything but a smooth, triumphant ride
In the era of capitalist imperialism, Africa lost any political independence and was almost completely colonized. At the dawn of the 1889th century, only four African states were independent: Liberia, Libya, Ethiopia and Morocco. The colonizing European states – Great Britain, Germany, Italy – created, as the powers had done in the 1901th century, privileged (monopoly) companies responsible for colonization. In the 1910th century, African autonomous economic development was not deformed, but simply sunk or destroyed. The new European imperialism was concentrated in Africa, where neocolonial expansion was based on the platform built by the Old Colonial System. Officially abolished by England the international slave trade (slavery continued to exist legally until 1922 in Brazil, 1928 in Southern Nigeria, until 1935 in Angola and Congo, until XNUMX in Tanganyika, XNUMX in Sierra Leone and XNUMX in Ethiopia), Africa was the great theater of new colonial expansion, differentiated according to its areas: “Imperialism particularly tended to transform into colonialism in areas where the native political organization could not, for local reasons, exercise its authority effectively”.[I]
These “local reasons”, however, were derived from the previous destruction of African societies and populations. The continent's demographic catastrophe began with the colonial system built in the 1415th century, with the Portuguese conquest of Ceuta, in North Africa, in XNUMX, then extending along the African coast and transforming its black population into the main commodity of the world economy at the beginning of the Modern Era. The native population of sub-Saharan Africa was, at the end of the 19th century, three times smaller than in the 16th century: “The African 16th century was marked by the fact that no large region of Africa escaped the events that determined an extremely extreme cultural and economic decline. fast".[ii] The slave trade was sanctioned by a decree signed in Brussels by Charles V, the king of the empire “where the sun never set”. In its first phase it was divided between the French (who could operate between Senegal and Gambia), the English (Gold Coast and Ivory Coast) and the Portuguese (Angola and Benguela regions). The European conquest in the Old Colonial System (with the use of artillery against, at most, bladed and thrown weapons, and later some rifles, from colonial peoples), multiform and widespread forced labor, the repression of numerous revolts by means of iron and fire, malnutrition, various local and imported diseases and the slave trade, reduced a population that dropped to almost a third of that previously existing in the regions affected by the slave trade.
Between the mid-1660th century and the second half of the 1787th century, African slavery involved the sale and transfer of approximately thirteen million individuals, movements carried out in the holds of overcrowded boats (where Africans traveled in chains), which caused immense deaths. After Portugal, England founded African slave trading posts for its American plantations in 3,8, taking possession, in 4.860.000, of numerous territories between the Gambia River (in French Senegal) and Nigeria, including the Gold Coast and Ghana. . In three and a half centuries, more than one and a half million African slaves were exported to Central America, almost 40 million to the Caribbean; 1700 were destined for Brazil, which received almost 25% of the human beings shipped as slaves. What was the demographic impact of this trade in Africa? Due to the rarity of population censuses on the continent, only broad estimates exist. In 1850, the region of West Africa subjected to slave hunting must have had XNUMX million inhabitants. A quarter of them were hunted and enslaved. A century and a half later, in XNUMX, the region's population had fallen to twenty million, precisely at the time when the world's population experienced a spectacular leap. The most affected regions were Angola and the Gulf of Benin.
More impressive are the figures relating to the African percentage share in the world population. Considering the population of Europe, Africa, the Middle East and the Americas, the African population fell, between 1600 and 1900, from 30% to 10% of the total population. The percentage would be smaller (the percentage drop would be greater) if China (excluded from the estimate) were considered, due to its large population that was constantly growing during the period covered. Considering average or “normal” demographic growth, sub-Saharan Africa should have had, in the middle of the 100th century (when the “legal” end of the slave trade occurred), a population of XNUMX million inhabitants: it had, at that time, half of this figure.[iii] “Black Africa” was cut off from half of its potential population, with irreversible consequences for its development. Of all African ethnicities, the Yoruba of West Africa were the most affected by the slave trade, but there were also significant contributions from groups in Senegambia (the mandenka), who brought more than 30% of the slaves arriving in Spanish America after 1630, from South Africa (Bantu speakers) and East Africa.
At the beginning of the 19th century, in Africa, “the material contributions and military service that the State demanded of the people in exchange for their protection were reduced to what was strictly necessary. The daily lives of individuals were largely part of a fabric of relationships involving kinship ties and religious, legal and economic institutions that, very often, were not limited to the borders of States. The Maghreb and Egypt were the only regions where relatively durable political structures had long been established, derived from several centuries of application of Islamic law.”[iv] The States were, therefore, “fragile”, but the European colonization of the 19th century was not the settlement of virgin areas or without social organization: “With the exception of South Africa, and a little in Rhodesia and Kenya, the European was not a colonization of the white population; on the contrary, it ultimately gave a considerable demographic boost to the black population. The contact between ancient African civilizations and European civilization was fatal to them, breaking their traditional forms. The Europeans could not be reproached for having deliberately and consciously attacked the traditional African heritage, except in certain aspects... Initially, the Europeans ignored African civilizations. For them, there was nothing more than one civilization, theirs.”[v] In fact, there was only one society, the European one, in which the others could only play a complementary role. The new European colonization did not expand the “industrial civilization” of the metropolises, but it destroyed local industry. Until the neocolonialism of the 19th century, this colonization had not penetrated deeply into Africa: “During the first three quarters of the 19th century, the main external factor in East and Northeast Africa was not European, but Arab and Egyptian. In East Africa, the first half of the century saw the consolidation of an Arabized coastal population speaking shawali, as well as the Arabized urban population coming from the south of Gomales, on the western coasts of the Persian Gulf”.[vi] The local dynamics of cultures and miscegenations were violently interrupted in the last quarter of the 19th century.
A Pax Britannica after 1815 constituted the historic milestone of the global expansion of capital, which resulted, on the one hand, “the abolition of slavery, due to the need for free labor and, on the other hand, the creation of political bodies capable of guaranteeing security of commercial networks. However, production capacity was still limited, Great Britain practiced 'informal imperialism'. From 1873 onwards, as a result of economic and political transformations, Great Britain lost its privileged position on the African continent. France, Germany and the USA became their main adversaries, especially in the most important industrial sectors. The consequence of this rivalry was the direct colonization of almost all of Africa… The 'race for Africa' began, creating well-defined territories for each of the colonizing powers.”[vii] A turning point of historic significance took place in Africa: “In 1870, the gaps in Europe's knowledge of Africa were immense. Most African communities were unaware of the existence of the white man, even though they used products manufactured by him. The European presence on the continent, until the eve of 1900, was only felt by a small minority and, even later, very many were those who had never seen a Portuguese, an Englishman, a Frenchman or a German, or had any idea that their lands were under the control of a people from beyond the sea. [Their] establishments were seen by Africans as areas given for rent or loan, as they had done in the past with other people – the reviewed ou uangaras, the Hausa, the aros – who had set up shop for commercial purposes. The English and French thought differently: they had these territories, however small they were, as protectorates or under their direct sovereignty. The clash between the two conceptions was inevitable.”[viii] This clash, of conceptions, of populations, and also of armies, led to the almost complete colonization of Africa.
Before 1880, European possessions in Africa were relatively small and limited to coastal areas, with most of the coasts and almost the entire continental interior remaining independent. Just twenty years later, in 1900, Africa was almost entirely divided into separate territories controlled by European nations. Only penetration into Islamic North Africa was hampered, on the one hand, by the dispute between European powers for control of the Mediterranean, and on the other by the suzerainty exercised to a greater or lesser extent by the Ottoman Empire over important countries in the region. The new imperialism in Africa differed from the old in another aspect that would be decisive in the 1884th century: “It was in Africa that Germany made its first major attempt to join the club of colonial powers; Between May 1885 and February XNUMX, Germany announced claims to the territory of South-West Africa, Togo, Cameroon (Kamerun) and part of the east African coast opposite Zanzibar. Two smaller nations, Belgium and Italy, also joined the ranks of partners, and even Portugal and Spain became once again active in their claims to African territory”.[ix]
The economic and social nature of the external powers interested in Africa also changed in relation to previous centuries. With the development of metropolitan industrial capitalism, European colonization expanded worldwide, changing its character: “In the early 1800s, after three centuries of an ever-increasing slave trade along the coast of West Africa, a large number of City-states emerged and were led by Africans, Europeans, and Afro-European merchants who represented conflicting commercial interests… Around the Kasanga Kingdom of Angola and the disintegrating Oiô Empire of Yorubaland, the Atlantic slave trade continued active into the 1850s… As As industrialized Europe generated new demands for goods produced in Africa, the leaders of West African coastal cities turned away from the pursuit of slaves to the production of 'legitimate' export goods. Nigeria's first 'Slave Coast' became known to European merchants as the 'Oil River' because of the rapid transition to large-scale oil palm production (1810-1850). These new trends in the international market, away from the slave trade and towards the production of goods and legitimate trade, were reinforced by the increasing activities of British naval squadrons”.[X] The two factors, the driving spring and the “reinforcement”, fed each other.
For the conquest of Africa by the European powers was anything but a smooth and triumphant ride: it required naval fleets and veritable armies, better armed and supplied than their African counterparts. In some regions, Europeans only confronted an unarmed civilian population, in others (as in the case of the Ashanti kingdom) this was not the case: “Along the coast of Guinea, the kingdom of Dahomey was a conquering state, expanded for a century. by aggressive leaders in command of an ethnically mixed population, fused into a kind of nation. Its armed forces were part of a state apparatus placed under firm centralized control, where the bodies of royal slaves were notable. The royal battalions of single women gave Dahomey a great reputation abroad.” Dahomey firmly opposed the French advance, as did the Zulus to the English in the south of the continent: “Zululand was truly a nation in arms. Although small, with a population of no more than 300 thousand people, it had an extreme degree of militarization that, in the war of 1879, mobilized 50 thousand soldiers. 40 thousand were always ready for action, half of whom were under thirty. Young people were trained in exercise camps, and marriage was prohibited until their 'baptism of fire'. They were organized into 36 regiments with permanent availability, something exceptional at the time in non-European societies”.[xi] Confrontations with colonizers were wars between states.
The geopolitical and social scope of African wars was international. When slavery was abolished in most independent countries in America, it was maintained in the USA and Brazil, the main consumers of African slaves. The political and geopolitical structure of Africa was also changing. In North Africa, Algeria had been annexed to the Ottoman Empire by Khair-ad-Don, who established the Algerian borders and made the coast an important corsair base. Their activities reached their peak in the 17th century. In the following century, constant attacks against North American ships in the Mediterranean resulted in the “Berber Wars”. The second French colonial wave rested on economic foundations of a predominantly capitalist type, which defined the blitz France in North Africa: under the pretext of lack of respect towards its consul, France invaded Algeria in 1830, making it an integral part of its territory, which would only end with the collapse of the Fourth Republic, in the second half of the 1857th century. In neighboring Tunisia, subject to French rule, “constitutional decrees were passed in 1861 and XNUMX, at the suggestion of the French and English consulates, to satisfy the ambitions of the rich and well-educated Tunisian middle class and the influential French and Italian commercial communities. The constitution guaranteed equality of all men before the law and freedom of trade, and appointed advisors to the bey. In practice, the people were not helped by the constitution, which only gave political power to a few rich people. The government largely ignored the constitution, which quickly fell into disuse.”[xii] The establishment of the French protectorate in Tunisia took place in 1881.
The European onslaught in North Africa deepened with the last colonial shocks of a decadent power, barely recovered from the loss of almost all of its colonies in America; She conjured up pre-modern motives for her new colonial onslaught. Spain declared war against Morocco in 1859, using the pretext of insulting its national flag by Moroccan soldiers. In the Spanish metropolis, the war was encouraged by the Catholic Church, which called on Spanish soldiers to “will not return without destroying Islam, destroying the mosques and beating the cross in all the alcázars”. The Spanish colonial army left Algeciras, with “45.000 men, 3.000 mules and horses and 78 pieces of artillery, supported by a war squadron formed by a sailing ship, propeller frigates and a sail, corbetas, four guillemots, one wheeled steamers and three faluches, in addition of new steamboats and three urcas that acted as troop transports".[xiii] Spain took Tetuán and,[xiv] in 1860, the port of Tangier, surrendering the Moroccan commander Muley Abbás. Through the Treaty of Wad-Ras, Spain obtained the perpetual concession of Ceuta and Melilla (maintained as Spanish territories until the present), some Mediterranean islands and strong economic compensation; Spanish “public opinion”, however, desired the conquest of all of Morocco, an achievement made impossible by the numerous casualties of the Spanish army in the fighting.
Spanish treaties with Morocco in 1860 and 1861 consolidated Spain's growing interests in North Africa, but in succeeding decades tensions arose between Spanish army patrols and local Berber tribes, hostile to Spain and Morocco, and over which the sultan Moroccan had no control. In 1890, Rife pirates captured a Spanish merchant ship and kidnapped its crew. As a result, war between Spain and 39 of the Rife tribes began on October 3, 1893. Sultan Hassan I declared war on Spain on November 9 of that year. Six thousand Rife warriors armed with Remington rifles descended the mountain and attacked the city barracks. The Spanish fought a bloody battle against them: Spanish artillery was used to bombard Rifen forces in villages; When a bombing hit a mosque, the Rifian war took on the character of a Jihad. The new confrontation against Morocco brought war fever to Spain. The Spanish government dispatched a battleship and two gunboats to the theater of war, placed the fleet on alert and mobilized the Andalusian army for service abroad. The governor of Melilla and commander of the Spanish forces issued an ultimatum to Morocco; Against him, the sultan sent a contingent of regular troops to reestablish the situation, without success. The Spanish government sent four more infantry battalions and three cavalry regiments. General Ortega led three thousand soldiers and swept the Rifians from their ruined trenches. Rifen troops, however, occupied the beaches, frustrating the efforts of the Spanish navy to land new troops, horses and supplies. The Rifians expanded their trenches. With the arrival of armored cruisers, Spain began to use all its naval power, carrying out tireless bombardments on the coast, with seven thousand men in reinforcements. In April 1894, Spain finally managed to negotiate peace conditions directly with the sultan. European powers watched the Spanish campaigns against Rife because of their own expectations for the rest of the continent.
The fight against the slave trade in the metropolises, which reached its zenith in the 1860s, achieved the (English) parliamentary overthrow of slavery, but did not prevent the emergence of the new European imperialism, preluded by the conquest of Africa: “The effort of the powers European efforts to divide Africa took place on the eve of the imperialist era, when powerful monopoly groups based on industrial and financial power tried to expand their dominion to appropriate raw materials, especially minerals (in South Africa, in 1866, diamonds were discovered and gold; gold was also discovered in Rhodesia in the 1860s), to acquire land for colonization and strategic purposes, and to establish new points of dominance for trade”.[xv] From 1880 onwards, competition between the metropolises for dominance over African territories intensified: “It was the discovery of the Congo that suddenly faced a large number of competing interests”.[xvi] Until the last quarter of the 1876th century, the European presence in Africa was limited to a few coastal points; most of Africa was ruled by Africans. The continent was divided into empires, kingdoms and city-states. The African partition was precipitated by the French advance into Senegal in XNUMX, which provoked a reaction from Germany and also from the old dominant power in the region, England.
The African partition developed in the wake of the Suez Crisis of 1882, when British Liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone and his cabinet ordered the invasion of Egypt in an attempt to preserve British access to the Suez Canal. The British occupation of Egypt served as a catalyst for the partition of Africa: the scramble for Africa it was resolved diplomatically at the Berlin Conference (1885). In territorial terms, England was not the main African colonizing power, a place reserved for France. In that country, colonial policy conditioned internal repression, including that of minor offenders: Jean Genet, in Le Langage de la Muraille, an autobiographical text, showed how those were sent to “reformatory” colonies, where they were trained to be transformed into colonists in North Africa, or even soldiers in the colonial army. The French army was the second largest employer of young offenders when they were released after reaching the age of majority. The correctional facilities prepared the killers for the colonization army. The French government devised a plan to colonize Algeria and Tunisia with orphans, the poor and freed prisoners; those who did not go to the colonies would be exploited as cheap agricultural laborers in the metropolis.
Colonization of larger slices of territory was not synonymous with control of the colonization process. Strategically, between the end of the 1880th century and the middle of the 1867th century, the United Kingdom, with its enormous naval and economic power, took the lead in African colonization: England dominated Egypt, Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, English East Africa, Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), the South African Union (the Cape), Nigeria, the Gold Coast and Sierra Leone. Germany took Cameroon, South West Africa and German East Africa. Italy conquered Eritrea, Somalia and coastal Libya. Reduced portions fell to the former colonizers: Spain got Spanish Morocco, Rio de Ouro and Spanish Guinea (or Equatorial Guinea); Portugal, with Mozambique, Angola and Portuguese Guinea (Guiné Bissau). France was the largest colonizer, but far from an absolute majority. The occupation of Africa by European powers completely destroyed previous power structures, some of which served as intermediaries between the colonizer and the Africans, while others persisted in hiding. In 1835, the “legal” claim by European governments of parts of the African coastal territory began. In 1909, King Leopold II of Belgium (XNUMX-XNUMX) gave new impetus to European colonialism by bringing together a congress of presidents of geographical societies in Brussels, to “spread Western civilization”.
This resulted in the International African Association and the Upper Congo Study Group, which began the exploration and conquest of Congo. Leopoldo was one of the main contributors to the entities, financed by private capital. The race to Africa was “regulated” at the Berlin Conference in 1885, proposed by Bismarck and the French minister Jules Ferry, who shared Africa, the only space that remained to be fully occupied by the imperialist powers on the planet. The dominant elements were the three great European powers. The Conference legalized Leopold II's possession of the Congo: the country was handed over to a society whose main shareholder was the king of Belgium, preparing the conditions for the genocide of the people of the region. The Conference established rules for occupation; the colonial powers negotiated the division of Africa, and agreed not to invade areas occupied by other powers. The only African countries that were not turned into colonies were Ethiopia and Liberia, which had been created by freed slaves from the United States of America. The partition and political division of the continent were arbitrary, not respecting the ethnic and cultural characteristics of each people or region. In the three decades that passed between the Berlin Conference and the start of the First World War, the European onslaught in Africa colonized most of the continent.
European countries decided to embark on the “African adventure”. France, as we have seen, first invaded and colonized Algeria and established a protectorate in Tunisia. Afterwards, the French expanded into the interior and South Africa, creating, in 1880, the colony of French Sudan (currently Mali) and, in the years that followed, occupied a large part of North Africa and western and central Africa. France, seeking an ally for its own projects for the region, encouraged Spanish territorial expansion, to the detriment of Morocco: “In the Maghreb of the 'disastrous owner' from 1830 to French northern Africa in 1914, French colonization was late, vacillating. and accelerated by the internal political events of 1848, 1852 or 1871, limited to the Sahel, Mitidja, the plateaus of Oran and Constantine, and very centered on the coastal cities. In 1911, 750 Europeans were censused in Algeria. In Tunisia, settlement was later, but also deliberate: in 1911, there were 45 thousand French people and one hundred thousand Italians there. In Morocco, European settlement, French and Spanish, only took flight in 1911.”[xvii] In 1912, the Treaty of Fez divided Morocco into two protectorates, one Spanish (which was in the region of current Western Sahara) and one French (current Morocco). France forced the Sultan of Morocco to sign the Treaty, making the country a protectorate. March 30th became the “day of misfortune” (day of malheur) for Moroccans, a national anti-date that would never be forgotten. French colonies and possessions already comprised Algeria, Tunisia, French West Africa, French Equatorial Africa, the Somali Coast and Madagascar. The main European imperialist power, however, was another. In the “Horn of Africa”, the 1880s were marked by the Berlin Conference and the beginning of the modernization of Ethiopia, when the Italians began to rival the British for influence in the region.
Asseb, a port near the southern entrance to the Red Sea, was purchased in March 1870 by an Italian company from the local sultan, a vassal of the Ethiopian emperor, which led in 1890 to the formation of the Italian colony of Eritrea. Italy oriented itself towards classic colonialism. At the end of the 1896th century – beginning of the 1896th century, its tendency to exploit raw materials from the occupied territory emerged, with the spirit of pure speculation of the first private initiatives. Both in Eritrea, where the State intervened directly, and in Somalia, where an attempt was made to apply a type of administration in the English model, entrusting the administration of the protectorate to a private company supported by the Bank of Rome, the first experiences of colonial management resulted in failure and reflected an attitude focused more on speculation than on the economic valorization of the colony. The Italian colonial attempt, besides being late, did not correspond to an internal economic expansion and registered the absence of the fundamental conditions for the manifestation of modern capitalist imperialism: homogeneous internal markets, saturation of the financial market, absence of the possibility of profitable investments in the national market. Italy's frustrated colonial military expansion accentuated the inequality of its capitalist economic development, aggravating the “southern question” in the metropolis. Italy was also experiencing a period of “great emigration” of its population overseas. The Italian colonial attempt culminated in a defeat against the Ethiopians in the battle of Adwa, in XNUMX: the Ethiopians defeated the Italians and remained independent, under the government of Menelik II. Italy and Ethiopia signed a provisional peace treaty in October XNUMX. Ethiopia remained the only independent black African kingdom.
During the European imperial era, moreover, the demographic growth of Muslim countries reached spectacular rates, exceeding 50%: “Throughout Muslim White Africa, from the Atlantic to the Nile, in the context of closely binding religious and family motivations, of the non-existence Due to female celibacy, the precocity and multiplicity of marriage unions, the absence of contraceptive prevention, even the most basic, the legitimate fertility of young wives coincided with their physiological fertility. Furthermore, the terrible infant mortality reduced or suppressed the period of breastfeeding.”[xviii]The European attacks overlapped with the old Ottoman imperialism, provoking new local resistance, with religious flags. In North Africa and East Africa, under the banner of Islam, revolts began against the new colonial domination. To the south of Egypt, Sudan dominated much of the coast of the Red Sea, an obligatory crossing point for users of the Suez Canal. Following Mehmet Ali's invasion in 1819, Sudan came to be governed by an Egyptian administration. This colonial system imposed heavy taxes, not to mention Egyptian attempts to end the lucrative slave trade run by local Arab traders.
In 1870, a Sudanese Muslim leader, Muhammad Ahmad, preached the renewal of faith and the “liberation of the land,” and began to attract numerous followers. Soon afterwards there was a revolt against the Egyptians, in which Muhammad proclaimed himself Mahdi, the promised redeemer of the Islamic world. The Egyptian governor of Sudan, Raouf Pachá, sent two companies of infantry armed with machine guns to arrest him. The Mahdi commanded a counterattack that massacred the Egyptian army. As the Egyptian government came under British control, European powers, especially England, became increasingly interested in Sudan. British advisers to the Egyptian government gave consent for another expedition to the country. In the summer of 1883, Egyptian troops massed in Khartoum were placed under the command of a retired British officer (in the words of Winston Churchill, “perhaps the worst army that ever marched into war”) – an unpaid, inexperienced, undisciplined army. and whose soldiers had more in common with their enemies than with their European officers. The Mahdi assembled an army of 40.000 men, equipping it with weapons and ammunition captured in previous battles, his formation defeated the Egyptian expeditionaries.
The Egyptian government asked for a British officer to be sent to Sudan, who turned out to be the veteran Charles Gordon, active in China during the second “Opium War”. Gordon was besieged by the Mahdi, who had gathered around 50 soldiers. A British expedition was dispatched under the command of Garnet Wolseley, but became blocked at the Nile. The column finally reached Khartoum only to discover that it was too late: the city had fallen two days earlier, Gordon and his garrison had been massacred. These events temporarily ended British involvement in Sudan and Egypt. Muhammad Ahmad, the Mahdi, died shortly after his victory at Khartoum. Egypt did not renounce its rights to Sudan, which British authorities considered a legitimate claim. Under the strict control of British administrators, the Egyptian army had been reformed, led by British officers, to enable, among other things, Egypt to reconquer Sudan. The acquisition of new African territories, directly or through interposed agents, was a defensive measure of English interests, which were suffering attack from other powers.
In the last decades of the 40th century, English businessman Cecil Rhodes promoted the British project to build the railway that would connect Cairo, in Egypt, to the Cape, in South Africa, a project that was never realized. Rhodes was one of the founders of the De Beers company, which in the 90st century holds XNUMX% of the world diamond market (it once held XNUMX%). Rhodes' personal motto was “so much to do, so little time…” (So much to do, so little time…). The British South Africa Company was created by Rhodes through the merger of Central Gold Search Association and Exploring Company Ltd. In a period of less than ten years, Rhodes and his company had invaded or caused British imperial authority to impose itself over a region corresponding to modern Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Malawi, an area equivalent to three times the size of France. . Rhodes, in one of his wills, wrote: I considered the existence of God and decided that there is a good chance that he exists. If he really exists, he must be working on a plan. Therefore, if I am to serve God, I must discover the plan and do my best to help him carry it out. How to find out the plan? First, look for the race that God chose to be the divine instrument of future evolution. Unquestionably, it is the white race... I will devote the remainder of my life to God's purpose and to helping Him make the world English. Rhodes died and was buried in 1902 in the Matobo Hills, South Africa, where he had quelled a rebellion by the Matabeles, who came to his funeral anyway. The ceremony was Christian, but the Matabele chiefs paid tribute to Rhodes in accordance with his beliefs.[xx] His dream of building an uninterrupted English empire between Cairo and Cape Town was partially achieved after the Berlin Conference, which legitimized the English annexation of all territories along this corridor (Egypt, Sudan, Kenya, Rhodesia and Transvaal).
While the French expanded, Leopold II “used one of his states, the Congo, to strengthen his other state, Belgium. He dreamed of economic prosperity, social stability, political greatness and national pride. Reducing his enterprise to personal enrichment does not do justice to the national and social motives of his imperialism. Belgium was still young and unstable; with Dutch Limburg and Luxembourg it had lost important portions of its territory; Catholics and liberals were willing to devour each other raw; the proletariat began to move: an explosive cocktail. The country looked like 'a boiler without an escape valve', according to Leopoldo. Congo has become this valve".[xx] In Europe, Leopold presented his colonial “work” with a halo of humanitarian altruism, defense of free trade and fight against the slave trade, but, in Africa, he expropriated the local people of all their lands and resources, with his army. private sector, which subjected the population to forced labor. Repressive cruelty included murders, rapes, mutilations and beheadings. An estimated ten million Congolese lost their lives between 1885 (the year of international recognition of the “Free State of the Congo”) and 1908 (some authors raise this figure to twenty million). Leopold II died in 1909; During his reign the population of Congo reduced by more than two thirds (from thirty to nine million native inhabitants). Congo's colonial history exposes one of the bloodiest genocides of contemporary times.
In the penultimate decade of the 1885th century, the division of Africa accelerated. Threatened, African leaders ceded power to European troop commanders. Others signed protection treaties, unaware that they were transferring sovereignty over their lands and inhabitants to foreigners: they believed they were leasing or ceding a certain territory for temporary use, as is customary when a foreigner asked for the privilege and honor of living and trading among they. They were surprised when two groups of white men with different languages fought against each other violently for this honor and privilege, instead of sharing it. In 1878, Portugal managed to sign the Aguanzum treaty with King Glelê, of Danxomé, which established the Portuguese protectorate over the coast, giving it rights over the interior. The French, who had renewed the 1887 agreement with the same king for the cession of Cotonou, reacted promptly, forcing Portugal, in XNUMX, to renounce its claims.
By the Berlin Conference, “the territories that today correspond to Rwanda and Burundi were assigned to Germany. Thus, in 1894, Count von Götzen would become the first white man to visit Rwanda and his court, and, in 1897, he set up the first administrative posts and imposed indirect rule. However, in 1895 the mwami Rwabugiri, triggering a violent struggle for succession among the Tutsis. As a result, the leaders of the weaker clans began to collaborate with the German chiefs, who granted members of the Tutsi elite protection and freedom, which allowed them to consolidate possession of land and subjugate the Hutus”;[xxx] and “the Berlin Conference was completed by another, even more sinister and threatening, from an African point of view: that of Brussels, in 1890. They symptomatically called it the Anti-Slavery Conference, and the text that was produced there was a violent colonizing program. The empires, kingdoms and city-states of Africa were non-existent political entities to the European diplomats who participated in the Berlin and Brussels Conferences…. When their countries had to occupy the land they divided on the map, and their militaries had to make effective protectorate treaties that for the sovereigns of Africa were land lease or loan contracts, they encountered resistance from states with firm government structures and peoples with strong national feeling… They defeated us because they knew how to pit vassal peoples against their masters and traditional enemies against each other, but sometimes with great difficulty and after a long struggle”.[xxiii]
In the English metropolis, socialist movements opposed (they were the only ones to do so) the new wave of colonialist military attacks by Great Britain in Africa. In March 1885, the Socialist League English distributed throughout the country thousands of copies of a declaration which read: “An unjust and evil war has been unleashed by the ruling and propertied classes of this country, with all the resources of civilization, against a poorly armed and semi-barbaric people, whose only crime is that of having rebelled against foreign oppression, which the mentioned classes themselves admit to be infamous. Tens of thousands of workers, taken out of business in this country, were wasted to carry out a carnage of Arabs, for the following reasons: 1) So that East Africa can be 'opened' to the shipment of expired goods, bad alcohol, disease venereal, cheap knick-knacks and missionaries, all so that British merchants and businessmen can assert their dominance over the ruins of the traditional, simple and happy life of the children of the desert; 2) To create new and advantageous government posts for the sons of the dominant classes; 3) To inaugurate a new and favorable hunting ground for army sportsmen who find home life tedious, and are always ready for a little genocide of Arabs, when the occasion arises. on similar occasions? The classes that are looking for markets? Are they the ones that make up the troops of our army? No! They are the sons and brothers of our country's working class. Who are forced to serve in these trade wars for meager pay. They are the ones who conquer, for the rich middle and upper classes, new countries to be explored and new populations to be dispossessed…”.[xxiii] Twenty-five responsible English socialists and workers signed the declaration, led by Eleanor Marx-Aveling, Karl Marx's youngest daughter and probably the author of the document, as she was responsible for the international section of the English socialist newspaper.
His father was not original because he highlighted the inequities of African slavery, but because he placed it in the context of the capitalist mode of production: “In Brazil, in Suriname, in the southern regions of North America, direct slavery is the pivot upon which our industrialism today turns machinery, credit, etc. Without slavery there would be no cotton, without cotton there would be no modern industry. It is slavery that has given value to colonies, it was the colonies that created world trade, and world trade is the necessary condition for large-scale mechanical industry. Consequently, Before the slave trade, the colonies provided very few products to the old world, and they did not visibly change the face of the world.. Slavery is consequently an economic category of supreme importance. Without slavery, North America, the most progressive nation, would have become a patriarchal country. Just scratch North America off the map of peoples and you have anarchy, the complete decay of modern commerce and civilization. But to make slavery disappear would be to scratch America off the map of the peoples. That is why slavery, being an economic category, has been found since the beginning of the world in all peoples. Modern peoples only knew how to disguise slavery in their own bosom and openly import it into the New World”.[xxv]
It was not the colonies that needed slaves (there were colonies without slaves), but slavery in the service of capitalist accumulation that needed colonies.. In a letter to Engels (1860), Marx stated that the fight against slavery was “the most important thing that was happening in the world”. In the Socialist International, however, positions that justified African (and other) colonization in the name of Europe's “civilizing mission” gained strength. At the Stuttgart Congress of the International, the debate on the colonial question was more than revealing. A sector of German social democracy (headed by Vollmar and David) did not hesitate in calling itself “social-imperialist”. The thinking of this current was reflected in the intervention of Dutch leader Van Kol, who stated that the anti-colonialism of previous socialist congresses had served no purpose, that social democrats should recognize the indisputable existence of colonial empires and present concrete proposals to improve the treatment of indigenous people. , the development of its natural resources, and the use of these resources for the benefit of the entire human race. He asked opponents of colonialism whether their countries were really prepared to do without the resources of the colonies. He recalled that Bebel (founder of German social democracy) had said that nothing was “bad” in colonial development as such, and referred to the successes of the Dutch socialists in achieving improvements in the conditions of the indigenous people of the colonies in their metropolis.
The Congressional commission in charge of the colonial question presented the following position: “Congress does not reject in principle on every occasion a colonial policy, which under a socialist regime could offer a civilizing influence.” Lenin described the position as “monstrous” and, together with Rosa Luxemburg, presented an anti-colonialist motion. The moment of truth also presented itself for the only Latin American socialist party present at the Stuttgart Congress, the Argentine Socialist Party. PSA delegate Manuel Ugarte voted in favor of Lenin's anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist motion; A few years later he was expelled from the Party on charges of nationalism. The result of the vote was a sample of the existing division: the colonialist position was rejected by 128 votes against 108: “In this case, the presence of a negative trait in the European labor movement was marked, a trait that could cause considerable damage to the cause of the proletariat. The vast colonial policy led, in part, to the European proletariat in a situation whereby it is not their work that maintains the entire society, but the work of the almost completely subjugated indigenous people of the colonies. The English bourgeoisie obtains more income from the exploitation of hundreds of millions of inhabitants of India and other colonies than from the English workers. Such conditions create in certain countries a material, economic basis for contaminating colonial chauvinism to the proletariat of these countries.”[xxiv]
For the left wing of the International, the colonial war was the way to maintain the privileges of the great metropolitan bourgeoisie and the condition for maintaining the standard of living of privileged portions of the European proletariat. Furthermore, it created a situation of historical impasse in the colonizing metropolises, through the “left-wing colonizer (who) does not hold power, his statements and promises have no influence on the life of the colonized. Furthermore, he cannot dialogue with the colonized, ask him questions or ask for guarantees... The colonizer who rejects the colonial fact does not find the end of his discomfort in his revolt. If he does not suppress himself as a colonizer, he settles into ambiguity. If he rejects this extreme measure, he contributes to confirming and establishing the colonial relationship, the concrete relationship of his existence with that of the colonized. It can be understood that it is more comfortable to accept colonization, to follow the path that leads from colonial to colonialist to the end. The colonialist, in short, is just the colonizer who accepts himself as a colonizer.”[xxv]
In America, the fight against colonialism and slavery manifested itself in the fight for independent African churches, a tradition present in the black congregations of slaves in North America influenced by the Baptist church: the slave revolts in Jamaica in 1831 were called “ Baptist War”: “The tradition of North American black preachers and their conception of a political church, mobilizing black people in their fight against oppression and oppressors, had considerable influence in Africa”.[xxviii] At the end of the century, pan-Africanist thought emerged, with two black leaders who linked Africa with its diaspora in the Caribbean: Silvestre Williams and George Padmore. The first was a lawyer, born in Trinidad Tobago. In 1900, he organized a conference in London to protest against the seizure of African lands by Europeans, which was the starting point of political pan-Africanism, taken up by the African-American socialist leader WE Du Bois, from a Haitian family, in the USA, who wrote that “the great test for American socialists would be the Negro question.”
Marcus Garvey, born in Jamaica, founded the UNIA (Universal Association for the Overcoming of Negroes) in the USA, which opened more than a thousand branches in forty countries; against the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) Garvey sought to deepen the distances between white and black workers, and to unify black workers and capitalists in the same economic and political movement. Marcus Garvey even presented himself as the true creator of fascism. The black movement expanded simultaneously in Africa, Europe and the Americas. A cultural hybridism developed from the global African diaspora: “(In addition to) the importance of Jubilee Singers and his odyssey, it is important to remember the career of Orpheus Myron McAdoo, derived from the original group: his Jubilee Singers from Virginia toured South Africa extensively for five years between 1890 and 1898 (and also) for the impact, on what is considered authentic African culture, of the music performed by slaves who returned from Brazil to Nigeria in the 1840s.”[xxviii] White racism was a central component of the colonial race of powers: “It was a doctrine with multiple aspects, seductive for its civil prospective modernity, which distinguished it from the long and brutal conquest of Algeria or the unpopular distant expeditions of the Second Empire. It rested on the total ignorance of the social and mental structures of the indigenous people, imagined ready to collaborate, and on the naive conviction that the only civilization was the Western one; the 'inferior races' could only aspire to rise to it to enjoy its benefits.”[xxix] In the United Kingdom, Rudyard Kipling celebrated in the idea of the “white man's burden” his supposed “moral obligation” to bring civilization to backward and “uncivilized” peoples. Robert Livingston's expedition in search of the sources of the Nile took on the air of a civilizing epic.
The so-called “science of races” was in vogue in Europe and, in studies on the peoples of Central Africa, the Hamitic hypothesis, proposed by the English explorer John Hanning Speke, in 1863, prevailed. According to this “science”, civilization would have was introduced into Africa by a white Caucasoid people of Ethiopian origin, descendants of King David and, therefore, superior to the native blacks. For Speke, this “race” would be lost Christians… Thus, “the colonial powers divided Africa, quickly and painlessly, during the last twenty years of the XNUMXth century, at least on paper. Things, however, were totally different on African soil itself. The widespread use of weapons among the local population, military codes of honor and a long tradition of hostility to all external control, made African popular resistance to European conquest much more fearsome than that of India. The colonial authorities strove to create states on a sparsely populated but turbulent continent, using technical advantages: firepower, mechanical transport, medical skills, writing. The states thus created were nothing more than skeletons to which African political forces gave flesh and life. Each colony had to develop specialized production aimed at the world market, which determined an economic structure that survived the entire XNUMXth century.”[xxx]
At the Acclimatization Garden, in Paris, and later in other European capitals, an exhibition of “savages” from different parts of the planet, especially Africa, was organized. The European craze for seeing “primitive” humans spread. Hunters specializing in bringing wild animals to Europe and the United States were instructed to seek out “exotic” human life. Thus, there were exhibitions of Eskimos, Sinhalese, Kalmuks, Somalis, Ethiopians, Bedouins, Nubians from the Upper Nile, Australian aborigines, Zulu warriors, Mapuche Indians, Andaman islanders of the South Pacific, headhunters from Borneo: “human zoos” spread in Germany, France, England, Belgium, Spain, Italy and the United States. Representatives of exotic ethnic groups became prominent at “world’s fairs,” in exhibits billed as educational experiences by governments and the companies that profited from them.
Competition between powers for Africa gave rise to inter-imperialist conflicts: from the beginning of the 1880s until the beginning of the 1882th century, Anglo-French relations were never serene, both in relation to the colonial race and the geopolitical situation in Europe; Their routes almost collided to the point of starting a war between the two countries. Everything became more complicated after the British occupation of Egypt in 1884. From 1884 onwards, France and England engaged in an increasing naval race, which on the British side was associated with the possible loss of its Mediterranean line of communications and fears of a French invasion. across the English Channel. Even more persistent and threatening were the frequent colonial clashes, over the Congo in 1885-1880 and over West Africa during the 1890s and 1898s. The most serious crisis occurred in XNUMX, when their sixteen-year rivalry over the Control of the Nile valley came to a head in the confrontation between Kitchener's English army and Marchand's small expedition at Fashoda.
But Africa was not just shaken by conflicts between powers. At the end of the 19th century. African resistance in the Gulf of Guinea came to an end with the defeat of almamy Samori, who had raised “a formidable tata, which he named Boribana (the run is over). The French applied a new method to exterminate this irreducible enemy; henceforth, in the rainy season, no breaks to allow the almamy rebuild your strength. In addition, to reduce him to starvation, the method of scorched earth was applied around him... Certain sofas began to desert. But most of them surrounded him faithfully, more than ever”.[xxxii] Samori was captured in September 1898: convicted and imprisoned, he died two years later. African resistance, however, inflicted defeats on the Europeans: the worst were the Italians. In 1896, when Italy suffered a heavy defeat at the hands of the Ethiopians at the Battle of Adwa, the Italian position in East Africa was seriously weakened. The British government offered political support to help the Italians, making their military demonstration in northern Sudan. This coincided with the increased threat of French invasion in the Upper Nile regions.
In 1898, as part of the colonial rush to Africa, the British decided to reaffirm Egypt's claim to Sudan. Horatio Herbert Kitchener, the new commander of the Anglo-Egyptian army, received marching orders, his forces entered Sudan armed with the most modern military equipment of the time. Their advance was slow and methodical, fortified camps were built along the way, the railway was extended from Wadi Halfa to Sudan in order to supply the colonial army. Another “incident” almost led to an international war: the France-Germany conflict over Morocco. The inaugural agreement of Cordial agreement between France and England, signed in April 1904, granted France the right to “look after the tranquility of Morocco” (sic). German Chancellor von Bülow suspected the existence of secret military clauses in the agreement. Imperial Germany decided to use Morocco as a battering ram against the Franco-English alliance: in March 1905 the German Emperor, William II, visited the Moroccan sultan in Tangier, later issuing a statement that defined the sultanate as “absolutely free and independent”; Germany declared itself “protector” of this quality. The European press began to evoke the possibility of a “test of strength” between France and Germany, first in Africa, then who knows… The situation led to a crisis in the French cabinet, resolved after a few weeks with the dismissal of the party wing of a military confrontation. The crisis was momentarily postponed, but would reappear with full force a decade later, in 1914, leading to the first global war.[xxxi]
In the extreme south of Africa, in the Cape region, the English interest was in the strategic position that allowed oceanic communications with India. British imperialism encouraged the Transvaal English to demand special political rights. The English advance in Southern Africa concluded with two armed clashes in South Africa, which pitted settlers of Dutch and French origin, the Boers, against the British army, which intended to seize the diamond and gold mines recently found in that territory. Their rivals, the Boers, were descendants of Calvinist settlers from the Netherlands and also from Germany and Denmark, as well as French Huguenots, who had settled in the 1880th and 1881th centuries in South Africa, whose colonization they disputed with the British. were under British rule, with the promise of future self-rule. The first “Boer War” was fought between XNUMX and XNUMX: the victory of the colonists guaranteed the independence of the Boer republic of the Transvaal. The truce did not last long. The discovery of diamond and gold mines led the United Kingdom to change its strategy, due to new economic interests in the region. The English renounced the policy of concluding treaties with the indigenous people and proceeded to annex new territories. This attitude was in line with the ideas of Cecil Rhodes, who would later serve as Prime Minister of the Cape. The Boers' bellicosity increased.
This situation degenerated into a bitter struggle between the two parties in the period between 1877 and 1881, in which the English troops were beaten by the troops of Boer president Paulus Kruger. In 1881, the Pretoria Convention was negotiated, which once again recognized the autonomy of the Transvaal, retaining the English rights in matters of foreign policy. For the English, “the (legal) solution, which had precedents in other regions of Africa, was to grant a free instrument guaranteeing a real charter of exclusivity to the British South Africa Company of Cecil Rhodes, in 1889. To guarantee the privilege, Rhodes had the support and assistance of Sir Hercules Robinson, governor of the Cape, who had important investments in Rhodes' companies”.[xxxii] In 1895, from the Atlantic coast to the eastern coast, all of southern Africa was controlled by English colonialists, with the exception of the two Boer republics: the Republic of South Africa (Transvaal), which emerged in 1853, and the Republic of the Free State of Orange, recognized by the United Kingdom in 1852. After the recognition of Boer independence, the situation in the territory had been significantly compromised. The economic crisis was worsened by the division of the country into two opposing political units (Boer republics and English colonies).
The problems multiplied with the arrival of Indian and Chinese workers, immigrants recruited for the Transvaal mines. In the years that followed, a long political duel took place between the Boer leader Paulus Kruger and the British Cecil Rhodes, characterized by difficult negotiations, hesitations and reciprocal threats. What led to the “second Boer War” was the ultimatum given to the English by Kruger, demanding the dispersal of British troops along the borders of the Boer republics. The era of war in the 1899th century began in Africa. In October XNUMX, increasing British military and political pressure prompted Transvaal President Paulus Kruger to issue an ultimatum demanding a guarantee of the republic's independence and a cessation of the growing British military presence in the Cape and Natal colonies. The ultimatum was not taken into account by the English, and the Transvaal declared war on the United Kingdom, with the Orange Republic as its ally.
The conflict began in October 1899 and ended in late May 1902, with the deposition of the president of Transvaal. The British had mobilized almost 500 white soldiers from across the empire, assisted by around 100 non-white workers. 45 people lost their lives in South Africa as a result of the war, and more than 100 women and children were interned in British “concentration camps” in deplorable conditions. 20% of those admitted died, sometimes horribly. In England, “spared from war for half a century, losing more than a hundred soldiers in battle was a disaster that was no longer remembered. In 1899, the largest overseas expedition in British history was sent to subdue one of the smallest nations on the planet”.[xxxv] The South African war was not popular in England, and fueled distrust of the government. In the theater of battle, Lord Kitchener, the English military commander, also indiscriminately set fire to African and Boer farms. The scorched earth policy of the English colonial authorities even provoked street protests in the British metropolis itself.
When the war concluded, under the terms of the Peace Treaty, the two Boer republics returned to their status as British colonies. King Edward VII was recognized as its legitimate sovereign. The English military victory led to the creation of the South African Union through the annexation of the Boer republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State to the British colonies of the Cape and Natal. In South Africa, a racial policy was established that differentiated Europeans from Africans (all non-white natives). Social groups made up of Asian immigrants, particularly Indians, also suffered from the policy of racial discrimination, which was imposed through wars with populations that offered resistance to whites, such as the Xhosa, Zulu and Shoto tribes. As the 20th century advanced, racial discrimination took the form of the apartheid, officially segregating the entire non-white South African population.
In North Africa, Italy, in 1911, conquered its African provinces of Cyrenaica, Tripolitania and Fezzan from the Turks in the Italo-Turkish war, and in 1934 unified them under the name of Libya. Five years later, in 1939, Libya occupied by the Italians was incorporated into the (fascist) Kingdom of Italy, when the “Steel Pact” between Germany, Italy and Japan was already in force. The geopolitical positions of the Nazi-fascist Axis, that is, of imperialisms Europeans who were overlooked or defeated in the Great War, in the Arab-Islamic world, became stronger, configuring one of the strategic scenarios of the global political dispute between the great powers. The USA, in turn, moved politically and diplomatically, defining itself as defenders of African independence against European powers. In the succession crisis of Emperor Ménélik II in Ethiopia, external intervention, not only European, combined with the division of the ruling lordly class, was decisive for the line of succession to be partially interrupted with the appointment of the “modernizing” Tafari Makonen as prince regent , and then proclaimed himself Emperor, from 1930, with the name of Haile Selassié, distancing himself from the Muslim sectors of the country's elite. In 1935, fascist Italy, in the “Second Italo-Ethiopian War”, occupied the country and arrested Selassié (who only regained his freedom with the Italian defeat in the future world war), trying to realize in practice the old dream of an Italian colonial empire capable of to rival the British Empire. Ethiopia would be the “India” of fascist Italy, a dream that was translated into fascist “popular culture”, through successful songs such as La Facetta Nera. The “Horn of Africa” was part of the dispute for global hegemony between old and new empires.[xxxiv]

The African colonial conquest had considerations of “civilizational superiority” as its main ideological foundation, and produced victims in dimensions only comparable to the decimation of the Amerindian populations in the 1877th and 1889th centuries: “Each global drought was the green light for an imperialist race for land . If the South African drought of 91, for example, was Carnarvon's opportunity to attack Zulu independence, the Ethiopian famine of XNUMX-XNUMX was Crispi's [Italian prime minister] go-ahead to build a new Roman Empire in the Horn of Africa. Africa".[xxxiv] On the eve of the First World War, the recolonization of the African continent was almost complete, 90% of African lands were under European rule: Belgium, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Spain and Turkey had divided almost the entire African territory between them. Colonization numbers do not fully express its human reality. The partition of Africa had unprecedented characteristics in the era of monopoly capital, when it served the objectives of economic expansion of industrial and financial monopolies rather than the political expansion of colonialist states, although it included it as its instrument.
The domination of Africa was one of the main issues at stake in the two global war conflicts of the 1950th century, which brought inter-imperialist contradictions to a paroxysm. African decolonization after the Second World War was far from being a peaceful or consensual process, it required national wars from Congo to Mozambique, Angola and Guinea Bissau, in the decades between the 1980s and the 2011s. The UN, adopting a policy and countless decolonizing resolutions, attempted to take over a process that was already developing through armed means and popular mobilization on the African continent itself. With decolonization, imperial colonialism continued through multiple forms of dependence; monetary areas, private and state financing, commercial and technological dependence, military aid, political interventions, in short, direct military interventionism. The “African diaspora”, originating from mass slavery that began in the XNUMXth-XNUMXth centuries, covered all continents on the planet. Movements in defense of the rights of Afro-descendant populations in “host” countries prolonged the struggle against colonialism and imperialism in Africa on a global scale. The fight against apartheid and for the liberation of Nelson Mandela had an international reach and shook the foundations of the capitalist metropolises themselves. “Black movements” today have an impact on five continents, just as the “Arab revolutions”, which had an extraordinary peak in XNUMX, starting precisely in Arab African countries, shook the entire world. Imperialist domination in Africa, completed in the XNUMXth century, and the struggle against it, have become a central point in the political agenda of the oppressed throughout the world in our days.
*Osvaldo Coggiola He is a professor at the Department of History at USP. Author, among other books, of Marxist economic theory: an introduction (boitempo). [https://amzn.to/3tkGFRo]
Notes
[I] Neil Smith. The uneven development. Rio de Janeiro, Bertrand Brasil, 1988.
[ii] Robert and Marianne Cornevin. Histoire de l'Afrique. Des origines à la 2nd guerre mondiale. Paris, Payot, 1964.
[iii] John Iliffe. The Africans. Histoire d'un continent. Paris, Flammarion, 2009.
[iv] JF Ade Ajayi. Africa from the 1880th Century to the XNUMXs. São Paulo, Cortez/UNESCO, sdp.
[v] Pierre Bertaux. Africa. From prehistory to the current States. Mexico, Siglo XXI, 1972.
[vi] Roland Olivier and JD Fage. Brief History of Africa. Madrid, Alliance, 1972.
[vii] Étinne-Richard Mbaya. Cent says ans after the Berlin Conference, the wars that partagent l'Afrique. Africa nº 20-21, Revista do Centro de Estudos Africanos, São Paulo, Humanitas/USP, 2000.
[viii] Alberto da Costa eSilva. Brazil, Africa and the Atlantic in the XNUMXth century. Advanced Studies vol. 8, nº 21, São Paulo, University of São Paulo, May-August 1994.
[ix] Harry Magdoff. Imperialism. From the colonial era to the present. Rio de Janeiro, Zahar, 1979.
[X] Vincent B. Khapoya. The African Experience. Petropolis, Voices, 2015.
[xi] VG Kiernan. Colonial Empires and Armies 1815-1960. Gloucestershire, Sutton, 1998.
[xii] Roland Olivier and Anthony Atmore. Africa since 1800. New York, Cambridge University Press, 1981.
[xiii] Joseph Fontana. The era of liberalism. History of Spain. Barcelona, Criticism, 2007.
[xiv] In Tetuán, the Spanish general O'Donnel, upon entering the city, found inhabitants who spoke archaic Spanish: they were the Sephardic Jews of the city, whose ancestors had been expelled from Spain by the Inquisition, who had been victims of a pogrom in the preceding days . This was the first “modern” contact between Iberian Spaniards and Mediterranean Sephardim (Danielle Rozenberg. L'Espagne Contemporaine et la Question Juive. Toulouse, Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2006).
[xv] Jack Woddis. Africa. The lion wakes up. Buenos Aires, Platinum, 1962.
[xvi] Henri Brunschwig. Le Partage de l'Afrique Noire. Paris, Flammarion, 1971.
[xvii] Pierre Léon (ed.). Economic and Social History of the World. Bari, Laterza, 1980.
[xviii] Pierre Leon. Economic and Social History of the World, cit.
[xx] Martin Meredith. Diamonds, Gold and War. New York, Public Affairs, 2007. A Rhodes Scholarship is a prestigious international scholarship for external students at the University of Oxford in England.
[xx] David Van Reybrouck. congo. A history. Paris, Actes Sud/Fond Flammand des Lettres, 2012.
[xxx] Marina Gusmao de Mendonca. War of Extermination: The Genocide in Rwanda. Text presented at the Symposium “War and History”, held at the Department of History at USP, in September 2010.
[xxiii] Alberto da Costa e Silva. Brazil, Africa and the Atlantic in the 19th century, cit.
[xxiii] Apud Yvonne Kapp. Eleanor Marx. Turin, Einaudi, 1980, vol. II.
[xxv] Karl Marx. Letter to Pavel V. Annekov (1846).
[xxiv] VI Lenin. Los Socialistas y la Guerra. Mexico, Editorial America, 1939.
[xxv] Albert Memmi. Portrait of the Colonized. Preceded by the portrait of the colonizer. Rio de Janeiro, Brazilian Civilization, 2007.
[xxviii] Jack Woddis.Africa. The lion awakens, cit.
[xxviii] Paul Gilroy. The Black Atlantic. Modernity and double consciousness. Rio de Janeiro, Editora 34, 2012.
[xxix] Henri Brunschwig. Le Partage de l'Afrique Noire, cit.
[xxx] John Iliffe. The Africans. Histoire d'un continent. Paris, Flammarion, 2009.
[xxxii] Joseph Ki-Zerbo. history of black africa. Lisbon, Europe-America, 1991.
[xxxi] Jean-Louis Dufour. Première crisis entre la France et l'Allemagne à propos du Maroc. Les Crises Internationales. Brussels, Complexe, 2000.
[xxxii] PJ Cain and AG Hopkins. British Imperialism 1688-2000. Edinburgh, Longman-Pearson Education, 2001.
[xxxv] Thomas Pakenham. The Boer War. Johannesburg/London, Jonathan Ball/Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1982.
[xxxiv] Matteo Dominioni. Lo Sfascio dell'Impero. Gli italiani in Ethiopia 1936-1941. Bari, Laterza, 1992.
[xxxiv] Mike Davis. Colonial Holocausts. Climate, hunger and imperialism in the formation of the Third World. Rio de Janeiro, Record, 2002.
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