Among the major contradictions of globalization is the tendency to integrate and centralise certain regions while disintegrating and marginalizing other regions from the global system. While the former process has produced large and powerful blocks such as the EU, the latter process tends to produce what Castells has, quite aptly, described as “black holes in informational capitalism: regions where [there is] no escape from suffering and deprivation.⁶ Africa is progressively acquiring that image. The rapid integration and growth of the European and North American economies and the steady centralization of political authority, particularly in Europe, stands in stark contrast to the marginalization, impoverishment, disintegration and fragmentation on the African continent. The failure of African countries to integrate meaningfully is, at least in part, attributed to these divergent but interconnected processes.

Almost all of the African countries, though playing a marginal and steadily diminishing role in the European economy, still remain vertically integrated to the European countries creating a situation of persistent structural dependence. This dependence is in the course of being re-enforced by the signing of Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) between the EU and ACP under the Cotonou Convention which will open up Africa’s resources to European multinationals, block Africa’s integration and obstruct south-south cooperation.  This fact of being appendages of the European economies, by itself, constitutes a major obstacle to horizontal integration between the African countries themselves and may create obstacles in Africa’s relations with China.

Thus the irony is that while Europe is deepening its union and creating greater unity through an expanded EU, Africa, under EU pressure, is disintegrating into regional Economic Partnership Agreements linked to the EU with the effect of weakening the existing Regional Economic Communities (RECs) and eventually scuttling the dream of a politically unified Africa. There are four such EPAs proposed for Africa (West Africa, Central Africa, Eastern and Southern Africa, the Southern African Development Community) and one each for the Caribbean and the Pacific.

In Africa the EPAs create new regions on top of existing RECs. It is not surprising therefore that whereas European trade Commissioner, Barroso at the Lisbon EU-Africa summit in December 2007, claimed that the EPAs “…will turn our trading relationship into a healthy, diversified, development oriented partrnership”, Senegalese president Abdoulaye Wade countered by saying: “It is clear that Africa rejects the EPA…the EU was losing out to China in Africa…Europe is about to lose the battle of competition in Africa.” ⁷ African Union president Konare highlighted the danger of interim agreements playing African regions off against each other. He appealed for more time.  

Almost invariably, Africa’s vertical integration to Europe has entrenched economic dependence, weakened the African states and facilitated the plunder of Africa’s resources. The weakness and dependence of the state undermines its capacity rendering it unable to exercise effective control over its national resources. Loss of control over resources combines with structural dependence and indebtedness to produce what Beckford described as ‘persistent poverty’ for the majority of the population. ⁸ Persistent poverty precipitates the disintegration of national societies as well as the fragmentation and polarization of ethnic communities. It is the politicization of polarized ethnic communities by political elites that produces and sustains many conflicts in the continent. The convergence of external integration and internal disintegration also creates a crisis of legitimacy of the African state resulting in authoritarian rule, state failure/collapse, ethnic conflicts and internecine warfare. In brief for Africa globalization has unleashed a chain reaction which may be depicted as follows: Economic marginalization, resource plunder, impoverishment, state failure, political disintegration, social fragmentation, community polarization, conflicts. 

Ironically, the process that has brought about the socio-economic marginalization of Africa in terms of its share of international production, consumption and trade as well as its impoverishment, is the very same process which is intensifying and centralizing the exploitation of Africa’s resources. Africa’s position and role in the international division of labour, which has gone through at least three phases, is changing yet again. As is always the case such transitions present challenges as well as opportunities. All the prior phases of Africa’s history over the last five hundred years have been driven by external forces and promoted the interests of those forces. The crucial question, this time around, is whether Africa will seize the opportunity to shape and drive its own future to serve its own interests.

In the first phase during the slave trade Africans provide the labour that opened up the New World and supplied the commodities that led to the industrialization of Europe. In this phase Africa not only lost most of its able-bodied population, but the continent was also depopulated thus losing the population pressure that could have provided the spurt for transformation a la Boserup. ⁹ To this day, one of the most contentious issues in assessing the impact of the slave trade particularly on Africa’s development is the number of people pressed into slavery by the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. Estimates range from ten to one hundred million.

Demographically, two things are clear however. One is that the so–called  trade basically removed the young and able bodied people leaving the continent’s demographic structure tilted towards the very young and the very old for a very long time. Secondly, the three centuries of slave trading decimated Africa’s population. The continent’s population growth remained either static or declined in both absolute (population size) and relative (share of world’s population) terms. In terms of size Africa’s population stagnated at around 100million over the period having lost nearly 100 million to the slave trade and the violence it precipitated on the continent. It is estimated by some that for every one person transported into slavery sixteen were lost.¹⁰  In relative terms, Africa’s share of world population declined from nearly15% in 1500 to approximately 7% around 1900. Socially, slave raiding and catching left a legacy of what Rodney describes as social violence which survives to this day. Politically, the slave trade, not only destroyed stable and expanding empires but it also perverted political authority. From protecting the people and promoting their interests African political systems instead, exposed their publics to external danger and predation. This affliction continues to reproduce itself and to haunt the post-colonial state. To the extent that the African state continues to serve external interests and to neglect internal needs this affliction is the source of endemic political instability and underlies legitimacy deficit of the state. 

When the slave trade was no longer economically viable and politically sustainable, Europe embarked upon the scramble for Africa which culminated in the Berlin Conference and the partition of the continent in 1884.During the nearly eighty years of colonial occupation that followed, from being exported as slave labour, Africans were, through forced labour, made to produce industrial and food commodities for Europe on their own land. This period was in many respects even worse than the slave trade period. Population declined so precipitously that it prompted some observers of the situation to remark that; “Africa was able to survive the three centuries of slavery but is likely to succumb to one century of colonization” ¹¹ This condition has largely persisted over the post-independence period with Africa continuing to produce and export colonial crops and, almost invariably, failing to create ‘new economic space’ for itself. Meanwhile, the traditional markets of the colonial crops in particular, have been collapsing either from oversupply, growth of substitutes or changing tastes in the European countries.

To be continued

By Prof. Mwesiga Baregu
School of Graduate Studies,
St. Augustine University of Tanzania.
Dar es Salaam.

References

⁶ Quoted by Joel Netshitenzhe, Article: Letter from Tshwane, Survival in the global jungle, GCIS, South Africa.

⁷ EU-Africa Summit fails on trade. 10 Dec. 2007. http://www.euractiv.com/

⁸ George Beckford, Persistent Poverty: Underdevelopment in Plantation Economies. London, Oxford University Press, 1972.

⁹ Esther Boserup, Population and Technological Change. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1981.

¹⁰ Louise-Marie Diop-Maes, Demography and History in Sub-saharan Africa. www.ankhonline.com/africa_population

¹¹ M. Reinhard and A. Armegaud, Histoire generale de la polulation mondiale. Paris, Montchrestien, 1961.