Modern World History

Dr. Dragoş C. MATEESCU

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 Africa from 1500 to Decolonisation
• WOODRUFF, William. 1998. A concise history
of the modern world: 1500 to the present,
Basingstoke: Macmillan, pp. 44-53, 228-240.
• Relevant sections from Kennedy (1988) and
other sources indicated in the syllabus.

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 Africa from 1500 to Decolonisation
• Africa – the perpetual object of the European
subject of history. A continent of “savages”.
• Europe brought Africa into “history”. History
of the Euro-Mediterranean.
• By that time, Africa was already in the history
of the Indian Ocean and of Islam.

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 Africa from 1500 to Decolonisation
• Since the 700s A.D. the Muslims had explored
Africa in search of gold, wax, ivory, pepper,
timber, palm oil, hides and slaves, for which they
exchanged salt, cloth, iron, brass and copper
goods.
• Eventually Muslim influence prevailed from the
Senegal river in the west to the upper Nile in the
east, to Zimbabwe in the south.
• Commerce along the east coast was an Arab
preserve.
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 The early African success of Islam
• Islam’s language (Arabic) and faith made far greater
inroads in Africa than Christianity would do a thousand
years later.
• Islam accepted all men, regardless of colour, as brothers.
• The promise of Islam’s ‘wet Paradise’, with its imagery of
fountains and running water, was particularly attractive.
• Also inviting to some converts was Islam’s acceptance of
polygamy.
• Only in Ethiopia did a small Christian kingdom emerge
(Ethiopian Coptic Christians). That was the curiosity that
attracted first the Portuguese.
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 The Portuguese
“discovery” of Africa
• 1487: A Portuguese diplomat, Pedro de Covilhã,
reached Ethiopia.
• Attracted then by the trade of the Orient,
Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good
Hope.
• 1498: Vasco da Gama crossed the Indian Ocean.
• With the African ‘obstacle’ overcome, the
Europeans – led by the Portuguese – could
develop a vigorous trade rivalry among
themselves.

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The Dutch followed…
• 1641-1648: the Dutch occupy the Portuguese
Angolan Luanda.
• By 1652, the Dutch established themselves at the
Cape of Good Hope. These Protestant colonists
became known as Boers, speaking a Dutch dialect
called Afrikaans.
• From the Cape, Dutch fleets made their way to
the East Indies.
• By the mid-seventeenth century they had
replaced the Portuguese carrying trade in the
Indian Ocean.
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 The slave trade
• The Europeans had not introduced slavery to Africa; what
they did was to vastly increase its scope.
• By 1700 the slave trade exceeded the trade in gold and
ivory.
• Estimates of the number of slaves shipped to the
Americas between the sixteenth and the nineteenth
centuries range from 10 to 15 million.
• 18th century: 6–7 million.
• About two million are thought to have died en route.
• The British eventually took the lead as carriers, yet it was
the Muslims who dominated the internal slave trade of
Africa until it was abolished in the nineteenth century.
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 The European involvement
in the trade slave reduced
dramatically the value of
the Muslim trade route
through Timbuktu.

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 The expansion of the African slave trade by Europeans, Arabs and
Africans (some of whom enslaved their own people) was of epochal
importance to Africa and the world.
The eighteenth century world economy (hence the entire modern
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 Beyond slavery
• Responding to public outcry, slavery was
abolished by the Dutch in 1795, the Danes in
1803 and the British in 1807.
• By the 1880s all the major countries of the world
had outlawed it.
• The slave market at Zanzibar (Tanzania) was
finally closed in 1873.

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 Beyond slavery
• In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the
Europeans also went beyond their coastal possessions
to explore and colonise inland Africa.
• Mission civilisatrice – the civilising mission of Europe in
the world in general and in Africa in particular:
– Education
– Infrastructure
– Modern health systems, medication, vaccination
– More efficient economic activities
– Political modernisation

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 The “modernisation” of Africa
• By 1914 there was no part of Africa, except for
Liberia and Abyssinia (Ethiopia), that was not
occupied or controlled by a European nation.
• Great Britain claimed more than a third of the
continent.
• Africa became dependent upon non-African
markets.
• Political boundaries were drawn that had no relation
to ethnic or economic reality. Those boundaries still
exist and are the cause of wars being fought in
several parts of the continent.
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 The “modernisation” of Africa
• Overall, there was a peaceful coexistence of European
powers in Africa…
… except for the Boer War of 1899–1902:
– 300,000 British vs. 60,000 Dutch Protestant farmers (Boers).
• HIGH political costs for Britain! The herding of Boer
women and children into concentration camps, where
20,000 died, stripped Britain of its assumed role as the
moral arbiter of the western world.
• 1908: South Africa became British dominion (sovereign
in 1931 and independent republic in 1961).
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 The “modernisation” of Africa
• Local rebellions started threatening the colonial powers
toward the end of the nineteenth century.
– The Anglo-Zulu War of 1879.
– Abd al-Qadir’s rebellion against the French in Algeria in the
1880s.
– The battle between the Ethiopians and the Italians at Adowa
in 1896.
– The Battle of Omdurman against Sudanese Dervishes in 1898.
• Nevertheless, all these battles demonstrated the
overwhelming superiority of European arms.

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 Major interests in Africa before WW I
• Britain’s greatest concern was to protect its Egyptian route
to the East (including the Suez Canal after 1869) and
Egypt’s water supply – the Nile.
– In 1882, the British occupied the whole of Egypt.
• France – Britain’s chief rival in Africa – by 1914 possessed
an African empire larger than the whole of Europe.
• Belgium, Germany and Italy were late comers (after the
Berlin Conference on African Affairs in 1884–5), while
Spain and Portugal became insignificant in Africa.
• Local nationalisms will soon bring the death of European
colonialism in Africa.
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 The Decolonisation of Africa

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 The Beginning of Decolonisation
• 1941: the Atlantic Charter (US and Britain)
promised self-determination and self-
government for all.
• It thus heralded the end of European colonialism
in Africa.
• Britain’s granting of independence to India in
1947, coupled with Dutch and French defeats in
Asia, further strengthened the movement for
African independence.

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 The Atlantic Charter Conference on the HMS Prince of Wales
10 August 1941

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 Gradual decolonisation
• 1940s (WW II): The Italians were driven out of Ethiopia and
Libya.
• 1952: Libya became an independent constitutional monarchy.
– In 1969, Colonel Muammar al-Qadhafi (1942–2011) seized power
with a military coup.
• 1956: France granted independence to Tunisia and Morocco,
but not to Algeria.
• 1957: Spain peacefully transferred its Moroccan territory to the
independent Moroccan state.

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 Gradual decolonisation
• Algeria struggled for 17 years for independence
(1945–62). Hundreds of thousands died and
three-quarters of the European population had
to flee the country before independence was
won from De Gaulle’s France.

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 Gradual decolonisation
• Egypt gained independence in
1951 from Britain and proclaimed
the Republic in 1953.
– The first President was Muhammad
Naquib, followed by his companion
in the War of Independence, Gamal
Nasser.
• Suez Crisis, 1956 (the end of
Britain’s great power status).
• After Nasser’s death, pan-Arabism
was taken up by Libyan president
Qadhafi.
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 Gradual
decolonisation
• Belgian rule in Africa ended
in 1960 when the Democratic
Republic of the Congo was
proclaimed. From 1971 to
1997 the Congo was called
Zaire.
• Mozambique and Angola
obtained their independence
from Portugal in 1975.
Spain’s rule in the Spanish
Sahara was terminated in
1976; the territory was
divided between Morocco
and Mauritania.

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 Gradual
decolonisation
• 1990: Namibia gained
independence after 74
years of South African
rule.
• South Africa’s
intervention also
ended in Mozambique
and Angola.

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• The curious thing about African
decolonization is that it was
accomplished with relatively little
violence.
• By and large, the European nations were
as glad to surrender power as the native
leaders were to assume it.
• In the 1990s only the Republic of South
Africa (a nation of forty-five million)
remained as an example of white
minority rule.

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South African Republic:
• Ethnic groups in 1996: black 75%, white 14%, coloured 9%,
Indian 3%.
• The principle of apartheid – or separate development of the
races – first defined and proclaimed by the Boer (Dutch
Protestant Afrikaner) leader Daniel F. Malan in 1948 has plagued
South African history.
• It was one of the reasons why the Afrikaner Nationalist Party
declared the independence of South Africa in 1958, and why it
withdrew from the British Commonwealth in 1961.
• S. Africa was isolated by all Western countries.
• President F. de Klerk proclaimed the end of apertheid in 1991.
• Overwhelming victory of the African National Congress at the
polls in April 1994 (62.7%) - Nelson Mandela became the first
black President of S. Africa.
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Why is S. Africa important?
• The greatest single industrial and military power on the
continent.
• It accounts for about half of Africa’s productive
capacity.
• It also possesses one of the greatest mineral reserve in
the world (oil from coal, uranium, metals, non-metalic
reserves, precious stones).

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 ‘Modern’ African problems
• Until the 1990s, only four nations – Botswana,
Gambia, Mauritius and Senegal – had allowed
their people to express their political wishes
freely.
• Growing lawlessness arose out of tribal and
ethnic warfare.
• In the 1990s, Liberia, Rwanda, Burundi, Somalia,
Sudan, Angola, Congo and Chad were all torn
apart by tribal and ethnic clashes.
• 1994: a most terrible act of genocide left
hundreds of thousands dead in Rwanda.
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Rwanda: independence from Belgium in 1962; 10 milion people.
90% Hutu, 9% Tutsi (mostly upper class), 1% others.
Genocide (1994): 800.000 to 1.000.000 Tutsi and moderate Hutus killed in
100 days with machetes and AK-47s.

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 2010

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 No good perspectives…
• Despite the Lomé Conventions of 1975, 1980 and 1985
between the European Economic Community (EEC) and
a number of African countries, which promised
reciprocal trade preferences, the foreign trade of many
countries remains either stagnant or sluggish. Africa’s
share of world trade lessens.
• Equally alarming is the manner in which the
infrastructure of Africa’s roads, railways, cities and
towns built under European rule has deteriorated.
• African countries have quadrupled their imports of
arms since 1968. The trouble with debt relief given by
the western powers is that it is likely to increase the
amount spent on arms still more.
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Modernity:
• questioning of tradition; prioritization of individualism,
freedom and formal equality;
• faith in inevitable social and scientific and
technological progress and human perfectibility;
• rationalization and professionalization;
• departure from feudal agrarianism toward free-
market capitalism, industrialization, urbanization and
secularization;
• the emergence of the nation-state and its constitutive
institutions (e.g. representative democracy, public
education, modern bureaucracy) and forms of
surveillance.
+ The idea that states gradually learn to respect and
protect the society in terms of individual and collective
rights and private property.
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• BBC News on life during apartheid in S.Africa:
– https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPc5KNrysU0
• South African national anthem:
– https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdG7pEgzV5
Q
• New Zealand national anthem:
– https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhCgcZ0efA
A
• Haka:
– https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiKFYTFJ_kw

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 Thank you!

Good luck in the exams and…

be good persons before
anything else!!!

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