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“The wealth of the west was built on Africa’s exploitation. Britain has never faced up to the dark side of its imperial history”,including slave trade
By Richard Drayton, The Guardian, Saturday August 20, 2005.
In an article published on Saturday August 20, 2005, in the British daily The Guardian, and titled “The wealth of the west was built on Africa’s exploitation. Britain has never faced up to the dark side of its imperial history”, Richard Drayton, a senior lecturer in imperial and extra-European history (from 1.500Ad onward) at Cambridge University, wrote:
“Britain was the principal slaving nation of the modern world. In The Empire Pays Back, a documentary broadcast by Channel 4, Robert Beckford called on the British to take stock of this past. Why, he asked, had Britain made no apology for African slavery, as it had done for the Irish potato famine? Why was there no substantial public monument of national contrition equivalent to Berlin's Holocaust Museum? Why, most crucially, was there no recognition of how wealth extracted from Africa and Africans made possible the vigour and prosperity of modern Britain? Was there not a case for Britain to pay reparations to the descendants of African slaves?
“These are timely questions in a summer in which Blair and Bush, their hands still wet with Iraqi blood, sought to rebrand themselves as the saviours of
Africa. The G8’s debt-forgiveness initiative was spun successfully as an act of western altruism. The generous Massas never bothered to explain that, in order to benefit, governments must agree to “conditions”, which included allowing profit making companies to take over public services. This was no gift; it was what the merchant bankers would call a “debt-for-equity swap”, the equity here being national sovereignty. The sweetest bit of the deal was that the money owed, already more than repaid in interest, had mostly gone to buy industrial imports from the west and Japan, and oil from nations who bank their profits in London and New York. Only in a bookkeeping sense had it ever left the rich world. No one considered that Africa's debt was trivial compared to what the west really owes Africa.
“Beckford’s experts estimated Britain’s debt to Africans in the continent and diaspora to be in the trillions of pounds. While this was a useful benchmark, its basis was mistaken. Not because it was excessive, but because the real debt is incalculable. For without Africa and its Caribbean plantation extensions, the modern world as we know it would not exist.
“Profits from slave trading and from sugar, coffee, cotton and tobacco are only a small part of the story. What mattered was how the pull and push from these industries transformed western Europe’s economies. English banking, insurance, shipbuilding, wool and cotton manufacture, copper and iron smelting, and the cities of Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow, multiplied in response to the direct and indirect stimulus of the slave plantations.
“Joseph Inikori’s masterful book, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in
England, shows how African consumers, free and enslaved, nurtured Britain’s infant manufacturing industry. As Malachy Postlethwayt, the political economist, candidly put it in 1745: “British trade is a magnificent superstructure of American commerce and naval power on an African foundation.”
“In The Great Divergence, Kenneth Pomeranz asked why Europe, rather than China, made the breakthrough first into a modern industrial economy. To his two answers - abundant coal and New World colonies - he should have added access to west Africa. For the colonial Americas were more Africa’s creation than Europe’s: before 1800, far more Africans than Europeans crossed the Atlantic. New World slaves were vital too, strangely enough, for European trade in the east. For merchants needed precious metals to buy Asian luxuries, returning home with profits in the form of textiles; only through exchanging these cloths in Africa for slaves to be sold in the New World could Europe obtain new gold and silver to keep the system moving. East Indian companies led ultimately to Europe's domination of Asia and its 19th-century humiliation of China.
“Africa not only underpinned Europe’s earlier development. Its palm oil, petroleum, copper, chromium, platinum and in particular gold were and are crucial to the later world economy. Only South America, at the zenith of its silver mines, outranks Africa’s contribution to the growth of the global bullion supply. The guinea coin paid homage in its name to the west African origins of one flood of gold. By this standard, the British pound since 1880 should have been rechristened the rand, for Britain’s prosperity and its currency stability depended on South Africa’s mines. I would wager that a large share of that gold in the IMF’s vaults which was supposed to pay for Africa’s debt relief had originally been stolen from that continent.
“There are many who like to blame Africa's weak governments and economies, famines and disease on its post-1960 leadership. But the fragility of contemporary Africa is a direct consequence of two centuries of slaving, followed by another of colonial despotism. Nor was “decolonisation” all it seemed: both Britain and France attempted to corrupt the whole project of political sovereignty.
“It is remarkable that none of those in Britain who talk about African dictatorship and kleptocracy seem aware that Idi Amin came to power in Uganda through British covert action, and that Nigeria’s generals were supported and manipulated from 1960 onwards in support of Britain’s oil interests. It is amusing, too, to find the Telegraph nd the Daily Mail - which just a generation ago supported Ian Smith’s Rhodesia and South African apartheid – are now so concerned about human rights in Zimbabwe. The tragedy of Mugabe and others is that they learned too well from the British how to govern without real popular consent, and how to make the law serve ruthless private interest. The real appetite of the west for democracy in Africa is
less than it seems.
“We talk about the Congo tragedy without mentioning that it was a British statesman, Alec Douglas-Home, who agreed with the US president in 1960 that Patrice Lumumba, its elected leader, needed to “fall into a river of crocodiles.
“African slavery and colonialism are not ancient or foreign history; the world they made is around us in Britain. It is not merely in economic terms that Africa underpins a modern experience of (white) British privilege. Had Africa’s signature not been visible on the body of the Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes, would he have been gunned down on a tube at Stockwell? The slight kink of the hair, his pale beige skin, broadcast something misread by police as foreign danger. In that sense, his shooting was the twin of the axe murder of Anthony Walker in Liverpool, and of the more than 100 deaths of black people in mysterious circumstances while in police, prison or hospital custody since 1969.
“This universe of risk, part of the black experience, is the afterlife of slavery. The reverse of the medal is what WEB DuBois called the “wage of whiteness”, the world of safety, trustworthiness, welcome that those with pale skins take for granted. The psychology of racism operates even among those who believe in human equality, shaping unequal outcomes in education, employment, criminal justice. By its light, such all-white clubs as the G8 continue to meet in comfort. In early 2005, Gordon Brown told journalists in Mozambique that Britain should stop apologising for colonialism. The truth is, though, that Britain has never even faced up to the dark side of its imperial history, let alone begun to apologise.”
Great stuff! One cannot fail to see here that Britain and America “have no friends in Africa. They have only interests” But at what cost? That is why I have always been campaigning for the idea of a moratorium for Africa.
N.B.: Drayton’s book The Caribbean and the Making of the Modern World will be published in 2006.
Corruption in the third world is our problem
Britain is slow to punish businessmen who offer bribes abroad
Special report: Globalisation
Jonathan Steele
The Guardian, Wednesday December 13, 2000
You bribe a foreign official to give your company a contract. It works and you get the business. You escape prosecution in Britain because corruption performed abroad is not illegal here. Better still, the British government gives you a tax break because "commissions" paid abroad are accepted as a deductible expense.
Not bad going, and in the fourth year of New Labour's tenure there is still no action to change things. The tireless Clare Short made a big issue of corruption in the Department of International Development's white paper on globalisation this week, but much of her fire was directed at kickbacks taken by foreign officials from their compatriots rather than from foreigners.
It is certainly true that poor people suffer most from corruption. In developing countries and most of the so-called transition economies in the former Soviet Union and eastern Europe, people often have to bribe teachers and doctors to get services which are supposed to be free. Local police and judges frequently want their palms greased. Foreign-donated medicines and other items of aid disappear into private hands.
Most non-governmental organisations working in the third world have not made enough of these scandals for fear of discrediting aid in general or making reform look too difficult. So the Department for International Development's focus on this prevalent but "petty" corruption is welcome.
The government is also promising to help countries tackle the "grand" corruption involving politicians, senior officials, and businessmen. In last week's Queen's speech, the government pledged to bring in a bill to strengthen the law on money laundering and make it easier for countries to recover funds which their leaders or officials acquired corruptly and deposited in British banks. Yet for every Marcos, Milosevic, or Mobutu there is a British salesman or senior executive who has offered cash illegally abroad. When is action going to be taken in this country against them?
Britain's record is poor. Last summer the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development reviewed the action rich countries had taken to implement its 1997 anti-bribery convention. It found Britain was falling behind almost everyone else. Although it had ratified the convention, it had no law which explicitly criminalised bribery of foreign officials. When New Labour came to power, it initially followed in its predecessor's footsteps in arguing that a 1906 statute on bribery at home implicitly covered bribery abroad. Yet in more than 90 years there had not been a single prosecution under this law.
British companies are among the worst offenders. Some 37 of the 55 companies which the World Bank publicly blacklists and has disbarred from participating in its contracts because of evidence of corruption are domiciled in Britain. Transparency International, which publishes a "bribe-payers' survey", based on perceptions by business executives and professionals in the third world of how foreign companies behave, confirms that bribes are most common in the arms trade, public works and big infrastructure projects. British companies are among the strongest players in all these sectors.
This summer the government accepted that a new law is needed to bring bribery by Britons abroad under the jurisdiction of British courts and remove the problem of "extra-territoriality". Ministers made all the right noises in a discussion paper.
"Corruption is like a deadly virus. It has no boundaries. We need to fight it wherever it is found," thundered Jack Straw, the home secretary. "For too long dishonest individuals have profited at the expense of undermining the integrity of professional and public life in this country. The international business community increasingly realises that a culture of corruption is a disincentive to investment and trade."
Richard Caborn, the trade minister, added his own controlled wrath: "The government believes that bribery has no place in a modern economy. These proposals demonstrate our determination to be at the forefront of international efforts to stamp out bribery."
Yet the government continues to delay. It says the money-laundering bill which it will publish this session will not be given time until the next parliament. The same holds for its promised bill to tighten controls on the arms trade. The anti-bribery bill is in even worse shape. There is no commitment even to publish it this session, nor is drafting firmly on track within Whitehall to have it ready for the next one.
The OECD's inter-governmental working group, which provides peer-group review on compliance, came close to censuring Britain this autumn for this failure to honour its convention obligations. "British companies could be considered unsafe until new legislation is in force," said Professor Mark Pieth, the Swiss lawyer who chairs it. At the time the OECD was fobbed off with the promise that legislation was on the way. Now it has been delayed again, to the anger of the US, France, and other countries which feel Britain is trying to steal business through laxer standards.
The Department of Trade and Industry made one important advance this month when it joined other OECD member states in agreeing on an action programme to deter bribery in government-supported export credit transactions. From now on the export credit and insurance agencies of OECD countries will demand signed statements from companies applying for coverage, stating they will not engage in bribery. If bribery is established, the agency will reject claims for indemnification and refer the case to the judicial authorities. This could act as a powerful deterrent, provided it is enforced.
Bribery is notoriously difficult to establish. The OECD guidelines recognise that small "facilitation" payments to obtain licences in a foreign country cannot realistically be pursued, although it declines to set a size limit. When a sales commission amounts to a quarter or half of a contract's value, the bells of suspicion must ring. Payments of this size cannot easily be explained, if auditing procedures require them to be clarified.
When she introduced her white paper this week, Clare Short renewed the government's pledge "to put our own house in order" by passing anti-bribery legislation. Yet it remains blocked. If the problem is only that parliamentary time is limited, there is no reason why clauses outlawing foreign bribery could not be added to the bill the government is proposing on money laundering.
The home secretary, the trade minister, and Clare Short all favour action. So where are the forces of conservatism stopping progress? Is the problem the prime minister and his wish to appear business-friendly at all costs?
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