The Sunday News
Saul Gwakuba Ndlovu
THE massive colonisation of African countries by various European states was intensified soon after the 1884-85 Berlin Conference which was the brainchild of Prince Otto Eduardo Leopold von Bismark, the then German chancellor.
Germany strongly felt that it was lagging behind in the acquisition of imperial territory, and that an international conference attended by European heads of state would work out a formula by which as yet uncolonised land outside the European continent could be seized by the interested states without any conflict among themselves.
The African continent had been a source of slaves who were captured by Arab dealers and sold to Spanish, Portuguese, French, Indian, Arabic, English, Dutch, American buyers along either the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean or the Red Sea coasts.
Germany did not play a significant part in the slave trade but had tried to expand its borders at the expense of France which it defeated in the 1870-71 Franco-Prussian War, and earlier in 1864 had robbed Denmark of its Schleswig-Holstein region.
At the time of the Berlin Conference, only Britain, Portugal, Spain, France, and Belgium had some African colonial possessions.
The Berlin conference opened the colonial flood gates over the African continent resulting in every country except virtually only two, Ethiopia and Liberia, remaining uncolonised.
Traditional hereditary leaders resisted but were subdued because of two reasons, one was that most African regions had lost large numbers of able-bodied people to the slave traders. So, those traditional leaders who tried to put up armed resistance lacked personnel.
The other reason was that the African resistance fighters were armed with technologically poor weapons such as spears and shields, bows and arrows whereas the European colonial invaders had guns, cannons and mortars plus dynamite. They literally mowed down the African resistance fighters and blasted with explosives those who hid in caves.
When the First World War began, many African men enlisted in the colonial powers’ armies, that is, British colonials joined the British, the French enlisted in those of France and so on. Many were simply conscripted into those armies.
At the end of that war, President Woodrow Wilson of the United States came up with the famous 14 points highlighting human rights and freedoms. He also vigorously promoted the idea of the formation of the League of Nations.
Some of the rights and freedoms were anti-colonialist in their tone if not in their actual interpretation. That fact strengthened the African and the Asian people’s representatives anti-colonial resolve at the armistice talks at Versailles in France.
When the peace treaty was signed on 28 June 1919, the African and Asian anti-colonial petitioners were completely ignored on the ground that they were not representatives of any government but subjects of such colonial powers as France and Britain.
Among the petitioners were officials of the African National Congress (ANC) of South Africa and those of the people of Indo-China, a part of which was later known as Vietnam. The ANC had been formed in January 1912, two years after Britain and South African Boers had decided to amalgamate two South African British colonies, Natal and the Cape (colony), with two Boer-ruled republics, the Orange Free State and the Transvaal (which was formerly called the South African Republic), into what they named the Union of South Africa.
That British-Boer creation (the Union of South Africa) was a dominion with the same politico-iplomatic relations with Britain as Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
During the First World War (1914-18), Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, was in the administrative hands of Cecil John Rhodes’ colonising agent, the British South Africa (Chartered) Company (BSAC) which was operating on the authority of a charter issued by Britain’s Queen Victoria in 1889.
Many black people of Southern Rhodesia participated in the First World War as British colonial subjects. However, they still yearned to be free and to repossess their land, large parts of which had been violently grabbed from them by Rhodes using the BSAC as his legal arm.
Although African resistance had been met with the BSAC’s devastating machine guns and dynamite, first in 1893 and then in 1896-97, resistance sparks lingered on.
In Salisbury, the black people’s anti-colonial sentiments were expressed occasionally by a Mr Twala who was a South Africa-born school teacher whose wish was to see educated black people being exempted from the then repressive racial discrimination obtaining throughout the country.
There was also a clandestine person who referred to himself as “Chirimuwuta” who secretly distributed anti-colonial hand written material in the African townships as well as in the town’s business sector.
In Bulawayo, similar anti-colonial sentiments were openly expressed by some urban based black people the most prominent of whom were Martha Ngano and Sobantu, both of them were of South African Xhosa and Zulu extraction respectively.
News about what was happening in other parts of the African continent was hard to come by at that time. In Bulawayo, The Chronicle newspaper had been launched in 1894 but was meant primarily for the white settler community.
The Sunday News, a sister paper of The Chronicle was established in 1930 and also initially targeted white (European) readership.
That situation was worsened by the country’s black community very low literacy rate at that time. The electronic media was non-existent then. However, news came by word of mouth by means of passenger trains since a railway line linking South Africa with Southern Rhodesia had been laid in 1897, Bulawayo-Mafikeng-Cape Town.
It was by means of that railway line that Masotsha Ndlovu travelled from Plumtree to Cape Town in the early 1920s. In Cape Town, he became an official of the Industrial and Commercial Union (ICWU) led by the famous Clements Kadelie. Masotsha Ndlovu later returned home to found and lead a trade union by the same name in Southern Rhodesia, in that way sowing the seed of inter-African socio-economic co-operation.
Ndlovu later opened up ICWU branches in Gatooma (Kadoma) and Salisbury (Harare), and by 1928 the trade union law was at its highest.
When, in 1934, Aaron Jacha Rusike launched the Southern Rhodesia African National Congress (SRANC) with the help and guidance of Prof. J. T Jabavu from the then Cape Province of the Union of South Africa, the Pan-Africanism seed was sown.
The Southern Rhodesian black peoples (later Zimbabwe) march to a new era of Pan-Africanist resistance had begun. The black people of Zimbabwe would take part in the launch of the Organisation of African Unity in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, through ZAPU on 25 May 1963, some 29 years after Aaron Jacha Rusike had founded the SRANC.
Africans realised through very bitter experience that they were all oppressed and by European nations that had agreed to co-operate in doing so. That meant that for Africans to free themselves, they too must co-operate.
So, to achieve that goal, they decided to organise what they called, “Pan-African conferences” at appropriate time and places more or less regularly.
The first Pan-African conference, which was referred to as a congress, was held in Paris in 1919 immediately after the First World War peace treaty was agreed. The congress passed the following resolutions:
a. That the Allied and Associated Powers establish a code of law for the international protection of the natives of Africa, similar to the proposed international code of labour.
b. That the League of Nations establish a permanent bureau charged with the special duty of overseeing the application of these laws to the political, social, and economic welfare of the natives.
c. The Negroes of the world demand that hereafter the natives of Africa and the peoples of African descent be governed according to the following principles:
The land: The land and its natural resources shall be held in trust for the natives and at all times they shall have effective ownership of as much land as they can effectively develop.
Capital: The investment of capital and the granting of concessions shall be so regulated as to prevent the exploitation of the natives and the exhaustion of the natural wealth of the country. Concessions shall always be limited in time and be subject to state control. The growing social needs of the natives must be regarded and the profits taxed for social and material benefit of the natives.
Labour: Slavery and corporal punishment shall be abolished and forced labour except in punishment of a crime, and the general conditions of labour shall be prescribed and regulated by the State.
Education: It shall be the right of every native child to learn to read and write his own language, and the language of the trustee nation, at public expense, and to be given technical instruction in some branch of industry. The state shall also educate as large a number of natives as possible in higher technical and cultural training and maintain a corps of native teachers.
The state: The natives of Africa must have the right to participate in government as fast as their development permits, in conformity with the principle that the government exists for the natives, and not the natives for the government.
They shall at once be allowed to participate in local and tribal government, according to ancient usage, and this participation shall gradually extend, as education and experience proceed, to the higher offices of states: to the end that, in time Africa is ruled by consent of the African. Whenever it is proven that African natives are not receiving just treatment at the hands of any state or that any state deliberately excludes its civilised citizens or subjects of Negro descent from its body politic and culture, it shall be the duty of the League of Nations to bring the matter to the notice of the civilised world”.
The reader will have noticed that land and its natural resources prominently featured in the priorities of the African people even at that time.
That was because the colonial powers had seized and continued to seize large tracts of land for their nationals at the expense of the indigenous populations referred to in the resolution as either “African natives” or “Negroes”.
Another important observation to make in the resolution is its call for democracy. It says “the Government exists for the natives, and not natives for the Government,” and that Africa should be ruled by the consent of the African”.
Education was also highlighted in that resolution and so was social, political, cultural and economic values which were ruthlessly denied colonial subjects and were later repeatedly priotirised by subsequent Pan-African conferences that preceded the launching of the OAU in Addis Ababa in 1963. (. . .to be continued next Sunday) .
Saul Gwakuba Ndlovu is a retired, Bulawayo-based journalist. He can be contacted on cell 0773428443 or through email [email protected]
