The Greeks, Romans, Phoenicians and other nations of the classical world all had colonies which were occupied by their own citizens and soldiers, often for purposes of depredation in the surrounding countryside but equally to carry on trade with the metropolitan capital. Roman amphitheatres can be found in North Africa today and the remnants Greek libraries are extant in Asia Minor and in Egypt. This was classical colonialism and, although it involved slavery, it was not closely akin to the modern kind passed largely on the opening of the so-called New World across the Atlantic where the need for labour induced the new possessors to import large populations of Africans in chains and to exploit their labour over numerous generations in a form of slavery conducted on an industrial scale and with every manifestation of profound inhumanity which has left its mark on both the victims and the perpetrates in the generalised form of North American racism.

Today, the study of colonialism - somewhat ambiguously called post-colonialism is concerned with both the history and the impact of “adventures” in European expansion at the cost of both indigenous and imported populations who were treated, de facto, as inferior not only in mental capacity but in their very humanity - their human being - which is primarily marked by darker pigmentation (or negritude) adapted by nature for the hotter regions of the earth (and those nearer the equator) and at variance with the European norm which, in spite of considerable variance, is identified as white and marked too by differences in facial bone structure readily apparent to the practiced observer. Genetically, these groups diverged from a single human genus many millenial ago. Today, perhaps, they are converging through intermarriage - at no great rate. In the interim they constituted the most important visible difference between masters and servants in the demographics of overseas conquest.

When, in the 1490s, the first sailor-explorers cross the Atlantic attempting to reach the Indies (a source of spices fabled for immense wealth) they discovered a new continent, soon to be called America after Amerigo Vespucci - though the credit for first contact in 1493 rightly goes to Christopher Columbus. For the rulers and inhabitants of the New World, as it was soon called, that contact spelt awful tragedy: the arrival of “stout Cortez” and his soldiers in 1519 spelt death and destruction for Montezuma and the Aztec Empire while, for the so-called “Indian” population of what is now Latin American, it mean death of the millions from European diseases to which they had no immunity: scarlet fever, measles, syphilis. The circumnavigation of Africa by Vasco da Gama in 1497-98 has somewhat the same effect.

After the first great wave of pillaging conquistadores came the settlers, generally direct agents of the King of Portugal or Spain and afterwards agents of the English and French ruling familes in whose names the new territories were “claimed” (or expropriated) in keeping with the legal principles of Christian monarchies at the time. For the settlers, the problem was how to exploit the territory efficiently without themselves playing the part of labourers and for this reason the idea of importing Africans as slaves was conceived. Apparently it was Bishop Bartholomé De La Casas, a self-proclaimed protector of Amerindian natives (and as such a revered figure for humanists) who actually proposed the idea in order to spare his charges from forced labour. [1]

The first such licence was issued by Charles V to Flemish merchants in 1517, permitting 4,000 slaves to be shipped annually to Hispaniola [mod. Haiti]. (The implication that they were being expended should not be overlooked.) It is estimated that some 12 million West Africans were transported to the Americas in the ensuing 300 years before the trade was abolished by British Act of Parliament in 1807, following a campaign led by William Wilberforce and Charles Fox. Slavery was later debarred from British crown settlements in 1833, though blacks in the United States of America would have to wait until 1865 before the Anti-Slavery Proclamation of 1861 became federal law. It is hardly necessary to add that the real conditions of Afro-American continued to be wretched long after and that the effects of enfranchisement were hardly felt until the 1960s Civil Rights Movement.

In general, the early days of colonialism were crueller than the latter; that is to say, the European nations started out with relentless slaughter and ended as patriarchal governors of their native charges (as they saw them). Here self interest was often a consideration since experience taught that an antagonised colonial population would not provide a safe haven for the European settler. A profound sense of cultural superiority lay behind a growing sense of responsibility, also, to provice the elements of Western education and the equivalent of Western health care so far as resources permitted. The stamping out of local “barbarisms” such as infanticide in Africa and suttee (i.e., immolation of widows) in India were conceived as part of the colonial mission also.

In many such ways the colonial attitude was characterised by the kind of paternalism epitomised in Rudyard Kipling’s anthems of the British Empire in verses such as those addressed to the Americans when the United States relieved the dwindling Spanish empire of Cuba and the Philippines in 1898: “Take up the white man’s burden”, or in the famous lines of his poem “Recessional” - an exhortation to Englishmen serving in the colonies to temper the exercise of near-absolute power with a sense of Christian duty which explicitly speaks the language of racism in its allusion to “lesser breeds beneath the sun”. [For full text, see infra.]

Yet, even as late as 1904, the Belgian colonists in the Congo were indicted of atrocities on a vast scale in their attempt to maximise profits for themselves and for the legal owner of the region, King Leopold of Belgium. The task of exposing those atrocities lay with Roger Casement, an Irish-born consular office of the British Empire serving in Nigeria and sent officially to assess basis of rumours emanating from the Congo. What he found there was reported to the British Cabinet in terms that shocked all of Europe. This is how W. G. Sebald retells the substance of his report:

The history of colonial conquest, particularly in relation to the saga of Atlantic Slavery Triangle (Lagos, Bristol, Bermuda) seems remorselessly brutal, especially in the early period; but, in another aspect - when separated from slavery and forced labour - it is a story of cultural encounter and the imaginative resourcefulness of those involved on it on either side, leading to a rich transfer of cultural goods and a heightened awareness of cultural difference which we inherit today and which constitutes the main burden of postcolonial literature and criticism.

American slavery is a special case of European colonialism, involving the exploitation and servitude of African millions in a landscape whcih was itself a transatlantic colony and whose white-settler inhabitants declared independence from their former compatriots in the colonial homeland. Meanwhile, millions of native Americas lazily categorised as Red Indians were liquidated, sometimes with great brutality and sometimes from disease and famine in order to make room for the newly post-colonial nation of migrant Americans.

The experience of the captive blacks under these conditions was somewhat like that of the ancient Israelites during the Babylonian captivity - a comparison extensively developed in their own oral literature of song, based as it was on the Christian traditions which largely replaced the amputated culture of their native land. In another sense it resembled the second great cataclysm of Jewish history, the Diaspora or “dispersal” that took place in AD 70 when the Roman authorities quelled the Jewih Rebellion by razing Jerusalem and sending its population into exile.

So strong, indeed, is the biblical comparison that a note might be added here about the Ur-text of postcolonial literature, which is arguably to be met with Psalm 137, the immeasurably well-known verses that begin “By the Waters of Babylon I lay down and Wept”. In most versions the psalm proclaims the refusal of the Hebrew slaves to sing and play for their captors. In the King James version of 1611, it ends with a sanguinary call for the destruction of the ‘daughters of Babylon’ and their children, ending: ‘Happy shall he be, that [...] dasheth thy little ones against the stones.’ [For longer extracts, see infra.]

The history of colonial conquest, particularly in relation to the saga of Atlantic Slavery Triangle (Lagos, Bristol, Bermuda) seems remorselessly brutal, especially in the early period; but, in another aspect - when separated from slavery and forced labour - it is a story of cultural encounter and the imaginative resourcefulness of those involved on it on either side, leading to a rich transfer of cultural goods and a heightened awareness of cultural difference which we inherit today and which constitutes the main burden of postcolonial literature and criticism.

Many of the commentators whom we will read - notably Albert Memmi, Frantz Fanon and Edward - regard the whole “structure of colonialism” as unequivocally bad for convincing moral and physical material reasons, and no creditable writer defends the European imperialist adventure in anything like the terms in which it used to be defended by its original participants. In reality, however, colonialism in action was (at least for its British exponents) very often a reluctant and somewhat impromptu affair, and often too against the advice and perceived self-interest of British governments.

In the case of Nigeria, for instance, the period of engagement in the slave trade was terminated with the Wilberforce Act of 1807 to the general relief of the British people and their leaders in view of the obvious brutality of the system and the dubious morality of treating other humans in such a fashion. (The cruelties of slave-transporters were notoriously extreme, given the object of cramming as many live bodies as possible on shipboard for journeys lasting several months.)

As in India, Britain’s presence in West Africa was initially commercial and only later evolved into a government concern. The involvement of the City (i.e., the financial centre of the United Kingdom) and the need to co-ordinate activities on behalf of the investors led in 1879 to the formation of the Royal Niger Company, although a parliamentary report had actually recommended withdrawal from West Africa in 1865. It was only as a result of the Berlin Conference of 1885 that Britain acknowledged possession of Nigeria in the formal division of Africa between European colonists arrived at then.

Initial, thereafter, the region was governed by means of “dual mandate” until the creation of a series of federal constitutions in the twentieth century effectively imposed on the region by the British Government in the wake of nominal unification arranged by Lord Lugard, the High Commissioner, in 1916. During the ensuing years, the aim of the British Government was to prepare the political class in Nigeria for independence without prejudice to British interests in the region - chiefly copper and oil - and this was finally effected with the installation of the Nigerian Constitution of 1959. (75% of Nigerian capital remained British after Independence.)

Unlike the Kenyan experience, the British left no blemish of oppressive government on Nigeria and were not ousted as the result of an nationalist uprising. On the contrary, their commitment to the “enlightened” policy of indirect rule adopted by Lord Lugard and his successors led to a peaceful - if blatantly engineered - transfer of power to the most educated section of the population who was identified as the Ibos - thereby laying the groundwork for a subsequent civil war which brought massacres and famine in its wake in the 1950s and 1960s. The practice of bringing the most successful students to London for further education established cultural connections which were never broken, though the British might be accused of creating a “national bourgeoisie” in classic Marxist terms. (For the Kenya experience, see infra.)

Independence for Nigeria and other British colonies came on the agenda as an immediate result of wartime talks between Winston Churchill and Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt explicitly required that it should be dismantled on the cessation of hostilities. Churchill asked “when?”, expecting a reasonable lapse of time, and Roosevelt answered “now”. As it happens many British people felt the same way: being an empire was flattering and useful in one sense, but in another it involved a contradiction between the democratic character of British society at home and the lordly and sometimes ruthless behaviour of the British overseas.

Two general reasons can be given for the dismantling of the British colonial system and it is not entirely easy to single out the main one. Rising nationalist pressure from the colonised was an important factor and in some cases the most important one: Kenyan independence was driven, chiefly, by the violence of the Mau Mau Rising and the widespread opposition of Kenyans to the division of their country into vast farmlands held by recent white settlers from Great Britain. (Those expelled from Burma or those dissatisfied with Labour Britain tended, in the post-war years, to set up in coffee plantations Kenya.)

But there were other reasons intrinsic to the dynamics of colonialism itself why the system was bound to break down in time. These reasons are best explained by R. F. Holland in the following account of the role of “miasmic dust” in clogging up the wheels of the erstwhile colonial world order. Holland writes: ‘Decolonisation happened because colonialism as a set of nationally orchestrated systems (by the British, French, Dutch, Belgians and Portuguese) ceased to possess the self-sustained virtue of internal equilibrium … in the post 1939-decades.’ In other words, colonialism stopped because it was no longer workable in cultural, economic or other terms.[3] He goes on:

Here it emerges that, contrary to popular opinion, the British were always careful to prevent the intrusion of Christian missionaries too deeply into the communities they governed - especially when the population included a majority of Muslims, as in Northern Nigeria.

This was in a sense paradoxical since one of the primary justifications for colonialism in Africa was to bring the Christian faith to the natives including, if possible, the followers of Islam. History shows, however, that the incidence of Muslim-Christian conversion have been so low at any time as to be entirely nugatory: Christian-Muslim conversion, on the other hand, has always been a temptation for colonial males of a certain temperament. (In a Nigerian population of 119 million today, 47% are Muslim, 35% Christian, and the rest described as animist or “pagan”.)

The key point in R. F. Holland’s view is the idea that colonialism works best at a time when the contact between the colonist and the colonised remains at a practical minimum. When, on the rother hand, the colonial presence became conspicuous due to the number of colonists and the frequency of contact, a reaction against the system naturally sets in, leading to the formation of nationalist parties with the common desire to boot the colonists out, thus securing for their own - often divisive - interests the privileged positions and economic advantage hitherto reserved for the foreign colonists alone.

Whether that result is achieved by rebellion, plebiscite or negotiation with the colonial “mother country”, it seems to be an invariable outcome once the idea of popular will has been admitted to the picture - once, that is to say, the colonising power undertakings to extend the machinery of democracy to the colonised in their own country. In Nigeria, the British government was keen to introduce democracy as soon as possible in keeping with its policy of “indirect rule”. As A. J. Harding, the director of Nigerian Affairs in the Colonial Office told the Cabinet in the 1920s: ‘Direct government by impartial and honest men of alien race ... never yet satisfied a nation long and ... under such a form of government, as wealth and education increase, so do political discontent and sedition.’ [5]

With this in mind it is easy to conclude that British were intrinsically more willing to concede national rights to their former colonies than, for instance, the French in Algeria or Vietnam. The Algerian War of Independence cost hundreds of thousands of lives in 1954-62 precisely because the French regarded Algeria as part of “Greater France” in spite of its lying across the Mediterranean. Men like George Mitterand believed at the time that ‘France without Algeria would no longer be France’, an attitude that the British never took to their African possessions (nor to any part of Ireland either).

For Britain in the twentieth century granting independence to the colonies, whether within a Dominion system or a Commonwealth of Nations, was less a question of “if” than “when”. Matters were very different, however, in cases where the colonial administration was faced with uprisings on the ground. At such time, the full brutality of the system was apt to be revealed - as the case of the Mau-Mau Rising clearly shows, when 32 white settlers deaths were answered with the imprisonment of 71,046 Kukuyu 1,090 of whom were hanged - more than all the other uprisings the British faced in the last phase of the colonial period put together. [6]

[1] The first transportation of slaves to S. America is ascribed to Bartholomé de la Casas in the entry on “Slavery” in Postcolonial Studies: Key Concepts, ed., by Bill Aschroft [et al.] (London: Routledge 2000). However, this enlightened priest is not generally regarded as a pro-slavery figure and, indeed, is often spoken of as a defender of Africans no less than native Americans in other sources. See for instance, Mexico Connect Website [link].
[2] W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn (London: Harvill 1999), p.127; for longer extract, see infra.
[3] R. F. Holland, European Decolonisation 1918-1981: An Introductory Survey (Routledge 1985), p.1. For my notes on this sources, see infra.
[4] Ibid., p.11.
[5] See Library of Congress “County Studies” web pages at http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/cshome.html.
[6] See Richard Dowden, “State of Shame” [book review], in The Guardian (5 Feb. 2005; online or copy).