At a time when Gordon Brown is working his way through Africa is it time to ask if Africa and other area of th world benefited from a Colonial past ?

To many former colonial states in Africa, colonialism is usually associated with suppression, retarded economic development and erosion of the indigenous culture. However, some scholars have discovered that colonialism was not enterely bad. Other social scientists have even gone further to state that even other evil practises like slavery had a silver lining.

The controversial, conservative Indian scholar Dinesh D’Souza who is the most authoritative supporter of the benefits of colonialism has in several books and articles argued that colonialism has gotten a bad name despite greatly improving the lives of the colonised people.

And true to the scholar’s acute observation, colonialism till recently has never had a balanced analysis. The only books that have flooded the market on the subject are all anti-colonialism.

Among the leading Western scholars is Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Walter Rodney and Samir Amin. Third World intellectuals who are stringently anti-colonialism include Nobel Prize winning playwright Wole Soyinka, Chinweizu, Ashis Nandy and Franz Fanon of the Wretched of the Earth fame.

Like D’Souza has rightly pointed out, these scholars, despite highlighting the evils of colonialism, have turned a blind eye on the many benefits of colonialism or are simply ignorant of its advantages.

Many of the things people have been made to believe about colonialism for many years are half-truths. Many scholars have hastily concluded that colonialism and imperialism are distinctively Western evils.

The other much-mouthed but debatable claim is that as a consequence of colonialism, the West became rich and the former colonies became poor.

A close study of development of nations will reveal that some countries which never colonised other countries are rich. On the other hand, a number of poor countries in the Third World countries are poor not wholly as a result of colonialism but other factors which include mismanagement, poor policies and mediocre leadership.

The other fallacy is that descendants of colonialism are worse off than they would have been had colonialism not occurred. The cruel truth is that many Third World countries citizens would be far worse off if were it not for colonisation.

One only needs to look at ‘ undisturbed ‘ societies like the Pygmies of Ituri forestin the Democratic Republic of the Congo and other aborigines who have never had a serious social intercourse with the dynamic Western culture to realise what many societies could have been if the colonialists had not come.

In his classic Marxist book The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon points out that, “European opulence has been founded on slavery. The well-being and progress of Europe have been built up with the sweat and the dead bodies of Negroes, Arabs, Indians, and the yellow races.’’ Really Mr Fanon ?

The point Fanon and other proponents of such notions miss is that in the first place colonialism is not unique to the West. In traditional Zambia, owning slaves was practised in many parts of the country. Vernacular names for a slave abound in almost all Zambian tribes.

The fact that the slave traders commercialised slavery does not criminalise the practice as being more evil than slavery that was practised by our own chiefs and other traditional leaders long before we heard of notorious slave traders like Mlozi or Tib Tibbu.

In other parts of the world former colonies like India had been colonised by other people before the British hoisted their Union Jack in the country and forced the natives to sing God Save the Queen.

The Indians had been invaded and conquered by the Persians, the Afghans, Alexander the Great, the Mongols, the Arabs and the Turks. In short, the British as a colonial power was preceded by six other colonial powers some of them racially-related to Indians.

Globally other once colonial powers included the Egyptian empire, which among their subjects were the Jews who now control America, the Persian empire, the Macedonia empire, the Islamic empire, the Mongol empire, the Chinese empire, and the Aztec and Inca empires in the Americas.

The once mighty Ancient Greece was for example conquered by Rome and the Roman empire itself was once conquered by the Huns, Vandals, Lombards and Visgoth from northern Europe.

If the Industrial Revolution had first taken place in Africa, maybe an African country could have colonised a European state ! Remember, the greatest nation in the world-America was once colonised by Britain. England itself was conquered and ruled by the Normans from France.

World history before the League of Nations which culminated into the UN is full of fights by a mightier nation to dominate a smaller or weaker nation.

Back home tribal wars in Southern Africa saw stronger tribes like the Ngonis and Bembas defeating smaller tribes and imposing their cultures on them.

The scenario was no different in Europe which had seen many empires at one time dominating the West or the world. We should understand that at one time the West was not a dominant and powerful civilisation it is today.

The West has become an affluent and dominant political and economic global force because of inventing three institutions : science, democracy and capitalism.

This led to the West subduing the rest of the world between 16th and 19th centuries. It’s wealth gave it the impetus for global conquest not initially by stealing raw materials and manpower to build Europe.
The Marxist writer Walter Rodney in his famous book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa misses the point when he accuses Europeans of stealing raw material and manpower for their economic success.

Rodney is partially right. Other scholars like the economic historian PT Bauer have pointed out that before British rule, there were no rubber trees in Malaya, no cocoa trees in West Africa, nor tea in India. The British colonial powers introduced rubber to Malaya from South America. They brought tea to India from China. They also taught Africans to grow cocoa which was not an indigenous crop to West Africa.

In Zambia and many African countries most of the foods eaten in the region like maize, cassava, millet, sweet potatoes were all brought by explorers and colonialists.

As descendants of colonialism we are better off than we would have been if colonialism had never taken place.

As D’ Souza rightly observes, colonialism has been hell for people who lived under it. To suggest that it was a deliberate intention for colonialists to improve the lives of the colonised is at best controversial.

Colonialism anywhere has never been a humanitarian act to empower the colonised. It is rather based on the might is right approach to govern usually with contempt of the subdued group.

In South Africa, Mozambique, Angola and even Zambia, the wounds of colonialism are still festering. Any right thinking person knows that colonialism was bad but to say, we would have been better if we had not been colonised...well.

Even in countries like South Africa, where colonialism bore more uglier marks than in countries like Zambia, some frank black South Africans realised that a White man despite his many faults in relating with other non-white people is successful.

The creation of a Rainbow nation encompassing all races for a better South African has already borne fruits in economic and political circles.

For countries like Zambia whose well-meaning nationalists came up with emotional and ill-conceived political and economic policies like nationalisation that saw an exodus of whites to countries like South Africa, New Zealand, Australia and Britain, the consequences have been grave.

Needless to say if the victorious UNIP had tolerated the white-dominated United Federal Party (UFP) to develop the country, Zambia would have been a better place than it is now.

Zambia should have also created a Rainbow nation both in Parliament and other sectors of national development. A Ndola resident who has lived in the city from colonial days recently showed me some pictures of old Ndola. I could not believe my eyes when I saw some roads and building which instead of improving are deteriorating.

Recently the founding father Dr Kenneth Kaunda himself confessed in an interview with the former Times of Zambia political editor Samuel Ngoma that the nationalists at Independence were ill-equipped to rule the country.

Even one of the most anti-white civil rights group-the Black Muslims of America in its blueprint calls on the blacks in America to emulate the white man because of his success.

Despite what anti-colonialism prophets say, colonialism bad as it was has acted as a conveyor belt to prosperity for many former colonies in all fields.

Poets like the late Senegalese founding father Leopold Sedar Sengor who romanticises Africa should not have turned a blind eye in his fantastical, poetical stupor to the numerous negative aspects of the continent like tyranny, tribal and religious conflict, abject poverty, diseases and plunder of national wealth.

Colonialism like slavery were barbaric and evil acts, but we could have been exposed to even harsher and undemocratic practices if we had not been colonised.

It is reported that American sports icon, Ali Muhammad, arriving at the Kinshasa international airport of the DR Congo (then Zaire) for a 1974 heavyweight boxing clash promoted as the ‘rumble in the jungle with George Foreman looked around at the surroundings as quipped;

‘Man am I glad my old man got on that slave ship.” Many black Americans wouldn’t put quite like that, but there must be precious few who are not glad they are over there, rather than over here.