Freedom’s fallout: How post-colonial Africa lost its way - Andrew Kenny

Key topics:Post-independence Africa plagued by corruption and economic collapseTribal divisions, not addressed post-colonialism, fueled violent conflictsSocialism crippled economies while elites thrived, people starved.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here.The auditorium doors will open for BNIC#2 on 10 September 2025 in Hermanus. For more information and tickets, click here..By Andrew Kenny*.“Look what’s happening in the north! Look what happens when the blacks take over!” In South Africa, in the 1960s, this is what I heard over and over again from white people, when I tried to argue for giving black people the vote (which would mean black rule).I never knew how to answer. Nor did most anti-apartheid white liberals. They tried to avoid the subject; they found it too embarrassing. The tragic failure of independent Sub-Saharan Africa is one of the most important subjects of the 20th Century and one of the most ignored. Why did so many countries south of the Sahara fail so badly when the colonists left (not all: Botswana did well), and why did they fail in the same way? In so many African countries, independence celebrations were followed by bloody conflict and economic collapse, leaving ordinary African people worse off than they had been under colonialism. What went wrong?50 years ago, on 25 June 1975, Mozambique became independent. This was a momentous day for southern Africa, with profound consequences for Rhodesia and South Africa. Mozambique’s Frelimo government wants celebration, but many people wonder what there is to celebrate. Mozambique is a beautiful country, richly endowed with natural resources, including an enormous gas field in the north, but after half a century of corrupt Frelimo rule her economy is one of the most underdeveloped in the world and her people are miserably poor. In the 1960s, under Portuguese rule, Mozambique was regarded as a lazy, easy country, jolly to visit, with a relaxed Latin culture that was a blessed relief from the grim Calvinism of South Africa under the National Party.The capital, then Lourenço Marques (LM), was regarded as a place to go to for sin. Apartheid had the disgusting Immorality Act, which forbade sex between the races, while Mozambique had no such restriction. South Africans used to say about LM, “White men go there for the black women, white women go there for the black men, and Jews go there for the prawns.” The Beatles were banned in South Africa (because John Lennon had once said that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus; he was lamenting the fact, I think, not boasting about it). But you could hear the Beatles on LM radio, so we all listened to LM radio instead of local stations. Then came the revolution in Lisbon in 1974, the end of white rule in Mozambique and the start of black rule.The worstI should rate the horribleness of different colonial rules as follows. The worst was the private rule of King Leopold II of Belgium over the Congo from 1885 to 1908. He was brutally cruel, a sadistic barbarian, bent only on plunder. Next came the Germans, with their atrocities against the Herero and Nama in German West Africa. Then Spain and Portugal, with Portugal having far more African colonies. These two countries began the Atlantic slave trade. Then the French, and finally the British, who were probably the least cruel of all, although massively arrogant, with Cecil John Rhodes leading the way.There were many and mixed motives for imperialism. Lenin’s theory that it was the last stage of capitalism is complete nonsense, like most of his theories; the Soviet Union later reigned over an enormous non-capitalist empire in Asia and East Europe. Inter-European rivalry for status was one motive for imperialism; other motives included missionary work, adventure and careers for the second sons of the ruling classes, and pure greed. Many of the colonies, maybe most, ran at a loss for the colonial power, which would invest in railways, electricity and modern technology in Africa without getting much in return. Portugal had vast colonies in Africa and emerged as one of the poorest countries in Europe. Switzerland had no colonies anywhere and emerged as one of the richest countries in Europe..Read more:. Hartford: Why we need to unite against global forces seeking SA’s chaos and division.The first Sub-Saharan country to gain independence was Ghana in 1957 under Prime Minister (later President) Kwame Nkrumah. Nkrumah set a pattern for African liberation leaders. He gave lofty sermons about Pan-Africanism and seeking the “political kingdom”, while wrecking the rule of law and establishing a corrupt one-man dictatorship. He ruined perhaps the most economically successful of all the colonies and drove the country into poverty. He was finally ousted in a coup in 1966, unlamented by the people Today he is celebrated as a great African hero. “Ghana would have been a thriving African country today if only he hadn’t been overthrown by – “(name some evil, imperialist, colonialist, counter-revolutionary, capitalist force). The same goes for the dreadful Patrice Lumumba, who became prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1960. He was overthrown by the even more dreadful Joseph Mobutu.Awful bloodshedThe Congo, enormous in area, fabulous in natural treasure, very quickly plunged into awful bloodshed. Nigeria, which gained independence in 1960 too, soon fell apart through tribal conflict and eventually a civil war that was waged from 1967 to 1970, killing between 500,000 and 3 million people. In Uganda, which Churchill had called the “Pearl of Africa”, the ghastly Milton Obote was overthrown by the ghastly Idi Amin, who slaughtered around half a million people belonging to different tribes from his own and kicked all the Asians out of Uganda. Angola was taken from the Portuguese by the MPLA liberation army in October 1975. There was soon civil war there too.Eventually the MPLA triumphed and turned Angola, which has huge oil reserves and massive natural resources, into one of the most corrupt countries in the world and one of the poorest. In Tanzania, President Julius Nyerere, perhaps the most sanctimonious sermoniser in Africa, wrecked the Tanzanian agriculture with his Stalinist farm collectives, which he called ujamaa or “African Socialism”. The collective farms were at first voluntary, as in communist Russia, but as nobody volunteered, as in Russia, people were forced into them with all the violent enthusiasm of Stalin in the Soviet Union or Verwoerd in apartheid South Africa, shoving the blacks into the homelands.But I have only given a few examples of African failure. There are many, many more. Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Sudan, Burundi and Rwanda all have their horror stories and tragedies. Elsewhere there have been wars and bloodshed, coups, economic disintegration, grinding poverty, and black people trying to flee from the countries of their fathers. Why?The tribal conflicts are the easiest to explain. Humans, like the other apes, are extremely prone to war between groups. The Common Chimpanzee, our cousin, is even more tribal and warlike than we are. Humans are always divided into different races, tribes or nations (depending on your definition). Europe is divided into tribes but has two advantages over Africa in this regard.Forced togetherFirst, the different tribes usually separated or joined themselves freely. In Africa, the European colonists, oblivious to the wishes of African people, carved up the boundaries of their colonies without any regard to the traditional areas of the different tribes. The result was that the same tribes were divided into different colonies or, far worse, different tribes were forced together. The colonists kept the alien tribes together but as soon as they were gone, the tribes fell on each other. The problem is made far worse by the fact that Africa has far more tribes than Europe, with far bigger racial differences. So the disastrous conflicts after de-colonisation are hardly surprising. What can we do about them?The first thing is to recognise the reality of tribal differences and tribal identity. Those woke whites who pretend that tribalism doesn’t exist do great harm. Then we must get people to talk to one another. It can be done. To a considerable extent, the two world wars were fought between different European tribes, between Germans and French (“Teutons and Gauls”). There were wars between English and French (including a war that lasted over a hundred years) and others. Now Germans, French and English get on just fine, thanks in part to the European Union. Pan Africanism is a good idea, if it can be made practical rather than just rhetorical.The prime reason for the economic decline of Africa is easy to explain. It is because Africa chose socialism over capitalism. By socialism I mean state control; by capitalism I mean free enterprise, where ordinary people may do business among themselves as they please. Many of the failed countries above have been ruled by Marxist-Leninist parties, such as Frelimo in Mozambique and the MPLA in Angola. Communism is guaranteed to fail the people. It has done so in every single country where it has been tried. But African dictators who want to keep all power in their own hands choose communism, because it allows them to do just that. They don’t care whether ordinary black people are impoverished or even if they starve. After all, they might say, the great white comrades in Russia, Lenin and Stalin, made millions of white people starve to death.In 1974, the Derg, a revolutionary movement, took over Ethiopia under Mengistu Haile Mariam, who instituted Leninist-Marxist policies, including a red terror that murdered hundreds of thousands of people. His policies led to the terrible drought in Ethiopia from 1983-85, which caused up to a million people to starve to death. This did not bother the communists at all. In 1984 they had lavish 10-year celebrations, with millions of dollars spent on imported champagne, fine wines and spirits, and all the most sumptuous and exotic foodstuffs that the capitalist world outside could provide. This further explains why communism is so popular among African dictators and aspiring dictators: it might make ordinary people starve to death, but it brings enormous rewards for the Leninist-Marxist elite.Brings prosperityHow to overcome these problems? First, by demonstrating that capitalism always brings prosperity to the people and socialism/communism never does. Second, by pointing out the massive hypocrisy of the communist leaders, who live like kings while their working classes live like serfs.There are many other common features of post-independence decline in Africa. The black liberators berate the departed colonial power but ape it. They want to speak the colonial language, send their children to schools and universities in the colonial country, wear European clothes, and imitate all the pageantry and spectacle of the colonials. They are ashamed of their African culture and languages, and look down their noses at ordinary African people who still value them. Their armies have many generals with splendid colonial uniforms and chests full of medals, but few soldiers and even fewer weapons and transport machines that work. African leaders love opening things and launching things, but hate maintaining anything. So a gleaming new power station is opened by the president and promptly falls to pieces from lack of maintenance. Roads disintegrate, electricity supply fails, the new railway line stops working.All of this is utterly different from the East Asian countries that were also once European colonies. In 1960, many East Asian countries, such as Singapore and Taiwan, were at the same economic level as African countries such as Kenya and Ghana. Now they are far richer, with advanced economies, while Africa stagnates.The outside world was madly interested in Africa when it had white rulers and lost all interest when black rulers took over. Every action or speech of Ian Smith or PW Botha received a lot of attention; every crime of either made horrified headlines around the world. In Sharpeville in 1960, when panicking white police opened fire for 40 seconds on peaceful black protestors, killing 69 of them, there was an international uproar. In Zimbabwe, when Robert Mugabe’s extermination squads set about carefully, deliberately, slaughtering over 20,000 unarmed Ndebele men, women and children over a four-year period from 1983 to 1987, there was silence from the world.When no white people were involved, the world’s reaction to racial slaughter on a terrible scale was to yawn. Black lives meant nothing. Once or twice, such as in the Ethiopian famine of 1984, some Western activists managed to stir up a bit of interest but it didn’t last long. The only whites who showed any interest in independent black Africa were the last people Africa needed. These were handwringing, anti-Western, proto-woke socialists who, like all the black leaders, blamed everything on colonialism. These whites, usually with university degrees, encouraged Julius Nyerere to persist with forced collectivisation, which was ruining Tanzanian agriculture.I lived and worked in England from 1972 to 1982 and saw from afar these tragic events in Africa. I noticed the complete lack of interest, by British people. I was living in Coventry in 1974 when one morning early I heard on the radio that there had been a military overthrow of the Portuguese regime, and that this would surely lead to Portugal giving up her colonies in Angola and Mozambique. Very excited, I ran downstairs into the street to buy a newspaper. Across the road, I saw a man selling papers and brandishing the sensational headline: “Liz and Dick to Divorce!”“E-ba-gum”I was working at a factory in Manchester at the time of the 1980 election in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe. I came on shift and asked a foreman if Mugabe had won. He looked at me and said, “Mugabe? Is ‘e fat one or one wi’ glasses?” (However, they smiled when they discovered that “Mugabe” was “e-ba-gum” spelt backwards.) The only interest in Africa among English working men I knew was in Idi Amin. They liked him and called him “Big Daddy”. They liked his big white smile in his big black face, and the fact that he killed and mutilated lots of black people, and kept human body parts in his fridge and ate them. This amused them. They thought he was acting as a black man was expected to act; like the African chief in their comic strips boiling a white missionary in a big pot.In South Africa in the early 1990s, as the 1994 election was drawing near and the ANC was certain to win, we wondered if the ANC had learnt any lessons from the failures of independent Africa to the north. It hadn’t. We wondered if it would repeat all their failed policies. It did. So we had lots of socialism and little capitalism. The limited capitalism produced the only economic successes of early ANC rule and so was systematically hobbled. The ANC in its official ideology wanted the party to control the state, and the state eventually to take over everything, as in communist Russia and communist Ethiopia. “Comrade” and “cadre” became standard patter.The ANC railed against British colonialism, but demanded the English language in schools and universities. The communist leaders awarded themselves capitalist luxuries and private services. Maintenance was neglected everywhere, resulting in the failures of electricity supply, railways, roads, harbours, water and sanitation. The ANC elite become super-rich while the working-classes went hungry. This was like the rest of Africa – but not as bad, and not because of any special wisdom from the ANC, but because in 1994 South Africa had by far the most advanced, industrialised economy in Africa, and so had a huge flywheel of progress that would take a long time for the ANC to stop. But it might be doing so now.The lessons from the above are simple. Implementing them is not..*Andrew Kenny is a writer, an engineer and a classical liberal..This article was first published by Daily Friend and is republished with permission.

Freedom’s fallout: How post-colonial Africa lost its way - Andrew Kenny

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