Africa: Despite the Abuse, the Spirit is Flourishing

Elephants in the Masai Mara, Kenya.

Small nations have always suffered at the hands and feet and weapons of larger, stronger and wealthier nations. I need only mention my own country’s occupation by its larger neighbour for 800 years. But we won’t talk of Ireland in this article.

Looking at the history of the world, there is nowhere that has suffered as much as Africa. In this instance, it was a case of an entire continent being bullied by a more powerful neighbouring continent – Europe. Some will say, oh, this was all in the past and, largely speaking, it was. However, the abuse and injustices done to the peoples of Africa still resonate today; one only has to look at the racial tensions between blacks and whites still prevalent in the U.S. for proof. On the continent of Africa itself, some would say the poverty, the crime, the famines, the epidemics and the inept and corrupt governments are an unholy mess created by the white man.  

Meknes, Morocco.

Personally, I’m not as cynical or as pessimistic but let’s examine the evidence. I have always been fascinated by Africa. Strangely enough, despite a lifetime travelling the world, I only first visited the continent four years ago. Thankfully, I’ve made up for that in the meantime, with numerous visits to all parts of this place with such a fascinating mixture of peoples and cultures. But first allow me to give the picture I carried in my mind  - I used to have an impression of Africa as the last huge, wild, untamed continent, with no borders or dividing lines, where people and animals roamed freely. Animals only hunt when they need food and I guess the people did likewise. I’m sure there were disputes between tribes over territory and no doubt some of these involved bloodshed, but the image I have is of a largely peaceful place.

All changed with the coming of the white man. Millions of Africans were forcibly taken from their homes and transported to the sugar plantations of the Caribbean, the prairies of America and to almost every nation on earth to be sold as slaves. However, if we read western history books, we hear about ‘civilisation’ being introduced to Africa and indeed other continents. You have to wonder what that word means – would it be the way-of-life practiced by Europeans? Are we to believe that the native peoples were all savages, murdering each other and without scruples whatsoever? The truth is somewhat different. In fact, latter day accounts actually show that most of the murder and mayhem was carried out by the white men, in their attempts to subdue native peoples and conquer their lands. But the victors write history. 

The much lesser known Dashur Pyramid, outside Cairo, Egypt.

I initially intended to include part of this article in one of my travel blogs, but my partner, who is from South Africa, felt it was too dark and advised me to keep it separate from my travel stories, which are largely sunny and informative. I took her advice and in the meantime did a little research in order to try to get my facts correct. The result is my ‘take’ on what Europe has done to Africa. It may not be entirely factual but I have tried to capture the soul of what the continent was like before it was taken and review it in the aftermath.  

Before the first sails appeared on the horizon, Africa was a continent in rhythm with itself. The tribes were many and the languages were diverse (they still are, thankfully) but there were no countries. From the deserts of the north to the jungles of the Congo, life moved through natural cycles — the rains, the harvest, the herds; the hunter/gatherers who provided for their families and their tribe. Communities knew their places not through maps drawn by rulers, but through ancestral memory. The borders were invisible but understood: the mountains belonged to the spirits, the river to the people, the forest to the hunters and the healers.

Society was ordered around kinship and community. Elders ruled through consensus, not decree. Disputes were settled beneath trees, by men and women who remembered the stories of their fathers and mothers. Justice was local, personal, and restorative. The idea of owning land outright, of drawing a line and saying ‘this is mine,’ was alien. The land owned the people, not the other way around. It wasn’t utopia, of course. Wars flared between tribes; ambition and vengeance were not European inventions. But I believe life was balanced and sustainable. The scars of war healed quickly because survival depended on cooperation. It was a civilisation, though not the kind Europe recognised.

Lesotho - the small country entirely enclosed within South Africa.

The first contact came quietly — a few explorers along the coasts, drawn by curiosity, trade, and a sense of adventure. Apparently these were mostly friendly and many became friendly with the locals, trading in mutual respect. Then came the slave traders, the missionaries, the soldiers. Unfortunately they came not to learn, but to conquer and possess. The one thing the white man had that the black man did not, was firearms. This was, in my view, the one thing that made for easy conquest and allowed the invaders to murder, rape, capture and subdue a relatively peaceful people, armed, if at all, only with sticks and arrows.  

Drakensberg Mountains near Tigela Falls, South Africa.

The arrival of the white man brought with it a new language of power: maps, treaties, flags, and guns. They claimed the land was discovered, as though it had been waiting for their conquest and influence. The Africans who had lived there for centuries were redefined overnight as ‘natives,’ to either be subdued or used as labour. The trade in human beings — the most terrible chapter of all — began with calculated cruelty. Villages were raided, families torn apart, and generations transported to all corners of the world, lost forever to the insatiable appetite for sugar, cotton, and tobacco. Ships became floating tombs, packed with men, women, and children chained together in darkness. Many did not survive the journey; those who did found themselves in foreign lands where their identities were erased and their bodies used as cheap labour to produce goods required for the wealthy back in Europe.

Africa bled — not only its people, but its dignity. For hundreds of years, the continent was viewed almost as an open mine for Europe’s ambitions, an endless source of cheap labour and boundless wealth. Native Africans were considered to be a lower class of people, to be used at the white man’s pleasure.

When the slave trade finally began to fall from moral favour, the white man found a new justification for his presence: civilisation. Missionaries came carrying the Bible in one hand and the flag in the other. They preached salvation while soldiers stood behind them with rifles. Of course this was never told to people back home. Even when I was going to school, we were told of the ‘joy’ felt by Africans when they saw the missionaries coming to save their souls. The influence of these religious people is still very much in evidence today; there are as many churches per capita in Africa as there are in the bible-belt of the USA and ‘Christian’ Africans are almost fundamental in their devotion to Christ, far more so than their counterparts in Europe. 

Eswatini - a tiny country formerly known as Swaziland, sandwiched between Mozambique and South Africa.

After conquest, the white man set about ‘civilizing’ the natives. This meant to abandon one’s gods, customs, and language. Whole cultures were declared heathen; traditions that had survived for millennia were labelled primitive. The concept of civilisation became a tool of domination. It is difficult now to imagine the psychological violence of this process. Imagine being told that your gods were false, your names meaningless, your ways barbaric — that to be human, you must become like your conqueror. Many Africans accepted the new faiths, but even then, they did not abandon their old ones entirely. They wove Christianity and Islam into their traditions, creating a tapestry of belief both resilient and unique. Yet the deeper loss was in the erosion of self-worth; the engendered belief that Africa was backward and needed saving. It is arguably this inherent feeling of inferiority that still holds many Africans back to this day.

Mozambique.

The slave trade may have been outlawed but the 19th century brought the most ruthless phase of European involvement. The Berlin Conference of 1884–85, at which, astonishingly, no African was invited to sit, divided the entire continent like a cake among European powers. The mapmakers in Berlin drew straight lines across deserts, jungles, and rivers, ignorant of the tribes, languages, and histories they were slicing apart. Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Holland, took their shares and even Italy and Germany got a piece. 

The absurdity was monumental: nations such as Nigeria or the Congo were created overnight out of nothing more than European convenience. Kingdoms that had stood for centuries were reduced to ‘districts.’ Former allies and brothers were placed under different flags; enemies were forced into the same colony. Today, when we look at the public outrage at Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or Israel’s devastation of Gaza, it is unbelievable that the powers of one continent were allowed to divide up another. Of course there was no sky news or investigative journalism back then. Changed times now - thankfully.

The colonial powers claimed they were bringing progress and to be fair, they did bring railways, schools and hospitals. What we were not told however, was that they were not built for the benefit of Africans. The railways led from the mines to the ports, carrying gold, diamonds, copper, and ivory away from the continent. The schools taught obedience, not empowerment. The hospitals served the settlers first. The true purpose of this colonisation was extraction — of wealth, of labour and ultimately of spirit. The white man had brought new tools but they were double-edged. With one hand he gave, and with the other he took far more away.

Amboseli Nature Park - Kenya.

I am not anti-religion nor am I anti-Church. I believe in allowing people to pray and worship whatever God they wish, or none, if they so choose. But sadly, in Africa, religion was severely abused. As far as I can see, it was perhaps the most potent instrument of control. Mission schools educated the young Africans to read and write, but always within the moral frame of their conquerors. The Bible replaced the oral traditions; Shakespeare replaced the native African folk tales. To be fair, to many Africans, the new religion brought comfort — a message of love and redemption that resonated deeply. But it also brought submission. The God of the missionaries demanded obedience to rulers and empires. The African spiritual world that had once been vibrant and local became old-fashioned and even distant and foreign.

But, apparently, despite this, Africa adapted. Across the continent, I believe hybrid forms of worship emerged — Christian hymns sung in African rhythms, biblical stories retold in local imagery. The colonisers could conquer the land, but never the imagination nor the spirit entirely. Education also became a weapon. The colonial curriculum taught Africans to admire the very men who enslaved them. History lessons praised explorers who ‘discovered’ the land their ancestors had lived on for generations. Statues erected to some of these men still stand today. The smartest young Africans were groomed to become clerks, interpreters, and minor officials; useful, but never equal. This was a sort of quiet conquest: one that worked not through whips or guns, but through clever ideas.

Drakensberg - South Africa.

The European hunger for Africa’s resources was boundless. Gold in the south, diamonds in Kimberley, copper in Katanga, palm oil in Nigeria, and rubber in the Congo — each discovery took more and more of the continent’s natural wealth and bled it of more natural resources. Nowhere was this greed more obscene than in King Leopold II’s Congo Free State. Under the guise of philanthropy and progress, Leopold’s agents turned the Congo into a private labour camp. Millions perished through forced labour, mutilation, and starvation — all to feed Europe’s appetite for rubber. 

People may question as to why I attribute all the blame to Europe; it is of course true that America (all parts) benefited hugely from the transfer of African slaves to the western continent. It is probably more accurate to attribute the actions to the white man because it was white America that benefited. But that brings us full circle because white America was European. What the European white man did on the North and South American continents to the native peoples is another sickening tale, but that’s a whole other article. Some might argue that what transpired was even worse than the African conquests because black African people are still here in their millions today, whereas the great tribes of North America – the Apache, Cherokee, the Sioux, the Cheyenne and dozens more are almost extinct. Similarly, the great indigenous civilisations of central and south America such as the Inca and Mayan peoples are but a distant memory, either replaced by or subsumed into Spanish and Portugese speaking nations. 

But let us return to European transformation of Africa. Vast tracts of fertile land were seized for plantations. Africans were taxed in money they did not have, forcing them into wage labour for the colonists. The land that had once been held in common was fenced off, surveyed, and sold. The harmony between people and nature, once central to African life, was broken.

The wild seemingly endless Karoo in South Africa.

The white man saw the land as a resource to be owned, mined, and sold — not as a living entity. In the process, the balance between human and environment was destroyed. Forests were cleared, wildlife hunted to near extinction, and traditional farming patterns disrupted beyond repair. Thankfully, today, Africans have again taken control of their own destiny and have created areas where the native wildlife can once again roam freely, although game rangers have told me that the poaching trade is still huge and many rare species are still being viciously hunted down.

The massive agricultural plantations that were created can still be seen today; fields that stretch as far and even farther than the eye can see. Sadly, most of the food that they produced back in the day was shipped back to Europe and didn’t benefit the locals – again, there is a similar parallel with the Irish famine. The amount of labour that was required to clear these lands of native vegetation and transform them into land suitable for European style cultivation is mind blowing. I’m sure that the farmers who came out from Europe to ‘supervise’ this transformation and who are often credited with ‘creating’ these farms, were hardy people, but there is no doubt that the work was done by native Africans. I remember when I first saw these enormous ‘fields’ as they would be called in Europe, I remarked to a local as to how incredibly large they were. Inadvertently, I said, ‘European farmers would kill for fields like that.’ My interlocutor replied sadly, ‘oh they did sir, they sure did.’ Remarkably, even though Africa has some of the richest agricultural lands and the greatest diversity of crops on earth, many parts of it are often struggling to feed its people and there have been famines in many countries. While the climate is not always cooperative, most of these famines are caused by poor organisation and neglect.     

I believe Africa did not submit easily. From the earliest slave raids to the height of empire, resistance flared again and again. While some fought with weapons, these were usually far inferior to those of the Europeans. Others fought with words, and others still, most notably Nelson Mandela, with quiet defiance. In the early 20th century, the seeds of independence began to sprout. Educated Africans, men like Nkrumah, Kenyatta, and Nyerere, used the language of their colonisers to demand freedom. They understood the system from within, and turned its logic against it. The Second World War accelerated the change. Thousands of Africans fought and died in Europe’s wars, supposedly for ‘freedom and democracy.’ When they returned home, they demanded those same ideals for themselves. The decades that followed were filled with struggle and hope. One by one, the colonies broke free. Flags were raised, anthems written, constitutions signed. But the damage was deep. The borders drawn in Berlin remained and largely still do today; the economies built on extraction persisted; the education systems still echoed European values. Gradually, the entire continent became independent. It gave Africa political control, but arguably not full liberation. Sadly, some of the new regimes adopted some of the bad habits of their conquerors and corruption became rife in many economies. The devastation of Zimbabwe by Robert Mugabe is possibly the worst example of this. 

While some people would argue that there was always division in Africa, there is evidence that the white man used this ruthlessly, sowing division between peoples in a ‘divide and conquer’ strategy which was a classic colonisation strategy in all parts of the world. One tribe would be favoured over another, sowing seeds of mistrust that would later blossom into conflict. The examples are there, like scars: Rwanda’s genocide, Nigeria’s Biafran war, Sudan’s decades of strife which are still continuing. All can trace their roots, at least in part, to the artificial boundaries and hierarchies imposed by colonisation. The white man departed, but his map remained. For people not familiar with Africa, think of some of the British colonies they gave independence too, begrudgingly no doubt, but then proceeded to divide the country, artificially creating continuous strife – Ireland, Cyprus, Palestine and India/Pakistan. 

A stroll at twilight in the Bush, Serengeti, Tanzania.

Economically, too, Africa was shackled. Its industries were never allowed to mature; its infrastructure was designed for export, not self-sufficiency. Even after independence, many African nations found themselves trapped in a web of debt and dependency, their resources still flowing outward to enrich others.

Culturally, a subtle confusion persisted. Western languages became the languages of power (they still are); African tongues were relegated to the home and the market. European dress, manners, and institutions became symbols of success. The psychological colonisation continued long after the physical one ended. For a European, like myself, Africa is a joy to visit because everywhere you go, people can either speak English or French or some form of a European language. If I might digress, it’s not just Africa. North America speaks English; South America Spanish and Portugese. Australia and New Zealand speak English. It is only in Asia where native languages are primary and even there, huge groups of people speak European languages.    

Today, Africa stands at a crossroads between memory and modernity. Most cities heave with life: people have a relatively comfortable standard of living. In the countryside, things are still at subsistence level. That is why there is such a pull for people to go to the big city. Many survive and prosper but others fall through the cracks and end up homeless. But there is pride, resilience, and innovation despite the fact that many of the ghosts of the past still linger. The white man’s influence is everywhere: in the courts that mirror British law, the schools that follow French syllabuses, the currencies tied to European banks. Even the faith of millions, preached in colonial tongues, bears the influence of foreign hands. And yet, Africa endures. The younger generation no longer accepts the idea that to be modern is to be Western. Across the continent, writers, musicians, and thinkers are reclaiming African identity. They are rewriting the story — this time from their own perspective. Where once Europe defined Africa as ‘the dark continent, Africans now illuminate the world with their creativity, intellect, and energy. But healing takes time. The wounds of slavery and colonisation run deep, not only in the soil but in the soul.

When the white man spoke of civilisation, he meant cities, machines, and empires. But civilisation, in its truest sense, is about harmony — with each other and with nature. Africa had that once, long before the ships came. The tragedy of colonialism is not only in its violence, but in its arrogance — the belief that one peoples view of life was ‘the right one’ and they could define humanity for all. The white man looked at Africa and saw wilderness; he did not see wisdom. He saw darkness, not diversity. Because the black man looked different; was different and had a totally different culture, he was distrusted and forced to change. We can see the same racism in our societies today, although thankfully in only a minority. 

You can argue that it was a different time and western peoples were not as civilized as we are today. History is history – it is not destiny. Africa has absorbed each blow and still stands. The drums still beat, the languages still flourish, the stories still continue to flow like rivers through time. The continent refuses to be defined solely by what was done to it. The change brought by the white man was immense — catastrophic in many ways, transformative in others. But Africa remains a place of rebirth. Out of the pain of colonisation, new nations were born; out of exploitation, new consciousness.

I have been told that if you listen closely, beneath the noise of politics and the roar of modern cities — you can still hear it: the old song of Africa. It is the sound of people who remember. It is sung in hundreds of tongues, carried on the wind from Egypt to the Cape. The white man may have changed Africa, changed its borders, its faiths, its languages, and its economies. But he could not change its cultures or its spirit. For every chain that bound an African wrist, there was an ancestor who whispered of freedom in the future. Africa was wounded but not defeated. It has been plundered, misunderstood, and rewritten — yet it continues to be resilient and not at all hostile to its former conquerors. 

There is one other factor, which I have mentioned in a previous article. It is the philosophy of ‘Ubuntu,’ which is a way of life that emphasizes the interconnectednessof all people, often summarized as ‘I am because you are.’ It is a belief in a universal human bond that means ones humanity is realized through community and the relationships with others, regardless of race, fostering values like compassion, kindness, respect and a sense of a shared humanity. Africans have always had this philosophy; what a pity the white man couldn’t see this when he came. 

But we will finish on a positive note - some people say Africa is still far behind the western world in many ways. In terms of economic progress, they may be correct, but that is not their fault. Perhaps what they lack in material wealth, they make up for in the richness of the culture and their attitude to life. It is rare to meet an African in bad humour; I have rarely had that encounter; I have been welcomed warmly, in fact outrageously warmly, by all races and people I have met there. Maybe one day, the rest of the world will ‘get it’ and finally understand what Africa has known all along and can bring to the rest of the world: Civilisation is not measured by conquest or technology or wealth, but by the ability to live in balance and harmony, to remember one’s past, live in the here and now, not to worry about the future and to treat everyone equally, seeing humanity in every face and respecting it.