2023-06-30 07:22:32
The road to European unification began with a promise to Africa. On May 9, 1950, French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman proposed merging coal production in the Ruhr with steel production in Lorraine, a “solidarity of production” that would make wars between France and Germany impossible and pave the way for European unification.
If this were successful, the so-called “Schuman Plan” stated, “Europe would be able to pursue one of its most important tasks with increased resources: the development of the African continent”. A promise made out of a bad conscience, because for centuries the development of Africa had been hampered by the exploitative slavery-based policy of the European colonial powers.
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Howard W. French, a professor at New York’s Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, tells the story of this exploitation in a fascinating book spanning four continents and five centuries. The German title “Afrika and the emergence of the modern world. A Global History” only inadequately reflects the scope of the book.
In the original title, however, “Born in Blackness. Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War”, it becomes clear that for the author the focus is less on the continent of Africa and more on “the slave who was abducted from Africa as the linchpin of modernity”. . In addition to the “dark continent”, the locations are the Caribbean, Brazil, the United States and Europe.
Diminution, trivialization, erasure
The history of Africa and the suffering of Africans is a history of slavery. Howard W. French also focuses on the slave trade and the slave economy. The fact that the pre-colonial inner-African slave trade is not suppressed is anything but a matter of course. The subject is still taboo in the post-colonial national biographies of many African states.
As for the West, French quotes Anglo-Jamaican author Zadie Smith: “It’s no exaggeration to say the only thing I ever learned about slavery in the British education system was that ‘we’ ended it.” With that Linked to this was the assertion, not only by British political and economic historians, that the colonies were not decisive for the growth of the West – rather the development of machines, the expansion of international shipping and the enforcement of liberal banking laws were decisive for the take-off of the economy .
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“It is hardly contemplated,” French passionately protests, “that our present-day prosperity could be in some way related to the synaptic energy of African muscles, the sweat shed by Africans, the tears of Africans dragged into slavery, or even their ingenuity and… related to their will to survive.”
French revises the “century-old process of diminishing, trivializing, and erasing Africans and people of African descent from the narrative of the modern world.” With a pathos supported by empiricism and statistics, he shows that only the profitable colonies based on slave economy made the imperial nations of the West powerful and rich, which would otherwise have lagged behind the centers of Asian and Islamic civilization.
First gold, then sugar, cotton, tobacco
For a long time, historians considered the African continent to be the obstacle that European ships had to circumnavigate in order to find the sea route to India. In reality, French says, this search was less important than the efforts of the Portuguese and other Western nations to secure the sources of West Africa’s gold wealth. In their gold rush, they paid no attention to African history and were blind to the civilizational legacy of the great African empires. The colonizers displayed a mentality as expressed in the Berlin Congo Conference in 1884, when Africa was arbitrarily divided by the European powers into 54 sometimes tiny countries, with disregard for ethnic and language borders.
First gold, then sugar, cotton and tobacco made the colonies dependent on the slave economy rich. For a time, Brazil’s sugar crop accounted for 40 percent of Portugal’s total revenue, while France’s Saint-Domingue, “the richest spot on earth,” traded with the entire United States.
“Cutting of Sugarcane” (Peacock hunters on Cuba). Gemland of Victor Patrick de Landaluze (1830–1889)
Quelle: picture alliance / akg-images
Sugar production shows that, more than any other part of the world, Africa became the “engine in the machinery of modernity” through the “export” of slaves. The boom in plantation sugar began in the mid-17th century. 2000 or more slaves worked on a sugar plantation, in the large sugar mills agricultural and industrial development processes were combined and anticipated the assembly line.
“Sugar Islands” and “Nutrition Boost”
Forty years after the establishment of the first slave sugar plantation, sugar consumption in England quadrupled. Between 1650 and 1800 it could increase by 2500 percent because new “sugar islands” had started work during this period. The per capita consumption of sugar increased from two to four pounds between 1660 and 1690, and by the end of the 18th century it had risen to 23 pounds.
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“Pfister’s Mill” by Wilhelm Raabe
Economic historians spoke of a “nutrition boost”: the calorie intake from cheap sugar created “the energy needed for the long and arduous working days of English factory workers”. A “new age of wakefulness” emerged, hygiene improved because boiling water had to be used to prepare tea and coffee, tobacco suppressed appetite in the workplace.
Sugar production based on slave labor played an important role in the emergence of European civil society: “The availability of hot, sweetened and stimulating beverages led to the emergence of the first coffeehouse, which opened in Oxford in 1650”. French quotes Jürgen Habermas when he traces how enjoying coffee and tea, combined with reading the newspaper, became the “hour of birth of a modern public sphere”.
French concludes, almost triumphantly, “Through great socio-historical upheavals such as this, we finally come to realize that the Enlightenment itself had its roots in the hardship and sweat of African prisoners who were abducted and forced to work in squads on the integrated plantations.”
The promise of the Schuman Plan
The polyglot Howard W. French (65) is the child of Afro-American parents, on his mother’s side slave women are among his ancestors. As a correspondent for the New York Times, he reported from Central America, the Caribbean, West and Central Africa, Japan and China. His book ends with a warning, reminiscent of the Schuman Plan’s promise to Africa:
“If things don’t go well for Africa in the 21st century, massive waves of migration are inevitable that will far dwarf any that have gone before. The consequences of a politically unstable and economically underdeveloped African continent will be chronic wars, terrorism and new diseases that will spread across the world. Not to mention the devastating levels of environmental degradation that will affect all of humanity as desperate people clear the African rainforests and fish the adjacent oceans dry.”
Howard W. French: “Africa and the Making of the Modern World. A Global History”. Translated from the English by Karin Schuler, Thomas Stauder and Andreas Thomsen. Klett-Cotta, 512 pages, 35 euros.
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