The Rest Is History - 100. Decolonising Africa

Episode Date: September 23, 2021

Writer and critic Tomiwa Owolade joins Dominic and Tom to discuss the pan-African movement and the varying ways in which African states became independent from their European colonisers during the 20th century. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. In December 1958, the first conference of the Union of African Nations was held at Accra in Ghana. Among the delegations was one from Algeria, representatives of a movement which for four years had been engaged in the bloody war of independence from France. But the Algerian delegates were not interested solely in Algeria. Every African must feel directly engaged and ready to answer the call of any and all territories, one of them declared. An Algerian cannot be a true Algerian if he does not feel in his core

the indescribable tragedy that is unfolding in the two Rhodesias or in Angola. And that man, Dominic, was Frantz Fanon, who I guess is, I mean, he's a colossally influential figure, isn't he, on the history of decolonization, and I guess specifically in the African context. Yeah, he is absolutely. So born in Martinique, he's one of the, he becomes one of the emblematic intellectuals of the age of decolonization, with his arguments about blackness and about pan-Africanism and so on. Now, I know what you're thinking, Tom. You think I know nothing about Frantz Fanon. But what you don't know is that my very first work of research was on French colonial Algeria, a subject that Fanon came to know very well.

I wrote a thesis about an anti-Semitic riot in the city of Constantine in Algeria in 1934. Utterly unread, languishes somewhere in a library in Oxford, but I did it. So there you go. So I've managed to turn the conversation from myself which regular listeners regular listeners will know is exactly the spirit in which we conduct this podcast a classic European maneuver very much yeah re-centering Europe yes exactly on what is going to be a discussion about um the process of of African decolonization and it's a fascinating subject though, isn't it?

Yeah, and I found it was a remarkable writer. The Wretched of the Earth, I mean, is kind of one of the great kind of foundational texts. But I think one of the things that's interesting about him is the degree to which he's also very French. And because, you know, Martinique was, you know, French colony. And so I wanted to do this topic because uh i read a fantastic essay

by um tom o'allade in unheard on fannel and the moment i read it i messaged him and asked him if he would come on and uh elaborate not just about fannel but about the entire history of african decolonization very much for answering the call yes your entire history of african decolonization so very much for answering the call yes your entire history we've got what 50 minutes 40 50 minutes to do that um so thanks so much for for joining us thank you very much for having me so tom could i ask you um december 1958 when um fannel delivers those comments what is the state of play with Africa and the process of decolonisation? Yeah, so in 1958, decolonisation was just at the very early stages. So a year before that, in 1957, the first black African country to gain independence from the British Empire was Ghana with Kwame Nkrumah.

And the year before that, in 1956, two of France's protectorates in Northern Africa, Tunisia and Morocco, gained independence. But by 1945, which I think should be seen as the year in which many anti-colonial leaders really gained confidence they were about only four african countries that could be said to be independent so egypt which which we can dispute but was arguably an independent state by 1945 but very well it had long been under british yeah of course yeah et Yeah, of course, of course, of course. Yeah. Ethiopia as well, which was, of course, occupied during the Second World War by Mussolini's Italy. Liberia, which was founded in the 19th century by ex-African-American slaves, or was founded for, I should say, ex-African American slaves in the 19th century. And also Sierra Leone, which was as well founded to house slaves that were freed after the American Revolutionary War.

South Africa as well was independent because in 1910, South Africa became a dominion within the British Empire, which meant similar to Australia and also Canada, it had independence and was self-governing. So apart from those countries, Africa was colonized, or at least controlled by some other means by European powers. And there's quite a lot of variety in that though, isn't there? So some of these places have, let's say, French Algeria or Kenya or let's say Southern Rhodesia. They have pretty substantial European white settler populations. I mean, Algeria is probably the classic example.

10% of them are white Europeans. But that's not the case everywhere. So obviously there are quite a lot of colonies where there's a pretty small European presence. And there, I guess, does it depend largely on collaborationist kind of elites? I mean, collaborationist

is a very loaded word, but you know what I mean. Does it basically depend... Is the power base of the Europeans always more fragile than it looks, do you think? Definitely. In a country like the Gold Coast, which later became Ghana, it was very much dependent upon the collaboration between the British colonial authorities

and the native African elites, so the businessmen and the lawyers as well. So by 1951, for example, six years before the Gold Coast became independent as Ghana, they were given what was known as responsible self-government. So a constitution granted them responsible self-government. And this was only done because I think by that time, Ghana itself had an emerging upper middle class elite. It was probably the most educated out of all of Britain's West African colonies. So the British could afford to give them a degree of autonomy on that basis. But that's not the case, for example, if we compare that to Congo under the Belgian colonial authority, which was basically ruled from Brussels, essentially,

and was a very, very poorly educated colony. So are there radical differences between, say, British colonies, Belgian colonies, French colonies that you can trace? Or do they, are they, I mean, I suppose there's a big difference, say, between Gold Coast and South Africa, as Dominic's pointed out. So with regards to France, the French colonies were treated as a sort of integral part of France itself, essentially.

So Algeria is, isn't it? Algeria is actually the metropolitan part of France. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Exactly. And even the three of the most northern Algerian territories, so Algiers, Iran and Constantine were actually departments of France. They had the same political and legal status as actual territories within metropolitan France. And the other territories as well, so in West Africa, but also in an area known as French Equatorial Africa, they were treated as part of a greater France, essentially. Whereas with the British colonies, they were ruled as individual and independent colonies.

So they had no sort of relation with each other. But with France, they were all sort of integrated within greater France. And with Belgium, Belgium is an interesting case because before Congo officially became a part of the Belgian colony in 1908, it was essentially the private property of Leopold II, who was one of the most influential figures in the scramble for Africa and he ruled Belgium for about 23 years and he basically used Belgium to extract the natural resources especially in the 1890s when the invention of the pneumatic title led to a massive boom for rubber and his regime is very notorious because half the population of Congo were killed during his 23-year rule. And he's also the figure upon which Kurtz from Joseph Conrad's famous novella, Hearts of Darkness, is based upon. The horror, the horror.

Exactly, exactly. Yeah, because that's, I i mean kind of hands being chopped off and yeah yeah people's children being killed if they i mean horrendous so so there's a a wide array of colonial approaches to africa uh by the europeans but by 1958, the foundations are starting to wobble. Yeah. And why is that? Is that due to European weakness or to the growing strength of African determination to obtain autonomy and independence, do you think? What's more important? I think that's probably a case-by-case basis so should we look should we look at at ghana where this you know

this this um first conference of the union of african nations is being held in 1958 yeah so so what's the what's the the process by which ghana becomes independent from Britain? In 1947, there was a new party that was created in Ghana. And this party was known as the United Gold Coast Convention. And it was a party which consisted of native African elites, so businessmen and lawyers. And the leader of that party was a man called Joseph Dwanqua. And Dwanqua was, I believe, the first Black African to actually qualify as a barrister in the Inner Temple in London. So this party consisted largely of westernised Native Africans. And the party was created so that the British could develop a path by which the Gold Coast can gradually become a self-governing country within the British Empire and possibly become independent eventually. was created, one of the leaders of the parties or one of the organisers of the parties split off when created his own party. And this organiser within the party was Kwame Nkrumah, who later

became the first Prime Minister of Ghana. So prior to joining this party in 1947, Nkrumah lived for over a decade abroad. He was in America studying sociology, economics and philosophy, but he was largely impoverished during this time. And he even spent some time in New York selling fish. And he also later moved to London to study law. And he spent most of his time time rather than actually getting his law degree arguing with communists and anti-colonialists in Camden cafes. Never go to Camden, that's the last one. Definitely. So in 1949 Nkrumah split off from the United Gold Coast Convention to set up

his own party and the priority for Nkrumah was not independence as a gradual process. He wanted independence now. He was later imprisoned by the Governor General of the Gold Coast, Charles Arden Clark, for incitement and sedition. During his imprisonment, he actually won an election. So in 1951, there was an important election in the Gold Coast, which Nkrumah won, and which basically demonstrated to the British authorities that independence was basically around the corner. So let me ask you two things.

I can see Tom wants to butt in, so I'm going to ask two questions to stop him. The first one is about education. So Nkrumah has gone to New York, and I think he studied in Pennsylvania before he went to New York, Lincoln University, and then he goes to the LSE. And if you look, a lot of these African independence leaders in the 50s and 60s, an awful lot of them have studied abroad

or studied in the metropolis. And I wondered awful lot of them have studied abroad or studied in them in the metropolis and i wondered if you could talk a bit about the influence of that and then how representative that makes them of of of of the people they want to lead basically and then the second issue is about one thing we haven't talked about is the second world war and that presumably that had a shattering effect on these, on the self-confidence of the Europeans, but also the confidence of the African, well, the African population now knew that these people weren't,

I mean, if they'd ever thought it, that these people are beatable. You know, they're not superheroes. They have feet of clay and they've been humiliated by the Japanese, for example. So there's two things there. Can you say something about those two? yeah and then tom can never speak again tom yeah yes i know my place um so so during the um the interwar period yes many um anti-colonial leaders moved to the us and the uk to study and i and i think this this relates moved to the US and the UK to study. And I think this relates actually to the

notion of Pan-Africanism. What many people, I'm not sure, understand is that Pan-Africanism is in many respects a Western concept. So the very first Pan-African conference, for instance, was actually held in London in 1900. And it wasn't actually organized by an African. It was organized by a West Indian man called Henry Sylvester Williams. And pan-African congresses were held in Paris, London, New York, and Manchester before they actually reached an African city. So the very first Pan-African conference that was held in Africa wasn't until 1974. Wow, that's amazing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's incredible. In Dar es Salaam. So when these anti-colonial leaders moved to major Western cities, they were also interacting with West Indian thinkers and intellectuals as well. So like Fanon? Yeah, so like Fanon, but also like, for instance,

C.L.R. James in London. So they were interacting with these West Indian thinkers and intellectuals. And incidentally, Marcus Garvey never visited Africa in his life. And Garvey was one of the most influential Pan-African leaders. So to that extent, many of these anti-colonial leaders were to a significant extent westernized and they were westernized to an extent um that sort of that essentially distinguished them from the native population of the country from from which they came from because most most of the population

most of the population populations in the countries from which they came were largely illiterate and they couldn't speak the European languages and I think one of the most distinctive qualities of many of these post-colonial and anti-colonial African leaders was their fluency

and was their charisma. Somebody like Leopold Seda Senghor was both an influential figure within the negritude movement in 1930s Paris, but also became the first president of Senegal. And he was elected a fellow of the Académie Française, wasn't he? Yeah, the first black African to be elected

a member of the Académie Française. And he was also the first person to pass aggregation which which is like um a very competitive exam um that allows you to become a teacher in france he was also um a school teacher in france during the 1930s um and also a poet as well i mean we we opened with fanner and i commented on when when i read him i mean he feels to me incredibly french yes so many of his attitudes his assumptions his arguments are strange nouns and you mentioned clr james you know this is brilliant um right from the caribbean and i read him because he writes about cricket and I the first when I read him when I was young I thought oh this is you know he's very radical you know this is most unlike any writing about cricket I've ever read and I read him again recently and I thought god this

guy's British he's going on about WG Grace all the time and and I guess that's kind of probably true if you're coming from the Caribbean because they've been shaped for so much longer by British and French traditions of imperialism. And Africa, you know, the period of British and French them is coming from the universities of london paris new york yeah so do you i mean would it be an exaggeration to say that the impetus for decolonization from western rule is itself pretty western um i i think that that would be a correct thing to say because even the notion of and this links to

your book again Tom don't do this thank you but the notion of universal human rights is he had a I think he got a kind of highest distinction of universal human rights is...

Well, Nkrumah had a... I think he got the highest distinction in theology, didn't he? Yeah, yeah. And interestingly enough, Nkrumah was baptised a Catholic and he

seriously considered becoming a Jesuit priest, but then politics. Christianity by other means. Yeah, definitely, definitely. And Nkrumah as well was also besotted by many, many aspects of British culture. So when he became Prime Minister of Ghana in 1957, he actually visited the Queen in Balmoral, and a picture

was taken of both of them until the day he died. That picture of Nkrumah and the Queen was one of his most prized possessions. Well, there's that um very um i think exaggerated sequence in the crown have you seen that where and krumer and the queen dance dominic watch this he he despises the crown um i think that's exaggerated but i mean i guess that's the kind of experience but what just on the topic of um of religion it dominic i just that's such a tom holland thing to say but but but but but there's there's there's there's there's there's kind of western type you know post-french

revolutionary uh universalism and yeah you know which feeds into marxism and that obviously is a kind of a very appealing to lots of african leaders in this period but you do also have the universalisms of Islam and Christianity, and they're also quite important. And one of the things I thought was really interesting when I was researching Dominion was to discover how important Ethiopia was as, you know, the first Christian nation before Rome. Yes. And the sense that its origins go all the way back to Solomon and the Queen of

Sheba and the sense that it had go all the way back to Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. And this sense that it had preserved its independence and therefore could provide a kind of inspiration to both to kind of African nationalists and to African Christians that did not come from Europe. And that seemed to have a kind of salience and importance that I hadn't properly understood until I began reading that. Yes, yes. Ethiopia played an integral role in the concept of Pan-Africanism. So you can even see a legacy of that in Rastafarianism, which is a sort of a melange of Pan-Africanist ideals with with with a sort of worship of ethiopian monarchy harley slassie and yeah exactly yeah and and even though there was even a time when to call the black but when black people were referred to as ethiopians or yeah or etopians or something like that and I think that refers to again the sort of

integral role Ethiopia played in a sort of collective black identity I think that's why Ethiopia surviving the onslaught of Mussolini during the Second World War

was I think so important to African decolonization. Because you sort of see the twin poles, the sort of ancient African civilization against this European superpower that claims to be a sort of resurrection of the Roman Empire, basically, and the African civilization survived. Yeah. Just before we go to a break, I have a question. The last question I asked about the Second World War, Tom Holland very deftly steered it away from back to his book

and the subject of religion. So let's park the Second World War for a second, because the question I have to ask, so much of this has been about elites, about very highly educated people who've gone, you know, who are influenced by the example of Ethiopia, who have been transformed by being at universities in their 20s and 30s, who've been talking to communists in Camden, doing lots of dodgy things like that, and have come back inspired with Pan-African ideals. My question is, what about everybody else? Because obviously decolonization is partly driven by mass meetings,

protest movements, insurgencies, and so on. What is it that explains, I mean, it can't be as simplistic as a generalized desire for freedom but but what is it that gets all these people marching and and chanting and and rallying behind kwame and krumer and and people like him and other colonists um so with with kwame um and krumer he was basically um actually, I think the interesting thing about Nkrumah was that even though he went to the West and attended many elite universities, he actually came from not a of emerging urban workers, essentially. So the trade unionists, school teachers in cities, rather than necessarily the elites of the country. So Nkrumah was basically able to cultivate the persona of a man of the people rather than a sort of distant elite so he was able to sort of

engage in that form of populism which i think is an accurate way to describe it and he was also a sort of agony aunt as well so so an interesting thing about in krumer was that many people actually visited his residence during the 1950s, asking for advice about what kind of job they can do and also asking for him advice on marital problems as well. Goodness, that's a level of engagement. Yeah, that's an element of this podcast we've yet to explore. Imagine doing that with Boris.

Imagine going to number 10 and ask Boris for marital advice. That would be terrible. Which is funny because Nkrumah was not married during that time. And unlike many other African

leaders, he had a very sort of chaste and slightly puritanical private life. He was going to become a Jesuit, wasn't he? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not surprised. I think we should take a break. And I think when we come back, we should look at the violence that surrounded quite a lot of the transfer of power.

So, you know, quite a lot. The British particularly were quite adept at the flummery of, you know, the Union Jack coming down and the new flag going up. And likewise, the French were very good at kind of manufacturing the idea of the francophonie and the idea that nothing much had greatly changed. But of course, there really were very, very violent exceptions to that. So let's look at that. And then perhaps could we look at Congo, which is, I mean, in a way, the most brutal of the lot. So we will be back with that after the break.

I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening,

bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Welcome back to The Rest Is History. We are talking about African decolonization with Tom Owolade. And we have been talking about elites. We've been talking about Camden coffee shops. And now we're going to talk about violence. Because obviously, this was often a very violent process, wasn't it? The process of decolonization.

The classic examples, places like Algeria. I suppose Kenya would be the most obvious british one it's not always violent but but when when is it that you think is it is is violence more likely when there are big populations of white settlers do you think yeah yeah i think that definitely um is the case in the two classic examples so um algeria and also kenya as well so with with algeria i i think um because you said at the beginning that algeria 10 percent of of algeria um algeria's population came from europe so were european settlers the uh pied noir i think i think the striking thing was that in Algiers, which was the biggest city in Algeria, the European population was a third of the city. So they had a massive presence. The people at Albert Camus, I mean, he's the most famous example.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Definitely, definitely. And interestingly enough, many of them, because I think the perception some people might think is that many of the sort of pieds noirs, European settlers, came from France. And one of these elites who actually meant many of them were poor and they came from other European Mediterranean countries. So Spain, Greece, Italy as well. Even Camus' mother was partly Spanish, I believe, or had Spanish ancestry. But I think the key thing that defined many of the Pierre Noir was resistance to any sort of decolonisation or any sort of independence away from france and the same was true in rhodesia wasn't it and obviously i mean in south africa yeah exactly complicated yeah yeah and i think that was partly motivated by fear of living as a minority in a majority um native country and the sort of the possibility of any sort of retribution, which was the case in both Algeria and also in Rhodesia, actually, unfortunately. So there was definitely violence on both sides. So in Algeria, the most famous classic examples of the violence was the way in which collective punishment was meted out by the French colonial authorities.

So all the Arab and Berber populations were essentially quarantined within parts of the city. And anyone suspected of sedition or terrorism was violently tortured. But there was also, from about 1955, the FLN, which was the guerrilla organisation behind the Algerian independence movement. To which Fanon belonged, right? Yeah, he belonged to as well. Also targeted, specifically targeted, civilian areas with European people

living there. Well, there's those famous scenes in the film The Battle of Algiers, of the people planting the bombs in the cafes, aren't there? Yeah, exactly. A brilliant film, actually, about the violence and the difficulty of it. And the film was released

only in 1966, so literally just four years after the war ended. And it was actually banned in France for about five years. And I mean, the argument of Wretched of the Earth, Fanon's great book is precisely that there needs to be violence if European colonialism is going to be cast off yeah because fanon thought that the um nature of colonialism and imperialism was violent by its very nature so the only adequate response to it was through violent means okay which which brings us to to congo yeah which is notoriously the worst example of european colonialism and i guess you would say i mean it's not a coincidence then that that it's which is notoriously the worst example of European colonialism. And I guess you would say, I mean, it's not a coincidence then that its fate in independence is kind of awful as well. Yeah, so in contrast to many other colonial states in Congo,

the native black population were, before independence, they were forbidden to become lawyers or doctors or architects. And they were also forbidden to gain any sort of senior position in the military. So the population was not only sort of disenfranchised politically, but they were forbidden any sort of route to gaining power. So when the Congo became independent, there was no civil society that was able to sort of successfully carry the country to any sort of prosperity or even sustainability, because the population was largely illiterate but also the belgians just they just pack up and go yeah yeah yeah i mean it's unbelievable when you actually

read the timeline they're sort of vaguely talking about leaving in 1959 they have a meeting in january 1916 they say we're off in the summer goodbye you know fend for yourselves yeah and and and and even like during the um final speech the um the king of king of Belgium at that time, King Padua, basically praised King Leopold II for bringing the Belgians to Congo. And Patrice Lumumba in his speech after said, we are not your monkeys anymore. Yeah. So tell us about Lumum lamumba um yeah who is he where's he coming from because he's he's a key and and tragic figure he's the great martyr isn't he yeah yeah yeah he's the great martyr of of of decolonization uh you could you

could plausibly say um so lamumba was born in um 1925 which um funny enough was also the year that Fanon was born in um and and he he became a sort of trade unionist and and by 1960 he was a leader of of a particular party in Congo I I think what's important to emphasise is that Congo was a vast country and there were many parties competing during the elections that led to Congo's independence. And Lumumba was just one of a vast array. So he had to handle a coalition, basically.

And so by late June of 1960, Lumumba becomes the first prime minister of an independent Congo. And the non-executive president was a man called Joseph Kasafubu, who would later play an influential role. And in this time, Lumumba's Secretary of State, when he became Prime Minister, was a man called Joseph Desiree Mobutu. And now Mobutu, before he became Lumumba's Private Secretary, he was a journalist, but before that he served in the Congolese armed forces, but he was only allowed to serve in lowly positions. He wasn't allowed to ascend through the ranks because that was explicitly forbidden for Black Africans. So by late June 1960, Lumumba was prime minister, but two forms of crisis were about to engulf him. The first crisis was the mutiny led by the Congolese armed forces, because they were still largely white, essentially, and they were opposed to Lumumba from the start.

So Lumumba dismissed them. And the second crisis was a secessionist movement in the southeast of Congo, the Katanga region, which was where a lot of the diamonds were stored in Congo. And Lumumba was frightened of both the mutiny and the secessionist movement. And that's why he actually called for the UN to come in and intervene. And then Lumumba got frustrated with the UN and eventually he did probably the biggest mistake that he could possibly do, which was ask for the Soviet Union to come in and intervene.

And that was his downfall. And this is when Eisenhower is the US president and Eisenhower a few years earlier had effectively pulled the curtain down on the British and French Imperial period at Suez. Yeah. But now he's, he's saying we've got to get rid of this guy.

I mean, he kind of basically, I mean, he, he, he effectively says that, doesn't he? He kind of says,

we've got to do whatever is necessary to get rid of. There's lots of declassified. There's lots of declassified MI6 and CIA documents that say, you know, ideally we should kill him. Yeah, because they saw the solo member as basically a second fidel castro essentially um somebody um who was um basically an anti-colonial leader just become a soviet state sorry so they have all these kind of mad schemes to get rid of of castro famously with exploding cigars and things and they send they send a guy called dr death of langley sydney gottlieb who has this wheeze to mix some poison that will simulate the effects of polio

in lemumbus toothpaste yeah yeah yeah they try that but um that didn't come because the um um i think the poison ran out of its sell-by date that's very cia behavior oh dear oh good so so yeah so the poison toothpaste doesn't work so so talk us through the horrible story about what how they get rid of him joseph ume Mobutu and Joseph Kasafubu, who, as I said earlier, was the president of Congo, the CIA in America and also the Belgian authorities saw both of them as suitable replacements for Patrice Lumumba. And so they got in touch with both of them.

And Lumumba's rule as the prime minister of Congo lasted 64 days. So a couple of months after, with all the crisis, the military mutiny, but also the secession movements in Southeast lost control and was basically imprisoned after. And then a few months later, in January 1961, on his way to the Southeast, taken to the Southeast, he was brutally murdered and his body was um decomposed uh i think it's the right way to put it yeah and buried in an obscure place he was put in acid wasn't he was he dissolved in acid

basically yeah dissolved in acid yes and all that remained was a tooth that got found in the details i i can't bear anybody touching my nails it's's really... Don't you? I hate it. I really, really hate it. How did you get on when your parents were cutting your nails? I couldn't stand it. Even thinking about it makes me cringe. And Patrice Lumumba thought he had it bad. Well, they shoved splints underneath his nails.

Yeah, yeah. They tortured him. Just horrible, horrible, horrible. Yeah. Anyway, enough of that. But the crisis doesn't actually end there. So after Lumumba was assassinated, Mobutsu and Kasafubu still had to deal with the secession movement

in the Southeast, Katanga separation movement. So they had to quell that movement. But a few years after that, they also had to deal with a secession movement in a place called Stanleyville. So Stanleyville, which is in the east of the country, was where Lumumba had most of his support. So Stanleyville in 1964 declared independence from congo and this led to a terrible civil war in which um joseph mabutu as now a a military lieutenant general had to quell that that secession movement and tens of thousands of people were killed and then by 1965 uh when when that stanleyville secession movement was was finally suppressed mabutsu basically dismissed

joseph kasafubu the president and also also the prime minister at that time and declared himself as the new president of Congo in November 1965. And a few months or six months later, Mobutu accused four ministers from the previous administration of being corrupt and of basically being treacherous. and four of those ministers including um the previous prime minister uh were publicly executed so mabuti kind of becomes the paradigm of the despotic african president so he's he's he's nicknamed the dinosaur um he i mean he's what he's he's plunders billions and spends it all on kind of Concorde trips to Paris he builds a Versailles doesn't he

he builds a Versailles in the jungle the rumble in the jungle exactly and the interesting thing about Mobutu is that he sort of combines many sort of factors within the sort of the post-colonial leader. So on the one hand, he had a very strong relationship with America and with

many other Western forces. But on the other hand, he developed a called uh mobutuism and authenticity so authenticity so he changed the name of of congo to zaire um in 1971 and he also changed the currency to zaire and also the river the river congo to the river zaire and and he changed his name as well from Joseph Desiree Mobutu to Mobutu Sese Seko. And during that time, during his reign, he made it forbidden for Catholic priests and Catholic bishops to baptize any child with a European name. So all the people in Zaire needed to have African names. And he was doing all of this whilst visiting Paris, being great friends with Nixon. But isn't that a sort of pattern though, Tom,

that you see this with... I mean, Tom and I were talking before we started the broadcast, actually, about Jean-Bédel Bacassa, the Central African Republic, who makes himself emperor. He has a coronation based on that of Napoleon. Or indeed Idi Amin. Amin Idi Amin was in the King's African Rifles. He was a cook.

He played rugby. Last King of Scotland. Players used to hit him with a hammer on the head before games to get him excited. But yes, he claims that he's the last King of Scotland. He gives himself the title Con conqueror of the British Empire. So on the one hand, these guys are very anti-colonial, anti-Western. But they're clearly completely shaped by that legacy

and they can't rid themselves. They have to constantly prove every day that they are better than the western exploiters and they do that by using western kind of formulae and and flying on concord and giving themselves invented western titles and things yeah mabuchu's favorite book uh and apparently the book that he was able to recite was um machiavellius the Prince. Wow. He could recite it. He'd learned it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Apparently he could recite large passages from it. It's quite a short book, I think. Yeah. Even so, though. Quite impressive. Yeah, yeah. Quite impressive.

I guess, I mean, this is absolutely a whistle-stop tour around an entire continent. I mean, I wonder i wonder just now there is talk about um china and whether you feel that perhaps there is a a process of recolonization going on with china people do talk about that do you think that's exaggerated or not i i don't think it's necessarily exaggerated because China is definitely investing a lot in Africa, in African infrastructure. And it is true that there are many Chinese people that are moving into Africa, working with African businesses, working with African engineers. So I do think that that is a significant fact of 21st century Africa. The issue is the extent to which this is comparable to colonialism

during the European colonialism. If we have a very sort of expansive definition of colonialism, then it is definitely comparable. But if our definition of colonialism is more limited to the European example, then I think there are significant differences between what's going on in China and what occurred during the 19th and early 20th century.

Let me ask you a question about the process of decolonization from the viewpoint now. When we look at it now, I mean, we've listed what happened in the Congo. Obviously, there are so many countries where the British or the French congratulated themselves on having set up these incredibly healthy multi-party democracies, and then within two years or five years, that had come crashing down.

Do you think that there was any plausible way that, in general, the process of European withdrawal from Africa could have been better handled? Or do you think, really, it was a kind of, given the nature of those regimes given the the weakness of civil society in some of those countries given that the europeans had treated the africans so badly do you think that was always inevitable um i i wouldn't say inevitable but i i would say it would have been quite difficult to successfully manage um a process of decolonization. I think partly because many, many Africans within the particular parameters of the nation state came from different ethnic groups and different cultural traditions. So creating a nation state out of many of these

territories was always going to be very difficult. I think one example which has personal resonance for me is Nigeria. So at the time Nigeria became an independent state, there were over 250 different ethnic groups within the country, and the country was largely split into three territories. So the largely Muslim North, which was ruled by the Hausa Fulani ethnic group, and also the largely Christian South, which was bifurcated between the Igbo East and the largely Yoruba West. And less than 10 years after Nigeria became an independent state, there was the Biafran War, which led to the death of two or three million people. So I do think that it was always going to be difficult

to successfully manage decolonisation. And I think a big part of that isn't just cruelty by the Europeans or oppression by the Europeans or incompetence by the Europeans, though this was definitely a factor, but also the fact that many of these countries were largely fictions, which sort of elided the important cultural and ethnic differences within the population. Which I suppose maps onto the idea that a lot of the ideological impetus for decolonization comes from Europe. The very idea of a of a nation the state being

independent is is a manifestation of that yeah definitely yeah it's fascinating i i such a great discussion thanks ever so much for it we haven't even scratched the surface have we yes no well i think i think i mean i think you know as with so many of these um discussions we've had it kind of opens up all kinds of um prospects for future episodes i mean we haven't talked about rhodesia or south africa at all which are kind of huge huge topics so i think these are you know things to come back to don't you don't definitely definitely absolutely if tom will um if tom will find time to come back and and maybe we can finally talk about what the importance of world war ii tom holland yes yes i'll keep that in mind as well all right who cares about world war ii yeah well your brother

yes he does um brilliant thanks so much tom thank you tom thank you so much thank you bye-bye bye everybody everybody. Thanks for listening to the rest is history for bonus episodes, early access, ad free listening and access to our chat community. Please sign up at rest is history pod.com. That's rest is history pod.com.