The foreground of this illustration from Bogaarts's Historische Reizen depicts the Khoikhoi way of life. The background shows the Dutch settlement and way of life beginning to take root. Source: South African National Library. Its headquarters were in Jakarta on the island of Java. Because the journey to the East took so long, European shipping nations stopped at the Cape of Good Hope to collect fresh water and food. The Khoikhoi people at the Cape traded sheep, cattle, ivory, ostrich feathers and shells for beads, metal objects, tobacco and alcohol.
Unlike the Portuguese, the Dutch did not trade guns as they did not want the Khoikhoi to use the guns against them. In , the VOC decided to establish a permanent refreshment station at the Cape.
Jan van Riebeeck was appointed commander of this station. It was his responsibility to build a fort for their protection and a hospital for sick sailors. Employees of the company planted vegetables and obtained meat from the Khoikhoi so that they could supply the ships as they called in at Table Bay. French and English ships were also allowed to stop at the Cape, but they were charged very high prices.
Increasingly the Khoikhoi lost land and cattle to the Dutch as the settlement grew. The Company used rival Khoikhoi clans to raid the Cochoqua herds between and This is known as the Second Khoikhoi-Dutch War. The Cochoqua were defeated and lost all their cattle and sheep to the Dutch and their Khoikhoi allies. The boers then settled on their land. Wheat and grapes for wine were grown in this area for the settlement and for export to the passing ships.
The settlers were sold slaves from Madagascar, Mozambique and Indonesia to work the land. Trek Boers in the Karoo. As the settlement grew, some of the farmers became hunters and cattle farmers in the interior of the Cape.
They were known as 'trekboers' because they lived in ox-wagons and were always on the move. They were granted large pieces of land each and allowed their cattle to graze on the land until it was overgrazed and then they would move on. The new arrivals were settled in the fertile valleys of Paarl, Stellenbosch and Franschhoek. The Khoikhoi were at a disadvantage in their struggle to resist the expansion of the Dutch settlement at the Cape.
They had no guns or horses and were nearly wiped out by a series of smallpox epidemics that swept through the Cape starting in Like the Aztecs in Mexico, they had no immunity against European diseases and they died in their thousands.
The Khoikhoi found different ways to resist Dutch expansion. At first they resisted by attacking and raiding Dutch farms. In reaction, the trekboers formed themselves into military groups called 'commandos' and attacked the Khoikhoi in order to get back their cattle. As a result, hundreds of Khoikhoi people were killed. As soon as the commandos returned to their farms, the Khoikhoi attacked again, setting in motion a continuous cycle of attack and counter-attack.
In the end the Khoikhoi had two options. Either they could move into more remote and drier regions of the expanding colony or else they could become servants of the boers acting as trackers, herdsmen and shepherds. Some even joined boer commandos and attacked other Khoikhoi groups. The boers were not allowed to enslave the indigenous people of South Africa, so these Khoikhoi servants remained free citizens, but they were seldom paid wages.
They were usually paid in food, clothing, housing, brandy and tobacco. They were sometimes allowed to keep cattle, but they lost their independence and with that much of their culture and language. In the Eastern Cape, many Khoikhoi people were absorbed into Xhosa society.
European control of India Britain takes control of India. British East India Company flag. The Portuguese dominated the trade routes on the coast of India during the sixteenth century. The Dutch forced the Portuguese out of India in the seventeenth century.
Both companies began by trading in spices, but later shifted to textiles. They operated mostly on the southern and eastern coasts of India and in the Bengal region. The French also joined trade in India in about Rapid growth followed, and in the company set up a new factory further up the Hugli river, on a site that became Calcutta now Kolkata. By the company had extended its trading activities in Bengal and used this as a reason to involve itself in Indian politics.
As the French and British were fighting over the control of India's trade, the Mogul Empire was experiencing serious problems and regional kingdoms were becoming more powerful. The emperor, Aurangzeb, was a harsh ruler who did not tolerate the Hindu population and often destroyed their temples.
He tried to force Indians to become Muslims against their will. As a result of this he was not a popular ruler. Soon after his death in , the empire began to disintegrate. The French and British took advantage of the weakness of the Mogul empire. They offered military support to the regional rulers who were undermining the empire.
The British and the French kept increasing their own political or territorial power while pretending to support a specific local or regional ruler. By the French managed to place themselves in a powerful position in southern India, but a year later British troops took the French south-eastern stronghold by force.
This area was part of the Mogul Empire and its emperor attacked Calcutta in After this attack the British governor moved north from Madras and secretly conspired with the commander of his enemy's army. The Mogul emperor was defeated at Plassey by the Company troops under the command of Robert Clive in The French attempted to regain their position in India but were forced to give up Pondicherry in In the British again defeated local rulers and firmly established British control over the Bengal region.
Source: historyfiles. They made use of both Indian and British soldiers to gain more land. The Indian population did not like British rule. This led to the Sepoy Rebellion of , in which Indian soldiers called sepoys staged an armed uprising. The rebellion failed because it lacked good leaders and did not have enough support.
The uprising did not upset British rule, but many lives were lost during this rebellion. The British then focused on governing efficiently while including some traditional elements of Indian society. After India was no longer controlled by the East India Company and was brought directly under British rule instead.
Britain did not control the whole of India at this time. Many princes signed treaties with the British and agreed to co-operate with the British. In other areas the British appointed Indians as princes and put them in charge.
In this way Britain ruled the so-called Indian States indirectly. Queen Victoria of Britain appointed a viceroy to rule India. The expansion of European trade resulted in the colonisation of five continents over a period of five centuries. Using military force, each of the European colonial powers dominated world trade at different times.
When one colonial power became weak, another challenged it and replaced it as the dominant power. From voyages of trade and discovery to colonisation: This section of the grade 10 curriculum was developed in Early European voyages of trade and discovery Bartholomeu Dias, the first European to sail around the southern tip of Africa. Colonisation Colonisation is the process of acquiring colonies.
Over the past years there have been different phases of colonisation. Reasons for colonisation A quick way to remember the main reasons for establishing colonies is 'gold, God and glory', but you need to understand each reason in more detail. Conquering the Aztec Empire You learnt about the wealthy and powerful Aztec Empire in the previous section. Conquering the Inca Empire This is a portrait of Atahualpa, drawn from life, by a member of Pizarro's detachment, Resistance to Spanish colonialism The Aztec and Inca Empires covered very large areas and consisted of millions of people.
Resistance Case Study 3 The Spanish encountered particularly fierce resistance from the Auracanian tribes. Resistance Case Study 4 A distinct type of resistance in exploitation colonies was the slave revolt. The legacy of the Spanish in Central and South America Disease and forced labour drastically reduced the population of Central America.
It is estimated that the population of Mexico was reduced by ninety per cent in the first fifty years after the arrival of the Spanish. In Central and South America, the Spanish settlers eventually intermarried with the Incas and Aztecs as most of the settlers were men. The people of mixed racial descent are known as mestizo and now form the majority of the population. The official language of the former Spanish colonies in the Americas is Spanish but there are many people who still speak their indigenous languages.
The indigenous people were also converted to Catholicism which remains the dominant religion in Central and South America. The legacy of the Portuguese in western-central Africa The Portuguese introduced agricultural products grown in South America such as maize, sugar cane and tobacco.
Coffee plantations were introduced to Angola in the nineteenth century. Coffee is one of Angola's major exports today. The Portuguese introduced guns to the region which changed the nature of warfare and enabled their allies to dominate other kingdoms. The Portuguese encouraged wars between rival kingdoms to maintain a constant supply of slaves.
The result of this was that the region was constantly at war and millions of young people, mainly men, were forced to leave Africa and work as slaves in the Americas. The Portuguese language is mainly spoken in urban areas of Angola today.
However, the indigenous languages have survived among the rural population. In modern Angola, about ninety per cent of the population is Christian, mainly Catholic, as a result of Portuguese missionary activity in the area. The remainder of the population follows traditional African religions. Portuguese trading stations in East Africa A map drawn in Spain dated , showing the king of Mali holding a gold nugget. Source: British Library Well-established gold and ivory trade network existed between African kingdoms in the interior and cities on the east coast of Africa.
The Portuguese control of the Indian Ocean trade The During the 15th and 16th centuries, Portugal led the world in navigation and exploration, and they believed it was their duty to spread the Catholic religion. The Portuguese replaced Arab control of the trade in ivory, gold and slaves with their own.
They traded up the Zambezi river and interfered with the existing inland African trade. Only kingdoms that co-operated with the Portuguese benefited from this interference. Portuguese is still spoken in Mozambique, but the majority of the rural population speaks one of the indigenous Bantu languages. Only thirty per cent of the population is Christian, mostly Catholic.
The majority of the population practise traditional African religions or no religion at all. The Dutch in Southern Africa The Dutch challenged Portuguese domination of the Indian Ocean trade in the late sixteenth century when they began trading in spices, calico and silks in the East and gold, copper, ivory and slaves in Africa.
Expansion of the Dutch settlement Increasingly the Khoikhoi lost land and cattle to the Dutch as the settlement grew. The Trekboers Trek Boers in the Karoo. Source: wikipedia As the settlement grew, some of the farmers became hunters and cattle farmers in the interior of the Cape.
Khoikhoi resistance in the interior The Khoikhoi were at a disadvantage in their struggle to resist the expansion of the Dutch settlement at the Cape. Dutch laws, customs and attitudes towards race were brought to South Africa and Dutch people became the ruling class until the Cape was taken over by the British in The Dutch did not actively encourage the Khoikhoi or slaves to become Christians as this would imply they were equal.
Besides, even the busiest African in West, Central, or East Africa was concerned more with trade than with production, because of the nature of the contacts with Europe; and that situation was not conducive to the introduction of any technological advances. The most dynamic groups over a great area of Africa became associated with foreign trade notably, the Afro-Portuguese middlemen of upper Guinea, the Akan market women, the Aro traders of the Bight of Biafra, the mulattos of Angola, the Yao traders of Mozambique, and the Swahili and Wanyamwezi of East Africa.
The trade which they carried on does require the invention of machinery. Apart from that, they were agents for distributing European imports. The fore stated purportion does not mean that Africans against the odds of these times does not strive for an industrial rebirth, there were several attempt by Africans as especially exhibited by some great ones — Emperor Lebna Dengel of Ethiopia, Agaja Trudo of Dahomey and Assantehene Opoku Ware 17 — to invite European technical knowledge into their respective domain in order to integrate their indigenous with foreign expertise.
The European age of overseas discovery brought them into a pronounced contact with Africa and the subsequent founding of colonial empires therein, the struggles of which filled the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
This strife which severally manifested through trade with its stifling effect for Africans prepared the ground for the nineteenth century colonial onslaught. A conceptualisation and reasons for the colonisation of Africa have been discussed prior.
The economic matrices to the colonisation are comparatively superior. Chinweizu, while discussing the European conquest of Africa noted that;. When Europe pioneered industrial capitalism, her demands upon the resources of the world increased tremendously. In addition to obtaining spices for her tables and manpower for her mines and plantations in the Americas, Europe set out to seize for her factories the mineral and agricultural resources of the entire world.
Her need to take African manpower to the Americas declined. It is important to note that initially, Africans did not necessarily lack the type of technology necessary for the exploitation and maximization of the exported capitals as Ocheni and Nwankwo 18 would want us to believe.
The need to reorganize and reorient the African labour force to adapt to the requirements and demands of the exported capital is just a means of familiarizing them with imposed alien industrial practices to which they have no choice.
The capitals transported and industrial organizational life associated with it was alien to the African economy and labour force. It was therefore hard for the Africans to voluntarily and willingly move to seek for job in the new industries developed with the exported capital.
The problem or question then was how the Africans could be compelled to work in the new industries and change their work attitude to that of industrial life without revolt or with minimum violence. The only option was to take direct control of their economy and political administration and then use government machinery through the proclamation of laws to compel them to move from their enclave and to abandon their traditional system of production in preference to that of their colonizers.
Hence, the need for direct colonization of the African territories and the consequent imperialism. And despite the rhetoric by which such rule was justified, the logic of administration was dictated by the needs of the metropolitan power.
There were simple practical things which they performed as solutions to some problems and it appeared like magic to African simple folk. All these further assisted in surrounding them with a halo of awe and respect. First they began to take out of African use of occupancy whatever land they wanted, and they simultaneously assembled African labour to mine the land for gold, copper, diamonds, asbestos, tin, iron and zinc, or to farm it for wool, sisal, palm-oil and kernels, cotton, cocoa, rubber and groundnuts.
But as the African people were reluctant to dispossess themselves of their lands and unwilling to work for the profit of Europeans, such land as the Europeans wanted had to be confiscated and African labour compelled. The means of doing this was the adoption by a white ruling race of legal measures designed expressly to compel the individual natives to whom they apply to quit land, which they occupy and by which they can live in order to work in white service for the private gain of the white man.
When lands formerly occupied by natives are confiscated, or otherwise annexed for white owners, the creation of a labour supply out of the dispossessed natives is usually a secondary object. Yes, the creation of labour supply out of the dispossessed natives is a secondary issue because the people lived on land and make their means of livelihood or survival from tilling and working on the land.
Since they had been dispossessed of their lands, they had no other means of survival or livelihood than to work for the colonialists unwillingly. They were compelled to work for the colonialist because they must survive together with members of their families. Afeez Tope Raji Author. Add to cart. Preth Century African Indigenous Industry and the Coming of the Industrial Colonization Contrary to what is explicit in most Eurocentric literatures about pre-colonial African indigenous industry most of which spells negativity, one can only wonder; where names as Gold Coast, Ivory Coast, and others would have come from, were it not that these undeniable treasures have been greatly worked upon by their rightful possessors!
This is later to be looted in the Benin Massacre What Africans experienced in the early centuries of trade was precisely a loss of development opportunity and this is of greatest importance. Colonization and African Indigenous Industry: Changes and Adaptation The European age of overseas discovery brought them into a pronounced contact with Africa and the subsequent founding of colonial empires therein, the struggles of which filled the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Chinweizu, while discussing the European conquest of Africa noted that; When Europe pioneered industrial capitalism, her demands upon the resources of the world increased tremendously. Sign in to write a comment. This scramble was so intense that there were fears that it could lead to inter-imperialist conflicts and even wars. To prevent this, the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck convened a diplomatic summit of European powers in the late nineteenth century.
This was the famous Berlin West African conference more generally known as the Berlin Conference , held from November to February The conference produced a treaty known as the Berlin Act, with provisions to guide the conduct of the European inter-imperialist competition in Africa.
Some of its major articles were as follows:. This treaty, drawn up without African participation, provided the basis for the subsequent partition, invasion, and colonization of Africa by various European powers. The European imperialist designs and pressures of the late nineteenth century provoked African political and diplomatic responses and eventually military resistance. During and after the Berlin Conference various European countries sent out agents to sign so-called treaties of protection with the leaders of African societies, states, kingdoms, decentralized societies, and empires.
The differential interpretation of these treaties by the contending forces often led to conflict between both parties and eventually to military encounters. For Europeans, these treaties meant that Africans had signed away their sovereignties to European powers; but for Africans, the treaties were merely diplomatic and commercial friendship treaties. After discovering that they had in effect been defrauded and that the European powers now wanted to impose and exercise political authority in their lands, African rulers organized militarily to resist the seizure of their lands and the imposition of colonial domination.
This situation was compounded by commercial conflicts between Europeans and Africans. During the early phase of the rise of primary commodity commerce erroneously referred to in the literature as "Legitimate Trade or Commerce" , Europeans got their supplies of trade goods like palm oil, cotton, palm kernel, rubber, and groundnut from African intermediaries, but as the scramble intensified, they wanted to bypass the African intermediaries and trade directly with sources of the trade goods.
Naturally Africans resisted and insisted on the maintenance of a system of commercial interaction with foreigners which expressed their sovereignties as autonomous political and economic entities and actors.
For their part, the European merchants and trading companies called on their home governments to intervene and impose "free trade," by force if necessary. It was these political, diplomatic, and commercial factors and contentions that led to the military conflicts and organized African resistance to European imperialism. African military resistance took two main forms: guerrilla warfare and direct military engagement.
While these were used as needed by African forces, the dominant type used depended on the political, social, and military organizations of the societies concerned. In general, small-scale societies, the decentralized societies erroneously known as "stateless" societies , used guerrilla warfare because of their size and the absence of standing or professional armies. Instead of professional soldiers, small groups of organized fighters with a mastery of the terrain mounted resistance by using the classical guerrilla tactic of hit-and-run raids against stationary enemy forces.
This was the approach used by the Igbo of southeastern Nigeria against the British. Even though the British imperialists swept through Igboland in three years, between and , and despite the small scale of the societies, the Igbo put up protracted resistance. The resistance was diffuse and piecemeal, and therefore it was difficult to conquer them completely and declare absolute victory. Long after the British formally colonized Igboland, they had not fully mastered the territory.
Direct military engagement was most commonly organized by the centralized state systems, such as chiefdoms, city-states, kingdoms, and empires, which often had standing or professional armies and could therefore tackle the European forces with massed troops. This was the case with the resistance actions of the Ethiopians, the Zulu, the Mandinka leadership, and numerous other centralized states. In the case of Ethiopia, the imperialist intruder was Italy.
It confronted a determined and sagacious military leader in the Ethiopian emperor Menelik II. As Italy intensified pressure in the s to impose its rule over Ethiopia, the Ethiopians organized to resist. In the famous battle of Adwa in , one hundred thousand Ethiopian troops confronted the Italians and inflicted a decisive defeat. Thereafter, Ethiopia was able to maintain its independence for much of the colonial period, except for a brief interlude of Italian oversight between and This brought the parties into conflict.
During this sixteen-year period, he used a variety of strategies, including guerrilla warfare, scorched-earth programs, and direct military engagement. For this last tactic he acquired arms, especially quick-firing rifles, from European merchant and traders in Sierra Leone and Senegal. He also established engineering workshops where weapons were repaired and parts were fabricated. With these resources and his well-trained forces and the motivation of national defense he provided his protracted resistance to the French.
Eventually he was captured and, in , exiled to Gabon, where he died in It is quite clear that most African societies fought fiercely and bravely to retain control over their countries and societies against European imperialist designs and military invasions. But the African societies eventually lost out. This was partly for political and technological reasons.
The nineteenth century was a period of profound and even revolutionary changes in the political geography of Africa, characterized by the demise of old African kingdoms and empires and their reconfiguration into different political entities.
Some of the old societies were reconstructed and new African societies were founded on different ideological and social premises. Consequently, African societies were in a state of flux, and many were organizationally weak and politically unstable.
They were therefore unable to put up effective resistance against the European invaders. The technological factor was expressed in the radical disparity between the technologies of warfare deployed by the contending European and African forces.
African forces in general fought with bows, arrows, spears, swords, old rifles, and cavalries; the European forces, beneficiaries of the technical fruits of the Industrial Revolution, fought with more deadly firearms, machines guns, new rifles, and artillery guns. Thus in direct encounters European forces often won the day. But as the length of some resistance struggles amply demonstrates, Africans put up the best resistance with the resources they had. After the conquest of African decentralized and centralized states, the European powers set about establishing colonial state systems.
The colonial state was the machinery of administrative domination established to facilitate effective control and exploitation of the colonized societies. Partly as a result of their origins in military conquest and partly because of the racist ideology of the imperialist enterprise, the colonial states were authoritarian, bureaucratic systems. Because they were imposed and maintained by force, without the consent of the governed, the colonial states never had the effective legitimacy of normal governments.
Second, they were bureaucratic because they were administered by military officers and civil servants who were appointees of the colonial power. While they were all authoritarian, bureaucratic state systems, their forms of administration varied, partly due to the different national administrative traditions and specific imperialist ideologies of the colonizers and partly because of the political conditions in the various territories that they conquered. There was usually a governor or governor-general in the colonial capital who governed along with an appointed executive council and a legislative council of appointed and selected local and foreign members.
The governor was responsible to the colonial office and the colonial secretary in London, from whom laws, policies, and programs were received. He made some local laws and policies, however. Colonial policies and directives were implemented through a central administrative organization or a colonial secretariat, with officers responsible for different departments such as Revenue, Agriculture, Trade, Transport, Health, Education, Police, Prison, and so on.
The British colonies were often subdivided into provinces headed by provincial commissioners or residents, and then into districts headed by district officers or district commissioners. Laws and policies on taxation, public works, forced labor, mining, agricultural production, and other matters were made in London or in the colonial capital and then passed down to the lower administrative levels for enforcement.
At the provincial and district levels the British established the system of local administration popularly known as indirect rule. This system operated in alliance with preexisting political leaderships and institutions. The theory and practice of indirect rule is commonly associated with Lord Lugard, who was first the British high commissioner for northern Nigeria and later governor-general of Nigeria.
Lugard simply and wisely adapted it to his ends. It was cheap and convenient. Despite attempts to portray the use of indirect rule as an expression of British administrative genius, it was nothing of the sort. It was a pragmatic and parsimonious choice based partly on using existing functional institutions. The choice was also partly based on Britain's unwillingness to provide the resources required to administer its vast empire.
Instead, it developed the perverse view that the colonized should pay for their colonial domination.
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