Page 20 - Afrika Must Unite

THE AFRICAN BACKGROUND 5
with resistance to their greed and theft. They were better armed.
They were trained to ruthlessness. They wanted more than a
simple monopoly of trade, ruinous though that would be for the
coastal cities: they wanted loot as well. African warfare, like
Indian warfare, was designed to minimize casualties, not
maximize them. These invaders had no such care.1

It is well worth dwelling upon these facts when we recall the
pretexts on which later European colonization of Africa was
justified. Assuming the Christian responsibility of redeeming
Africa from the benightedness of barbarism, the ravages of the
European slave trade were forgotten; the enormities of the
European conquest were ignored. M aps prepared in Europe
which had borne the names of M ali and Songhay were lost.
Records of the African kingdoms were left to gather dust and
crumble away. The achievements of states that had m anu­
factured in iron and gold and carried on lucrative international
trade were expunged from memory.
They had disappeared as a result of the continuing European
penetration and spoliation. For on the heels of the Portuguese
there quickly followed Dutch, Spanish, Danish and English and
French sailors and traders. Their purposes were the same, their
methods, too. They set up forts and trading posts at various
points along our coasts, and added a living commodity to the
other items of plunder. For over three hundred years the slave
trade dominated Africa’s history; and, in fact, influences it still
today through our diminished population and its brutalizing
and retarding effects upon our socio-economic order. It does
not require a very perceptive m ind to appreciate the disastrous
consequences it has had upon African development. Whole
villages were frequently left empty of inhabitants either through
capture or flight. The num ber of inhabitants drawn off the
African continent as slaves has been variously put between
twenty and fifty million.
In Ghana, there exist many reminders of those days. Chris-
tiansborg Castle, which the Danes built in the seventeenth
century, still stands. So also do forts at Cape Coast, their guns
still facing out to sea, where they once were used to ward off

1 Basil Davidson: op. cit., pp. 168-70.