The activation in Ethiopia this week of Africa’s largest hydro-electric dam, reminds us of the continent’s unfinished business with the outside world. The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (Gerd) is among the foremost 20 hydro-electric plants in the world. With more than 5.15 gigawatts installed already, it can power Kenya’s electric energy twice over.
President William Ruto, who was present at the event in the Nile Valley, says Kenya will buy some of this power. This is good and bad. It is good because Kenyans are assured of yet one more stable source of electric power supply. But it is also terrible because we have messed up our own efforts to build water and electric supply dams. We have turned them into gravy trains, to feed our dishonest appetites. The story of Kimwarer, Arror and sundry dams into which billions of shillings were sunk, is already forgotten. Meanwhile, others have soldiered on. We have now queued up, ready to buy from them. That’s how we roll.
Ethiopia’s Prime Minister, Abiy Ahmed, probably exaggerates when he describes Gerd as “the greatest achievement in the history of the Black race”. Yet, the symbolic significance of the dam cannot be lost on us. It is loaded with meaning. Gerd is a profound statement on African resistance and sovereignty. Egypt has been hotly opposed to the construction of the dam that began in 2011 under Meles Zenawi. Cairo hangs on the misplaced River Nile Waters Agreements of the 1920s and the ’50s.
These accords ignored critical stakeholders in the waters. Yet, Egypt wants to invoke them, virtually to the exclusion of the countries upstream. These include Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. They represent the headwaters of the River Nile. Their location disturbed 19thCentury Industrial Europe for long. They sent one explorer after the other to look for them. Historians Ronald Robinson, Andrew Gallagher, and Alice Denny, have called what drove them “the official mind of imperialism.”
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The mind of the 19th Century European imperialism is captured in the historical assertion attributed to the British Royal Geographical Society, in its time to the effect, “Whoever controls the headwaters of the Nile will control trade in the Mediterranean.”
The British gained this control by signing the 1929 Nile treaty with themselves. They pretended that it had been signed between Egypt and Sudan. But there is an African saying that a dog and its tail cannot be separated to become two things. For a start, Egypt was only nominally independent. Sudan, on the other hand, was a colony, jointly of Britain and Egypt. They called their government the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium (1899–1956). Fancy, therefore, Britain claiming to witness Egypt signing an accord with Sudan under such imbalance. The genuine Sudanese voice and signature was absent.
Yet, here was Sudan, being claimed to grant Egypt dominance over the waters of River Nile. Fancy, further, Sudan, Ethiopia, and the countries of the Lake Victoria Basin (the source of the Nile) being restricted by Egypt on how they may use (more accurately “not use”) the waters of Lake Victoria. Imagine them being threatened with war, in the event that they do not do what Egypt says. All this because of an out-dated agreement that strangers signed among themselves. It is an agreement that ought never to have been signed in the first place.
Gerd calls to mind the scam signatures in this agreement. But Gerd also liberates Ethiopia from this anachronistic deal. To that extent, Abiy is right. Gerd is a great happening in Black history. The intersection of this history with that of Europe has been like that of a horse and its rider. Prof Hugh Trevor–Roper, an Oxford University professor of history (1957–1980), was the owner of these words. He believed that in this intersection, the African must be the horse, and the European the rider.
On this account alone, visitors whom Africa has over the centuries welcomed in good faith, have lured and drafted her into scams, disguised as agreements. The harmful aftermath of our guests’ selfish agendas in gone times lingers on in many parts of the continent, long after our relatives who welcomed these guests are gone and forgotten. The visitors, too, are subjects of history. Unfortunately, we Africans do not bother to interact with this history. Our leaders, from Yoweri Museveni to William Ruto, tell us, “History is a useless subject which should not be studied.” Kunta Kinte!
So how will we understand why successive generations of Africans continue to wallow in hopelessness, because of the lies that Europe told their great-great grandparents? Anyone who has not read Walter Rodney’s evergreen How Europe Underdeveloped Africa has no business in State House on the continent. From Sir Harry Johnstone and the Buganda Agreement of 1900, to Donald Stewart and Edouard Girouard of the Masai Agreements of 1904 and 1911 (respectively), the stench of deceit is suffocating. It refuses to go away, well over a century later.
Look at the Buganda Agreement. It was entered into in 1900, between Johnstone and Sir Apollo Kagwa. Kagwa was the Katikiro (or Prime Minister of Buganda). He signed on behalf of the Kabaka, who was then a small boy, called Kabaka Chua. There was a cocktail of other Baganda notables, who hardly understood what Johnson and the British were doing. Worst of all, the boy Kabaka did not even know that anything was happening. Kagwa signed. The other notables and grandees put their thumbprints on the paper.
Regardless, Buganda became a British protectorate. The Kabaka lost sovereignty. In a pork barrel politics scenario, a new landed aristocracy that was loyal to the British, and not to the Kabaka, was created. They were given land called “mailo land.” Up to this day, the social inequalities that Harry Johnstone created in Uganda are still felt. Numerous land disputes and rural inequalities in Uganda derive from this colonial pact.
But back to Kenya, the toxic impact of the two Masai Agreements of 1904 and 1911 is also still felt. The Masai lost their best grazing lands to foreigners, in exchange for nothing. Persistent land disputes between the Masai and other people, in both Kenya and Tanzania, are rooted in the two agreements. They also drive poverty and sundry livelihood uncertainties among the Masai. When you come across the Masai walking with their cattle in the streets of Nairobi, seek not to find what is happening.
You are witnessing the aftermath of non-literate Masai elders being deceived into putting their fingerprints on documents they did not understand. By that alone, they were understood to have “voluntarily surrendered” their best lands to foreigners. It was now said that they had agreed to restrict themselves to semi-dry areas in Laikipia; and that they would not venture out of them.
Do we need to revisit some of these signatures into which our forefathers were blindfolded? Ethiopia has defied a wicked treaty, whose grotesque inks continue to trouble those who were never involved in its negotiation and autographs. At the turn of the century and the millennium, the World Bank boldly petitioned Africa to claim the 21st Century. The new age was Africa’s to claim or squander, the bank stated. Everything seemed just right. Population, education, improved life expectancy, sovereign consciousness, and expanding awareness on civil liberties.
How possible is it for a continent shackled by troublesome ghosts from colonial and pre-colonial encounters to claim a century now at the midpoint of its first half? Is the first quarter of the 21st Century already lost for Africa? Does the continent need to exorcise European ghosts before she could claim the century?
Europe’s offensives against Africa can be mind boggling. They are to be found in every part of the continent. The French and Belgians were master treaty makers on the continent in the precolonial age.
And they did not hesitate to employ violence, whenever they thought it was necessary. The wounds are still yawning, more than a century later. Pierre de Brazza signed up in what is now Congo Brazzaville (literally “Brazza’s town,” named for him), on behalf of the French government.
Across the great river, Henry Morton Stanley gave what is today the Democratic Republic of Congo to King Leopold II of Belgium. It became his personal property. Get that right. During the Berlin Conference that partitioned Africa among the great European powers (1884–1885) DRC was styled as the Congo Free State. It was “free” to the extent that it was this king’s own thing. It was not even a colony of Belgium at this time in history.
The Congo Free State has left a very long shadow on Africa. It was the ultimate symbol and driver of concessions and treaties; the negation of African sovereignty. And the Congo still pays the price today. Africa feels it. Leopold’s treaties that placed the Congo Basin into his pocket were coerced upon African chiefs. They were disguised as “protection pacts” and “friendly concessions.” These pacts were, in effect, industrial scale extensions of similar treaties that had been signed in Matabeleland, robbing Africa of rich agricultural lands, and mining fields.
Europe justified King Leopold II’s plunder of Congo’s enormous minerals and forests by the pretext that he had come “to civilize Africa.” He had also come “to abolish slave trade.” Kunta Kinte! Never mind that slave labour was used to collect wild rubber and ivory by this man, whom Europe recognized and document as a Christian gentleman, and an abolitionist of slavery! Adam Hochschild has lucidly documented the atrocious extractive brutality in his 1998 book aptly titled King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa.
It is a shame that the brutal exploitation that King Leopold began in the Congo in the 1800s continues today. But it is also a metaphor for the African condition everywhere else on the continent. The DRC is the home of hostages, refugees, terror, murder and mayhem at the peak of these offensives. Yet to lesser degrees, and in different guises, they are the continental norm.
Demographic catastrophes continue unabated in Eastern DRC, sometimes sucking in neighbouring African leaders as combatants with selfish agendas. They are the latter day Kings Leopold II. Homegrown African predators with insatiable megalomaniac appetites. What Europe did in disguise, they do unashamedly, as appendages of latter-day external plunderers. The Congo is a humanitarian scandal. Indeed, Africa is a humanitarian scandal. The scam is driven by foreigners and abetted by Africans in State Houses, all over the continent.
Extraction without justice is the name of the game. The attributes include child labour and child soldiers; conflict minerals, environmental disasters, and unethical supply chains. Media images of African leaders in powerful handshakes and profound hugs speak to their undisclosed collaborative successes in these spaces. As in the past, foreign multinational corporations have secured opaque concessions through our political elites. Hardly anything is factored in for local populations, and the African countries themselves. In effect, the story of Africa in the 21st Century is the narrative of gangster regimes in different guises, perfecting new brands of defective agreements that outsiders brought to the continent.
Do African citizens need to seek from their governments full disclosure of all agreements that have caged them in external binds? Africans must unmask the past before they can advance. They must name deceits in the concessions that have been entered on their behalf by both their own governments in post-colonial times, and those that were imposed by outsiders. They must reframe the law, reclaim what is theirs, and restore property rights on the continent to factory settings.
To realise restoration and reparations, the study of history is obligatory. Africa is world history ought to be made a compulsory subject at all levels of learning. This is regardless that someone is studying Medicine, or Archaeology. Your Medicine only makes you a hospital robot if you do not know who you are and where you have come from. You don’t even know where you are going if you don’t know how you have got here. You live on daily instalments of nothing.
Re-engagement with the outside world need not be violent, however. There is much scope for re-engagement through discourse. Europe, especially, needs to demonstrate that it has recovered from the hyenic appetites that drove her explorers and sundry prospectors, in all their profligacy, to other people’s thresholds for murder, mayhem and plunder.
Ethiopia’s Gerd is an invitation to new conversations in Africa, and between Africa and the rest of the world. Ethiopia is a metaphor for Africa’s sovereignty, both in the historical context and today. Perhaps the African Union in Addis could lead the way?
– Dr Muluka, is a strategic communications adviser and DNA secretary general. www.barrackmuluka.co.ke
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The activation in Ethiopia this week of Africa’s largest hydro-electric dam, reminds us of the continent’s unfinished business with the outside world. The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (Gerd) is among the foremost 20 hydro-electric plants in the world. With more than 5.15 gigawatts installed already, it can power Kenya’s electric energy twice over.
President William Ruto, who was present at the event in the Nile Valley, says Kenya will buy some of this power. This is good and bad. It is good because Kenyans are assured of yet one more stable source of electric power supply. But it is also terrible because we have messed up our own efforts to build water and electric supply dams. We have turned them into gravy trains, to feed our dishonest appetites. The story of Kimwarer, Arror and sundry dams into which billions of shillings were sunk, is already forgotten. Meanwhile, others have soldiered on. We have now queued up, ready to buy from them. That’s how we roll.
Ethiopia’s Prime Minister, Abiy Ahmed, probably exaggerates when he describes Gerd as “the greatest achievement in the history of the Black race”. Yet, the symbolic significance of the dam cannot be lost on us. It is loaded with meaning. Gerd is a profound statement on African resistance and sovereignty. Egypt has been hotly opposed to the construction of the dam that began in 2011 under Meles Zenawi. Cairo hangs on the misplaced River Nile Waters Agreements of the 1920s and the ’50s.
These accords ignored critical stakeholders in the waters. Yet, Egypt wants to invoke them, virtually to the exclusion of the countries upstream. These include Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. They represent the headwaters of the River Nile. Their location disturbed 19thCentury Industrial Europe for long. They sent one explorer after the other to look for them. Historians Ronald Robinson, Andrew Gallagher, and Alice Denny, have called what drove them “the official mind of imperialism.”
Follow The Standard
channel
on WhatsApp
The mind of the 19th Century European imperialism is captured in the historical assertion attributed to the British Royal Geographical Society, in its time to the effect, “Whoever controls the headwaters of the Nile will control trade in the Mediterranean.”
The British gained this control by signing the 1929 Nile treaty with themselves. They pretended that it had been signed between Egypt and Sudan. But there is an African saying that a dog and its tail cannot be separated to become two things. For a start, Egypt was only nominally independent. Sudan, on the other hand, was a colony, jointly of Britain and Egypt. They called their government the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium (1899–1956). Fancy, therefore, Britain claiming to witness Egypt signing an accord with Sudan under such imbalance. The genuine Sudanese voice and signature was absent.
Yet, here was Sudan, being claimed to grant Egypt dominance over the waters of River Nile. Fancy, further, Sudan, Ethiopia, and the countries of the Lake Victoria Basin (the source of the Nile) being restricted by Egypt on how they may use (more accurately “not use”) the waters of Lake Victoria. Imagine them being threatened with war, in the event that they do not do what Egypt says. All this because of an out-dated agreement that strangers signed among themselves. It is an agreement that ought never to have been signed in the first place.
Gerd calls to mind the scam signatures in this agreement. But Gerd also liberates Ethiopia from this anachronistic deal. To that extent, Abiy is right. Gerd is a great happening in Black history. The intersection of this history with that of Europe has been like that of a horse and its rider. Prof Hugh Trevor–Roper, an Oxford University professor of history (1957–1980), was the owner of these words. He believed that in this intersection, the African must be the horse, and the European the rider.
On this account alone, visitors whom Africa has over the centuries welcomed in good faith, have lured and drafted her into scams, disguised as agreements. The harmful aftermath of our guests’ selfish agendas in gone times lingers on in many parts of the continent, long after our relatives who welcomed these guests are gone and forgotten. The visitors, too, are subjects of history. Unfortunately, we Africans do not bother to interact with this history. Our leaders, from Yoweri Museveni to William Ruto, tell us, “History is a useless subject which should not be studied.” Kunta Kinte!
So how will we understand why successive generations of Africans continue to wallow in hopelessness, because of the lies that Europe told their great-great grandparents? Anyone who has not read Walter Rodney’s evergreen How Europe Underdeveloped Africa has no business in State House on the continent. From Sir Harry Johnstone and the Buganda Agreement of 1900, to Donald Stewart and Edouard Girouard of the Masai Agreements of 1904 and 1911 (respectively), the stench of deceit is suffocating. It refuses to go away, well over a century later.
Look at the Buganda Agreement. It was entered into in 1900, between Johnstone and Sir Apollo Kagwa. Kagwa was the Katikiro (or Prime Minister of Buganda). He signed on behalf of the Kabaka, who was then a small boy, called Kabaka Chua. There was a cocktail of other Baganda notables, who hardly understood what Johnson and the British were doing. Worst of all, the boy Kabaka did not even know that anything was happening. Kagwa signed. The other notables and grandees put their thumbprints on the paper.
Regardless, Buganda became a British protectorate. The Kabaka lost sovereignty. In a pork barrel politics scenario, a new landed aristocracy that was loyal to the British, and not to the Kabaka, was created. They were given land called “mailo land.” Up to this day, the social inequalities that Harry Johnstone created in Uganda are still felt. Numerous land disputes and rural inequalities in Uganda derive from this colonial pact.
But back to Kenya, the toxic impact of the two Masai Agreements of 1904 and 1911 is also still felt. The Masai lost their best grazing lands to foreigners, in exchange for nothing. Persistent land disputes between the Masai and other people, in both Kenya and Tanzania, are rooted in the two agreements. They also drive poverty and sundry livelihood uncertainties among the Masai. When you come across the Masai walking with their cattle in the streets of Nairobi, seek not to find what is happening.
You are witnessing the aftermath of non-literate Masai elders being deceived into putting their fingerprints on documents they did not understand. By that alone, they were understood to have “voluntarily surrendered” their best lands to foreigners. It was now said that they had agreed to restrict themselves to semi-dry areas in Laikipia; and that they would not venture out of them.
Do we need to revisit some of these signatures into which our forefathers were blindfolded? Ethiopia has defied a wicked treaty, whose grotesque inks continue to trouble those who were never involved in its negotiation and autographs. At the turn of the century and the millennium, the World Bank boldly petitioned Africa to claim the 21st Century. The new age was Africa’s to claim or squander, the bank stated. Everything seemed just right. Population, education, improved life expectancy, sovereign consciousness, and expanding awareness on civil liberties.
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How possible is it for a continent shackled by troublesome ghosts from colonial and pre-colonial encounters to claim a century now at the midpoint of its first half? Is the first quarter of the 21st Century already lost for Africa? Does the continent need to exorcise European ghosts before she could claim the century?
Europe’s offensives against Africa can be mind boggling. They are to be found in every part of the continent. The French and Belgians were master treaty makers on the continent in the precolonial age.
And they did not hesitate to employ violence, whenever they thought it was necessary. The wounds are still yawning, more than a century later. Pierre de Brazza signed up in what is now Congo Brazzaville (literally “Brazza’s town,” named for him), on behalf of the French government.
Across the great river, Henry Morton Stanley gave what is today the Democratic Republic of Congo to King Leopold II of Belgium. It became his personal property. Get that right. During the Berlin Conference that partitioned Africa among the great European powers (1884–1885) DRC was styled as the Congo Free State. It was “free” to the extent that it was this king’s own thing. It was not even a colony of Belgium at this time in history.
The Congo Free State has left a very long shadow on Africa. It was the ultimate symbol and driver of concessions and treaties; the negation of African sovereignty. And the Congo still pays the price today. Africa feels it. Leopold’s treaties that placed the Congo Basin into his pocket were coerced upon African chiefs. They were disguised as “protection pacts” and “friendly concessions.” These pacts were, in effect, industrial scale extensions of similar treaties that had been signed in Matabeleland, robbing Africa of rich agricultural lands, and mining fields.
Europe justified King Leopold II’s plunder of Congo’s enormous minerals and forests by the pretext that he had come “to civilize Africa.” He had also come “to abolish slave trade.” Kunta Kinte! Never mind that slave labour was used to collect wild rubber and ivory by this man, whom Europe recognized and document as a Christian gentleman, and an abolitionist of slavery! Adam Hochschild has lucidly documented the atrocious extractive brutality in his 1998 book aptly titled King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa.
It is a shame that the brutal exploitation that King Leopold began in the Congo in the 1800s continues today. But it is also a metaphor for the African condition everywhere else on the continent. The DRC is the home of hostages, refugees, terror, murder and mayhem at the peak of these offensives. Yet to lesser degrees, and in different guises, they are the continental norm.
Demographic catastrophes continue unabated in Eastern DRC, sometimes sucking in neighbouring African leaders as combatants with selfish agendas. They are the latter day Kings Leopold II. Homegrown African predators with insatiable megalomaniac appetites. What Europe did in disguise, they do unashamedly, as appendages of latter-day external plunderers. The Congo is a humanitarian scandal. Indeed, Africa is a humanitarian scandal. The scam is driven by foreigners and abetted by Africans in State Houses, all over the continent.
Extraction without justice is the name of the game. The attributes include child labour and child soldiers; conflict minerals, environmental disasters, and unethical supply chains. Media images of African leaders in powerful handshakes and profound hugs speak to their undisclosed collaborative successes in these spaces. As in the past, foreign multinational corporations have secured opaque concessions through our political elites. Hardly anything is factored in for local populations, and the African countries themselves. In effect, the story of Africa in the 21st Century is the narrative of gangster regimes in different guises, perfecting new brands of defective agreements that outsiders brought to the continent.
Do African citizens need to seek from their governments full disclosure of all agreements that have caged them in external binds? Africans must unmask the past before they can advance. They must name deceits in the concessions that have been entered on their behalf by both their own governments in post-colonial times, and those that were imposed by outsiders. They must reframe the law, reclaim what is theirs, and restore property rights on the continent to factory settings.
To realise restoration and reparations, the study of history is obligatory. Africa is world history ought to be made a compulsory subject at all levels of learning. This is regardless that someone is studying Medicine, or Archaeology. Your Medicine only makes you a hospital robot if you do not know who you are and where you have come from. You don’t even know where you are going if you don’t know how you have got here. You live on daily instalments of nothing.
Re-engagement with the outside world need not be violent, however. There is much scope for re-engagement through discourse. Europe, especially, needs to demonstrate that it has recovered from the hyenic appetites that drove her explorers and sundry prospectors, in all their profligacy, to other people’s thresholds for murder, mayhem and plunder.
Ethiopia’s Gerd is an invitation to new conversations in Africa, and between Africa and the rest of the world. Ethiopia is a metaphor for Africa’s sovereignty, both in the historical context and today. Perhaps the African Union in Addis could lead the way?
– Dr Muluka, is a strategic communications adviser and DNA secretary general. www.barrackmuluka.co.ke
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By Barrack Muluka