History of Africa Quotes

“Few were surprised when the ‘Great Rebellion’ broke out on 29 March 1947. In the initial months of the rebellion, several hundred Europeans and their Malagasy ‘collaborators’ were killed as rebels seized control of eastern parts of the country. Over the following year, however, the French suppressed the rebellion with ruthless brutality, leaving at least 90,000 killed.”
― Kevin Shillington, History of Africa

“At the independence ceremony on 30 June 1960, King Baudouin of Belgium made a paternalistic speech referring to Belgium’s noble ‘civilising mission’ and praising his predecessor, Leopold”
― Kevin Shillington, History of Africa

“By 1956, however, the tiny educated minority of clerks, teachers and shopkeepers in the main urban centres were raising demands for the abolition of the racial discrimination that dominated all aspects of social and economic life in the colony. The Belgians believed they could satisfy this group by permitting them to take part in open elections for local government in the principal towns of Leopoldville (Kinshasa), Stanleyville (Kisangani), Elizabethville (Lubumbashi) and Luluabourg (Kananga).”
― Kevin Shillington, History of Africa

“He negotiated union with Zanzibar in 1964, and thus became president of the Republic of Tanzania, 1964–85, when he became one of the few African presidents of his generation to retire from office.”
― Kevin Shillington, History of Africa

“The movement of India towards independence in 1947 heralded the break-up of the British Empire. Self-government for Africans could not be far behind. In British West Africa, the movement towards independence was led by the colony of Gold Coast, soon to become the independent state of Ghana.”
― Kevin Shillington, History of Africa

“Colonial governments were generally too intent on ordering and instructing rather than consulting and supporting local African initiatives.”
― Kevin Shillington, History of Africa

“But, by 1945, African expectations had been transformed, especially among the educated élite. No longer satisfied with reforming a system, they turned to demanding the overthrow of the whole deeply humiliating concept of colonial rule. Colonial authorities resisted as long as possible, but the colonial powers were exhausted after the Second World War, and a combination of popular protest and political party agitation brought most to the negotiating table in due course.”
― Kevin Shillington, History of Africa

“In British west Africa, the war years saw educated Africans increasingly being brought into higher administrative positions and onto elected local councils. British colonial administrators began to contemplate a time, in the distant future, when Africans would be allowed some degree of self-government. Significantly, Portugal, which had remained neutral in the war, felt no such obligation to introduce reform in their African colonies.”
― Kevin Shillington, History of Africa

“The British, in particular, used films, radio and officially sponsored newspapers to spread wartime propaganda. They sought to persuade Africans to cooperate with the colonial authorities, to volunteer for war service or produce more food and raw materials. In seeking to persuade in this way, rather than relying on naked force, colonial authorities were admitting a need to explain their policies and to open a discussion with their African subjects. Literate Africans were quick to respond.”
― Kevin Shillington, History of Africa

“Allied shipping repairs gave a great boost to South African steel manufacturing. By 1943, manufacturing had overtaken mining as the largest employer and producer of wealth in South Africa. With increasing land restrictions and poverty in the rural areas, black people were already pouring into the rising manufacturing centres of the Witwatersrand, Cape Town and Port Elizabeth. It was a major period of black urbanisation in South Africa, and a time of great opportunities for some. But it was also a time of growing black urban poverty and unemployment, as the numbers seeking work far outstripped the numbers of new jobs available. It was a situation already approaching crisis point when the 200,000 whites and 100,000 blacks serving in Allied armies overseas returned to South Africa after the war.”
― Kevin Shillington, History of Africa

“Within the Union of South Africa, the war stimulated a tremendous growth in manufacturing industry. With a shortage of imports from Europe, South Africa began to process their own food, and manufacture their own clothing, chemicals, machinery and tools.”
― Kevin Shillington, History of Africa

“The commercial and military demands of the Second World War stimulated colonial investment in African harbours and airports on a scale not seen since their initial development of the railways. In a number of west African ports, such as Freetown and Lagos, docks were deepened so as to admit larger vessels, and harbour facilities improved.”
― Kevin Shillington, History of Africa

“in 1943, Africans from French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa made up more than half of the total of the Free French army.”
― Kevin Shillington, History of Africa

“The general brutality and injustices of French rule in this period provoked regular uprisings throughout the 1920s, culminating in the revolt of 1928. Known as the Kongo-Wara rebellion (1928–31), from the word for ‘hoe handle’, the symbol of the peasantry, the revolt was led by a messianic holy man named Karinou who claimed supernatural powers. What started as a non-violent campaign soon turned to a violent revolt by the long-oppressed Baya. After some initial successes, the Baya suffered a major defeat at the hands of French reinforcements in which Karinou was killed. When resistance continued into the 1930s the French resorted to blowing up the caves where thousands of rebels and refugees had sought refuge. The scale of the slaughter that accompanied the violent suppression of this revolt was one of the great atrocities of colonial rule in tropical Africa.”
― Kevin Shillington, History of Africa

“French speakers went to France, while English speakers went mostly to African American institutions in North America. In the 1930s and 40s, more than 100 west Africans went to US universities, among them Azikiwe (‘Zik’) of Nigeria and Nkrumah of the Gold Coast, both graduates of Lincoln University. From among these overseas graduates came most of the leaders of the nationalist and independence movements that followed in the decades after the Second World War.”
― Kevin Shillington, History of Africa

“Basically, colonial governments were only interested in training a small élite to fill the lower rungs of the administrative service. They saw mass education as a danger to be avoided. Thus, aside from the Qur’anic schools, in French West and Equatorial Africa in the 1920s, a mere 3 per cent of school-age children attended school, mission or state.”
― Kevin Shillington, History of Africa

“European-run plantations were a feature of parts of Mozambique, Angola and the Belgian Congo. But these were not comparable to the individual, small settler estates characteristic of Kenya or Rhodesia.”
― Kevin Shillington, History of Africa

“Another new major killer was tuberculosis, which thrived in the rising colonial urban centres of African wage labour, especially in the crowded, unhealthy conditions of mining compounds.”
― Kevin Shillington, History of Africa

“In January 1918, shortly after the USA entered the war, President Woodrow Wilson pronounced ‘Fourteen Points’ that ought to form the basis of any postwar settlement.”
― Kevin Shillington, History of Africa

“influenza struck hardest where people were already weakened by warfare, hunger or poor working conditions.”
― Kevin Shillington, History of Africa

“The development of cocoa as an export crop from Gold Coast (Ghana) was a striking example of African initiative”
― Kevin Shillington, History of Africa

“in 1911, the British company Lever Brothers (later Unilever) was granted the monopoly rights to purchase all palm products from an area covering three-quarters of a million hectares.”
― Kevin Shillington, History of Africa

“American missionary working in the Congo, Reverend J.B. Murphy, described the barbarity of the system he had witnessed: It has reduced the people to a state of utter despair. Each town in the district is forced to bring a certain quantity [of rubber] to the headquarters of the commissaire every Sunday … The soldiers drive the people into the bush. If they will not go they are shot down, and their left hands cut off and taken as trophies to the commissaire … These hands, the hands of men, women and children, are placed in rows before the commissaire, who counts them to see that the soldiers have not wasted the cartridges. The commissaire is paid a commission of about 1d. a pound upon all the rubber he gets. It is therefore to his interest to get as much as he can …”
― Kevin Shillington, History of Africa

“Migrant labour, encouraged to meet the demands of the colonial economy, systematically drained rural areas of their male workforce. Women may thus have gained some level of social empowerment, but the overall effect was a social and economic weakening of rural society at a time when the vast majority of Africa’s population was still rurally based. Migrant labour and cash taxation was part of a deliberate policy of forcing Africans into a cash economy on terms set by colonial employers. This undermined economic self-sufficiency and led to a dramatic increase in rural poverty. Indeed, it can be argued that the roots of modern Africa’s persistent rural and peri-urban poverty can be traced to the first generation of colonial rule.”
― Kevin Shillington, History of Africa

“David Livingstone. On Livingstone’s death in the Lake Bangweulu region of modern Zambia in 1873, Chuma supervised the embalming of the body. It was then taken in a caravan of 60 men, by Chuma and his companion Susi, to the coastal town of Bagamoyo for transportation to and burial in England. The journey took them ten months. They received little thanks and no reward from a parsimonious British government.”
― Kevin Shillington, History of Africa

“it was 1827 before Frenchman René Caillé became the first European to return with a first-hand account of Timbuktu (see Map 22.1). Ironically, Caillé was disbelieved because his description of drab and dusty Timbuktu failed to live up to Europe,s golden expectations.”
― Kevin Shillington, History of Africa

“a racist disregard for the value of African lives, and partly driven by a calculated desire to instil a level of fear that would safeguard European colonial rule.”
― Kevin Shillington, History of Africa

“This story reveals the formation of the ‘new states’ that were arbitrarily imposed on the continent and the identity of the colonial power that would oversee them for the next two or three generations. This is significant, for a future generation of largely culturally assimilated African leaders would treat these colonial boundaries as sacrosanct. In doing so, the colonial powers and their successors left unresolved conflicts of cultural and political identity that were to plague independent Africa even into the twenty-first century.”
― Kevin Shillington, History of Africa

“In 1881, a Muslim holy man from Dongola, Muhammad Ahmad, declared that he was the Mahdi, ‘the Guided One’ the saviour who would restore Muslim purity to the faithful of Islam.”
― Kevin Shillington, History of Africa

“Although in theory Britain now ruled the country in the name of their appointed pasha, Egypt had, in practice, become a British colony.”
― Kevin Shillington, History of Africa