21. What Does a Butterfly Collector do in the Congo?
The Berlin Conference and the Colonisation of Africa
In October 1887 a veterinarian in Belfast was tinkering with his son’s bicycle. Its metal wheels made the cycle slow, so to fix this, John Dunlop took some rubber that he used in his veterinary practice; he added the inflated tube of sheet rubber to a wooden wheel and rolled both the wooden and metal wheels across his yard in a game to see which could roll furthest. The inflated wooden wheel continued on long after the metal wheel had stopped rolling. The pneumatic tyre was born.
Dunlop’s timing was impeccable. Two years earlier the Rover had first appeared on the market. In contrast to the penny-farthing, the Rover was a rear-wheel-drive, chain-driven ‘safety bicycle’ with two similar-sized wheels. It is the bicycle design still most common today. The two inventions – the new bicycle and the inflatable rubber tyre – transformed the bicycle industry. Although Dunlop retired in 1895 and his company was sold the following year, it was renamed Dunlop Rubber in the early twentieth century, just as Ford’s first Model T, with its insatiable demand for rubber tyres, was rolling off the assembly line.
To satisfy this demand, new sources of wild rubber had to be found. Brazil had long been the only source, but the labour-intensive and generally unpleasant nature of harvesting rubber meant that production could not easily be scaled up. Central Africa offered the perfect solution. Here was a region richly endowed with wild rubber, with a large negative trade balance and a seemingly docile labour force. What could possibly go wrong?
It helps to start the story a bit earlier. In 1876 the king of the Belgians, Leopold II, hosted a geographic conference in Brussels to which he invited explorers. His aim was to stir up interest in the region around the Congo River, ostensibly as a civilising mission to ‘improve’ the local Congolese. After the conference, Henry Morton Stanley, an American explorer of Africa who is largely remembered for his quip ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume’ when meeting the famous Scottish explorer and missionary David Livingstone in 1871, was appointed by Leopold to explore the Congo River further and sign treaties with the local chiefs living on its banks.
But it was not only Leopold who was interested in Africa. One consequence of the Industrial Revolution in Britain and, by the end of the nineteenth century, also in the United States and Western Europe was a rise in the relative prices of commodities. Many of these commodities –such as ivory, groundnuts, palm oil, gum, sugar, rubber, cotton and various minerals – were found in Africa, and made the continent an attractive place for trade.1 But imports could not keep up with demand – and, in any case, it required the cooperation of local entrepreneurs. Having to pay increasingly more for commodity imports from Africa, European rulers began to consider an alternative approach.
This became clear when Otto von Bismarck, chancellor of the German Empire, convened a conference of fourteen countries in November 1884 to discuss the principles that should guide European colonisation of African territories. Attended by Britain, France, the Ottoman Empire and the United States, among others, the conference opened in November 1884 and concluded in February 1885. The outcome – the General Act of the Berlin Conference – is generally considered to have formalised the Scramble for Africa by European powers, although it is perhaps best to see the Berlin Conference in a broader context, as one of many steps in the process of the European colonisation and occupation of Africa. Just as European trade in the Indian Ocean had morphed into colonisation, a topic we discussed in Chapter 11, so too trade over several decades turned into the European conquest and colonisation of Africa.
But the Berlin Conference was an important moment. The delegates around the table were perhaps unaware of (or uninterested in) the implications of their decisions, but in reality they were deciding the futures of nations. As Lord Salisbury, the British representative, noted: ‘We have been engaged in drawing lines upon maps where no white man’s feet have ever trod; we have been giving away mountains and rivers and lakes to each other, only hindered by the small impediment that we never knew exactly where the mountains and rivers and lakes were.’
In 2016 two economists, Stelios Michalopoulos and Elias Papaioannou, published a paper that investigated the consequences of this partitioning of Africa.2 To do this they used George Murdock’s Ethnolinguistic Map, which shows all the boundaries of African ethnic communities and kingdoms before colonisation and identifies those ethnic groups that were partitioned by the new colonial boundaries drawn up at the Berlin Conference. The point was to compare the outcomes today of those ethnic groups that were partitioned by the Conference delegates with those that were not. The outcome they were most interested in was violence, so they used a dataset of all acts of political violence that occurred on the continent between 1997 and 2013. These included conflicts between government forces, rebels and militias, and violence against civilians.
Their findings revealed the long-term consequences of the arbitrary partitioning of Africa. An ethnic group that was partitioned, they found, had an 8 per cent greater likelihood of some act of violence than an ethnic group that was not partitioned. The intensity of the conflicts was also 40 per cent worse for partitioned ethnicities. The largest effect was on conflict between governments and rebel groups; they found no effect, for example, of ethnic partitioning on riots and protests. This confirms what we know from history: partitioned ethnic groups that form minorities in a country are more likely to ‘face discrimination from the national government’ and therefore engage in rebellions, ‘often with the support of their co-ethnics on the other side of the border’.3
The effects of partitioning are not only apparent in the likelihood of violence. Using a modern-day survey across twenty African countries, Michalopoulos and Papaioannou showed that the members of a partitioned ethnic group today have fewer household assets, poorer access to public utilities, and lower levels of education. This is not because the countries in which these partitioned groups reside are necessarily poorer; ‘rather it is driven by the poorer economic circumstances of members of split ethnicities irrespective of their actual residence’.4
The Scramble for Africa began a haphazard process of European colonisation of the African continent that would formally end during the second half of the twentieth century. European occupation and rule was neither a uniform nor a linear process; the motives for the colonisation of Africa and the ways in which it was carried out varied considerably between colonial powers, and depended on the types of political and social systems in the colonised territories as well as the timing of the intervention.5 This has made understanding the impact of colonisation a very difficult and much-debated issue, with some scholars arguing that colonisation brought formal education and new technologies to the continent, thereby improving living standards, while others point to the subjugation and repression that many Africans had to endure under European rule and conclude that colonisation was clearly detrimental – and that it has never truly ended.
The reason there is so much debate is that there is no plausible research design. That is, almost all of Africa was colonised; we do not have sufficient observations of African territories that were not colonised. That makes our usual tools to measure the impact of a historical shock unsuitable and explains why there are so many different interpretations. As social scientists, though, it is our duty to think of innovative ways to answer this question in the most rigorous of ways. It means that we have to think hard about the counterfactual: what would have been the outcome if colonisation had not happened? That is what the economic historians Leander Heldring and James Robinson explore in ‘Colonialism and economic development in Africa’.
Before we turn to their findings, it is perhaps useful to consider the type of question we will ask. In economic history we usually distinguish between positive and normative questions. Positive questions ask ‘what happened’. They are interested in testable, refutable facts. Normative questions ask ‘whether this was good or bad’. This implies a value judgement. These are much harder questions to answer because they are based on the norms and values of those asking the questions. And when there are different norms and values in a society, the same normative questions could have different answers, even if the facts are the same.
When the question about the impact of colonisation is considered, most people immediately jump to a normative interpretation: whether colonisation was ‘good’ or ‘bad’. That is not what we want to answer here. We want instead to understand what colonisation was: how, where, when and by whom? What, when and why did Europeans intervene and how, when and why did Africans respond? If we know this, it will help us to ascertain how and why people (as individuals and groups) behaved the way they did. That is ultimately what we are interested in as social scientists: to construct better theories of human and social behaviour.
Although I have stressed that the experience of African colonisation varied substantially across the continent, it helps to categorise these diverse experiences. Heldring and Robinson identify three broad types of colonisation. The first concerns those regions with a centralised state at the time of colonisation. These include countries such as Botswana, Burundi, Ghana, Lesotho and Rwanda. The second concerns those regions characterised by European settlement. These are places like Kenya, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe. The third concerns everywhere else: places with no centralised state, a mixture of centralised and decentralised states, and no European settlement. These are countries such as Nigeria, Uganda, Sierra Leone and Somalia.
Evaluating each of these three colonisation types, Heldring and Robinson argue that there is little evidence that colonisation brought more rapid development than would have happened in a counterfactual world where African states continued to govern their own territories. This is especially true for the first two colonisation types: those involving centralised African states and European settlement. The third case is more uncertain because it is unlikely that central states would have developed in these places. Colonial rule may have brought a more peaceful situation than the counterfactual in the short run, but perhaps that came at the cost of long-run peace, as the Michalopoulos and Papaioannou paper clearly demonstrates.
Despite the construction of railways and other forms of infrastructure geared towards European interests, and despite investment in formal education and medicine, Heldring and Robinson conclude that in each of the colonisation types they identify, the evidence suggests that colonisation had a detrimental effect on African living standards relative to the counterfactual case of no colonisation. In their own words: ‘All in all, we find it difficult to bring the available evidence together with plausible counterfactuals to argue that there is any country today in sub-Saharan Africa which is more developed because it was colonised by Europeans. Quite the contrary.’6 Keep in mind that this does not deny that colonial powers did bring formal education, infrastructure or technology to some places – and that many Africans benefited from these investments. In Ghana, for example, African farmers profited greatly from the initial introduction of cash crops such as cocoa.7 But given the favourable terms of trade for African commodities at the time, did this economic take-off happen because of or despite colonial rule? In other words, without British involvement, would it not have happened in any case? It seems very likely. Another aspect to keep in mind is that, as the economic historian Elise Huillery has demonstrated, often these colonial investments were funded not by the colonial powers but by taxes on Africans themselves.8 And where taxes could not be raised, Africans were often coerced into forced labour.9 Although we do not have accurate estimates for incomes before European arrival, the existing anthropometric evidence we have suggests that the heights of Africans declined during colonisation.10 Taking all this evidence together, then, there is little doubt that European colonisation hurt rather than aided African development.
To understand just how debilitating colonisation could be, it helps to return to the Congo Free State, perhaps the most extreme version of colonisation in Africa. At the Berlin Conference France was ‘given’ the north bank of the Congo River (today, Congo-Brazzaville and the Central African Republic), while Portugal was given Angola. Leopold, in his personal capacity, was given the Congo (today the Democratic Republic of the Congo), an area larger than England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain combined.
When the demand for rubber increased suddenly because of John Dunlop’s invention, Leopold saw an opportunity. He gave concessions to private companies and appointed a private army of Belgian and local soldiers – the Force Publique – to compel the more than 30 million inhabitants of the Congo to harvest wild rubber. Under colonial officials such as Léon Rom, a man who otherwise liked painting, writing and butterfly collecting, the Force Publique used any and every method to ensure a supply of wild rubber. Those who resisted the concession companies and armed forces were punished with torture, mutilation and murder. What began as a tool for extraction turned into genocide. While the numbers are imprecise, an estimated 10 million Congolese were killed, just as many as all the soldiers who died during the First World War and just below the total number of Africans shipped across the Atlantic as slaves. It was one of the worst human atrocities ever committed.
The economists Sara Lowes and Eduardo Montero wanted to know whether these historical concessions still affect living standards today, more than a century after they were shut down.11 To find out, they surveyed residents living on either side of the border of the former rubber concessions. Congolese living inside these former concessions, they discovered, have lower levels of wealth, health and education. Village chiefs inside these borders also provide less infrastructure, are less democratic and are more likely to be hereditary. Leopold’s ghost remains.
Leopold himself never paid for the atrocities committed in his name. When news of the genocide reached the West, Leopold was, after a delay of several years, finally forced to relinquish ‘his’ colony to the Belgian government. In King Leopold’s Ghost, journalist Adam Hochschild discusses the terms of the handover agreement.12 The Belgian government agreed to assume all 110 million francs of debt. It also agreed to pay 45.5 million francs towards completing Leopold’s then unfinished pet building projects. And, on top of all this, the Belgian government agreed to pay their king another 50 million francs ‘as a mark of gratitude for his great sacrifices made for the Congo’.
‘Those funds were not expected to come from the Belgian taxpayer,’ Hochschild notes. ‘They were to be extracted from the Congo itself.’13
E. Frankema, J. Williamson and P. Woltjer, An economic rationale for the West African scramble? The commercial transition and the commodity price boom of 1835–1885, Journal of Economic History, 78 (1), 2018, 231–67.↩︎
S. Michalopoulos and E. Papaioannou, The long-run effects of the Scramble for Africa, American Economic Review, 106 (7), 2016, 1802–48.↩︎
Ibid., p. 1804.↩︎
Ibid., p. 1844.↩︎
L. Heldring and J. Robinson, Colonialism and economic development in Africa, in The Oxford Handbook of the Politics of Development, edited by C. Lancaster and N. van de Walle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 295–327.↩︎
Ibid., p. 300.↩︎
P. Y. Aboagye and J. Bolt, Long-term trends in income inequality: Winners and losers of economic change in Ghana, 1891–1960, Explorations in Economic History, 2021, 101405.↩︎
E. Huillery, The black man’s burden: The cost of colonization of French West Africa, Journal of Economic History, 74 (1), 2014, 1–38.↩︎
M. van Waijenburg, Financing the African colonial state: The revenue imperative and forced labor, Journal of Economic History, 78 (1), 2018, 40–80.↩︎
J. Baten and L. Maravall, The influence of colonialism on Africa’s welfare: An anthropometric study, Journal of Comparative Economics, 2021 (in press).↩︎
S. Lowes and E. Montero, Concessions, violence, and indirect rule: Evidence from the Congo Free State, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 136 (4), 2021, 2047–91.↩︎
A. Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (London: The Folio Society, 2017 [ 1998]).↩︎
Ibid., p. 272.↩︎