Historicising Africa’s subjugation - The Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Recolonisation of

Introduction

The story of Africa’s problems, challenges, and opportunities – past, present and future – has been largely told from a perspective which blames Africa and Africans for their circumstances. In this process Africa is variously labelled as a place of perennial lacks, lacking, inter alia, development, history, human rights, manners, laws, democracy, and even the will to succeed (Grosfoguel, 2007a). Yet Africa is a product of millennia of external plunder, subjugation, pillage, and strategic and sustained colonialism whose latest stage I refer to as (re)colonisa-tion in this book. (Re)colonisa(re)colonisa-tion of Africa is the consolida(re)colonisa-tion, routinising, and maintenance of Africa’s inferior position in the world. Africa is subjugated because it has to remain as a cheap source of materials (black bodies and raw materials) needed for the developed world to afford and sustain their luxurious lifestyles.

But the story of the four industrial revolutions, slave trade, colonialism, and the effect they had on humanity will always be told from different perspectives depending on the teller’s lived experiences and motives. This book expresses African perspectives and from those who experienced the dark side of Euro-North American modernity, that is, slave trade, colonialism, and the past three industrial revolutions in Africa. Global imperial designs are exposed and explored as the reason and drivers of Africa’s (re)colonisation. Immanuel Wallerstein’s world systems analysis is efficacious in deploying the globe as the unit of analysis in understanding what sustains global power structures which in turn perpetuates Africa’s marginality (Wallerstein, 1974, 2007). Global power structures, institutions, norms, and practices do not only sustain the Global North’s superiority but they also routinise, normalise, and maintain Africa’s inferior position in the capitalist global political economy.

Enslavement, slave trade, colonialism, the operations of extractive indus-tries in Africa, and the data economy are very complex and multifaceted phe-nomenon. Coloniality, coloniality of data, the 4IR, and the reality of the (re) colonisation of Africa are equally contested and multifaceted. I am aware of the existence of many alternative, competing, and at times opposing narratives especially regarding the role of technology in solving “the African problem”.

I do not expect those in London, Paris, New York, and Brussels to have the same views on colonialism as those in Juba, Nairobi, Lusaka, Lilongwe, or Nyasaka, Dambamazura, Gandavaroyi in Gokwe. When the colonisers left the United Kingdom destined for Africa as an example, what their families in the United Kingdom saw departing were brave men and women going to civ-ilise a “dark continent”, making a huge sacrifice in the service of humanity.

What our forefathers and parents received was not a civilising mission but the complete opposite. They received colonialism, brutalisation, humiliation, sub-jugation, commodification, and utter thingification, that is, the darker side of Euro-North American modernity. The views expressed in these pages are what we experienced and continue to experience in Africa. These views on the industrial revolutions and their impact on Africa and Africans are not the only narrative, I am simply stating one of the many views on the impact of the past industrial revolutions and the potential impact of the fourth industrial revolu-tion (4IR) on Africa, from Africa. In essence, this book produces a decolonial epistemic perspective on the potential impact of the 4IR on Africa.

In this book, I extensively deploy the notion of slaves and slavery. The prac-tice of slavery goes against every aspect of human rights and jusprac-tice. Human rights are taken as being born, living, and dying in dignity (Shivji, 2019, p. 7).

In simple terms, and from an African perspective, human rights is living a life devoid of humiliation.

Since the term slave and its derivatives are used quite extensively in the book, framing the institution of slavehood is proper in laying the foundation for my arguments. A slave is a person who lives a life of humiliation, a life characterised by an alienation from the self, usually enforced by violence. Besides being alienated from oneself, a slave is usually owned by another, wholly or partly, as a property of the powerful other. In a way, the slave owner will be in possession of double persons, the enslaving self and the enslaved other. On the other hand, the enslaved other will have lost their humanity to the enslaving other.

Enslaved persons are thingified. To thingify is to remove the humanity from a person by rendering them through violence the property of the powerful other.

Enslavement is a product of power relations and exists today in various forms and geographies.

A slave is owned by the powerful other because they would have lost their agency, that is, the capacity to determine their own will and make free choice.

Slaves do not govern or run their own lives. A slave does not have the agency to determine what happens in their lives. The loss of agency is very central to the practice of slavery and to the notion of data slavery, the subject of this book.

There are modern digital practices that are occurring as a result of the 4IR that are resulting in data slavery. At the centre of the practice of slavery in general and data slavery in particular is the capitalist mantra of profit by any means.

Africans have been enslaved for the past millennia. Initially, they were enslaved in order to provide manual labour, for example in the plantations of South Carolina, Haiti, Georgia, Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi. In the current dispensation they are being enslaved in order to provide data which is the new

Historicising Africa’s subjugation 19 gold and oil of the 4IR. What changes is the form of slavery that Africans will be undergoing, slavery as a capitalist endeavour merely mutates and adapts and, in the process, manages to remain both effective and omnipresent.

This book problematises, explains, and rationalises the (re)colonisation of Africa in the 4IR owing to four main factors. First, the conditions which necessitated the initial colonisation of Africa by Euro- North American states still exist and are even more amplified than they were in the 17th/ 18th cen-turies. Instead of looking at the conditions which necessitated the colonisa-tion of Africa in Africa, I look for them in Euro- North America where the colonisers came from. In other words, why did the colonisers leave the “com-fort of their homes”, risking their lives in the venomous snake and malaria- infested African tropics? Euro- North America is more trouble now than it was when Africa was initially colonised.

Second, the conditions which enabled the initial colonisation of Africa still exist and are even more amplified in Africa. The conditions in Africa that made it relatively easy for the colonisers to colonise Africa still exists. Third, the 4IR will further entrench Africa as the weakest member of the international com-munity and fourth, global cartels, networks of coloniality, technology- related multinational corporations have turned big data into capital. This new oil exists

“unguarded” in Africa and will be mined as Africa lacks strong institutions to regulate data mining.

The main theme of the book is the (re)colonisation of Africa. The objective is to demonstrate how Africa will remain on the marginalised/ darker side/

underside of the international political economy. The looting of Africa con-tinues unabated the way it occurred courtesy of the first industrial revolu-tion. Developing on the notion of Coloniality of Data (Couldry and Ulises Ali Mejias, 2019, p. 83), the 4IR is postulated as the final phase which will con-clude Africa’s peregrination towards (re)colonisation. The 4IR will lead to the theft of individuals’ and nations’ sovereignties. Four factors are singled out and unpacked: (1) Africa will suffer the most because it has the largest proportion of the digitally deprived, (2) Africa has the rarest earth’s natural resources needed to drive smart devices, (3) Africa does not have strong institutions and ethical leadership, to manage the extraction of its rare earth minerals, and (4) Africa and Africans lack the power to enforce their rights at home and away.

The various past industrial revolutions brought many innovations and technologies which enhanced the lives of humanity (Cipolla, 1976; Crafts, 1977; Fukuyama, 2014; Satia, 2018; Fomunyam, 2019). These developments commenced with the first industrial revolution where various machines and technologies were invented giving rise to industrialised mass production. The culmination is the 4IR which gave rise to unlimited possibilities of inter-connectedness between billions of people, mobile and immobile devices, in the process giving rise to a lot of data, massive processing power, storage cap-abilities, and knowledge access (Schwab, 2016). The innovations, efficiencies, and comforts brought about by the various inventions cannot be questioned.

What is being questioned here is the cost of these innovations to the African

continent. What was the cost of the first, the second, the third, and the current fourth industrial revolutions to Africa? The short answer is that the past three industrial revolutions and the current 4IR did not bring much sustainable development, human rights, and dignity to Africa. They brought dehumanisa-tion, thingificadehumanisa-tion, subjugation in the forms of the slave trade, colonialism, and now coloniality.

While depositing many positive aspects in Euro- North America, the indus-trial revolutions deposited their toxic waste, negative and darker side in Africa and other parts of the (formerly) colonised world. Euro- North American mod-ernity works in a dialectical manner. It is akin to a person afflicted with bipolar disorder, benefiting its home while pilfering Africa. Euro- North American modernity underdeveloped and undeveloped the colonies in order to develop the “metropolis”. It enslaves, dehumanises, and thingifies the colonies in order to enhance and uphold human rights in the “metropolis”. It extracts raw materials from the colonies in a destructive and ruthless manner that aims at maximising production at the cost of human life and the environment to afford the “metropolis” luxurious and technological goods. The “metropolis”

has a persistent underside where it deposits all its negative aspects. This place is Africa and other (formerly) colonised parts of the world. It is from what Water Mignolo termed the darker side of Euro- North American modernity (Mignolo, 2011) that I am located and from where I write.

Contemporary Africa is a product of Euro- North American modernity. By definition, Euro- North American modernity is the occupation through vio-lence of Africa and Africans’ time, geography, and being (Ndlovu- Gatsheni, 2015, p. 490, 2018, pp. 22– 23). This forceful occupation of time, geography, and space birthed the rhetoric of trajectorising humanity’s social “development” in linear terms of civilisation, development, emancipation, modernisation, and so on, with Euro- North America as the leaders and pace setters while Africa must play catch- up and learn from the “leaders”.

The book uses the three main decolonial analytical pillars; coloniality of power (Anibal Quijano, 2000; Grosfoguel and Georas, 2000; Wynter, 2003b; Grosfoguel, 2007a; Mignolo, 2007), coloniality of knowledge (Grosfoguel, 2007a; Ghiso and Campano, 2013; Al- Hardan, 2014; Connell, 2014; Nhemachena, Mlambo and Kaundjua, 2016; Benyera, 2017a), and the coloniality of being (Wynter, 2003b;

Maldonado- Torres, 2004, 2007, 2018; Maldonado- Torres and Richardson, 2012). The coloniality of the market (Tafira and Ndlovu- Gatsheni, 2017), nature, and agriculture (Janer, 2007; Graddy- Lovelace, 2017; Alimonda, 2019; Francis, 2020) are also used to support the (re)colonisation thesis being advanced in these pages.

The conceptualisation of Africans as raw materials to be enslaved and mined for data is presented in typical Toulminian argument format (claim, grounds, warrant, backing, qualifier, and rebuttal). The claim is that coloniality will be further entrenched in Africa because of the 4IR. The grounds exist both in Euro- North America on one hand and in Africa on the other. The existen-tial circumstances which necessitated slave trade on both sides still exist. These

Historicising Africa’s subjugation 21 conditions warrant the (re)colonisation of Africa as Euro- North America has very few options of sustaining their economies and (re)colonising Africa ranks as the main possible solution. The 4IR provides the propitious environment for the (re)colonisation of Africa, starting with digital and data slavery. The rebuttal is offered in the final chapter where Africa is positioned as having the pro-pensity to utilise the 4IR to end coloniality by claiming its epistemic freedom and agency and stop supporting unethical and unjust leaders. Blind political follower-ship, unconditional loyalty especially to the independence polit-ical parties and the instability to hold public officials to account have haunted Africa since the dawn of political independence. That Africans can not hold their pubic official to account can not be blamed on external parties. The con-clusion of this logic is that the (re)colonisation of Africa has more to do with condition in Africa than elsewhere.

The trajectorisation of the past three industrial revolutions and how they accumulatively weakened Africa making it the weakest, albeit richest continent in the 4IR, is an innovative argument. This deviates from the analyses of the past industrial revolutions and their damages to Africa as episodic. Using Hardt and Negri’s thesis of the empire (Hardt and Negri, 2000), I argue that the empire operates in a continuum, underlined by capitalism which is characterised as the clothes of the empire (Passavant and Dean, 2004). Each past industrial revolution is linked to the problems it caused in Africa (darker side of Euro- North America modernity) and how each problem leads to the eventual (re) colonisation of Africa predominantly by Euro- North America, this time joined by China.

Where it all began: Africa’s conquest

The opening up and accessing of Africa which led to its colonisation can be attributed to three European men and their collaborators. Two of them opened up the South African Cape peninsula to global navigation while the third one opened up the north of Africa for navigation. The first one is the Portuguese navigator Bartholomew Diaz who in 1488 failed to circumvent the Cape pen-insula. The second one is another Portuguese navigator, Vasco da Gama, who in 1498 managed to circumvent the Cape peninsula and hence lead the way from Europe around the Indian Ocean to the Orient. The third man was the French engineer Ferdinand de Lesseps who in 1869 was instrumental in opening up the Suez Canal, and hence North Africa.

When Africa was thus accessible to the world, it engaged the Orient and Europe in five major ways: (1) interactively; (2) comparatively; (3) competi-tively; (4) cooperacompeti-tively; and (5) conflictually (Mazrui, 1998, p. 118). Prior to the opening up of North and South Africa to global navigation, Arabs had been coming to the eastern coast of Africa bringing along their religion as way back as the 7th century. This constituted the interactive, cooperative, and com-parative aspects of these relations. There are cities that were born out of these interactions such as Mombasa, Kilwa, Malindi, Gefi, Sofala, and Lamu (Beach,

1972; Gayre, 1972, p. 59). Besides the Arabic religious influence, there was also a linguistic influence. The consequence of this influence was the birth of the Swahili language.

With regard to the conflictual relations, the slave trade was the major out-come of these interactions (Williams, 1974; Kalusa, 2009). Slavery in Africa took place on three broad levels. First there was black- on- black slavery in countries such as Ethiopia, Mali, Ghana, Nigeria, and Egypt (Collins, 1992;

Tegegne, 2017). This practice consisted of black slave masters owning, trading, and controlling black slaves. The difference between Euro- North American slavery and intra- black slavery is that for the later, slavery was not biologically inscribed. Black on black slavery was socially constructed while Arab/white on black slavery was biological. One’s social status, not skin colour, made them slaves.

In Africa, slavery formed part of the social system. Indeed, there were grades of slaves depending on their different roles and functions. Also, there were relative degrees of servitude: the right to ownership of property, pos-sibility for social mobility etc. Above all, a slave was not defined by bio-logical characteristics. He was not “naturally” a slave; he was socially, not biologically defined.

(Encisco, no date, p. 26) In some civilisations such as the Fulani, Fante, Ashanti, Mandinka (Malinke), and the Dahomey, this form of slavery predates Euro- North American mod-ernity (Polanyi, Arensberg and Pearson, 1957; Polanyi, 1966; Bohen, 1985; Dale, 2010). However, the Dahomey Kingdom was also involved in slave trade with the Europeans. This became the source of Dahomey’s military might.

Dahomey traded prisoners, which it captured during wars and raids or exacted from tributaries, with the Europeans for miscellaneous goods such as knives, bayonets, firearms, fabrics and spirits. The trade was so profit-able that Dahomey amassed considerprofit-able wealth within a few decades and consolidated its status as a regional military and political power.

(Joubeaud, 2014, p. 12) Black- on- black slavery was also prevalent in precolonial Africa, especially in Nigeria among the Igbo people. Among the Igbos, slaves were created from prisoners of war, from those that failed to pay their debt or as punishment for various crimes. Slavery created a caste system akin to that in India whose dev-astating effects persist until today. Descendants of former slaves among the Igbo people still face a lot of stigma, marginalisation, and all other ills suffered by (former) slaves elsewhere. Classifying the descendants of former slaves of the Igbo people as free persons is a misrepresentation and is an injustice because the effects of the enslavement of their forefathers still persist until today, albeit in a supposedly democratic, free Nigeria.

Historicising Africa’s subjugation 23 In intra- Africa slavery, slaves were not traded, they were not moved from their geographies and shipped thousands of kilometres away. However, parallels exist between intra- Africa slavery and the European and American slave trade.

One similarity is the sale of those adjudged to be a disgrace to the family. The same was also done by the English when they banished their criminals and disgraced fellows to Australia.

The practice differed from slavery in the Americas: slaves were permitted to move freely in their communities and to own property, but they were also sometimes sacrificed in religious ceremonies or buried alive with their masters to serve them in the next life. When the transatlantic trade began, in the fifteenth century, the demand for slaves spiked. Igbo traders began kidnapping people from distant villages. Sometimes a family would sell off a disgraced relative…

(Nwaubani, 2020) So many atrocities were committed against both sets of slaves. For example, when an Igbo person died, six slaves were buried alive with the deceased. Igbo slaves were also often chained together with chains that were so heavy that a child could not lift them.

At another level, Igbo slave traders were also complicit in the colonisation of Nigeria as they collaborated with the missionaries and even protected them from their fellow Igbos who intended to expel the colonial forerunners and accomplices masquerading as missionaries. One such person who protected Anglican missionaries in Nigeria was Nwaubami Ogogo who gave armed escort to the first missionaries in that region, a trio who were known as the Cookey Brothers (Nwaubani, 2020). Intra- Igbo slavery’s legacy persist until

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