How Colonialism Broke the Machine

Yesterday we talked about what Africa built. Today we talk about how it was dismantled.

There's a lazy version of this story that goes: Europeans came, they were stronger, they took over. As if colonialism was just a military conquest, a temporary occupation that ended when the flags changed in the 1960s.

That's not what happened.

What happened was a systematic rewiring of an entire continent. The economies, the political systems, the education, the borders, the languages, the very way Africans understood themselves — all of it was deliberately restructured to serve one purpose: extraction. And the machine they built is still running today.

The Berlin Conference: Carving Up a Continent

In 1884, fourteen European powers sat down in Berlin to divide Africa among themselves. No African was invited. No African was consulted. Men who had never set foot on the continent drew lines on maps, cutting through kingdoms, ethnic groups, and trade routes that had existed for centuries.

The Maasai were split between Kenya and Tanzania. The Ewe were divided between Ghana and Togo. The Somali people ended up in five different colonial territories. The Kingdom of Kongo was carved into French, Belgian, and Portuguese pieces.

Take Nigeria — the most populous country in Africa today. The name itself was invented by Flora Shaw, a British journalist, in an 1897 article for The Times. She combined "Niger" (the river) with "area" because "Royal Niger Company Territories" was too long. She later married Lord Frederick Lugard, who in 1914 amalgamated the Northern and Southern Protectorates into one colony.

Why? Because Northern Nigeria wasn't profitable. The South had palm oil revenue; the North was running at a loss. So the British merged them to balance the books. They didn't ask the Hausa-Fulani in the North, the Yoruba in the Southwest, or the Igbo in the Southeast if they wanted to be one country. They didn't consider that these were peoples with different languages, religions, political systems, and histories. The North was predominantly Muslim with centralized emirates. The South was largely Christian with different governance structures. The Igbo in the East had traditionally democratic, decentralized communities.

Here's how seriously the British took this. Flora Shaw couldn't tolerate the Nigerian climate, so Lugard proposed governing Nigeria from England for six months each year — so he could be with his wife. The Colonial Office accepted a version of this scheme. As Governor-General, Lugard spent four months of every year in London, 4,000 miles away. His subordinates had to delay decisions on many matters until he returned. The scheme was so unpopular and confusing it was eventually phased out — but not before the damage was done. This was the man who created what is now Africa's most populous nation.

Even Nigerian leaders knew what this meant. Sir Ahmadu Bello, the Premier of Northern Nigeria, called the amalgamation "the mistake of 1914." Chief Obafemi Awolowo called Nigeria "a mere geographic expression." They were right. That forced marriage led directly to the Nigerian Civil War of 1967-1970, where up to three million people died when the Igbo-majority Southeast tried to secede as Biafra. The ethnic and religious tensions that Britain manufactured are still tearing at Nigeria today.

These weren't accidents. They weren't oversights by ignorant Europeans. The borders were deliberately designed to weaken African political unity. A divided people are easier to control.

And here's what we have to admit: those divisions worked because they exploited existing tensions. The Europeans didn't invent ethnic rivalry — they weaponized it. They elevated certain groups to positions of colonial administration and suppressed others. They played communities against each other. And too often, Africans cooperated with this system for short-term advantage.

The borders drawn in Berlin are still the borders of African nations today. We inherited lines designed to make us weak, and we kept them.

The Economic Rewiring

Before colonialism, African economies were diverse. Farmers grew food for local consumption and regional trade. Artisans produced goods. Merchants ran trade networks that stretched across the Sahara and along the East African coast.

The colonial system replaced all of this with extraction.

Entire economies were restructured around single export commodities — cocoa in Gold Coast, groundnuts in Senegal, cotton in Egypt, rubber in Congo, copper in Northern Rhodesia. Africans were forced off subsistence farming and into cash crop production. The food they needed had to be imported. The goods they used had to be manufactured in Europe.

The infrastructure tells the story clearly. Look at a railway map of colonial Africa. Every line runs from the interior to the coast. From the mine to the port. From the plantation to the ship. There are almost no railways connecting African cities to each other. The infrastructure wasn't built to develop Africa — it was built to empty it.

This wasn't an accident. This was policy.

In the Congo Free State — the personal property of Belgium's King Leopold II — Africans were forced to harvest rubber under a system of terror. Those who failed to meet quotas had their hands cut off. Conservative estimates put the death toll between one and ten million people. The colony was profitable. The people were disposable.

Destroying What Worked

Colonial administrators understood that to maintain control, they needed to destroy existing African institutions.

Traditional governance systems were either co-opted or crushed. Where African kings and chiefs were allowed to remain, they became enforcers for colonial rule — collecting taxes, supplying forced labor, implementing policies they had no say in creating. Those who resisted were deposed, exiled, or killed. We saw this with Oba Ovonramwen. We saw it across the continent.

Education was restructured to produce clerks and translators, not leaders or innovators. African languages were suppressed. African history was erased or rewritten as primitive prehistory waiting for European civilization. Children were taught to see their own cultures as backward.

Religious systems were targeted. Missionaries often worked hand-in-hand with colonial administrators. Conversion wasn't just spiritual — it meant adopting European names, European dress, European values. It meant rejecting what your ancestors had built.

The psychological dimension matters as much as the economic one. Colonialism didn't just steal resources — it tried to steal identity. It taught Africans to see themselves through European eyes, to measure progress by European standards, to aspire to European approval.

The Violence Underneath

Every colonial system rested on violence.

The British killed tens of thousands suppressing the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya — official figures say 11,500, but historians estimate anywhere from 25,000 to over 50,000 deaths, with half being children under ten who died from starvation and disease in the camps. Up to 320,000 people were interned in detention camps. They used torture — slicing off ears, burning with cigarettes, sexual assault. This was in the 1950s, not ancient history.

The Germans committed genocide against the Herero and Nama people of Namibia between 1904 and 1908. Survivors were put in concentration camps where mortality rates exceeded 50%. Germany acknowledged this as genocide in 2015, but only agreed to a formal apology and financial settlement in 2021 — over a century later.

The French used forced labor across their colonies. They conscripted Africans to fight in European wars. They violently suppressed independence movements from Madagascar to Algeria.

The Portuguese held on until 1975, fighting brutal colonial wars in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau.

This violence wasn't exceptional. It was structural. It was how the system functioned.

What Was Left Behind

When the colonial powers finally departed — often because holding on became too expensive after World War II — they left behind:

Borders designed to divide. Economies built for extraction. Elites educated to serve foreign interests. Infrastructure that connected Africa to Europe but not to itself. Debt. Dependency. And populations deliberately kept uneducated — when Congo gained independence in 1960, there were only about 15 Congolese university graduates in the entire country. No Congolese in the military ranked higher than sergeant. When 250,000 Portuguese left Mozambique, they took the technical knowledge with them, leaving a country where 93% of the African population was illiterate.

Independence came with flags and anthems, but the machine kept running. The cash crops still flowed to European markets. The manufactured goods still came from European factories. The loans still came from European banks — with conditions attached.

This is what we inherited. This is what we're still trying to undo.

The Hard Truth

But here's where we have to be honest with ourselves: colonialism succeeded in part because of African failures.

We sold each other into slavery. We collaborated with colonial administrations for status and power. We maintained the arbitrary borders after independence because changing them might cost our own nations territory. We kept the colonial languages as "official" because we couldn't agree on which African language to elevate. Our post-independence leaders often replicated the extractive, authoritarian systems they inherited — sometimes worse.

The machine was built by Europeans, but Africans have been operating it for sixty years now. We can't blame colonialism for everything forever. At some point, the question becomes: what are we going to do about it?

Colonialism broke the machine. Our job is to build a new one.

Tomorrow, we'll look at what happened when the flags changed — how political independence came without economic independence, and how the new leaders navigated impossible choices.

How Colonialism Broke the Machine