Myth of independence

On November 22, the deadline by which the United Kingdom was supposed to return the occupied Chagos Islands to the African island nation of Mauritius passed. Six months earlier, the United Nations General Assembly had voted overwhelmingly in favour of the reunification, which came on the tail of the International Court of Justice ruling that British control over the islands is unlawful.

London's refusal to abide by the ruling and the UN resolution prompted immediate reaction and accusations of colonial occupation. The African Union demanded "a complete decolonisation" of the islands.

The dispute is all the more significant as it falls just days after the 135th anniversary of the Berlin Conference, at which European powers agreed the rules by which they would parcel out Africa among themselves.

The AU's demand is a bit curious, linking as it does a British withdrawal with "decolonisation". But there is a little more to it than that. In fact, although many on the continent have tended to equate decolonisation with the dawn of independence in the 1960s, independence, in fact, turned out to be a bit of a hoax.

While it undoubtedly improved life for some on the continent, for the most part, it did not mean freedom. Rather, it marked the internationalisation and indigenisation of colonialism. It was to become a tool to transform Africans from being the objects of colonial subjugation into partners in their own exploitation.

This is neatly illustrated by the now largely forgotten Eurafrica project. Conceived in the interwar years, it was a plan to replace European colonial competition for Africa's resources with an internationalised colonialism that would allow Europeans to jointly exploit the continent under the auspices of what became the European Union.

As the Chinese do today, in the years following the end of World War II, many in Europe saw in Africa the resources and markets they required to rebuild their shattered economies and to join the United States and the USSR as a third superpower. Africa and its resources thus featured prominently in discussions over the creation of pan-European institutions.

The Rome Treaty, which established the EEC in 1957, was nothing short of a resurrection of the Berlin Conference's General Act, which 73 years earlier had sought to create an internationalised regime of free trade stretching across the middle of Africa.

In Rome, six European countries, without the involvement of any Africans, promised each other equal access to trading and investment opportunities in what is today the territory of 21 African countries: Senegal, Mali, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Benin, Mauritania, Niger, Burkina Faso, the Republic of the Congo (Congo Brazzaville), the Central Africa Republic, Chad, Gabon, the Comoros, Madagascar, Djibouti, Togo, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Rwanda, Burundi and Somalia. In fact, as noted by Hansen and Jonsson, three-quarters of the territory covered by the EEC actually lay outside continental Europe.

Although the British did not join the first EEC treaty, they had similar ambitions for retaining control of their colonies. In 1947, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Stafford Cripps, declared that "in Africa indeed is to be found a great potential for new strength and vigour in the Western European economy".

A decade later, in the same year the EEC was set up, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan commissioned a cabinet committee report on the effect of African independence on "the prestige and influence of the UK" and whether "premature withdrawal of United Kingdom jurisdiction would leave a vacuum which would be filled by a country hostile to the United Kingdom and her Allies".

It was into this context that the countries of Africa were born. Congenitally misshapen, they were easy prey for Europe. The Eurafrica project was simply given a makeover as the 1963 Yaounde Convention signed between the EEC and 18 former French and Belgian colonies.

Excerpted from: 'Eurafrica and the myth of African independence'.

Courtesy: AlJazeera.com