The Penguin History of the World

In 1965, the GDP of the entire continent had been less than that of Illinois and in more than half of African countries manufacturing output went down in the 1980s. On these feeble economies there had fallen first the blow of the oil crisis of the early 1970s and then the trade recession that followed. The shattering effects for Africa were made even worse soon after by the onset of repeated drought. In 1960 Africa’s GDP had been growing at the unexciting, but still positive annual rate of about 1.6 per cent; the trend soon turned downward and in the first half of the 1980s was falling at a rate of 1.7 per cent a year. It hardly seems a surprise that in 1983 the UN Economic Commission for Africa described the picture of the continent’s economy emerging from the historical trends as ‘almost a nightmare’.

Since the late 1990s most African economies have begun to grow, and the picture looked more hopeful, at least until the economic crisis of 2008. Raw material prices increased and governance improved, at least in some countries. The end to long-standing civil wars also helped markedly, as did improvements in banking systems and in communications and infrastructure. But there are still major problems to be solved before Africa will emerge from poverty and inequity. The terrible toll that HIV/AIDS has taken on the continent will take a long time to overcome (more than 10 per cent of the young population is infected in some countries, and the disease continues to spread). There are also far too many countries that are dependent on a single crop or mineral for almost all of their national income, and education levels are low. Most of Africa seems in desperate need for political stability under representative governments in order to move from chaos and conflict to sustainable levels of growth.

The fact that the most powerful of African states, the Union of South Africa, was for years a white-ruled country cut off from relations with the rest of the continent, did not help Africa’s development. The Afrikaans-speaking Boers, who by 1945 dominated that country, cherished against the British grievances that went back to the Great Trek and which had been intensified by defeat in the Boer War. They had led to the progressive destruction of ties with the British Commonwealth after the First World War, a process made easier by the concentration of voters of Anglo-Saxon origin in the provinces of Cape Town and Natal; the Boers were entrenched in the Transvaal and the major industrial areas as well as the rural hinterland. South Africa, it is true, entered the war in 1939 on the British side and supplied important forces to fight in it, but even then intransigent ‘Afrikaners’, as they increasingly called themselves, supported a movement favouring co-operation with the Nazis.

Its leader became prime minister in 1948, after defeating South Africa’s senior statesman, Jan Smuts, in a general election. As the Afrikaners had steadily engrossed power inside the Union, and had built up their economic position in the industrial and financial sectors, the prospect of imposing a policy towards the black Africans that diverged from their deep prejudices was already inconceivable. The result was the construction of a system of separation of the races: apartheid. It systematically embodied and reinforced the legal reduction of the black African to the inferior status he occupied in Boer ideology. Its aim was to guarantee the position of the whites in a land where industrialism and market economies had done much to break down the regulation and distribution of the growing black population by the old tribal divisions.