European colonization had devastating effect on the continent in the late-19th century, says historian

Martin Meredith believes Africa finds it difficult to draw strength from its ancient civilization the way China does.

The veteran journalist and writer has just produced a book, The Fortunes of Africa: A 5,000 Year History of Wealth, Greed and Endeavour, that traces the continent's history back to its earliest origins.

Meredith says that unlike China Africa does not draws strength from its history. Nick J.B. Moore / For China Daily

But despite going back to the Egyptian pharaohs and the origins of the Niger-Congo peoples of the fourth millennium BC, much of this early culture, he argues, now remains buried in the problems of the present.

"China has an ancient civilization and in a sense is able to draw upon it but I think in Africa this does not really apply.

"If you look at tropical sub-Saharan Africa they had no method of writing really until Arabic was used in the north after the Arab invasions. They had very minimal engineering progress. They didn't even use the wheel, for example. Very different to China," he says.

Meredith, a long-time African journalist and biographer of Nelson Mandela and Robert Mugabe, was speaking at St Anthony's College, where he was a research fellow in the 1980s.

His latest 700-page book took him four years to write, including one of just research.

"I wondered whether it would be possible at the start to write a single volume on a continent over a period of 5,000 years. All similar books in existence on the whole tend to be written by academics.

"It took me a year to get to grips with a lot of the ancient history that I really didn't know nothing about before. The theme of wealth came much later but there is a sense that Africans have failed to turn their wealth into a broader kind of benefit."

That resources were some form of curse is a theme that repeats itself throughout African history. South Africa's first president, Paul Kruger, spoke of the "curse" of gold that would bring "rivers of tears".

"He was an Old Testament patriarch really who thought worldly things like gold were just a menace and it turned out he was right but not really for the religious reasons that concerned him," he says.

The issue of whether Africa benefits from its natural resources has arisen again with China's new economic relationship with the continent over the past decade.

"Chinese investment in Africa has led to a great spurt in economic progress and its demand for raw materials has produced a commodities boom.

"I suspect they are the biggest single foreign player in Africa now. They have a real sense of what African governments want and they work hard at it. I think the West is tired of dealing with Africa, they have aid fatigue and they have debt relief fatigue."

Meredith says China's position in the world is enhanced by delivering what Africa wants.

"They (China) want prestige and influence and they have now accumulated an awful lot of it in Africa. If you are an African government and want your football stadium built, the Chinese will come in and in nine months it will be there. They deliver these things."

Meredith, now 71 and living near Oxford eschewing modern devices such as mobile phones, has had a life almost fitting of the great African adventurers of the Victorian era.

From a family of musicians, he dropped out of the Royal College of Music in London and funding himself with money he borrowed from his grandmother went off to Africa.

"I was going to be a composer but it was a boyhood passion to explore the Nile after reading Alan Moorehead's books and that is what I did.

"I had a huge amount of fun venturing to places such as the Maluti mountains in Lesotho. I traversed the Okavango Delta in northern Botswana which, as far as I know, no European had ever done."

He eventually became a reporter for The Times of Zambia in the mid-1960s, where then president Kenneth Kaunda used to phone him up personally about stories in the paper.

"I remember I started a campaign for the abolition of capital punishment and he phoned me and asked me to desist since it was giving him trouble.

"I was just 22 and he asked me round to tea and said that while he was in favour of it, others in the cabinet were not."

He went on to work as a correspondent for The Observer and then The Sunday Times for nearly two decades.

"It was a time when it all started to go wrong for Africa after the optimism following independence," he says.

Meredith saw first hand China's building of the 1,860-km Tanzam railway linking Dar es Salaam and Kapiri Mposhi in Zambia and regarded as the foundation stone of the modern China-Africa relationship.

"I spent a week with the Chinese who were mainly PLA (People's Liberation Army) engineers. I was hugely impressed about how they could get it all done, fix it and have all the manpower and finance in place to do it. It is a way of operating that outpaces anything the West can deliver."

Meredith embarked on writing books after he returned to the UK to become a research fellow at Oxford.

He wrote the first full biography of Nelson Mandela, just beating British writer and former editor of South Africa's Drum magazine Anthony Sampson's authorised one on to the bookshelves.

"I was riveted by Winnie (who was married to Mandela for 38 years) and Anthony said my book was more about Winnie than it was about Nelson. Of course, Winnie was off limits in the authorised version," he laughs.

His latest book illuminates the melting pot of civilizations of the 10,000 political entities that existed before colonization.

Meredith says that some societies such as the Bugandans (from modern day Uganda) made dramatic progress despite having no literacy.

"They had quite advanced administrations without using writing or money right up to the 19th century which proves that it is possible to do this."

It was, however, European colonization that had a devastating effect on the continent with the "Scramble for Africa" in the late-19th century, according to Meredith.

"If you are looking for the problems of modern Africa they all date back to this scramble. It created artificial states that are colonial constructs that encompass all kinds of rival groups and hatreds.

"Nigeria is a completely artificial state containing some 300 linguistic groups and I quote Nigerians themselves as saying that this is something the British dreamt up and not them."

Meredith believes that China could play a role in putting the fragmented continent back together, particularly in making the various customs unions work economically.

"I was asked this at a China forum some years ago and it struck me that China could play a really beneficial role. The British, for example, were trying to put east Africa together as a serious economic grouping but it has now broken apart. I think China now has the real influence to do this."

andrewmoody@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily European Weekly 11/28/2014 page32)