Africa's identity: From negation to self-assertion

i

was

r

The author has been lecturer in Government, University of

M~nchester

(1960-65); Head, Department of Political Science, University of Khartoum (1965-69); Visiting Professor in

Political Science, Universities of Makerere and Lusaka (1970-71); Unesco Senior Expert in Social Sciences and Public

Administra-H' t ry and International tion (1971-73); Professor of Modern 1S..,O

Relations, University of Rabat

(1973~74);

'

SUdanes~

Ambassador to the Nordic Countries (1974-75) and Visiting Research Fellow at the Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, Uppsala.

b11' s h e d works include Imperialism and Nationalism in

His pu . . .

the Sudan, oxford 1969; Human Rights in Theory and Pract1ce, Beirut 1968; and The Problem of the Southern Sudan, Beirut 1971.

INTRODUCTION

Writing some six hundred years ago the great North African sociologist and philosopher of history Abd al-Rahman Ibn Khaldoun observed that the subjection of one people by an-other gives rise to serious social and psychological dis-location which may, in due cours~, ~e~ult in the total ex-tinction of the people concerned.l

But the capacity for psychological distortion and physical destruction of modern European imperialism - which, inci-dentally, began to gather momentum only a few decades after the death of Ibn Khaldoun in 1406 - was by far greater than that of any form of imperialism or domination previously known to mankind. And this was due to two principal factors:

First amongst these is the fact that modern European imperia-lism was able, from its very inception, to draw on the hither-to unparalleled technical skill and efficiency resulting from

the harnessing of the discoveries and inventions of modern science and technology to the purposes of navigation, trade and warfare. The resultant technical superiority of the new nation states of Europe did not only facilitate such remark-able human achievements as the circurnnavition of the globe and the discovery of the Americas; i t also gave birth to an era which - beginning with the arrival of Vasco Da Gama at Calicut in 1498 - was to be characterized by the colonial and

imperial domination, by various European powers, of the enti-re non-industrialized world - including, not only the newly discovered lands of the Western hemisphere and the islands of the Southern Seas, but also the ancient continents of Asia and Africa.

Another factor of

Key

importance in explaining the distinctly predatory and destructive character of modern European impe-rialism is that i t has been - and in its contemporary neo-colonial form continues to be - a totalitarian phenomenon in-volving not only the political subjugation of the people i t dominates and the economic exploitation of their labour and

es c i t is are no a

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