Cultural Studies

Cultural Studies

Unit 4 IP

In 1807, Britain banned the slave trade to British colonies, later enacting the outlaw of the entire institution of slavery in British colonies in 1834 to 1838, which prompted other European nations with Caribbean colonies to follow suit. Surrounded by the North-South controversy and a brutal Civil War, slavery in the United States was not entirely outlawed until 1865; Cuba and Brazil protected the institution of slavery legally until 1886 and 1888, respectively (Mayer, 2002). Because of the contraband demand for slave labor in the Americas, the trans-Saharan slave trade remnants in East Africa, and the established local practice of regionalized enslavement, many African nations upheld continental slavery as a lawful practice until the turn of the 20th century. Mauritania did not officially abolish slavery until 1981.

The 19th-century outlaw of the slave trade within the New World, which was reliant on the labor resources of Africa's able-bodied individuals, was shortly followed by the 1884 to 1885 Berlin Conference on Africa, held for European nations to divvy up African landmasses into colonies. At the conference meetings, African leaders were noticeably absent: The purpose was not to engage with African leaders civilly but, rather, to create peaceable treaties between the war-torn European nations struggling for increasing power within a highly competitive world market. Seeking for untapped resources, European nations arbitrarily cut the African continent into distinct colonies, for the most part regardless of long-established regional and ethnic boundaries.

In the “scramble for Africa,” Britain, France, Portugal, Belgium and Germany became the primary players deciding the future of Africa based on its regional economic viability, access to natural resources, and potential for colonial capital. Nearly every African nation today, excluding Ethiopia, was forcibly colonized by a European nation from the late 19th to mid-20th century. Dispersed African peoples were more easily quelled; strong states such as the Asante in present-day Ghana and the Sokoto Caliphate in present-day Nigeria upheld battle and massive resistance to the attempts at European control.

This process of European colonization disrupted local and regional hierarchies and established new systems of government as well as transforming laws, global relations, market input, urban development, the African elite, vocational opportunity, social displacement, and trade relations in the 20th century. African soldiers, fighting under colonial banners, significantly affected the outcomes of World War I and II (Mbiti, 1990). French Algeria and southern Africa had the largest population of European colonists; much of West and Central Africa was predominantly ruled from the Metropole.

The era of African independence began in 1957, when the British-ruled Gold Coast became the independent nation of Ghana. Francophone West and Central African colonies followed Britain's model and became independent in 1960, closely correlating to the timeline of the civil rights period in America and the independence movements in the Caribbean. The Organization of African Unity was founded in 1963 in Ethiopia with 32 newly formed African nations joining, promoting Kwame Nkrumah's early visions of Pan-Africanism. In nations such as South Africa, which initiated a system of apartheid in 1948, ...