ABSTRACT
Systems of capital accumulation left Africa “scrambled” long before the infamous 1884–1885 border carve-up was completed in Berlin. There, negotiators from the colonial powers Britain, France, Portugal, Germany and Belgium created scores of dysfunctional national units without reference to prior indigenous social organization. Setting the stage for colonial domination, the transatlantic enslavement of approximately 12 million Africans from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries was followed by the first systematic Western extraction projects: Kimberley diamonds (1867), Johannesburg gold (1884) and the myriad other mineral and petroleum outflows that followed. Then, over the next century, came repeated disasters for Africa: the colonial project’s catastrophic distortions; the “false decolonization” and neo-colonial power relationships after 1950s–1970s independence struggles were won; the durability of settler-colonialism especially in Southern Africa through the late twentieth century; the Cold War machinations until 1990; the foreign debt enslavement and structural adjustment policies of the neoliberal era, especially the lost decades of the 1980s–1990s; calamities associated with ongoing wars and terrorism; scores of African dictatorships supported by Washington, London and Paris; the looming destruction posed by climate change; and the resource cursing alongside “Africa Rising” myth-making of recent years. All these largely resulted from capital accumulation processes that favored Western corporations and their African comprador partners. The geopolitical arrangements and multilateral economic management strategies associated with this historic trajectory have – since even before Rosa Luxemburg wrote the seminal text in 1913 – earned the tag “imperialism,” because it is (as she showed using Africa as her main research base) in the combination of periodic global capitalist crises, the expansion of corporations’ geographic reach, the growing ambitions of financiers, and the fusion of capitalist/non-capitalist exploitative prowess that Western-dominated accumulation continues to underdevelop Africa.
