As of May 17th, I’ve just finished my degree work for a Bachelors degree in Sustainability at SUNY Delhi! I started the degree with the goal of pivoting professionally from corporate customer service to more environmental conservation focused work and I’m super pleased to be starting a new job in a weeks time with the Catskills Watershed Corporation.
While studying at Delhi, I had the opportunity to take a course called “Farming, Famine, and Fraud” which was an overview of American, Soviet, and Chinese agricultural development throughout the 20th century. For our final paper, I wanted to turn my attention to the African continent and so I worked on an overview of colonialism’s long running effects on African agricultural development. My findings are below. Please keep in mind I am a white, American male and thus am writing this from a place of privilege with little direct experience or interaction with African studies. All sources are peer reviewed, however I offer this only as a starting point, from having simply scratched the surface of this topic in undergraduate studies, and welcome critical discussion or response in the comments!
The Scramble for Africa
Colonialism’s detrimental effects on Sub-Saharan African Agricultural Development
Zach Baldwin-Way
SUNY Delhi — 05/16/25
Hist. 335 / History of Famine, Farming and Fraud — Dr. Gashler
It is difficult to understate the global impacts of European colonialism. As European powers jockeyed for resources and geopolitical control over far flung territories and colonies around the globe, entire civilizations were toppled or reshaped in their wake. Humans (assigned value based solely on the color of their skin) were regarded as chattel and shipped around the globe to support increasingly unsustainable resource extraction as indigenous populations were forced to assimilate, capitulate, or perish at the hands of primarily white settlers intent on securing their personal fortunes. Of the many territories that colonial powers claimed and exerted influence over, many African communities were the last to gain their independence, and the enduring impacts of colonial rule, enslavement, and disenfranchisement are still being grappled with to this day. On the African continent, examples of the oppressive power of colonial greed are many and are well represented in the modern development of agriculture in colonized states throughout the 20th century. In the aftermath of an already horrific slave trade that severely weakened many African communities, colonial powers worked to intentionally hamstring African nations by incentivising cash crops over food crops, applying coercive and abusive political tactics to both maximise resource extraction and disable social resistence, and ultimately destabilize communities from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to Nigeria to South Africa by installing colonial power structures and institutions that never served indigenous residents in the first place. African stakeholders, unless willing to cooperate with European powers, were never included in political conversations, and current conflicts, issues of food insecurity, and the slow developmental growth of many post-colonial nations in Africa can all be tied back to the negative influence of colonizers over humans throughout Sub-Saharan Africa.
To give a very brief (and overly simplified) historical context to the extractive agricultural practices that will be discussed, after the slave trade was abolished on paper in 1807, demand for palm oil (for soaps and industrial lubricants) encouraged agricultural export markets that began in West Africa and slowly spread eastward across the continent throughout the next century (Roessler et al., 2022). This led to a remarkable boom in the groundnut trade which was at this point mostly supported by smallholder farms in contrast to Latin America’s European plantations at the time (Roessler et al., 2022). This smallholder farm benefit in turn helped fuel the rise of the ‘‘merchant princes” of Africa and allowed for deeper penetration of African geography by European traders (Roessler et al., 2022). During this time, West Africa’s trade grew by 1.65% annually from 1808 to 1884 (Roessler et al., 2022). As this outpaced similar commodity export growth around the globe at the time, some scholars argue that this agricultural boom influenced new, intensive colonial strategies by providing novel and enticing cost-benefit analyses to consider (Roessler et al., 2022). Britain and France in particular increased their efforts, seeing colonization as a means to solidify their commercial interests against both merchant princes and other European powers (Roessler et al., 2022). Essentially, colonial governments wanted to justify the costs of colonialism and make their efforts profitable, increasing productivity by designing markets to their benefit, instating predatory tax systems, continuing slave labor through institutions like the corvée system, and where possible forcing locals to work on European plantations by outlawing African cash crop farming (Roessler et al., 2022). Colonial powers even intentionally limited and restricted local processing of raw goods to corner the production market, such as when France (a century before WWII) restricted groundnut imports to “bulk unshelled nuts on French vessels,” effectively preventing processing development and economic opportunity in their groundnut producing colonies (Roessler et al., 2022).
Clearly, European colonial powers shared one priority: the extraction of as many resources as possible, at the lowest costs possible, to fuel their industrializing economies. Importantly, these “costs” did not include humanitarian costs on the local residents on whom they depended for labor and control. For damning evidence that colonial powers prioritized their own interests over those of their colonial subjects, look no further than African real GDP growing at only half the rate of the rest of the world between 1820 and 1992, (Binswanger et al., 2000). With economic data like this, it is fairly easy to argue that colonial rule was bad for colonial subjects, but in what ways specifically?
Interestingly, some researchers are making very convincing arguments that colonial priorities and abuses can be blamed for current sub-par outcomes in developing African economies and agricultural production. While some have argued (with elitist perspectives) that colonialism actually benefited Africans, citing pre-colonial lack of the plow, wheel, or writing technologies outside of Ethiopia, many are making the more nuanced observation that while some examples of benefits exist, the overwhelming effects of colonialism have been largely negative in the long term and at larger scales than those narrowly focused infrastructure and technological advances that proponents fixate on (Heldring et al., 2012). While one study found that “colonial cash crop production had positive long-run effects on urbanization, road infrastructure, nighttime luminosity, and household wealth,” the same study underscores that commercial agriculture did not support regional growth, as in other regions of cash cropping around the world (Roessler et al., 2022).
With globalization and long-distance trade advances in the last century-and-a-half, coastal regions developed concentrations of economic activity due to existing port infrastructure (Roessler et al., 2022). As a result, cash crops tended to concentrate near these coastal export markets, and these were the first regions to benefit from new crops and agricultural techniques (Roessler et al., 2022). Colonial powers then expanded and reinforced transportation networks to reach vital resource areas of their concern, but importantly “the adoption and spread of cash crop agriculture tended to follow colonialism rather than the other way around” (Roessler et al., 2022). In truth, economic/infrastructure benefits of colonial cash crops were hyper-localized, actually draining economic opportunity and labor resources from surrounding areas, and Roessler et al. found that colonial investment in roads, railways and power generation is actually more of a determinant of long-run development than agricultural production, with cash crop suitability being more influential than caloric suitability or disease ecology (Roessler et al., 2022). These unsustainable, extractive influences left lasting development impacts that shape population densities and quality of life to this day, as illustrated in Figure 1.
Figure 1 - From top left: Cash Crop Suitability, Cash Crop Production Value (as of 1957), Colonial Transportation Infrastructure, and nighttime luminosity (as of 2015) (Roessler et al., 2022)
Though new infrastructure drove increased, localised development in cash crop markets and farms (sparking a major rural-to-rural migration across the continent) colonial powers also used “repressive colonial labor policies that employed direct taxation, forced labor and deprivation of local economic opportunities to create a cheap supply of labor to service cash crop and mining enclaves and work on colonial infrastructural projects” (Roessler et al., 2022). The impacts of these abusive policies are acutely felt in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) where current disparities in wealth, education, and health outcomes are correlated with regional exposure to colonial rubber extraction (Lowes et al., 2016).
Founded as a political land grab under the humanitarian guise of ending a persistent slave trade, the ironically named, Congo Free State (CFS) was King Leopold II of Belgium’s personal colony from 1895 to 1908 (Lowes et al., 2016). With a rocky start, he ended up investing “nearly the entirety of his father’s fortune” in maintaining a state presence there, and only reaped financial benefits thanks to the invention of the pneumatic tire and its subsequent demand for rubber (Lowes et al., 2016). This new demand for rubber proved to be very lucrative with the price of rubber rising from 6.20 francs per kilo to over 10 francs per kilo from 1894 to 1898 (Lowes et al., 2016). With the cost of production coming to roughly 1.35 francs, annual profits of more than twelve times initial investments were not uncommon (Lowes et al., 2016).
To harvest this “new” resource, Leopold II delegated control of rubber producing regions to private companies by granting them “concessions,” or parcels of land on which they received resource monopoly rights (despite the region being designated a free trade zone) (Lowes et al., 2016). Leaving this extraction up to private enterprise and backing their efforts with the state sponsored armed forces known as the “Force Publique” led to horrific coercive acts to satisfy greedy extraction quotas (Lowes et al., 2016). These quotas were set based on male populations in concession regions, and in most cases villagers were expected to both feed and supply company outposts and produce 4 kilos of rubber biweekly, tasks that largely prevented the tending of fields, leading to malnourishment and susceptibility to “sleeping sickness” (Lowes et al., 2016). To make matters worse, if these quotas were not met, villages (and in particular village chiefs) were subjected to extreme acts of violence including chicotte whippings (a hippopotamus hide whip), gum copal burnings, imprisonment, family ransoming, and even death (Lowes et al., 2016). Horrifically, in a waste preventing measure, soldiers of the “Force Publique” were expected to present human hands to account for bullets used (Lowes et al., 2016). The abuses went further than physical terrors. In a form of socio-psychological abuse, company appointed “kapitas” were tasked with denigrating and undermining the authority of non-compliant chiefs, personally benefiting greatly by hoarding food, women, and luxuries (Lowes et al., 2016). First hand testimonies from the time offer disturbing accounts into the atrocities committed in the name of productivity:
When I was still a child, the sentries shot at the people in my village because of the rubber. My father was murdered: they tied him to a tree and shot and killed him, and when the sentries untied him they gave him to their boys, who ate him. My mother and I were taken prisoner. The sentries cut off my mother’s hands while she was still alive. Two days later, they cut off her head. (Lowes et al., 2016)
Between 1880 and 1920, roughly half of the population of the region, approximately 10 million people, are estimated to have lost their lives, earning the commodity the nickname of “Red Rubber” and leaving permanent scars on the development of these affected regions (Lowes et al., 2016). As of 2015, the DRC ranked second to last in the UNDP’s Human Development Index, making it one of Africa’s poorest countries, and researchers have found that “Former rubber concession areas have lower levels of education, worse health outcomes and are poorer than areas outside of the concessions” as illustrated in Figure 2 (Lowes et al., 2016).
Figure 2 - Years of education with rubber concession boundaries (Lowes et al., 2016)
Abuses (no matter how traumatic) are not enough to solely account for the agricultural and economic disadvantages that many post-colonial African nations experience today. The traumas of colonialism in Africa were compounded by manipulative and oppressive institutions and sanctions that served only colonizers, often leaving African stakeholders out of discussions altogether. As commodity profits soared, colonial powers met in Berlin for the infamous 1884–85 Berlin Conference, in which rising export potential gave an economic incentive to politically defend divvying up Africa and continue colonial rule, crucially in a colonial echo chamber as neither diplomatic representation nor consultation from African stakeholders occurred (Frankema et al., 2018; Idejiora-Kalu, 2019). This is hardly surprising considering the recency of the slave trade in this context as well as the profit opportunities that colonial powers saw and reinforced. Some researchers have estimated that total African commodity export values skyrocketed by as much as 150% from 1897 to 1913 (Frankema et al., 2018). Importantly, however, this value only benefitted colonial powers by design as they instituted racist economic, educational, and health policies that limited indigenous opportunity, and streamlined imperial exploitation.
Limits on indigenous opportunity were most severe in white settler colonies, where land expropriation and “dual economies” suggest that African living standards deteriorated by as much as 50% as a consequence of colonialism, and the effects of this deterioration reach far into our current geo-political context (Heldring et al., 2012). In Malawi specifically, prohibition of small-holder tobacco production was only officially lifted in the mid-1990s, at the same time that similar oppressive colonial policies were lifted in South Africa (Binswanger et al., 2000). Crucially, no evidence has been found of a positive effect of colonialism on property rights, even when removing expropriation data from South Africa or Zimbabwe (Heldring et al., 2012). Adding credence to the severity of settler colony impediments, outside of settler colonies both nominal and real wages surprisingly increased for Africans during the colonial period, as in British West Africa where military recruits actually increased in standing (Heldring et al., 2012).
Colonial powers nearly always prioritized their own interests, providing education and healthcare support to indigenous populations only when absolutely necessary, and ignoring on-the-ground, pre-existing political boundaries and relationships entirely, stoking tribalism and class struggles that made it difficult for social resistance. Colonial education only prioritized reducing language barriers and efficiently training locals to take over for subordinate Europeans in prevailing colonial institutions (Bala, 2019). Similarly, healthcare support was purely for racist maintenance of superiority with a 1944 report by the native production trade commission in Zimbabwe stating that health services were needed because “...as we want to have a healthy white nation we have got to tackle infectious diseases in the native. The native is the reservoir of these infectious diseases” (Heldring et al., 2012).
This horrible and demeaning perspective is relatively unsurprising, since colonial powers did not even deem existing indigenous politics or trade networks worthy of support, respect, or understanding. Citing an inaccurate lack of sovereignty definitions in Africa at the time of the Berlin Conference, colonial powers did not include African stakeholders, conveniently ignoring well established diplomatic and trade relationships with a sovereign Liberia that dated as far back as 1847 (Idejiora-Kalu, 2019). In fact, prior to African colonialism, many African communities participated actively in international trade, and empires as powerful as Ghana, Mali, and Songhai “relied heavily on foreign trade taxing to finance government expenses” (Bala, 2019). Largely due to this colonial indifference to indigenous context, geo-political borders arbitrarily established during the Berlin Conference ignored and even exacerbated existing ethnic conflicts, such as the already existing conflicts between Rwandan Hutus and Tutsis (Heldring et al., 2012). Colonial impatience and callous lack of understanding led to granting Tutsis elite status and governing power, and colonial powers went so far as to distribute identity cards delineating these competing ethnic groups, a categorization system that was only repealed after 800,000 people lost their lives to genocide stemming from this conflict (Heldring et al., 2012).
The effects of these oppressive colonial systems are far reaching because many of them sadly persisted even after independence was achieved. Postcolonial regimes built off of already established systems that were put in place by colonizers, taxing farmers heavily and continuing to inhibit growth for their personal gain (Binswanger et al., 2000). After colonizers dropped their reins, more than 60% of African governments reserved full control of the procurement and the distribution of fertilizer and seeds which severely curtailed development potential (Binswanger et al., 2000). Some economic analyses have estimated that postcolonial African per capita annual growth could have been 4.3% if “fastgrowth” policies had been prioritized, rather than the paltry 0.8% growth which resulted historically (Binswanger et al., 2000). The effects of the colonial “cash crop revolution” are made remarkably apparent by cash crop dominance in agricultural exports from the continent. By the 1950s, groundnuts, cotton, cocoa, and palm products accounted for roughly 75% of all agricultural exports, none of which serve nutritional benefit to laborers (Roessler et al., 2022).
European colonial interference in African communities was unconscionably cruel, manipulative, and extortionist, resulting in continent scale social destabilization that hamstrung entire nations and brutalized individuals. By imperialistically prioritizing cash crops over food staples, dehumanizing laborers with unrealistic quotas and inhumane consequences, and structurally disadvantaging indigenous people by prioritizing colonial ambitions in all infrastructure, health, and education projects, colonial powers wrought havoc throughout Africa all to advance white interests and expansion throughout the globe. After the horrors of the slave trade, colonial agricultural development and natural resource extraction merely added salt to a gaping wound, and African populations in nations that are continuing to develop are still fighting an uphill battle thanks to this legacy. As climate change increases food insecurity by adding new agricultural challenges all over the globe, white supremacists with vast amounts of wealth and influence (like Elon Musk) continue to center white narratives in Africa, undermining reconstruction efforts with unfounded, propagandic conspiracy theories of white genocide. Without empathetic and studious reverence to historical truth, the truly unforgivable legacies of European colonialism will continue to perpetuate, and as we observe an erosion of democratic values in Western nations, attention to these historical details are of paramount importance.
Works Cited
Bala, U. A. (2019). Colonialism and the development in Nigeria: Effects and challenges. International Affairs and Global Strategy, 70(1), 9-20.
Binswanger, H. P., & Townsend, R. F. (2000). The growth performance of agriculture in Subsaharan Africa. American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 82(5), 1075-1086.
Frankema, E., Williamson, J., & Woltjer, P. (2018). An economic rationale for the West African scramble? The commercial transition and the commodity price boom of 1835–1885. The Journal of Economic History, 78(1), 231-267.
Heldring, L., & Robinson, J. A. (2012). Colonialism and economic development in Africa (No. w18566). National Bureau of Economic Research.
Idejiora-Kalu, N. (2019). Understanding the effects of the resolutions of the 1884–85 Berlin Conference to Africa’s Development and Euro-Africa relations. Prague Papers on the History of International Relations, (2), 99-108.
Lowes, S., & Montero, E. (2016). Blood rubber: The effects of labor coercion on institutions and culture in the drc. Working Paper.
Roessler, P., Pengl, Y. I., Marty, R., Titlow, K. S., & Van De Walle, N. (2022). The cash crop revolution, colonialism and economic reorganization in Africa. World Development, 158, 105934.