Category: Adebayo Lamikanra

All throughout the period of the First World War the factories of Britain and other belligerent countries were working full blast producing weapons of widespread destruction. Most of the men had of course gone off to war more often than not, to be maimed or killed. With all the power of industrial production behind them, never in the history of mankind had so much destructive power been unleashed in so many places at once. After all, the machines which produced and processes which were used to produce shoes and other such commodities could be switched ever so slightly to produce bullets and canons. The industrialists were in their natural element. They were producing and that was all that mattered to them. To put it bluntly, it did not matter to them that their products were now the instruments of torture and multiple sudden death.  Another interesting consideration was that under the exigencies of war, women were recruited to mind the machines which in peace time had been under the ministration of men. Actually, there was very little strangeness about this particular aspect of this  situation. After all, women and children of all ages had been put to work right from the beginning of the Industrial revolution. This time around however, there were very few men around on the factory floor.

At the outbreak of the war, in each of the belligerent nations, all the people were not just sure of victory but they were convinced and very strongly so, that it was going to be a quick affair, a giddy but minor inconvenience that was going to be over almost before it began. The various armies were sent off to the designated fronts to the sound of martial music noisily rendered by ecstatic bands. The poor soldiers, blissfully unaware of what they were in for, sang lustily as if they were going off to a grand picnic on an enchanted beach. Blinded by manufactured patriotism, former factory workers gleefully turned off their machines and picked up all sorts of lethal weapons with which they were sure they were going to rout the enemies created expressly for that purpose by their leaders. Little did they know that industry had turned war into unspeakable horror. Little could they imagine that the raw materials which were going to be fed into the awesome machines of war were human beings, sacrificial victims of modern warfare. The war which was supposed to be over within a few months dragged on for more than four excruciatingly painful years. No thanks to the power of industry which had nothing more on its mind but the design of even more horrible weapons with which to torment mankind in general and soldiers on the front lines in particular.

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Right at the beginning of the Industrial revolution, workers, even in their wretchedness had produced men and women who were determined to fight against the power of their bosses. There were none more so than those who appreciated the power of the new machines. The items of equipment which were being fashioned to destroy the will of the people who were to operate those machines for the benefit of the very few people who owned the means of production. The early struggles against the bosses was by necessity rather confused as workers turned their fury against the dumb machines which were destroying their means of livelihood. Most of these dissenters were the skilled artisans who in pre-industrial times made a good living from the practice of their craft.  The most famous of these dissenters were the Luddites who have given their name to any group of people who have shown opposition to the adoption of any form of technological innovation.

Some two centuries after the bloody repression and consequent suppression of the Luddite movement, those men and women who were adherent to the tenets of Luddism are at best, faint figures of fun. They have come down to us as  being rather ridiculous enemies of progress since the relative comforts we now enjoy are the products of machines, the prototypes of which the Luddites destroyed to protect what is now an antiquated way of life. Back then however, the Luddites were seen as a truly vicious threat to Human progress. So serious was that perceived threat that the deliberate destruction of any machine was legislatively pronounced as a capital offense which led to the prosecution and subsequent hanging of no less than sixteen Luddites at the height of their campaign. In addition to execution, many others were transported to the then penal colony of Australia, there to repent of their misdeeds at leisure. With the full weight of the law pressed against their necks, the Luddites were forced to renounce their beliefs and passed on to become nothing more significant than a footnote of history.

Conditions inside the mines and factories put up by the early industrialists were hellish to say the least. This encouraged some of the workers to band together to fight for the amelioration of those conditions. Fighting every inch of the way, these workers working under the umbrella of trade unions forced concessions out of the bosses. For example, the bosses insisted that workers put in more than twelve hours on the factory floor six days a week. Getting them to observe eight hour working days with a half day on Saturday was an uphill task. Getting the factory owners to pay their workers a living wage was another struggle, one which has not been resolved right up till now. Wages are still inadequate in all parts of the world including  the industrialised countries. Jobless workers have continued to exist even in the most advanced industrial nations. They exist to form a reservoir of workers to be called upon should those in employment try to get above their station. They are a warning to those who have jobs of what could be their fate should they begin to agitate too vigorously for higher wages. It has been said that the existence of a pool of jobless workers is an indispensable aspect of all capitalist systems.

From the period after the Second World War, foreigners have been encouraged to move from poorer countries to work at jobs which the indigenous people of the affluent countries have for one reason or the other shunned. This has led to the migrant crises in Europe and the USA with right wing politicians whipping up base sentiments against the immigrants in their midst. The Trump government in the USA has gone beyond rhetoric and is set to deport as many immigrants as possible in the coming weeks and months.

Whilst it is true that conditions on the factory floor have improved over the years, it needs to be pointed out that most of the necessary improvements have been the result of long and often bitter struggles on the part of workers. These struggles began as soon as the workers came to the realisation that they could get their respective employers to ameliorate the conditions of their employment. More than this, they came to appreciate the importance of working together in unions which could speak in one voice to the powers which previously dominated all aspects of their working lives completely. In the matter of going to war to be used as cannon fodder however, there was very little if a thing that the unions could do to shield their members from harm. At least as soon as the bullets began to fly as union, as no union, it was every man for himself.

Long before the beginning of the First World War. Even before workers appreciated the importance of corporate struggle, Karl Marx and his friend Frederick Engels had imagined an organisation consisting of all workers of the world. They exhorted all workers to unite across all boundaries of work specialisations and countries. The slogan which has rung down the age was, ‘Workers of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains.’ As far as the composers of the Communist manifesto were concerned, the workers were no more than slaves who were chained to their places in various places of work like slaves who had no freedom in the same way that slaves were treated by their owners. Whilst it is true that the allusion to slavery may not have done justice to the slaves who were toiling away on the cotton fields of Alabama or serfs being worked nearly to death in Russia, the workers were nevertheless almost as effectively chained to their workplaces in the dangerous factories where they worked for what could only be described as just a little better than starvation wages. Apparently however, it seemed that the workers had developed a liking for their chains and did not dare risk the empty freedom of being without work. Whatever the reason or reasons for not coming together, the workers did not or could not summon up the spirit necessary for standing up to the bosses. With the clouds of war gathering over the whole of Europe, it appeared that at last the workers had an incentive to come together to stand up to their bosses. Some of the Union leaders including Keir Hardie, the first leader of the British Labour party, pushed the line that workers from different countries had no business squaring up to each other, let alone killing each other for the benefit of the bosses. Unfortunately, that line of thinking did not gain any traction or perhaps the workers had been convinced that the coming war was going to be a walk in the park. Whatever their reason, a good opportunity to get rid of their chains was lost. Whatever the reasons were, the workers did not show any  dissent. They flocked like sheep to the standards with great enthusiasm to promote the rise, rise and rise of capitalism.  

One can be forgiven for thinking that throughout the torrid four year period of the First World War, British minds were solely concentrated on how to come out with victory from it. That for the period of the war, they would have put aside the thought of further imperial conquests as they fought a vicious modern war of survival. At a time when they were suffering several thousand casualties everyday, they were still plotting to extend the reach of their extended, some would even say, over-extended Empire which at that time covered more than 25% of the world and existed on all continents. This might be conventional thinking but, not for the British who as early as 1915, in the very early period of the war were already deep in the formulation of plots and stratagems to grab territories in the Middle East which were part of the Ottoman Empire. The empire which together with Germany, Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria formed the opposing Central powers. The war had come at a time when the Ottoman Empire which had at one time been a dominant force in European affairs was clearly on the wane. In spite of this, the Ottomans still held sway in the Middle East taking in territories which stretched across North Africa into the whole of what is called the Middle East today. Within a year of the beginning of the war however, the British, in collaboration with the French had concluded the Sykes-Picot agreement which was basically a secret accord which allocated vast territories to Britain, France, Russia and Italy. By the end of the war, Russia had dropped out of the Alliance and out of the Sykes-Picot agreement so that Britain and France got even more than they had originally allocated to themselves. An interesting footnote to this agreement is that the area around Morocco and also Libya was ceded to Italy whose earlier attempt at colonizing Ethiopia, then known as Abyssinia was brought to a tragic and altogether unsuccessful end at the battle of Adwa in 1899. Furthermore, this rapacious agreement was ratified when the respective territories were awarded to France and Britain as what were referred to as mandated territories. They were handed over to them by the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles which was supposed to have brought the First World War to a close. On further consideration it should be said that it is this kind of thinking that made it possible for that physically insignificant island nation to dominate the world to the extent that it did at the height of its pomp and glory.

The backbone of the British Empire was the Royal Navy as British naval power was immense. More than that, it was awesome. It was this institution that made the creation of the empire possible. And it was always capable of maintaining, strengthening and expanding it. It is quite understandable then that whatever the Navy wanted or needed, it got from any government of the day. It is pertinent to note that it was the involvement of the British in and the experience gained in the trans-Atlantic slave trade that made the Royal Navy the formidable force that she turned out to be. This is because many men and officers of the Royal Navy were introduced to service at sea on one of the many slave ships that ferried African captives across the sea into slavery. Without that platform, it is unlikely that the Royal Navy would have been as efficient a fighting force as it turned out to be. It was because Britannia ruled the waves that the assertion could be made as indeed it has been made that Britons could never be made slaves of.

As noted before, several events came together to trigger the Great War but little will be gained by enumerating them here. One of the more visible causes however has to be the insistence of the British on total domination of the seas. The reason for this is clear. The continued control of the affairs of the far flung British Empire could only be guaranteed by the Royal Navy. Each colony, especially India had to be kept within striking distance of a squadron of ships of the line to keep the natives in check at all times from both internal  insurrection and external interference from other colony seeking rivals.

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Another matter for consideration here is the protection that the Navy provided for the country itself. British involvement in European affairs could be said to have followed from the totally unexpected defeat of the mighty Spanish naval fleet, the Armada by what can only be described as a motley collection of British ships during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. By the time Napoleon, self proclaimed Emperor of the French, was rampaging through Europe nearly two and a half centuries later, it was the British Navy that made it possible for Britain to escape from inclusion in Napoleon’s agenda for total European domination. But for the costly victory of the Royal Navy at the battle of Trafalgar, Napoleon at his prime would have had all the crowned heads of Europe from Russia in the East and Britain in the West in his big bag. It was his inability to bring Britain to heel that led to his eventual demise at Waterloo in 1815. The British success in these battles is still commemorated by the existence of both Trafalgar square with its towering stature of Nelson and  Waterloo Place, both in London. I cannot at this point resist the temptation to put the records straight in this matter of who won the Battle of Waterloo. Not surprisingly, the British have, for a long time claimed Waterloo as a British victory. This is inspired propaganda. For much of that battle, the British were having their arses handed to them by Napoleon. At the height of the battle when Napoleon was probably thinking of another victory, Blücher, at the head of a massive Prussian Calvary force arrived just in time to turn the tide and secure victory. More than two hundred years later, the British are convinced of their victory over Napoleon at Waterloo. It fits right into their colonial tradition.

 At the height of the struggle of Europeans to establish colonies round the world, it was clear to the British that the seas had to be ruled by the Royal Navy. By the turn of the twentieth century, they had come round to insist on maintaining the two Navy system in which the power of the Royal Navy had to be greater than the combined naval power of the two countries next to them. The maintenance of this system was at this time put under considerable challenge when Germany decided on a course of massive naval building following her unification under the guiding hand of Otto von Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor. As expected, Britain accepted the challenge from Germany and it was resolved that she would build two warships for every warship built by the Germans. This sparked off an arms race with both sides finding it difficult to keep up given its effect on their respective economies. The strains imposed on them must have been a contributory factor to the war which duly followed.

Another ingredient in this heady mix of deadly power relations was the decision by the British government to build a navy powered by fuel oil rather than coal. The decision to switch from coal to oil was initiated by Winston Churchill in his capacity as the First Lord of the Admiralty on the bases of convenience and effectiveness of oil over coal. On the other hand however, there was the question of availability. There was an abundance of coal in Britain and so, there was no problem in respect to providing fuel for the Navy. But, to maintain the dominance of the Royal Navy at whatever cost required, its ships had to switch to oil, large quantities of which existed in those parts of the world under Ottoman control. The equation that needed to be solved was quite simple. Find a way to lay hands on those lands flowing with crude oil. With this in mind, the method in the madness of the Sykes – Picot agreement becomes easily discernible. Britain needed fuel oil for her naval vessels and it made sense to control the lands in which this commodity existed in considerable abundance. A classical case of imperialism at work. Since that unfortunate period in human history the world’s leading capitalist nations have been trying their utmost to retain some form of control over the countries in that region. They have taken little care to disguise their determination to dictate terms to the countries of the Middle East in respect of the vast quantities of crude oil under their soil. The British started the race when they took control of their mandated territories to extract the oil they needed to power the ships of the Royal Navy. Thereafter, they found out that their factories needed to burn fuel oil in order to make it possible for them to continue with the industrial production of all those seductive goods that were the key to their continued control of global means of production. However, the vital importance of oil to the evolution of human civilisation had to wait until after the Second World War when the capitalist mode of production was clearly seen to be in triumphant mode and all varieties of goods produced in ever increasing profusion became available all over the world except perhaps in those areas of the world under communist control as well as in those countries where the absence of capital did not leave room for the consumer boom being enjoyed in the more fortunate parts of the world where the rise, rise and rise of capitalism was prominent.

For the first one hundred and fifty years the industrial revolution was principally a European enterprise even if the Americans had come to the party about the same time as it had crossed the English Channel into the European mainland. As soon as it spread to any country, it was adapted to fit local conditions. Since there was a multiplicity of local conditions, several variants of the process took hold in different countries and this led to rivalries of the destructive variety all over the continent. The capitalists in the different countries, mainly in Western Europe competed with each other to secure spheres of exploitative financial interest in different parts of the world. From Africa to the Far East, back to the Middle East and even in the less sophisticated parts of Europe such as the Russian empire, not forgetting the Ottoman Empire which at that time was audibly, if slowly, disintegrating. Over time, these rivalries became deadly just as it was in the early days when the Spanish and Portuguese had cornered Africa and South America between them with the English, French and the  Dutch muscling in to corner different bits of the New World and parts of Asia for themselves. It was the riches wrung from these overseas territories that triggered the industrial revolution in England in the middle of the eighteenth century. This time, other European countries were determined not to miss out on any of the good things that were up for grabs in any part of the world. They were therefore determined to match anything that was cooked up by English industrialists in the area of seizing territories for exploitation abroad. From that point of view, both imperialism and colonialism were not allowed to be exclusively English thus setting the stage for deadly rivalry.

One of the most important triggers for industrial revolution in England was the draining of the population from the rural areas into the cities. This happened gradually over several centuries but by the middle of the eighteenth century, the large number of people, enough of them with critical skills, were on hand to kick-start work in the factories which the early industrialists were building in London, Birmingham, Manchester and other lesser cities dotted across England. However, this meant that there was a growing shortage of agricultural workers and a concomitant fall in food production both in terms of quality and quantity. The immediate consequence was that available food not only became more expensive but increasingly so with time. Under these circumstances, the workers became restive, demanding the provision of the food they needed to save themselves from starvation. To cope with the circumstances in which they were mired, they demanded that food be imported from wherever it could be imported to be sold at reasonable prices. They may have been hopelessly hamstrung by their situation. But the landlords who were benefitting from the high cost of food stood resolutely in the path of the legal reforms needed to allow the importation of food. It is interesting to note that the response of government to the agitation for food importation was to throw a wall of tariffs around food from abroad thereby maintaining the high cost of food even in the face of starvation as was the case in Ireland. There, up to a million people starved to death when the local potato crops failed two years in a row. Ironically the wheat crops in those years were better than they had ever been before. There was more than enough food to feed the people. But the people did not have money enough to buy the wheat which was grown in Ireland in those lean years. The abundant wheat harvests were sealed up under military protection in trains and shipped across the Irish sea to England to be sold at great profit to the landlords. The welfare of millions of people paled into massive insignificance in the face of the overwhelming need to generate profit for the members of the ruling class.

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It has to be said however that the people at the sharp end of government policies did not simply fold their powerless arms. They raised their voices in protest and when it was apparent that nobody was bothering to listen to them, they poured into the streets and rioted in one city after the other. They were insistent on overturning the Corn Laws which stood implacably between the people and affordable food. The battle was fought in parliament from the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815 with varying degrees of success. Finally the industrialists who were best placed to benefit from cheaper food for their workers were successful and the oppressive Corn Laws were repealed by parliament in 1846. Thereafter, wheat and other grains poured into Britain shifting the balance of power within the country to the cities. Consequently, Britain not only became an importer of food but other materials as well thereby establishing the principle of global free trade. She was of course able to do this because she had a far flung empire on which the sun never set demonstrating the power of imperialism to the rise and rise of capitalism on the global level.

Grains were being produced at minimum cost on the prairies of the USA, the pampas of Argentina and by the serfs toiling for next to nothing in the vast lands of the Russian  empire. These were imported to Britain at a much lower cost than before the repeal of the Corn Laws. Consequently, British workers not only had money for food but also to spend on factory produced goods. A win-win situation for the industrialists and capitalists to the detriment of the land owners whose hold on political power was also  being loosened. It also removed the spectre of starvation which hung over Europe making Malthus to sound the alarm about imminent starvation in his famous thesis which was published with much doom and gloom in the closing years of the eighteenth century. At that time the global population was still short of one billion. Today, hand in hand with the inexorable rise of capitalism global population is matching steadily towards the nine billion mark suggesting that the  ghost of Malthus has finally been exorcised.

It has become clear that the Malthusian prediction about the end of the world has been premature. It is highly unlikely now as it was indeed then that human civilization is not likely to come to an end with the whimper of global starvation. The trajectory of human existence suggests however that the danger of a spectacular ending such as some form of global war cannot be discountenanced or simply dismissed out of hand. Evidence provided by the Boer war eloquently suggests that the rise of capitalism goes hand in hand with the possibility of armed conflict. And this is what happened in Europe where the first war to have been fought on a global level was precipitated by the rivalries which followed the rise of capitalism within the continent. The simplistic answer to the question of how the First World War began is that Serbian nationalists assassinated Archduke Ferdinand and heir to the throne of the Austro Hungarian Empire (together with his consort) on the streets of Sarajevo. Yes, that was the immediate cause because it prompted the issuance of a string of ultimatums which led to the mobilisation of troops all over Europe. What is missing from that scenario is that the clouds of war, seeded by the rise of capitalism had been hanging over the continent for many years. In the beginning, it appeared that the scramble for Africa might light the fire of general war in Europe. The Berlin conference was convened with the specific intention of putting out that fire. And it did. But it soon became apparent that the embers of the fire were still glowing under a thin cover of ashes. The fire was still alive and was soon to be blown into a conflagration which all but destroyed Europe completely. That it did not do this was not for the want of trying.

More than a hundred years after the end of the First World War, there is still a great deal of debate about how the war began or more appropriately, which country lit the fatal torch that brought about the conflagration that led to the incineration of millions of Europeans. Germany lost the war and to suit the narrative of the winners, she was blamed for starting the war. This made it possible for war indemnity to be levied against Germany. The weight of the reparations imposed was so crushing that it virtually guaranteed a return match only twenty years after the end of the Great War as the First World War has come to be known in history.

The truth about what led to the First World War is that it was caused by at least several different reasons each one of them as compelling as the next one. Whatever the reason, that war did a great deal of damage to everything associated with human existence if only in terms of scale. For the first time in human history, millions of men were mobilised in a matter of a couple of weeks and poured into the cauldron of the first war to be fought on a scale invented by industrialists who are totally incapable of doing anything by halves. The killing that took place on the various theatres of that war was on an industrial scale. Soldiers were rushed to the various battle fields by train travelling at dizzying pace along railways which had been cleared of other trains except those carrying instruments of slaughter to the war front. At the battle of the Somme, the British army lost sixty thousand men in the first hour of battle. By the time that meaningless offensive ended, the French, British and German armies had sustained between them, the loss of more than a million men in a little over three months. All casually wasted over a few metres of muddy, unproductive tract of land. In the end, perhaps the only thing shining above those blood soaked fields of Flanders and elsewhere in the world was the flag of the industrialists celebrating the rise, rise and rise of capitalism.

I honestly did not think that South Africa, because of her small size as well as her distance from the epicentre of global capitalism, was going to consume as many column inches as she has done so far in this series. I am even now still wondering how South Africa has, so to say, slipped my creative leash such that I can only follow helplessly in her wake. However, after some reflection it is clear that South Africa, needs to be regarded as a special case because at different points of her existence she has demonstrated the many characteristics of rampant capitalism. She can therefore be cited as an index case for the rise, rise and rise of capitalism. All the indices of unapologetic  capitalism; imperialism, colonisation, exploitation, brutal resource extraction, punitive societal stratification, recourse to extreme violence, relentless pursuit of inequality and racial compartmentalisation as well as stark racism have all been part  and parcel of the history of South Africa for five centuries. That story is compelling and deserves to be told. It needs to be told.

The Boers fled from the Cape following the abrogation of slavery in all parts of the British empire in 1834. They did this in an attempt to put themselves outside the reach of British rule which was cramping their bigoted style. With the discovery of diamonds in Kimberley and gold in the Witwatersrand however, their independence became untenable as the British, their predatory style in full display, moved in to take what they regarded as their fair share of those precious minerals. As they had always done wherever they went around the world. Clearly, the situation demonstrated a high potential for violence which duly arrived when the Boers who had steadily built up a powerful arsenal of contemporary weapons went on the offensive against British towns leading to the Boer war which raged furiously for more than two years and seriously tested British resolve to continue to add new territories to the surging British empire on which the sun was never supposed to set.

At the beginning of the war, the Boers, for all their early aggression were not expected to stand up to the might of the British army for very long. Against all odds however, they did. They were able to do this not only because of their fighting qualities but also because of their use of guerrilla tactics with which the superior British forces, used to conventional warfare as they were, could not cope until an effective strategy could be developed to counter the potency of this method of fighting. In the end, vast resources in men and material had to be committed to the fight before the Boers could be removed from the field.

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In the first place, there had to be a general mobilisation within Britain in order to bring enough men under colours. To the dismay of the recruiting authorities, the general physical condition of the typical British male of our species at the time was so poor that the majority of men caught up in the recruitment net were declared unfit for service. The British working class was almost as a rule badly under-nourished and suffering from one or more diseases, many of which were endemic and were more or less incurable. The riches which had been pouring into Britain for more than three centuries had not percolated down the social ladder for the benefit of the majority of those at the bottom of the pile. According to one commentator, the British master race could not find enough men that were considered fit enough to be sent out to be killed by eager Boers on the hills of South Africa or anywhere else for that matter. Capitalism could not guarantee the provision of the minimum condition for human growth in the most advanced capitalist country outside the USA at the turn of the twentieth century. Fortunately for the cause, the authorities took this as a wake-up call for the enhancement of living conditions in Britain at that time. The steps taken at that point in the light of what needed to be dealt with, made it possible for the supply of all those millions of young men who were slaughtered wholesale on the Western front and other killing fields of the First World War some fifteen years later. Members of that generation were no more than fatted sheep ready made for sacrifice to Mammon and its acolytes.

As far as the Boer war was concerned, the ability of the British to put many men in the field was not a guarantee of success. Their commanders had to develop the proper strategy to deal with the enemy. What they came up with was fiendishly brilliant. The Boers in the field needed to be continuously supplied with food and other such necessities over short supply lines and all that was needed to thwart their military ambitions was to cut those supply lines. What the British did was to herd, mostly women and children into what they called concentration camps within which they died in their thousands, of hunger and disease. Thus, the British, to the fury of their opponents, were waging all out war on women and children. Later on, during World War II, the Germans had developed this strategy into and art form and used it to deadly effect all over Europe. The bitterness engendered by the use of this strategy against the Boers lingered on within South Africa for so long that many Boers were eager to fight on the side of Nazi Germany at the outbreak of World War II even though as part of the British empire, they were committed to supporting Britain in that conflict. And these antipathies are still being nursed today. This is why contemporary times the game of rugby is still associated with the Boers, cricket with the English and football abandoned to the blacks. The coloured fit in everywhere as best they could. Not too long ago, the different races that make up the Republic of South Africa did not share the same playing fields. They did not in fact share anything. Not even the air they breathed.

Another factor of the Boer war is that British settlers in Australia, Canada and to some extent, New Zealand were dragged into the fight. This set a tone for what has followed all British military engagements ever since, right down to their recent misadventure in Afghanistan. In the unlikely event of British involvement in  Ukraine, you can be sure that their overseas cousins especially the Australians will accompany them into battle.

The British were also influenced to some degree by their experience in South Africa. For many of the soldiers who were sent to war, this represented their first opportunity to see anything resembling life outside Britain and they came back home with many stories to tell. To them, war was an eye opener to many things including the poverty that the had to cope with everyday. Of course, this being war, not all of them survived to tell their stories. Today, Liverpool FC fans occupy a portion of the stadium at Arnfield which is known all over the world as the Kop. I wonder how many of them know that the original occupiers of that stand were veterans of the Boer war. They were those who survived the fighting on Spion kop, a small hill on which regiments raised in Liverpool fought and died in South Africa. The survivors of that battle came home and named a portion of the stadium which had a steep hill-like incline, the Kop, in honour and memory of the many that fought and died on the Spion kop. Their gallantry in defence of the rise of imperialism, colonisation and capitalism is all but completely forgotten now.

Britain may have defeated the Boers but it was at considerable cost to the imperial order. It may even have marked a turning point to the march of imperialism and should have been a warning to the imperialists. Right up to when they were confronted by the Boers, the British had won a series of easy victories against rabble armies which were armed with antiquated weapons which had no business on a modern battlefield. The warning that should have been heeded was that colonial conquests were likely to become much more expensive in men and material than they had been before. Another danger which was not heeded was that further expansion in many parts of the world could only be against well armed modern armies against which victory could not be guaranteed. But these warnings fell on deaf ears. There were resources which the capitalists needed to exploit for their natural resources and markets which were to cultivated as consumers of their manufactured goods. The hope was that the results of the Berlin conference was going to prevent the Europeans from going to war with each other over disputed territories in Africa. Whilst this limited objective was successful, events within Europe led to such sharp divisions that the First World War was precipitated and ferociously fought for four destructive years.

The population of Europe was on the rise at the beginning of the Industrial revolution. Looking back, this increase was at least partly instrumental in pushing this revolution forward. The revolution required a large population to push it and two processes merged to produce a situation in which the outcome was greater than the sum of the two processes.

The population of Europe had increased steadily since the end of plague years during which the continent lost about half of its population. For various reasons, Europeans began to colonise other parts of the world where the overspill of their increasing population was accommodated. Mostly in the New World; the Portuguese in Brazil, the Spaniards in the rest of what we now call Latin America and the British in what became the USA. In the aftermath of the wars which led to the independence of countries in Latin America, many settlers came over from Spain and Italy to settle in Uruguay, Chile, Columbia and others in that region turning the Americas into European settled countries. In this way, the European diaspora spread all over the Americas having slaughtered the indigenous people and imported millions of Africans to do all the heavy lifting for no pay. This led to a situation in which European capital accumulation prepared the way for total world domination and the rise of capitalism.

As long ago as 1823, the USA declared herself the superpower in the Western hemisphere. In doing so, she sealed off Europe from the Americas to prevent any further colonisation from Europe. At the time of the promulgation of what is now known as the Monroe doctrine, the USA had no power to enforce the doctrine but it stayed on the books and became USA policy. Later on, the USA became powerful enough to dictate policy to her hemisphere neighbours and she could shield the Western hemisphere from European powers. The USA was invited to the Berlin conference even though she had no interest in hacking out any colonies in the backwoods of Africa. Her interest in colonies with the potential for capitalist exploitation was restricted to her neighbours in Latin America. The invitation to Berlin was simply an acknowledgement that American interests could no longer be ignored. European powers on their own welcomed this arrangement because it allowed them to carry out their designs on the African continent without looking over their shoulders at what American interests in the matter were. American representatives were in Berlin but their minds were fixed on Latin America. When the time came she flexed her muscles and sent her troops to help shove out Spain completely from the Western hemisphere. In doing so, the independence of Cuba from Spain was secured and the Monroe doctrine became fact after close to ninety years.

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The Europeans spread throughout the world with the British spreading out farthest into Australia, parts of Canada, parts of South Africa,  Rhodesia and New Zealand. All these were settler colonies to which they migrated in considerably significant numbers. They also  emigrated to parts of Kenya, to the very fertile land in the Rift valley where they acquired large tracts of land from which they had evicted the indigenous people, mainly the Kikuyus. Decades later there was the Mau Mau uprising against the settlers. This occurred in the immediate period after the Second World War. In cold blooded imitation of German reaction to the Hereros of South West Africa, the uprising was ruthlessly put down by the British. They poured in thousands of battle hardened troops into Kenya. They then proceeded to herd thousands of people into primitive encampments where suspected Mau Mau fighters were interned for long periods. Many of those who disappeared into those camps were subjected to intolerable torture or simply executed. Put down like rabid dogs who had been given an odious name. They kept a lot of hangmen busy. Jomo Kenyatta who later became the President of an independent Kenya was jailed for five years and placed on restriction for another two years for being the leader of the Mau Mau, a charge which could not be proved beyond reasonable doubt. The most important settler colonies in Africa were Algeria in the North and South Africa.

The Dutch arrived in the Cape of Good Hope in 1652. This was roughly the halfway point between the Netherlands and Dutch possessions in the Dutch East Indies mainly Malaya and Indonesia which were valuable sources of spices which were much sought after in Europe. It made sense for the Dutch to set up a refitment point in the Cape. This they did under Jan  van Riebekke in 1652. Ships belonging to the Dutch East Indies Company sailing to and from the East picked up fresh supplies at the settlement on the Cape. It was strictly an agricultural outpost which supplied passing ships with fresh food. The first thing that needed to be done and was done with despatch was to eliminate the indigenes of that region through military action and the spread of exotic diseases. They then  imported slaves from the surrounding area and all the way from Malaya. The descendants of these Malayan imports are now referred to as Coloureds. In doing these, they laid the foundation for the sin of apartheid which is still awaiting redemption.

In time, many settlers arrived from the Netherlands and France. The French arrived on the Cape as refugees, Huguenots, Protestants who had to flee from France after the Saint Bartholomew massacre carried out by their Catholic neighbours and countrymen. Today, the flourishing vineyards of South Africa owe their origin to these French refugees.

For close on one hundred and fifty years the Dutch colony on the Cape was devoted to agriculture. So much so that they acquired the name Boers or Farmers in English. The Cape colony first attracted the attention of Britain in the closing years of the eighteenth century. That interest was ignited by war with France and a determination to keep the French out. The British moved in to protect the trade route to India, the territory which they were looting systematically if not ruthlessly at the time. It did not take them long to realise the potential of that region for producing the raw materials with which British factories were fed and translated to wealth. In the end, the British took over the administration of South Africa, their new creation on the Cape. It also became a British colony which attracted migrants from Britain and set the stage for the hundred and fifty year tragedy of apartheid.

The arrival of the British in South Africa led to serious demographic problems especially after slavery was ended throughout the British empire. The Boers had depended on slave labour to run their farms for a century and a half. This being so, they were not about to submit to the British on this point. In order to preserve their way of life and extricate themselves from British overlordship, they set out on what has come to be known as the Great Trek into the interior. They loaded up their ox wagons with all their possessions and armed with the most lethal guns available moved into lands belonging to African tribes such as the Xhosas and Zulus, dispossessing them of their lands as they went. They then settled on these lands on which they set up their Boer republic of the Transval, Natal and Orange Free states at the expense of the original owners of the land. This is why today, the whites in South Africa who make up 8% of the population own and control 72% of all available land. Blacks who constitute 81% of the population own only 4% of the land. This means that all the capital in South Africa is concentrated in white hands even if blacks have the consolation of political power. The current, albeit minority government is trying to rectify this situation but it is difficult to see how justice can be done under the prevailing circumstances. The contribution of South Africa to the rise of capitalism has been tremendous. But the human cost has been even more so. This connection is worthy of further interrogation.

I hope that those of my readers who have been following this series faithfully have as usual turned to these pages today to satisfy their curiousity about the fascinating subject of the continuous rise and rise of capitalism. If you have done so as usual, I am sorry to disappoint you and must confess that I have kept to the usual title only as a means of using it as a decoy. The truth is that so many things have been taking place recently that frankly, it would be carrying on something at least close to journalistic irresponsibility if one were to ignore them or even appear to ignore them in favour of rabbiting on this week about the Berlin conference or colonialism as I was committed to doing before common sense laid to waste all my well laid out plans for this week’s subject.

Having decided to pivot away from capitalism this week, the problem I must solve is which of the interesting subjects facing our world needs to be tackled first. And it is at this point that I am beginning to regret that I have not overcome the temptation to stick to the narrow path that I have been treading for some ten weeks now. After thoughtful, if not painful consideration however, I have decided to stay at home and talk about as some would say, the book which contrary to the nature of books has over the course of a few days exploded onto these shores with what could be described as the force of a powerful bomb. Since the book is from a military source however, it is quite appropriate to persist with the bomb analogy especially since a great deal of damage was done to persons and structures by the publication of this book in particular. On second thought, it is probably not the publication of this book that was responsible for the damage caused by the book. I must confess that I have not only not set eyes on the book but have no intention of spending or perhaps ever waste any time on reading it any time soon. And that is saying a great deal because being retired, time is a commodity I have plenty of to spend or waste as I please. Like me, the author of the book is also retired and like me, has a great deal of time on his hands. Still, I wonder why he has decided to spend so much time and energy which on the face of things he has little of,  to gather all those words together to form a book. On the other hand, there are some who will say and I wonder why they would say that the book is long awaited or overdue. Now that the book has made its long awaited arrival, one can only wonder if the arrival is worth the wait. But then the publication of the book is not so much the publication but its launching, the planning and execution of which must have been a logistical nightmare of gigantic proportions.

For a start, the only living former head of our state who was absent  was fully expected to be absent as his presence would have been awkward to say the least. After all, there is enough bad blood between those two officers and gentlemen to drown an army of crocodiles. Still, the presence of so many former heads of state, not to talk of the current tenant of Aso Rock in such a confined space was enough trouble to keep an inordinately large number of security details inordinately busy. At the end of it all, one cannot help but wonder what all the fuss was all about.

To be fair, that book for all it is worth may have promised much more than if was able to deliver but there is no denying the riot of colours associated with the author. No other head of our state living or dead can hold a candle next to him in this respect. Even in the prime of his career as a fully certified warrior his avuncular good looks was a perfect disguise for the sternness of his inclination and profession. But then, it is quite true that there is no art to find the mind’s construction in the face but it is even more difficult if that face is more often smiling than not because of the sharp contrast of those smiles to some of his physical reactions to some issues. For eight long years he held sway as head of state catching as many flies with honey as with vinegar. For many Nigerians even now, thirty-two years after ‘stepping aside’ he inexplicably remains their head of state, the commander in chief who is still quite capable of commanding that last salute. How they will come to terms with their chief’s abject abdication of his responsibility as head of state or the only self-styled military president the world has ever seen can only be guessed at. But there are many more people who are in no mood to forgive that lapse in judgement or courage which has only just admitted and for the first time that MKO Abiola was indeed the winner of what Nigerians continue to describe as the freest of fairest elections Nigeria has ever had as if there has ever been any free or fair election in the history of our country. The launching of the book went off like a bomb but the book itself lacked the power of ordnance to cause a detonation. Now, we have at least on the surface, a large sum of money with which to build a Presidential Library for a president who has neither been voted for nor voted out of office but then in Nigeria, there are no contradictions that cannot be resolved at some all-night rendezvous so beloved of our leaders. We simply live with everything no matter the absurdity we have to invest in.

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For the benefit of my sons who were born in the eighties but did not really grow up in what has turned out to be the most turbulent period in our history, a brief discussion of those days is pertinent. The eighties started with the long awaited return to civil rule after fourteen torrid years of military rule marked by bloodshed and general discomfort. Unfortunately, the civilians only came to power with their own version of mayhem. Blatantly rigged elections after four disastrous years persuaded us to jump from the frying pan of civil rule back into the fire of another round of military rule characterised as was the first round by rounds of fatal gunfire. This time, civilian casualties were limited but in 1985 after a coup against a military government, we fell into the clutches of a military president who proceeded to paint the country in his own colourful, some would say, lurid image. First, we were told that some officers had planned a coup against the government and they were duly executed to prove it. This was followed by a massive devaluation of the Naira and the institution of something called the Structural Adjustment Programme which turned the country’s economy upside down and pauperised a large section of wage earners. We were told at the time that this was going to lead to prosperity. We are still waiting in vain for that prosperity to arrive and even now with the removal of fuel subsidies and another massive devaluation of the Naira, we are still in the process of structural readjustment. Another promise was that the military was going to go back to their barracks by 1990. This promise was not kept until 1999 by which time we simply dressed a former military head of state in civilian clothes and pretended that we had transitioned successfully into democratic rule. Twenty-six years later, we are still coming to terms with the intricacies of democracy. You are not likely to remember that the importation of wheat and a whole lot of other commodities was banned and we substituted the reality of imported wheat for the fiction of producing wheat and other commodities in places where such production is very difficult if not impossible. But we were nothing if not determined and we showed our persistence by ploughing a great deal of money into our reluctant soil. In the meantime, we dissolved commodity boards and crippled the production of cocoa, palm oil and groundnuts. Our educational institutions, especially our universities which up till the eighties attracted scholars from all over the world began to wind down perceptibly and our doctors began to relocate to Saudi Arabia in search of American greenbacks which were commanding top premium. Our list of failures began to lengthen even as we embarked on the promotion of the cult of a flood of political appointments.  Special Assistants to political assistants began to proliferate along our corridors of power even as real power slipped from our nerveless hands. We diverted our energies and resources into a never ending transition to civil rule and only ended up in producing a cohort of politicians who are only fit for politics and nothing else. Our dependence on crude oil increased even as people from all unlikely works of life were turned into instant dollar multi millionaires through the allocation of oil blocks for undisclosed services rendered.  Now, we are turning our hands to the writing and launching of memoirs of frankly dubious value, both in terms of content and style. It is not unlikely that given the fun affair associated with last week’s book launch, many other people are waking up to writing their memoirs in their turn. Many more book launchings complete with the flaunting of donations are in the offing.

Now to something completely different. Three short months ago, the people of the United States went to the polls to choose their president and commander in chief. They have been doing this for more than two hundred years, actually, for two hundred and thirty-six years  and in that time only forty-five men (not a single woman) have been elected President of the United States. This shows just how coveted this position has been. Given this fact, it is not a position for mean men. It is only available for men with sterling qualities. The bar to it is, at least in theory set so high that only men of integrity, extraordinary intelligence and iron  clad morality need apply. Having said that however, it is on record that some of the men who have at one time or the other occupied this post have been thorough going scoundrels who have misbehaved badly whilst in office. One such person, at least in modern times was Richard Nixon, a man of so many contradictions that he was not only impeached for high crimes and misdemeanours but was forced to resign from office, the only man to have suffered that indignity. In addition, he would have served time in jail but for the pardon he received from his successor, Gerry Ford. Another modern president, Bill Clinton was impeached allegedly for seducing a young White House intern, Monica Lewinsky but escaped being tufted out on his ear by the skin of his teeth. Then came Donald Trump, the man who would be president, not once but twice just as he has been twice impeached, indicted for thirty-four felonies related to paying hush money to a porn star who claimed to have had sex with him and accused of formenting an insurrection against the very country he was aspiring to lead. Against many odds, he was elected president for the second time, only the second man in history to pull off this feat. I cannot see Donald Trump ever sitting down to write a book but if he did, who would want to read it. Some would say that he once wrote as best selling book, the art of the deal. As with virtually everything about this character, he actually got someone else to write the book.

• I promise to stick to the subject of capitalism next week.

The men who led the world into the age of the Industrial revolution were hard headed men who held no truck with niceties of any kind. They kept their eyes on the bottom line and exalted gold to the level of a deity. They saw all human beings only through the prism of profit and every single thing they did was towards the enhancement of their bank balance. They seized every opportunity that came their way and turned it into a tidy profit. Everything considered, there was no point in appealing to their humanity because they had none to speak of but to them had fallen the responsibility of  building an enduring global order. Or, have they, could they?

It was no coincidence that the industrial revolution took off in England. To start with, England had profited most from the slave trade and therefore had more money in private pockets than any other country including the United States whose economy was based primarily on the production of agricultural products using slave labour. It was becoming clear by the turn of the eighteenth century by which time the industrial revolution had arrived in the Northern states of the Union that the slave economy of the southern states was no longer tenable. However, it took more than sixty years before the debate over slavery was to be resolved on the battle fields of the American civil war. The North, with her almost limitless industrial capacity, at least compared to the South, was of course no match for those hill billies from the South. If they had a little gumption, they would have known that they had no chance against the North but how could anyone tell them that they were swimming against the currents of history and that sooner or later, they would be pulled under the waves. As General Sherman said as he rampaged through the South on his thirty-seven day march from Atlanta to Savannah on the sea, war was hell and Sherman made sure that the Confederates appreciated the meaning of hell as he destroyed all infrastructure in his path and bagged all the food in his path to ensure that his men were well fed and if such food was lost by the rebels, that was good for the Northern cause. He was able to carry out an expedition that has been described as the first action that could be described as modern warfare because of the Industrial base behind him and the lack of modern industry in the South. By the time Sherman reached the sea, it had become clear that the war was over bar the shouting. But I get beyond myself and it would be necessary to go back some seventy years to tell the story of how the USA was dragged into the industrial age.

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England is said to have set off the Industrial revolution by the middle of the eighteenth century and maintained a monopoly of industrial processes which made sure that English industrialists were much richer than the elites in other European countries and of course the USA which for much of that period was still fighting to gain her independence from the British. The situation changed in 1789 when Samuel Slater migrated to the USA from Derby in the English Midlands carrying in his head the industrial method of producing textiles. He had to memorise this process because there was a law preventing the transfer of this technology to any place outside England and having been able to achieve this transfer, Slater became known as a traitor by the English. By 1807, two brothers, William and John Cocktreil also moved the industrial production process to Belgium and it was not long before the Industrial revolution spread right throughout Europe except Russia which at that time was too backward to appreciate large scale industrial enterprises. It was not until 1865 that serfdom, a form of slavery was abolished in Russia and as was the case in the West Indies and the southern states of the USA, any form of slavery is incompatible with the industrial production of goods.

It has to be said that apart from the riches from the slave trade which had set up England to be the seat of the industrial revolution, geography was also kind to England in that all the materials and conditions needed for the take-off of the industrial revolution were present. In the first place, coal was found in considerable abundance in several parts of  Britain and this made it possible to switch to steam power as soon as versions of the steam engine were available. Indeed, the first use of the steam engine was in pumping out water from  damp mines before it was adapted to providing power to make the first power looms work to produce textiles on an industrial scale. Apart from the production of textiles perhaps the greatest  boost to the industrial revolution was the invention of the railways which were not only a marvel of engineering in themselves, they also made it possible for goods to be transported cheaply over long distances. Another advantage that England had was the presence of navigable rivers over which raw materials could be transported. In addition to this, the presence of these rivers made it possible for canals which were an additional aid to the movement of goods all around the country to be possible. By this time also all types of raw materials especially cotton were flowing into England from India and parts of China to be used in those early industries. It is also pertinent to add that the financial institutions needed by those early industrialists; banks, joint stock companies, insurance companies, not to talk of a huge merchant navy were at the disposal of those early English industrialists.

From the beginning of the nineteenth century, the industrial revolution was spreading through Europe with varying degrees of success from one country to another but nowhere was the British success fully replicated. Engineers were required to service the engines used in the new factories and the best engineers were British (and this is one area where the Scots came into their own) and they could be found all over Europe tending to the machines which were driving the industrial revolution. In what could be described as the second stage of the industrial revolution, British engineers could be found all over Europe supervising the laying of railway tracks and servicing the locomotives which hauled the rolling stock. Everywhere they went, the British also took with them their love of football which they spread together with the railroads they were building so that some of the most famous European football teams such as AC Milan and Juventus have some relationship with one Englishman or the other. AC Milan actually started life as Milan Football and Cricket Club! Both Spanish giants Real Madrid and Barcelona  also have considerable English background to their illustrious history.

This reference to football clubs is actually prelude to something much more serious. It was clear quite early in the industrial revolution that the most successful industrial countries were those that had areas of influence from where they had a guaranteed supply of raw materials and to which they could sell the cheap products from their factories. After all, for all the success of British industry, the most important raw material for textile production was cotton, a material which had to be imported from India and the USA. On the other hand the factories were churning out so many yards of cheap textiles that the local population especially with their low wages could never hope to consume more than a small fraction of the materials produced. The solution to this problem was a secure overseas market. In other words colonies or areas of influence were a prerequisite for industrial success. And once again, Britain with her long association with slave traders in Africa and control of most parts of the Indian sub-continent and China was in pole position in the race for the commercial domination of the world. The industrialised countries of Europe including Britain, France and Germany became locked in the race to acquire colonies wherever they could. They competed furiously against each other in Africa, fought wars against each other in India but cooperated with each other in China where they presented a united front agonist the Chinese emperor. All these manoeuvrings signified the end of the beginning industrialisation and the beginning of colonialism or as Lenin so elegantly put it, the age of imperialism which marked the highest state of capitalism. The point to be made here is that as soon as capitalism enters the stage of imperialism in which capitalists are able to carve out areas of interest abroad, there is great danger to the welfare of the workers in both capitalist countries and those in the periphery to come under lash of the oligarchs which working through giant finance corporations control everything and everyone. The current global situation suggests that we are now entering the period of imperialism bringing out the purest form of capitalism but again I am getting ahead of my narrative and must revert to a discussion on colonialism.

There is no doubt that Britain was well ahead of other industrializing countries of Europe right up to 1849, the year that The  Communist Manifesto was published and the warning about the spectre of communism haunting Europe delivered. Thereafter however, other countries especially France and the German Empire which was about to be put together by Otto von Bismarck now known to the world as the Iron Chancellor began to catch up with the British. This was competition which was not welcome by the British especially in the case of the German Empire sitting as she was right in the middle of Europe.

The Germans came late to the party and although they tried to make up for this crippling disadvantage by developing superb engineering skills and inserting themselves into small territories which for one reason or the other had been overlooked by either the French or the British in Africa. They were thus restricted to small territories; Togoland and parts of Cameroon in West Africa, an awful lot of sand in the  practically uninhabitable desert in South West Africa as well as Rwanda, Burundi and Tanganyika in East Africa.

This situation had the potential of causing a lot of trouble in Europe, trouble which was quite capable of toppling the balance of power in Europe which had been devised to prevent any war in Europe after the turbulent Napoleonic wars which had come close to bringing every European empire to her knees. This arrangement which came to be known as the Concert of Europe had succeeded in preventing any major war in Europe save the Crimean war which was fought in the Crimean peninsular, an area which was not really part of Europe. The war between the newly unified Germany and France was over so quickly that it did not disturb the Concert but it gave warning of the danger to the peace of Europe if disputes were not resolved before armies were mobilised and shots fired. By 1884, it had become clear that the squabbling over Africa had the potential to profoundly disturbing peace in Europe. This formed the impetus for Otto von Bismarck to invite fourteen countries including the USA to Berlin in 1884 for what has come to be known as the Berlin Conference.