The first act and indeed the signal victory of colonial capitalism was the destruction of the African artisan class. These were the workers in iron, copper, and gold. These artisans made things with the raw materials around them. They made jewelry: copper rings to decorate legs, arms, and necks, as well as earrings. They were the minds and hands behind the defense industry, making spears, arrowheads, and swords. They made cooking utensils. Their tools sustained the textile industry, making clothes out of leather and the bark of trees.
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It is also true in the case of domestic colonialism, like the Norwegian suppression of the language of Sami people, and variations of the same in other Scandinavian countries. The suppression of the languages of the dominated and the elevation of the language of conquest and domination were integral to the education system, which accompanied conquest and colonial occupation.
The language of a region holds the most effective and wide-ranging knowledge of the environment of that particular region. Destroy a people’s language, and you destroy the vocabulary by which they understood their environment, and consequently all the knowledge and information developed in the course of their interactions with that environment.
The language of the outsider becomes the language of power and normality. The vocabulary by which the conquering outsider looks at the conquered, their history, their productive capabilities, is that of the outsider. The colonial education system, enforced by the colonial language, was imbued through and through with the worldview of the outsider looking in. Those who went to the colonial school can remember lessons in geography and history that started with those of Europe.
The educated African may have consciously or unconsciously come to adopt the view of the outsider looking in. And in postcolonial Africa, the European language-educated elite has normalized the viewing of Africa from outside itself.
South Africa also became the knot that tied together the diverse histories and fortunes of Asia, Europe, and the United States. Like the rest of the continent, South Africa saw her people hunted down and carried away like slaves. Their labour was used to develop what later became the United States, and profits from the sale of their bodies as commodities became part of the capital that figures such as W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James, and Eric Williams have proved was the basis of Western Europe’s nineteenth-century industrial revolution
From 1652, when first Dutch and French settlers, then British settlers streamed into South Africa and began forcibly taking land from the Africans, to the nineteenth century when the whole country became first a British colony and then a crinoline supervised by a white minority, the gold, diamonds, and mineral resources of South Africa were used to develop Western European industries— and later U.S. industry, too— and to build enormous gold reserves. Is there any bank, financial institution, or industry of any significant size in Western Europe, the United States, and Japan that is not indebted to the gold and diamonds of South Africa?
The majority of the industries inside South Africa are branches, subsidiaries, or partners of those in the West and their enormous profits are clearly rooted in the slave wages of black workers and in the poverty of the majority guaranteed by the cruel system of apartheid. The South African economy is still inextricably tied to that of the West, so it is unsurprising that even now Britain and the United States are hostile to calls for economic boycotts to motivate South African government and institutions to undo the legacy of apartheid in the country’s continued social inequality and Black poverty.
In the South African system, people see the bitter fruition of at least five forces that have bedeviled the development of human beings: classical colonialism, neocolonialism, slave wages, racism, and the usurpation of the people’s sovereignty through the denial of democracy.
But Black South Africans are not endlessly helpless victims of superior forces. Their history presents a people who have been pioneers in the struggle for communal survival, national liberation, and social emancipation. The ferocity of Black South African resistance blunted the determined efforts of European settlers to annihilate them.
You build on tradition; you do not destroy it, as did colonial capitalism to African genius and self-belief.
In short, colonialism disabled the class that used to make things for use and exchange from the raw materials around them. Colonial domination killed that tradition of invention and manufacture. The newcomers coerced the export of raw materials to their home countries, where their own artisan class made things out of these same raw materials.