Kevin Shillington > Quotes

“Literacy, usually in Arabic, was spread through the teaching of the Qur’an. Thus the mosques became centres of learning. In this way, the peoples of northern and western Africa were exposed to and contributed to the intellectual achievements of the Muslim world. These achievements were considerable, especially in the fields of mathematics and science; it was people from this vast Muslim-Arab world who developed our modern numeral system based on counting from 1 to 10. They invented algebra, the use of the decimal point and the number zero – a mathematical concept missed by the Ancient Greeks. They developed physics and astronomy. They studied chemistry and were the first people to separate medicine from religion and develop it as a secular science. As we shall see later in this chapter, the peoples of the western Sudan became part of this Muslim intellectual tradition.”
― Kevin Shillington, History of Africa

“The sale of its own citizens into slavery and the importation of firearms undermined the productive capacity of Benin and hastened its decline during the eighteenth century.”
― Kevin Shillington, History of Africa

“In British west Africa, the war years saw educated Africans increasingly being brought into higher administrative positions and onto elected local councils. British colonial administrators began to contemplate a time, in the distant future, when Africans would be allowed some degree of self-government. Significantly, Portugal, which had remained neutral in the war, felt no such obligation to introduce reform in their African colonies.”
― Kevin Shillington, History of Africa

“it was 1827 before Frenchman René Caillé became the first European to return with a first-hand account of Timbuktu (see Map 22.1). Ironically, Caillé was disbelieved because his description of drab and dusty Timbuktu failed to live up to Europe,s golden expectations.”
― Kevin Shillington, History of Africa

“By 1956, however, the tiny educated minority of clerks, teachers and shopkeepers in the main urban centres were raising demands for the abolition of the racial discrimination that dominated all aspects of social and economic life in the colony. The Belgians believed they could satisfy this group by permitting them to take part in open elections for local government in the principal towns of Leopoldville (Kinshasa), Stanleyville (Kisangani), Elizabethville (Lubumbashi) and Luluabourg (Kananga).”
― Kevin Shillington, History of Africa

“In the years that followed, the British used their Sierra Leone colony as a base for settling freed blacks whom they released from captured slaving ships. The bulk of these ‘recaptives’ originated from among the Yoruba and Igbo peoples of modern Nigeria (the main source of west African slave exports in the early nineteenth century). The original settlers, known collectively as ‘Creoles’, were ardent Christians and strongly anglicised in character.”
― Kevin Shillington, History of Africa

“Few were surprised when the ‘Great Rebellion’ broke out on 29 March 1947. In the initial months of the rebellion, several hundred Europeans and their Malagasy ‘collaborators’ were killed as rebels seized control of eastern parts of the country. Over the following year, however, the French suppressed the rebellion with ruthless brutality, leaving at least 90,000 killed.”
― Kevin Shillington, History of Africa

“the greatest evil of the transatlantic trade in people was the extent of human suffering involved, and the callous disregard for human life and dignity displayed by those who dealt in slaves.”
― Kevin Shillington, History of Africa

“The commercial and military demands of the Second World War stimulated colonial investment in African harbours and airports on a scale not seen since their initial development of the railways. In a number of west African ports, such as Freetown and Lagos, docks were deepened so as to admit larger vessels, and harbour facilities improved.”
― Kevin Shillington, History of Africa

“Although in theory Britain now ruled the country in the name of their appointed pasha, Egypt had, in practice, become a British colony.”
― Kevin Shillington, History of Africa

“Holland and France banned the trade in 1814 and 1817 respectively.”
― Kevin Shillington, History of Africa

“oral traditions of the modern peoples of the region. These, too, have their limitations, however, especially in the early period. They focus mainly on the succession of rulers and tell us little if anything about how people lived. In addition, it is known that facts (chiefly genealogies) have sometimes been distorted in order to justify the claims to leadership of a particular clan or chief.”
― Kevin Shillington, History of Africa

“a racist disregard for the value of African lives, and partly driven by a calculated desire to instil a level of fear that would safeguard European colonial rule.”
― Kevin Shillington, History of Africa

“During the course of the eighteenth century, Britain overtook all other European nations as the single largest exporter of Africans from Africa. By the end of the century, more than half the captives transported from west Africa were carried across the Atlantic in British ships. It was only after a vigorous campaign by anti-slave trade campaigners that Britain finally banned British ships from engaging in the trade. In fact, there had been a wide international movement against the trade and slavery itself since at least the 1780s. Northern US states had been banning the institution of slavery from that time. In France, the revolutionary government imposed a partial ban – the emancipation of second-generation slaves in the colonies – in 1791, which sparked the Haitian Revolution, although Napoleon reversed the ban in 1802.”
― Kevin Shillington, History of Africa

“David Livingstone. On Livingstone’s death in the Lake Bangweulu region of modern Zambia in 1873, Chuma supervised the embalming of the body. It was then taken in a caravan of 60 men, by Chuma and his companion Susi, to the coastal town of Bagamoyo for transportation to and burial in England. The journey took them ten months. They received little thanks and no reward from a parsimonious British government.”
― Kevin Shillington, History of Africa

“The movement of India towards independence in 1947 heralded the break-up of the British Empire. Self-government for Africans could not be far behind. In British West Africa, the movement towards independence was led by the colony of Gold Coast, soon to become the independent state of Ghana.”
― Kevin Shillington, History of Africa

“But, by 1945, African expectations had been transformed, especially among the educated élite. No longer satisfied with reforming a system, they turned to demanding the overthrow of the whole deeply humiliating concept of colonial rule. Colonial authorities resisted as long as possible, but the colonial powers were exhausted after the Second World War, and a combination of popular protest and political party agitation brought most to the negotiating table in due course.”
― Kevin Shillington, History of Africa

“This leaves linguistics and archaeology as the principal sources of evidence for the early history of the east African interior.”
― Kevin Shillington, History of Africa

“American missionary working in the Congo, Reverend J.B. Murphy, described the barbarity of the system he had witnessed: It has reduced the people to a state of utter despair. Each town in the district is forced to bring a certain quantity [of rubber] to the headquarters of the commissaire every Sunday … The soldiers drive the people into the bush. If they will not go they are shot down, and their left hands cut off and taken as trophies to the commissaire … These hands, the hands of men, women and children, are placed in rows before the commissaire, who counts them to see that the soldiers have not wasted the cartridges. The commissaire is paid a commission of about 1d. a pound upon all the rubber he gets. It is therefore to his interest to get as much as he can …”
― Kevin Shillington, History of Africa

“Colonial governments were generally too intent on ordering and instructing rather than consulting and supporting local African initiatives.”
― Kevin Shillington, History of Africa

“non-producers who controlled production”
― Kevin Shillington, History of Africa

“The importation of mass-produced manufactured products in exchange for African primary commodities not only undermined indigenous craft manufacturing, but left Africans in an unequal trading relationship with the industrial world. Indeed, the terms of trade laid down in west Africa during this period were to prevail, little altered, through the colonial period and even into the twenty-first century.”
― Kevin Shillington, History of Africa

“Over the centuries, they developed the use of nets, harpoons and dugout canoes and cleared canals through reed-covered swamps. They developed the technique of drying fish. This not only provided them with an important source of protein, but also meant that their surplus catch could now be traded to other peoples.”
― Kevin Shillington, History of Africa

“the European colonists in Algeria, known as colons, numbered 130,000; by the end of the century, they had reached a million, 13 per cent of the total population.”
― Kevin Shillington, History of Africa

“from the 1630s, as first the Dutch and then the French and the English became involved, there was a rapid expansion of sugar plantations in Brazil and the Caribbean. Demand for slave labour increased and the scale of the trade in captives from west Africa reached epic proportions. There developed over the next 200 years the largest forced transportation of captive people ever devised in human history.”
― Kevin Shillington, History of Africa

“Basically, colonial governments were only interested in training a small élite to fill the lower rungs of the administrative service. They saw mass education as a danger to be avoided. Thus, aside from the Qur’anic schools, in French West and Equatorial Africa in the 1920s, a mere 3 per cent of school-age children attended school, mission or state.”
― Kevin Shillington, History of Africa

“They also asked whether, if they were to come to Holland, they would be permitted to act in a similar manner,”
― Kevin Shillington, History of Africa

“Within the Union of South Africa, the war stimulated a tremendous growth in manufacturing industry. With a shortage of imports from Europe, South Africa began to process their own food, and manufacture their own clothing, chemicals, machinery and tools.”
― Kevin Shillington, History of Africa

“French speakers went to France, while English speakers went mostly to African American institutions in North America. In the 1930s and 40s, more than 100 west Africans went to US universities, among them Azikiwe (‘Zik’) of Nigeria and Nkrumah of the Gold Coast, both graduates of Lincoln University. From among these overseas graduates came most of the leaders of the nationalist and independence movements that followed in the decades after the Second World War.”
― Kevin Shillington, History of Africa

“The evangelical missionaries saw their Christianity as part and parcel of their own European cultural values – even to the extent of insisting that African converts adopt European clothing. They preached a strict puritanical moral code. They opposed dancing, drinking, nonreligious singing and any form of sexual freedom outside monogamous marriage. Applied to Africa, this meant condemnation of much of the essential fabric of African society.”
― Kevin Shillington, History of Africa