A Critique of Colonial Rule: A Response to Bruce Gilley

Abstract

Bruce Gilley has done the Africanist community a favor. In defending colonial rule, he forces us to define what colonial rule was really like. The problem is that he gets his facts wrong. He is right about a few things. For example, African nationalists often did not have massive support, colonial rule ended the slave trade, and Africans participated in colonial rule. That participation was because colonial rule was weak and under-funded. That explains its reliance on African intermediaries and its brutality. The notion that colonial rule was based on universal values is contradicted by the harshness of the conquest and its treatment of dissent. It relied heavily on forced labor. Colonial rule was racist. Colonial rulers ignored famines, and actually did little for health and education. Gilley sees colonial rule as training for self-government, but in most of Africa, there was little training and reluctance until the very end to think about self-government. Gilley ends with a program for recolonization which is in the interest of neither the former colonizers or the colonized. Particularly absurd is the notion of reengaging Portugal, the worst of the colonial powers.