NAME SAMEEN OMOLOLA. O Essays - Geography Of Africa, Kipande, World

NAME: SAMEEN OMOLOLA. O DEPT: HISTORY COURSE CODE: HIS 208 COURSE TITLE: HISTORY OF EAST AND CENTRAL AFRICA IN THE 20 TH CENTURY MATRIC NO: HIS/2014/111 QUESTION: WHAT WOULD YOU REPAID AS THE MAJOR GRIEVANCE DURING THE COLONIAL RULE IN EAST AND CENTRAL AFRICA TO BE SUBMITED TO: DR Central Africa, region of Africa that straddles the equator and is drained largely by the Congo River system. East Africa is an area in African great lakes occupying roughly the same terrain as present-day Kenya from the Indian Ocean inland to Uganda and the Great Rift Valley . The countries of east and central Africa are Comoros, Djibouti, Eritrea , Ethiopia , Kenya, Madagascar, Seychelles, Somalia, Sudan , Uganda, Burundi, Burkina Faso , Cape Verde , cote d'lvoire , Chad, Congo, guinea, Gabon, Rwanda, Sao Tome, and Principe. The colonialisation of east and central Africa can be dated back to 18 th century as s o me part were colonized by Britain, some by Portugal, Germany, Belgium and so on. Burundi was colonized by Germany and Belgium , Mozambique by Portugal, Kenya colonialism lasted roughly 68years, from the end of the 19 th century until Kenya's independence from Great Britain in 196 3. East and central Africa's precapitalist forms of production were subjected to a historic break in their autonomous development; in the terminology of the time they were literally opened up'. They became part - economies, externally oriented to suit the dynamic of a capitalism which has been imposed upon them from outside. East Africa's pre-colonial relations with the global economy had been based too exclu sively on the production of two rapidly wasting assets, slaves and ivory. In the inland area which became the hub of Kenya there had barely been an exportable surplus at all when, suddenly, in the first decade of the twentieth beyond all p revious experience by the demands of colonial rule and, concurrently, by the opportunities of the commodity boom, itself in part created by the political and capital investments with which the imperial powers competed for preferential access to markets and resources. The British used five main policies to secure and control African labor. First, it established African reserves , "eventually with official boundaries where each African ethnic group in the colony was expected to separately." As Africans lacked sufficient land in their reserves, they "had little choice but to migrate to the European farms in search of work." Or, stated another way, "through the initial act of alienating land to settlers, the colonial state deprived some Africans of their means of production and laid the basis for the entry of Africans in ever-increasing numbers into the wage labor force. Second, they imposed taxes. The government imposed a hut tax and a poll tax, "together amounting to nearly twenty-five shillings, the equivalent of almost two months of African wages at the local rate." The taxation was a double edged sword: it encouraged peasant commodity production increased precisely in those regions from where the colonial state and capital expected to draw their labor, namely the central and Nyanja provinces. Thus, to keep Africans from competing with British farmers, the government imposed the third means of "encouraging African" labor; forbidding them to grow the most profitable cash crops (coffee, tea, and sisal). It was not actually illegal for Kenyans to grow coffee, but coffee growers needed a license and it was very difficult for Kenyans to obtain a license. Fourth, was forced labor, "Forced or compulsory labor was widely used and became institutionalized during the first few decades of colonial rule in Kenya. This was a period when massive supplies of labor were required to lay the very foundations of the colonial economy: rail lines and roads had to be built; damns and bridges constructed, administrative centers erected, and forests cleared and settler farms established... forced labor inevitably becam e the most reliable means of se curing labor. Few government officials or settlers even questioned the need for some form of labor coercion. For many it w as even an act of benevolence, a necessary shock therapy' for people deeply mired in idleness and indolence . Fifth, with thousands of k ikuyu migrating to look for wor k,