The Dark Continent - The Wise World Traveler: Becoming a Part of All that You Meet - page 342

The colonial state system imposed throughout Africa by these seven European powers
can be characterized by overwhelming colonial control and exploitation, with an overbear-
ing bureaucracy composed of civil servants and military officers who ruled in an extremely
authoritarian fashion with heavy undertones of racism and classism. What differences ex-
isted among the seven colonial powers were a matter of degree, not of kind. As one author
has stated, “they were alien, authoritarian, and bureaucratic, and distorted African political
and social organizations and undermined their moral authority and political legitimacy as
governing structures.” [295]
LAND OF 10,000 DISTINCT GROUPS
“There is almost no country in Africa where it is not essential to know to which tribe,
or which subgroup of which tribe, the president belongs. From this single piece of in-
formation you can trace the lines of patronage and allegiance that define the state.” ―
Christopher Hitchens
As with all countries and regions of the globe, Africa and its fifty-five countries that now
comprise the continent are a product of their history and traditions, their habits of the heart.
In this case, however, the habits of the heart of these varied groups of people, who trace
their ancestry to those who lived on land we now call Africa, for one or more millennia
were confronted by a colonial rule that sought to ignore, exploit, and even destroy those
cultural traditions that had evolved over hundreds if not thousands of years. Before colo-
nial rule, there were as many as 10,000 distinct groupings of people, organized from small
social units to large-scale distinct political organizations called states.
It is not surprising that still now there are estimated to be between 1,500 and 2,000
recognized languages spoken on the continent. The most popular languages represent both
native tongues (or at least those of conquerors of a bygone era) and those imported by
nineteenth-century colonial powers. Arabic leads the way with 170 million speakers, fol-
lowed by Swahili (140 million), English (130 million), French (115 million), Berber (50
million), Hausa (50 million), Portuguese (20 million), and Spanish (10 million).
AFRICAN RICHES
But the colonial powers of the late nineteenth century were not the first to seek the riches
that awaited those who set foot on the African continent. Martin Meredith chronicles the
long history of African exploitation in his recently published The Fortunes of Africa . [296]
In the very first sentence of this wonderful volume, Meredith traces the history of outsiders
coveting African riches back to the time of the Egyptian pharaohs. Precious stones and gold