Requisitos para la implantación del ABC en empresas de servicios

The resistance of African societies to European geographical distortion of their continent at the Berlin Conference, and eventual occupation was largely confrontational and repulsive. Across the continent towards the late 19^th century, African societies engaged the European colonialists militarily in an attempt to safeguard their homelands from the invading alien forces. Africa’s military resistance to the forces of colonization assumed two major dimensions: first was by guerrilla warfare. Second was through direct military engagement with the European forces.

93Ehiedu E.G. Iweriebor, The Colonization of Africa, Hunter College, Africana Age, African and African Diaspora Transformations in the 20^th Century, (2001), available at: www.Nypl.orlafricanage/essays-colonized.

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Suffice to say that each African society at the time employed different approaches to repel the European incursion.

This was largely due to the fact that each African society’s resistance to European colonial action was a function of their political structure, social institutions, and military organizations.

For instance, the small African societies, that is, the decentralized societies known as “stateless societies” in Eurocentric parlance, adopted the guerrilla warfare approaches due to their size and the lack of standing or professional armies. The guerrilla groups were made up of native fighters that engaged European forces (not on the battle field) but through the use of the traditional guerrilla tactic of hit-and-run raids against the stationary enemy forces.⁹⁴ This guerrilla approach was deployed by the Igbo people of South-eastern Nigeria albeit unsuccessfully against the British. Despite the resistance of the Igbo of South-eastern Nigeria, the British imperial forces still emerged victorious as the entire region was covered and subjugated between 1900 and 1903. The second form of resistance was through open military combat with the Europeans forces. This approach was deployed by the centralized African states. These states, unlike the decentralized African societies of the time, had state structures which allowed for the effective running of these traditional institutions such as empires, kingdoms, chiefdoms, and city-states. Consequently, they had standing armies at their disposal that could fight the European invaders. This form of resistance was used by a couple of African societies in an attempt to repel European incursion into their domain. Prominent among these African societies were the gallant Ethiopian army, the Zulus of present-day South Africa and a host of other African pre-colonial states across Africa. The case of Ethiopia was particularly unique as it successfully repelled Italian imperial onslaught on its territory.

The Italian invaders faced a resolute and astute military leader in the Ethiopian emperor Menelik II who galvanized his troops against Italian imperial aggression. Undaunted by the resistance of the Ethiopians, the Italians intensified pressure on the Ethiopian territory in an

94 Ibid.

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attempt to impose its rule. This, then, forced the Ethiopians to roll out its military arsenals to fend off the imperialist attack. Thus this situation prepared the stage for the historic battle of Adwa in 1896 when one hundred thousand Ethiopian troops engaged the Italian forces and inflicted a heavy and decisive defeat. Afterward, Ethiopia was able to preserve its territorial integrity for the better part of the colonial age, except for a brief interlude of Italian oversight between 1936 and 1941.

There are other examples of resistance led by Samory Touré of the emergent Mandinka Empire in West Africa. The leader of the empire - Touré had in an attempt to expand the frontiers of his empire and put in place a new political system encountered the French imperialists that were also pushing to extend their colonial territories from their operational base in Dakar, Senegal.

This situation ushered in a protracted period of intense armed conflict between the two parties as Touré engaged the French fiercely between 1882 and 1898. During this period, he deployed various strategies against the French such as guerrilla warfare tactics, scorched-earth programs and open military engagement. Touré’s resistance was however subdued by the French forces that captured him in 1898, and subsequently threw him into exile where he died in 1990. In conclusion, while it can be said those African societies fought gallantly and appreciably to safeguard their homelands from imperial aggression, these societies however lost out eventually. The failure of African resistance was due largely to technological factors. While Europeans fought with sophisticated and modernized weapons, Africans on the other hand fought with their indigenously made weapons such as spears, swords, traditional rifles, and cavalries; which were highly inferior when compared to the weapons wielded by their opponent – the Europeans. At the dawn of the 20^th century precisely by 1900 a greater part of African boundaries had been colonized by European powers.

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Having colonized much of the continent, European powers began to put in place colonial state systems which would serve as the tool for the political domination, and the material exploitation of their African colonies.⁹⁵ The colonial state systems were operated based on the colonial policies adopted by the colonizing countries. Prominent among these policies of colonial administration was the “indirect rule” policy in British colonial Africa and the policy of

“assimilation” in French colonial Africa. The most extreme of them all was arguably the apartheid policy which came into force in South-Africa in 1948 following the coming into power of the National Party. Consequently the foregoing scenarios prompted a nucleus of Black leaders in the Diaspora towards the end of the 19^th century to form a movement known as Pan-Africanism.