IT SEEMED A hopeless place to search for human remains, a wilderness of volcanic rock and ancient river sediment on a scorched hillside in East Africa. Everything was lunar grey, not a blade of green, not a glint of water, just the rubble of an ancient planet. Chalachew Seyoum clambered up a slope of slippery scree and found a desolate, windless plateau. It was a January morning in 2013, and he was with a team from Arizona State University, revisiting his Ethiopian homeland for an anthropological dig. Nothing had been found on these remote slopes for more than a decade, but when Seyoum looked down at the bleached stones around his feet, he noticed something out of place.
Jutting from the ground was a small fragment of something smooth and pumice-grey that seemed organic in origin. When he bent down to examine it properly, taking care not to disturb the stones on either side, he saw that it was about eight centimetres in length, a narrow bone-like fragment that was shaped like a beckoning finger. Seyoum lowered his head to the ground, and noticed several protrusions along its length, each about the size of a river pearl, grey, and worn flat on their exposed side. He knew immediately what he had found, although he didn’t yet know the age of it.
This was the lower left side of a human mandible with five teeth still attached. Seyoum began shouting for his colleagues.
A man had once sat where Seyoum sat, surveying vast open grasslands where zebras and giant pigs grazed. He may have been up there hunting, when the hillsides were lush green and streams ran along the valley bottoms, before the wild swings in climate and the clashing of the earth’s plates plunged the region into a barren wilderness. This was an era before man knew how to fashion spears from the branches of a Curtisia tree. Instead they hid in the tall grass, and ambushed their prey with rocks and clubs. If that failed, they would search the caves for remains of a kill by leopards or lions. The meat they scavenged would have been eaten raw. Man still hadn’t learned to control fire.
The fragment of mandible represents the burst of evolution that gave rise to humankind 2.8 million years ago, shortly after we had left the forests and stood upright for the first time. Its owner and his tribe were the forefathers of every one of us, chewing raw meat on the gentle, fertile hillsides of East Africa. The rest of the planet was empty of the genus Homo. That fragile stick of bone is the closest we have come to the missing link, the point in time when modern humans split from their more ape-like ancestors. It is 400,000 older than any other found in our lineage. Scientists named it LD 350-1. But we should call him Adam.
When Adam’s people set off westwards into the scrublands of what is now the Kalahari, and knelt to drink beside a pool of late summer rain, they would have seen sparkling crystals among the sand left in their palms. When they paused at a stream to bathe dust from their rough, chimp-like hair, they would have seen veins of copper-coloured silt, or tiny golden flecks dancing in the currents. The primordial African landscape was full of such wonders: basins of speckled bauxite, pink lakes of trona, canyon walls patterned with livid orange iron ore. Adam might have paused to dip his finger into the glutinous black drips leaking from rock faces near to the coast – oil seepages that were already many millions of years in the making.
Adam expired on that Ethiopian hillside when he was no more than forty years old, birds of prey circling overhead. It would be several millennia later that his ancestors would undertake the great migration, driven from their land by endless drought and volcanic eruptions, to discover new territories beyond Africa’s shores. The scattering of mankind to every corner of the earth began relatively recently, just 70,000 years ago. One group crossed what is now the Bab-el-Mandeb straits, the pinch-point between East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, sculling across the shallow seas on rafts secured by vines. Others headed north, to milder and more fertile climes. When they found their route blocked by the Mediterranean Sea, they were forced across the Sinai into the Middle East, and then spread into the tropics of central Asia. Others edged closer to the ice, and the snowy wilderness of the north, finally pushing over the top of the world from the East Asian Arctic to the Americas. But wherever mankind travelled and prospered, nothing would match the natural riches that they had left behind in Africa.
By the time Adam was born, the continent’s wealth was already ancient, mostly created as the earth cooled and a crust formed over its molten rocks about 3.5 billion years ago. Diamonds were forced to the surface when dinosaurs still grazed the grasslands, and when Africa was still attached to the Americas, 150 million years ago. Formed in a furnace of carbon just above the earth’s mantle, they were blasted to the surface from spectacular diamondiferous volcanoes that hurled them a mile into the Jurassic sky. In the middle of the nineteenth century our most respected geologists would have scoffed at the idea that diamonds were showered over the landscape by explosions deep inside the earth. They believed the gems came from alluvial deposits, dislodged from the earth by ancient rivers, and swept along in the mud and silt. But then came an event that changed all previous scientific thought, and led to a diamond rush like no other.
A group of prospectors known as the Red Caps were passing through a barren, rock-strewn wasteland in southern Africa, just beyond the border of Britain’s Cape Colony, when they stopped for a half-hearted inspection of the land. It was 1871, and a series of high-profile finds along the banks of the Vaal and the Orange rivers had attracted diggers from around the world. Some became rich with a single, spectacular discovery; most returned home exhausted, disease-ridden and penniless. The Red Caps were on their way to join the hopeful throng, and had no intention of starting a ‘dry dig’ away from the water’s edge. They had stopped for a rest when their leader, Fleetwood Rawstone, sent his cook to the summit of a small hillock, known in Afrikaans as a kopje, as punishment for being drunk the previous night. While up there, in the searing afternoon heat, the cook kicked the dusty soil and felt something hard beneath his boot. It was a large, translucent stone. He shouted for the others to join him, and within hours they had found many more. The hillock was, in fact, the peak of the first diamondiferous volcano ever found, and was sitting on top of a diamond ‘pipe’ that stretched almost a quarter of a mile down, its contents studded with gems like raisins in a cake. Tens of thousands of prospectors descended on the kopje from Europe and America. Diamond fever gripped the region. The land where the volcano stood was part of a farm owned by two Boer brothers who began renting out plots for excavation. Their name was de Beers.
Among the first to arrive, in October 1871, was an eighteen-year-old British youth dressed in school flannels, his fair hair doused in fine orange dust. He was often to be seen seated on an upturned bucket beside the deepening hole, supervising black labourers while reading the classics. His name was Cecil Rhodes.
By the second month of digging, weekly discoveries had reached a value of £50,000, a staggering £5.5 million in today’s money. Three more diamondiferous volcanoes were discovered nearby, all within a radius of two miles of each other. The finds eclipsed anything that had been seen before. Within a year, the de Beers had sold up and moved out. Cecil Rhodes remained, shrewdly trading plots of land, eliminating his competitors one by one, until his company, De Beers Consolidated Mines Ltd, controlled all four diamondiferous volcanoes, and with them, the bulk of diamond production in the world.
The question was, however: who actually governed this previously undesirable, largely uninhabited region? Sovereignty would undoubtedly bring with it economic and political dominance right across the region. Borders were fluid at the time, but the Boer republic of Transvaal had the strongest claim. Britain’s Cape Colony lay twenty-five miles to the south. Its claim was so thin as to be non-existent, but its governor had an idea. Why didn’t they appoint an arbitrational court to settle the issue? The chairman would be Robert William Keate, an old Etonian who had played cricket for Oxford University and for England. The Transvaal Boers were right to be suspicious. It was a stitch-up. In 1871, Keate awarded the diamond fields to a local chief called Nicholas Waterboer, who had already secretly agreed to hand the territory to Queen Victoria. The British colonial secretary, Lord Kimberley, arrived to celebrate, and instructed his underlings to anglicize the local place names so he could feel more at home. The young men of the Colonial Office knew how to get ahead. The mine, if Lord Kimberley would be so gracious, was to be called Kimberley, and the town was to be named Kimberley too. Even the diamond-bearing volcanic rock was given the colonial stamp. It was named kimberlite, and has been known as such ever since.
The scramble for Africa began in earnest shortly afterwards, culminating in the famous Berlin Conference of 1884–5, when European powers formally divided the continent among themselves. In its aftermath came a series of diamond discoveries: in Congo Free State – owned at the time by Leopold, king of the Belgians – Portuguese Angola, and British-run Sierra Leone. Several diamond mines were dug by Cecil Rhodes’s British South Africa Company in his privately run colonies of Matabeleland and Mashonaland, two territories that would later be fused together to form Southern Rhodesia. Spectacular discoveries followed much later in the British protectorate of Bechuanaland, starting in the 1950s, and transforming once again the world diamond markets. Surveys of the region had begun inauspiciously, with geological analysis of dozens of large termite mounds found on the parched, near-lifeless plains of the Kalahari Desert. The insects had burrowed down to find moisture and damp clay with which to construct their homes, but when scientists examined tiny particles of mud in the tall, tapering structures, they found traces of kimberlite. The termites were bringing to the surface evidence of diamonds somewhere beneath. Teams began excavating and found a diamondiferous pipe, just like the ones in Kimberley. More followed. Eventually, Bechuanaland, one of the most sparsely populated countries in Africa, was found to possess a dozen diamond-filled volcanoes. After independence in 1966, it became known as Botswana, and developed into the second-largest diamond producer in the world.
Gold was delivered to our planet by asteroids when the earth was still young. It first attracted our ancestors’ attention about 40,000 years ago, when ancient people took tiny flecks back to their caves to wonder at their deep sun-glow lustre. The first evidence of gold becoming a prized commodity was in Ancient Egypt, when the pharaohs began shaping it into jewellery, and even using it for the caps on the great pyramids of Giza. And then come the Europeans. They arrived on the coast of West Africa 500 years ago, drawn by rumours of entire cities built from gold and set up trading posts, where the precious metal was tricked from the natives in exchange for mirrors, cotton and rum. The whole coast of Guinea was divided according to the resources it could provide to Europeans: Grain Coast, Slave Coast, Gold Coast. Forts were built, first by the Portuguese in 1482 at Elmina in what is now Ghana, and then by the British, Dutch, Danish and Swedish, as European powers battled for dominance and conquered the tribal armies of indigenous chiefs. So much gold poured out of the region that it gave its name to the guinea coin. Again, it was Africa that provided the single game-changing discovery.
In 1886, fifteen years after the diamond discoveries, prospectors in the Boer republic of Transvaal, just up the road from Kimberley, found seams of gold that sliced through the mountains of Witwatersrand like pages of a giant book, forty miles long and two and a half miles wide. Gangs of fortune-hunters hurriedly relocated from the diamond digs; others charged in from Europe and America. Tough and filthy men swarmed the dusty hillsides with pick-axes and buckets, crushing the gold from rocks with primitive stamping machines. Sprawling camps took root, fuelled by cheap alcohol and served by European prostitutes. They grew into a town of huts and makeshift bars that would become known as Johannesburg. The gold digs at Witwatersrand were soon recognized as the richest in the world, and were to become the source of fifty per cent of all the gold ever mined. Watching from next door in Cape Colony, the British were hardly going to stand quietly by. Cecil Rhodes was, by this time, the Cape’s prime minister, and owned large gold-mining interests at the Transvaal dig. He wanted it in reliable and friendly hands. In 1896, he secretly tried to inspire an uprising among the British inhabitants of Transvaal against the republic’s Boer president, Paul Kruger. The idea was that, once a revolt had begun, he would send in armed forces from the British South Africa Company, led by Sir Leander Starr Jameson, on the pretext of restoring peace. Britain, he anticipated, would then step in, annex the territory, and help itself to the gold. The Jameson Raid ended in humiliating failure. Rhodes’s men were arrested, and, under a cloud of international condemnation, Rhodes himself was forced to resign. But, six years later, Britain did succeed in annexing the territory and Transvaal’s gold became central to the republic’s future as part of South Africa.
Africa’s colossal oil reserves were only unlocked relatively recently. For centuries, nomadic tradesmen crossing the Sahara Desert in Libya had reported finding curious rainbow sheens on the surface of oasis water. As far back as the mid-eighteenth century, Portuguese sailors had observed dribbles of hot tar seeping through the rocks along the coast of Angola. It was sticky, filthy and unmanageable, and certainly couldn’t be used as fuel. Instead, they collected it in buckets and used it to plug holes in their ships’ hulls. The race to find oil in Africa only began in earnest after the Second World War, when Europe recognized the strategic error of relying almost exclusively on capricious sheiks in the Middle East.
Cocoa may seem a strange inclusion among the precious resources that have helped shape Africa’s recent history, but it shares some of the attributes of gems and rare metals, in the sense of its restricted supply coupled with the world’s seemingly endless demand. Cocoa bushes only thrive in very particular conditions, on a narrow belt of land ten degrees either side of the equator. They need the shade of a jungle canopy, regular rain, and an absence of hot winds: a rare climatic combination offered by just a few regions of the world. West Africa is among them. Almost every chocolate bar we eat in Europe today originates from the cocoa bushes of Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, the two biggest producers in the world. Whoever controls cocoa in West Africa possesses considerable power.
It is the era that followed Europe’s decolonization that this book chiefly explores, although the tendency towards authoritarian rule can only be properly understood in the context of what went before. The colonial retreat came about as a result of the rise of nationalist movements in the 1950s and ’60s, and the realization that attitudes towards imperialism had changed forever. Suddenly indigenous rulers were in control of the precious resources that had previously been in the hands of London, Madrid, Lisbon and Paris. Most were unprepared for governance. The nations they inherited were coarsely mapped European constructs, with borders that took little account of age-old tribal rivalries. Families were left separated by the draftsmen’s blunt pencil. Hostile people were thrown together and told to sort out their differences at the ballot box. The newly empowered leaders chose to advance the interests of their own tribes above the rest. Gems and precious metals were used to reward the loyal and silence the foes. Leaders clung to power for fear that their rivals would corner Africa’s resources and impose their own way of life. Maintaining dominance of a single clan or family mattered above all else. In the tiny oil-rich state of Equatorial Guinea, the Nguema family began a dynasty that has ruled since the Spanish relinquished control in 1968.
Some European governments lingered after independence to keep a hand in Africa’s mineral wealth. Belgium retained its military presence in Congo, not only to hold back the perceived communist threat, but to shamelessly channel profits from diamonds and copper back home to Brussels.
Multinational companies cut deals with authoritarian African rulers, closing their eyes to human rights abuses and securing lucrative mineral rights. BP continued to prosper in Nigeria as successive dictators tortured and massacred tribes in the oil-producing regions for protesting about the devastating damage to their land. De Beers enjoyed diamond contracts throughout much of Mobutu’s rule in Congo. Western governments did the same, sustaining some of the continent’s most brutal dictators, in Libya, Nigeria and Sudan, in order to get their hands on Africa’s oil.
This is the story of how a whole continent has been robbed in broad daylight. And how it is still going on today.
This is the story of the men who stole Africa.