Africans can't rule themselves or develop their continent because they are "complete savages". Discuss.

I have been looking up the meaning of "complete savage" since 8 January, but I still don't get what Bernard Law Montgomery (1887-1976), the famous British field marshall, later made a viscount (of Alamein) and nicknamed Monty, meant when he wrote in 1948 that the "African is a complete savage" incapable of developing his continent.

My dictionary says the word "savage" has 10 different meanings, and since Monty is long dead, he leaves us guessing which of the 10 definitions he put on his "complete savage".

Did he mean definition 1: "wild and untamed"; or definition 2: "ferocious in temper, vicious"; or definition 3: "uncivilised, crude"; or definition 4: "non-literate, primitive"; or definition 8: "a crude or uncivilised person"; or definition 9: "a fierce or vicious person or animal". Or all of them?

Judging from what the West has always portrayed Africa, we can safely go for "definition all of them". Complete Savage!

Monty wrote those "beautiful" words in a secret report to the British government in 1948 after touring 11 African countries in the autumn of 1947 - namely, French Morocco, The Gambia, Gold Coast [now Ghana], Nigeria, Belgian Congo, South Africa, Southern Rhodesia [now Zimbabwe], Kenya, Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt.

At the time, Monty was chief of the Imperial General Staff, and he told the Clement Atlee government in London that the African's only hope was a British "master plan to carve out giant West, Central and East African federations and unlock their vast wealth" to service the British economy.

As The Times (of London) put it a feature on 8 January: "Monty thought that the continent was to be Britain's postwar larder, a source of cheap labour and of limitless natural commodities...

"He demanded, rather than proposed, a permanent, intensive British engagement in Africa, dictated not by altruism but by ambitions to rebuild Britain's, not Africa's, prosperity. The then colonial secretary rejected his plans not on moral grounds but because he thought Africa too poor to be worth a 'great expense of money and effort'."

What contradiction!

I think we can excuse the poor viscount for his "savage" (definition 4) views. I can cite chapter and verse here, from our history (before the advent of the Europeans) to prove that, far from being complete savages, we were in fact quite advanced in many of our ways - in some cases even more advanced than the viscount's own people.

What we can't excuse is The Times ringing endorsement - in 1999 - of Monty's racist views. In an editorial on 8 January, The Times said in part: "Yet so badly have Africans in fact ruled themselves that, were Monty alive today, he might be claiming that he saw the future more clearly than the decolonisers who were to pull Britain out of Africa as precipitately as it had scrambled in the 1890s to get in."

The question is: Have we ruled ourselves badly? Let's look at the facts.

Africa's attempt in modern times to rule itself goes back only 40 years. If we compare the first 40 years of European self-rule, when Europeans started to forge nations and rule themselves, Africa might not be doing badly at all.

The equivalent of the civil wars, poverty, corruption, under-development etc that we see in Africa today were prevalent in Europe, too, in those early years of nationhood.

We know about the Oliver Cromwells, the British civil war, the American civil war and how Germany became a nation through war. We know about the French revolution and the coups and military dictatorships in Spain and Portugal.

So let nobody bambozzle Africa with empty talk about savages unable to rule themselves. Western prosperity, in reality, took off only in the last 100 or so years.

In any case, how many schools, universities, hospitals, electricity projects, tarred roads, etc. did the Europeans leave Africa at the time of independence 40 years ago? And they ruled our countries for 100 years or more! At the time of Congo's independence in 1960, there was only one native university graduate. What did the Belgians do in all those years ruling Congo? Only shipping out its resources?

It is true that the incompetence of some African leaders has compounded the problem, but much of the rot in Africa today can be traced back to the doors of the West.

I don't have the space here to go through what 400 years of slavery has done to Africa in terms of depopulation and its spin-offs. Nor even the 100 years of colonialism during which Africa's wealth was not only looted to build Europe, but the African was so brainwashed that even today, we are still mimicking European ways like a people with no history.

If we can't rule ourselves, it is because there is too much political interference in Africa by the West. After independence, all the free-thinking leaders in Africa, like Kwame Nkrumah, were deliberately brought low or undermined by the West.

First, they used the cocoa price in Nkrumah's case. In 1959 the world market price of cocoa (which formed nearly 70% of Ghana's total exports) was as high as £480 per ton. Seven years later, when Nkrumah was ovethrown in Febuary 1966 in a coup hatched by the Americans, the cocoa price had collapsed to £60 a ton. Who can run a country whose chief export had seen such a devastating collapse in price (£420 wiped off every ton in the space of seven years)?

You may like to ask me, who sets the world cocoa price - the savages in Africa, perhaps?

Another thing: It was during the infancy of the European Union that Nkrumah was talking and working on Africa's own union, the African Unity Project. What happened? The same Europeans and their American cousins killed the project. If unity is good for Europe, why not Africa?

The Times mentions Mobutu as being the "prince of kleptocrats". Who created Mobutu and supported him for 32 years? Not the Americans and their Western allies?

One may like to ask, why did Tony Blair go all the way to South Africa in January to meet Thabo Mbeki? It is because Mbeki will be the next president of South Africa and Blair/the West does not want him to fly the nest.

The question left hanging is: Why do Africans and their leaders allow themselves to be manipulated by the West to Africa's detriment? Can we never learn?

The answer? I have run out of space, Sir.