There is an idea about Africa that refuses to die.
Sometimes it is stated crudely. Sometimes it is dressed in more respectable language. But the argument is essentially the same:
Whatever terrible things Europeans may have done in Africa, Europe ultimately brought civilization. Roads. Schools. Christianity. Technology. Government. Infrastructure. Connection to the wider world.
Without Europe, Africans would still be running around in the jungle chasing animals.
I have heard versions of this argument for most of my life. What struck me recently was not simply how insulting it is.
It was how much history has to disappear before the argument can make sense.
I was listening to Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali, the story of the founder of the Mali Empire, when something caught my attention. Alexander the Great kept appearing in the story.
Not because Sundiata and Alexander were contemporaries. They were separated by more than fifteen centuries. What interested me was something else.
The people preserving the story knew there was a larger world.
Here was an African civilization with its own political structures, commerce, specialists, traditions and historians, participating in an intellectual world that did not begin at the borders of Mali.
That shouldn’t have surprised me.
But it did.
Then I heard the story of King Afonso I of Kongo.
And suddenly the old image of Europeans arriving to awaken a sleeping continent became very difficult to maintain.
What the Portuguese Actually Found
When Portuguese explorers reached the Kingdom of Kongo in the late fifteenth century, they did not encounter an empty political landscape waiting for somebody to organize it.
They encountered a kingdom.
There was already a monarch.
There was already a capital.
There were provinces and political officials. There were systems of tribute and taxation, markets, agriculture, crafts, armies and long-distance trade. Roads and established routes connected political and commercial centers.
There was infrastructure.
Not railroads.
Not electrical grids.
Not interstate highways.
But neither did Portugal have those things in 1483.
This is one of the tricks hidden inside the claim that Europeans brought infrastructure to Africa. We compare preindustrial Africa with industrial or modern Europe rather than comparing African and European societies at the time they actually encountered one another.
Infrastructure is whatever enables a society to function: systems for moving people and goods, organizing commerce, administering territory, producing food, communicating across distance and maintaining political authority.
Kongo could not have been a substantial kingdom without such systems.
Neither could Portugal.
Their systems were different. Their technologies were different. Their material cultures were different.
But these were two functioning preindustrial societies.
Portugal possessed some enormously important advantages. Its maritime technology and navigation were remarkable. It belonged to extensive European and Mediterranean networks of written knowledge. It had universities, literate ecclesiastical and governmental institutions, ocean-going ships and technologies Kongo did not possess.
Kongo had its own advantages: an established government adapted to its territory, regional commercial networks, agricultural knowledge, local technologies and a political system capable of exercising authority over a substantial population.
And when the Portuguese encountered it, their response tells us something important.
They dealt with it as a kingdom.
King to King
This may be one of the most revealing parts of the story.
The early relationship between Portugal and Kongo operated through a diplomatic grammar recognizable on both sides.
King to king.
Court to court.
Embassy to embassy.
Gifts were exchanged. Representatives traveled between the kingdoms. Correspondence passed between monarchs.
That doesn’t mean Portugal and Kongo were identical societies or equal in every technological capability.
They weren’t.
But they could meet as political peers because each possessed something the other immediately recognized:
sovereign authority.
The Portuguese did not arrive, establish a colonial administration and appoint someone named Afonso to supervise the natives.
Kongo already had kings.
Afonso became one of them.
And what Afonso did next tells us something else about the Africa that supposedly required Europe to bring it civilization.
He looked at Portugal and saw things he wanted.
Afonso Wanted What Europe Had
Afonso embraced Christianity enthusiastically.
He wanted teachers.
He wanted priests.
He wanted technical knowledge.
He corresponded with Portuguese monarchs.
He sent people to Portugal for education.
His son Henrique studied in Europe, entered the Catholic Church and eventually became a bishop.
It would be easy to tell that story this way:
See? Europe educated them.
But think about what that sentence actually requires.
You have to be educated before you can go somewhere else to be educated.
You cannot take someone with no intellectual preparation, put him aboard a ship, deliver him to an institution of advanced learning in another culture and say, “Begin.”
A student studying abroad must be prepared to learn.
He must communicate. He must acquire languages. He must possess enough intellectual foundation to understand what is being taught. He must understand what formal study is.
And behind that student must be a society capable of recognizing that knowledge available somewhere else is worth acquiring.
Someone must identify the opportunity.
Someone must select the student.
Someone must prepare him.
Someone must arrange the journey.
And someone must believe that what he learns has value.
Going somewhere else to study is not evidence that you came from an uneducated civilization.
It is evidence that your civilization knew there was more to learn.
An American studying at Oxford does not prove that America lacks education.
A Japanese scientist studying at MIT does not prove that Japan was waiting for Massachusetts to introduce it to science.
Civilizations learn from one another.
That is what civilizations do.
And that, initially, is what Afonso appears to have been attempting.
He Wasn’t Asking Portugal to Replace Kongo
This distinction matters.
Afonso wasn’t choosing between Africa and Europe.
He was adding.
Keep Kongo—and acquire literacy.
Keep Kongo—and acquire new technologies.
Keep Kongo—and participate in Christianity.
Keep Kongo—and educate people abroad.
Keep Kongo—and expand international commerce.
We don’t need to pretend that Africa had nothing to learn from Europe.
Of course it did.
Europe had things Africa wanted.
But Africa had things Europe wanted too.
That’s why the Portuguese were there.
The existence of exchange does not establish the superiority of one civilization over another. It establishes that human societies possess different resources, knowledge and technologies and can benefit from contact with one another.
Afonso seems to have understood something profoundly ordinary:
My civilization can become something it isn’t yet.
And here’s the historical inequality we rarely notice.
We grant that possibility automatically to Europe.
We rarely grant it to Africa.
Portugal Wasn’t Finished Either
Portugal in 1500 was not modern Portugal.
Most Portuguese people did not attend universities. Most were not living lives remotely resembling those of Europeans today. There was no electricity, railroad, modern medicine, automobile, telecommunications network or industrial economy.
Portugal still had centuries of development ahead of it.
We know that because we know what happened next.
Renaissance.
Scientific revolution.
Industrialization.
Modern medicine.
Mass education.
Electricity.
Railroads.
Modern political institutions.
Technologies that someone standing in 1500 could scarcely have imagined.
Nobody looks at Portugal in 1500 and says:
That’s apparently as far Portuguese people were capable of developing.
We understand that Portugal was going somewhere.
But the colonial story does something extraordinary to Africa.
It freezes it.
Europe gets another five hundred years.
Africa gets 1483 forever.
The African society encountered by Europeans becomes evidence of what Africans would supposedly still be doing today had Europeans not intervened.
Think about how absurd that assumption is.
Why would African societies alone have stopped changing?
Why would they stop borrowing?
Why would they stop inventing?
Why would they stop trading?
Why would they stop reorganizing politically?
Why would they stop learning from the societies they encountered?
Afonso was already doing precisely the opposite.
Then the Relationship Changed
This is where the story becomes darker.
Afonso’s relationship with Portugal became increasingly entangled with the Atlantic slave trade.
Slavery already existed in Kongo. Africans participated in slavery and slave trading. Afonso himself operated within that system.
That fact should not be hidden.
History does not become more useful when we make Africans innocent in order to make Europeans guilty.
But something changed in scale, incentives and consequences.
Afonso eventually complained to the Portuguese crown that the trade was becoming destructive—that people were being seized and sold, including free people and people from important families.
He attempted to control what was happening.
The relationship that had contained the possibility of exchange was becoming something else.
Exchange became extraction.
Participation became domination.
And eventually domination developed an ideology capable of explaining why the people being dominated had needed domination all along.
The Trick of Looking Backward
This is where the argument that Europe “developed Africa” becomes particularly strange.
Participate for centuries in extracting human beings.
Create enormous economic incentives around their capture.
Contribute to warfare and political disruption.
Eventually conquer much of the continent.
Draw borders according to European interests.
Restructure economies around imperial needs.
Extract resources.
Control political institutions.
Then look at the resulting disparity between industrialized Europe and colonized Africa and announce:
See how backward Africa is?
And then perform one final trick.
Project that disparity backward.
Imagine that the Africa Europe dominated must represent what Africa had always been.
Mali disappears.
Kongo disappears.
The intellectual traditions disappear.
The cities disappear.
The commercial networks disappear.
The diplomacy disappears.
The infrastructure disappears.
The political experiments disappear.
The trajectories disappear.
And in their place appears an African running through the jungle chasing an animal until a European arrives carrying a Bible, a schoolbook and a shovel.
It isn’t history.
It is a creation myth for colonialism.
What Would Have Happened?
We cannot know what Africa would look like today had its relationship with Europe developed primarily through voluntary exchange rather than slavery, conquest and colonial rule.
And I don’t want to romanticize the answer.
African kingdoms would have fought wars.
Some would have collapsed.
Others would have expanded.
Governments would have changed.
Religions would have changed.
Technologies would have been borrowed and adapted.
Foreign ideas would have mixed with indigenous ones.
African societies would have made terrible decisions and brilliant ones.
In other words, Africans would have continued doing what human beings everywhere do.
They would have made history.
Perhaps the most interesting evidence is Afonso himself.
Here was an African ruler at the beginning of the sixteenth century looking outward.
He saw another civilization.
He saw things it possessed that he valued.
And he attempted to bring some of them home.
That is development.
Not isolation.
Not dependency.
Participation.
There was no historical law requiring that encounter to end with one civilization ruling the other.
Another possibility existed:
two developing civilizations encountering one another and both being changed.
We know what Portugal became over the next five centuries.
We will never know what Kongo might have become over those same five centuries had it retained comparable power to determine its own trajectory.
The History That Didn’t Get to Happen
This changes how I think about the damage done by slavery and colonialism.
We usually measure the damage by what happened.
The people taken.
The people killed.
The families separated.
The wealth extracted.
The land seized.
The governments displaced.
The cultures suppressed.
All of that matters.
But there is another loss that can never be counted.
What didn’t happen?
What institutions weren’t built?
What political systems didn’t evolve?
What intellectual traditions didn’t continue?
What cities weren’t developed?
What discoveries weren’t made?
What combinations of African and foreign ideas never had the opportunity to emerge organically?
What would Kongo have become after another century?
Two centuries?
Five?
We cannot know.
But the impossibility of knowing is part of the injury.
A trajectory was altered.
Then the altered condition was presented as evidence that there had never been a trajectory in the first place.
That may be one of colonialism’s most enduring intellectual achievements.
It didn’t merely dominate Africa.
It taught much of the world to imagine that there had been nothing moving there to interrupt.
There was.
Africa did not enter history when Europe arrived.
Africa did not enter the world when Africans were carried across the Atlantic.
Africans did not first encounter education when Europeans decided to teach them.
And infrastructure did not first appear when Europeans laid railroad tracks.
They were already participating in history.
Already governing.
Already building.
Already trading.
Already learning.
Already changing.
Already encountering other peoples.
Already borrowing.
Already inventing.
Already going somewhere.
We will never know exactly where.
But perhaps it is time to stop pretending that without Europe to lead them out of the jungle, they would have gone nowhere.