Africa: The Afterlife of Empire – Cape to Cairo, Darfur to Kivu

On Christmas Day in 1497, Vasco da Gama rounded the southern tip of Africa. He named the land he encountered Natalis–Portuguese for Christmas. Today, it is known as KwaZulu-Natal.

Da Gama’s voyage opened a new maritime artery linking Europe directly to India, bypassing the overland routes controlled by Arab and Ottoman intermediaries. It was not merely a navigational triumph; it was the opening chapter of Europe’s long, brutal engagement with Africa.

By 1652, a Dutchman, Jan van Riebeeck, established the first permanent white settlement at Table Bay–modern-day Cape Town. At the time, the British Empire was not yet the dominant naval power. That honor belonged to the Dutch. However, by 1795, Britain had begun to entrench itself as the preeminent imperial force in Southern Africa, a process dramatically accelerated by the discovery of diamonds in Kimberley and gold in Witwatersrand. The British colonial project in Africa was neither accidental nor benevolent. Among its grand ambitions was the so-called Cape to Cairo Railway–a steel spine intended to bind Britain’s African possessions from south to north. Like the projects of Germany, France, Portugal, and Belgium, this enterprise was fundamentally about plunder: the extraction of Africa’s vast natural wealth and the monopolisation of markets.

Market control, however, cannot exist without political domination. Colonialism–imperialism –therefore required the subjugation of African societies and the redrawing of their political geography to suit European economic interests.

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By 1910, Britain found itself contending with both German and Belgian ambitions in the Kigyezi region of southwestern Uganda. In a revealing letter from January 1910 to his superior in Entebbe, a British colonial officer dispatched to the area wrote: “I would like to remind His Majesty’s Government that if our object in acquiring the Mfumbiro district is to obtain a route for the Cape to Cairo railway, it will be necessary to include within it a strip of the Rutshuru Valley, since the hills to the south-east present an impassable barrier to the passage of a railway.”

In that single paragraph lies the anatomy of empire: African land reduced to corridors, African peoples rendered obstacles, and sovereignty subordinated to steel, commerce, and imperial ambition.

The logic expressed in that 1910 letter did not expire with the end of formal colonial rule. Instead, it changed costumes. Railways became borders; imperial directives evolved into international treaties; and direct governance was replaced by compliant elites, peacekeeping missions, and humanitarian language carefully stripped of historical context.

Nowhere is this continuity clearer than in the Great Lakes region.

The violent instability that has stalked eastern Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, and parts of Uganda is often narrated as ancient ethnic hatred, spontaneous savagery, or local failure. This is propaganda in Kasparov’s sense: not to persuade, but to exhaust–to numb critical thought until history itself becomes inconvenient.

The truth is simpler and more damning. The Great Lakes region is situated atop extraordinary mineral wealth, including gold, coltan, cobalt, tin, and rare earths essential to modern technology. Control of these resources–just as with diamonds in Kimberley or gold on the Witwatersrand–demands political leverage. Political leverage, in turn, requires instability. Chaos is not accidental; it is functional.

Colonial borders split communities, forced artificial majorities and minorities into single political units, and froze mobility that had defined African societies for centuries. The Tutsi communities of eastern Congo and in Uganda are not foreign implants, but victims of borders drawn for railways and balance sheets, not people.

When Rwanda insists that the Democratic Republic of Congo must dismantle genocidal forces such as the FDLR–men who crossed borders with weapons and ideology in 1994–it is not inventing insecurity. It is confronting the afterlife of a genocide that was never fully defeated, merely relocated. Congo’s refusal to resolve this is not just a domestic weakness; it is a regional threat incubated by decades of international indulgence and selective amnesia.

But European imperial logic is not the only external force to scar the region.

Long before Berlin or Brussels, Arab commercial and political interests had already penetrated deep into Africa’s interior. From the 7th century onward, Arab expansion across North Africa and down the Nile Valley carried trade, Islam, and power–but also slavery, racial hierarchies, and cultural domination that predated European conquest by centuries.

Sudan stands as the most tragic example of this unfinished history.

The Arabisation of Sudan was neither organic nor peaceful. It was enforced through violence, enslavement, and systematic marginalization of Black African communities in the south, the Nuba Mountains, Darfur, and Blue Nile. The Sudanese state, from its earliest modern form, functioned as an instrument of Arab supremacy–politically, culturally, and militarily.

The result has been unending war.

Darfur is not an accident. South Sudan’s secession was not a surprise. The current implosion of Sudan–warlords, militias, foreign backers circling like vultures–is the logical outcome of a state built on exclusion and racial hierarchy, sustained by external Arab patrons and international indifference.

Nor has this interference stopped at Sudan’s borders. Arms, fighters, ideology, and money flow southward–from Libya, from the Gulf, from shadowy networks that profit from African disorder while presenting themselves as brothers in faith or partners in development.