1. Do colonialism and slavery
belong in the past?

2. TODAY’S TOPICS….
WHAT IS COLONIALSM?
COLONIALISM OF OLD
PROCESS OF END OF SLAVERY
CONSEQUENCE OF END OF SLAVERY
DEFINITIONS OF SLAVERY

3. WHAT IS COLONLISM?
‘The direct political control of
a people by a foreign state’
(Bernstein et al. 1992: 168), as
‘the control by one group over
another inhabiting a separate
territory’ (De Alva 1995: 262),

4. • ‘An empire that was developed for
settlement by individual
communities or for commercial
purposes’ (Young 2001: 16).
Colonialism therefore implies some
degree of foreign command and
political control, whether or not
settlers are present.

5. TWO SIGNIFIICANT ASPECTS OF
COLONLIM OF OLD
Slavery in Africa
Establishment of a global
trading network controlled
by European powers and
their various agents

6. Reality behind the rhetoric in
contemporary West Africa
suggests that today’s world is
not postcolonial in any
meaningful sense

7. PROCESS OF END OF SLAVERY…..
 British Parliament’s ratification of the Act
for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in
March 1807 marked the beginning of the
end of the transatlantic trade in slaves
from Africa to the British colonies
 The Slavery Abolition Act of May 1833
brought an immediate end to the legal
principle of property but did not
immediately eliminate slave labour.

8.  In an effort to reconcile the competing
interests of slaveholders and abolitionists.
emancipation ‘in the course of 12 years
by the purchase of his freedom from the
fruits of his own exertions’ (Peel 1833:
2).
 In the meantime, all existing slaves were
required to register as ‘apprenticed
labourers’ and continue to work for their
masters.

9. The League of
Nations’ Slavery
Convention of 1926;

10. the United Nations’
1948 Universal
Declaration of
Human Rights;

11.  and the Rome Final
Act of 1998 represent
notable efforts to both
define slavery and
eradicate it.

12. More recently, human rights
campaigners and organisations (such
as Anti-Slavery International) have
taken the 200th anniversary of the
abolition of the slave trade as an
opportunity to raise awareness of all
forms of slavery, both historical and
contemporary.

13. ABOLITION IS A PROCESS NOT A FINISHED
ACHIEVEMENT….
the need to think in terms of
abolitionism as a process rather
than abolition as a finished
achievement. Furthermore,
they show that the major
legacy of abolitionism is not the
elimination of slavery but the
illegality of the principle of
‘property in man’.

14. Slavery is now illegal
everywhere because ‘freedom
from slavery has been defined
in international law as a
fundamental human right’
(Bales and Robbins 2001: 18)

15. CONSEQUENCES OF THE INTERNATIONAL
OUTLAWING OF SLAVERY
Concealment and official denial.
In his classic analysis of the ‘new’
or modern version of slavery that
is defined by its very illegality,
Bales (1999: 8) notes that ‘even
when shown photographs and
affidavits, nations’ officials deny
its existence’.

16. Slavery is often redefined as something
else….
INDENTURED LABOUR
‘child fostering
Conceptual
confusion….

17. For example, whereas Anti-Slavery
International (2007) puts the number
of contemporary slaves in the world at
12 million, the ‘best estimate’ of Bales
(1999: 8) is 27 million – a figure
considerably lower, he suggests, ‘than
the estimates put forward by some as
200 million

18. The current global context of
secrecy, denial, uncertainty and
confusion compels the question of
what the concept of slavery
means if not legal ownership of
human beings or ‘property in
man.’

19. Bates argues that while slavery
has changed in form over time
it has clearly not disappeared
as debt bondage and enforced
prostitution – are still violence,
control and economic
exploitation (Bales and Robbins
2001).

20.  Varying systems of production and labour
regimes clearly co-exist now, just as they did in
the colonies of old. If all forms of violence,
control and economic exploitation are labelled
as slavery then the millions of illegal and badly-
paid migrant workers in the world necessarily
belong in that category
 If we say that slavery is UNPAID FORCED LABOUR
this definition is a useful synthesis of insights
drawn from two bodies of work. One is Marxist
theory, notably its important distinction

21. UNPAID FORCED LABOUR… DEFINITION
SYNETHISIZED FROM TWO BODIES OF WORK
 Marxist Theory….. Distinction between
slavery as a mode of labour exploitation
typified by unpaid work and
proletarianisation as a system of labour
exploitation typified by wage labour.
 Theories of slavery, which generally
emphasise forced labour (through violence
and coercion) as the basis of the master–
slave relationship.

22. CASE STUDY- COTE D’IVORE –
IVORY COAST
Turn of Chocolate Slavery Trade
15,000 trafficked children from
Mali working without payment on
Ivorian cocoa farms that helped
turn a regional African
phenomenon into a matter of
international concern.

23.  Enslavement of trafficked children (who
are defined in international law as
persons under the age of 18 years)
constitutes a triple abuse of international
human rights conventions and protocols.
Violated along with the fundamental
human right to freedom from enslavement
are the human right to freedom from
trafficking and the child’s right to
freedom from labour.

24. Compelling
evidence that
slavery is present
in the Ivory Coast

25. COLONOLISM AND CAPITALIST
DEVELOPMENT IN IVORY COAST
Child slavery in Ivory Coast is best
understood in a wider context – in relation
to the effects of global capitalist
development on the West African region.
The story of modern slavery in Ivory Coast
(which became a colony of France in
1893) must begin in the early twentieth
century

26. Outward-directed economic
development of French West Africa
 Three key features of the colonial political
economy that still epitomise the region today:
1 an economic growth pattern marked by heavy
dependence on the export of a handful of primary
products
2 a forced labour system for the production of
agricultural commodities; and last but not least,
3 a global supply chain controlled all the way along
by colonial companies, traders, intermediaries and
middlemen.

27.  Ivory Coast derives from a profitable
international trade in ivory during the
seventeenth century
 resulting decimation of the elephant
population- wasn’t until after the subsequent
push inland in the mid-nineteenth century that
France began to establish a firm foothold in
the West African colon

28. WHY DRIVE FOR COLONOLISM IN WEST
AFRICA
 Economic exploitation, notably the promise of
fertile environments for cash crop production
(i.e. production of agricultural commodities
for sale rather than consumption or use).
 By the early twentieth century, the principal
cash crops in the southern forest zones of
Ivory Coast were coffee and cocoa, whereas in
the northern savannas the main cash crop was
cotton.

29. Cotton was already in production for
sale to local artisans before the arrival
of colonial powers
However, the intervention of the
French Textile Development Company
(Compagnie Française de
Developpement des Textiles – CFDT)
marked the onset of a classically
colonial pattern of unequal and
uneven exchange

30. WHAT WAS THAT CLASSICAL MODEL OF
EXPLOITATION AND UNEVEN EXCHANGE??
 A raw material of relatively low value
produced in the colonies was exchanged
for finished manufactures (in this case
textile goods) produced in the metropolis.
Entire international supply chain was
controlled by an integrated network of
colonial operators

31.  Basic structure of colonial cultivation in Ivory
Coast was the plantation economy. From 1912
(when cocoa became a cash crop) until the
end of World War II, production by Africans
was doubly enforced
 Those with access to land were compelled to
cultivate cocoa by colonial authorities while,
at the same time, French planters were
guaranteed a steady supply of workers via a
system of labour conscription

32. The French abolition of the forced
labour system in 1945 marked the onset
of a series of changes. That system was
abolished thanks to the collective
efforts of the 20,000 indigenous
planters who came together in 1944 to
form the African Agricultural Union.

33. POST INDEPENDENCE ECONOMIC
DEVELOPMENT
 Ivory Coast- one of many African states to achieve
formal political independence in 1960.
 According to Amin (1973: 50), the abolition of
forced labour was a catalyst for the plantation-
based agricultural development to follow.
 Agriculture was not the only aspect of post-
independence development, however.
Infrastructure (roads, railways and ports) and

34. POST INDEPENDENCE ECONOMIC
DEVELOPMENT
import substitution industrialisation(i.e.
the government policy of replacing
imports with domestically-produced
goods) to support the development of
national manufacturing (such as textile
mills and food-processing plants) were
also central to the new government’s
strategy for national development.

35. POST INDEPENDENCE ECONOMIC
DEVELOPMENT
But with formal political power in
the hands of the landed
plantation-based class, post-
independence development not
surprisingly entailed a focus on
agricultural growth (Campbell
1975: 37).

36.  Ivorian economic growth was successfully
achieved in the first decade after
independence via policies of agricultural
expansion and diversification. Production
rose for all crops – everything from
domestically-consumed yams, plantains and
manioc to the exported commodities of
coffee, cocoa, bananas and pineapples.

37. Economic development remained
outward-directed. Increases in food
production failed to achieve self-
sufficiency.
The food deficit actually worsened,
leading to greater dependence on
grain and rice imports (Amin 1973:
52).

38. The development of Ivory Coast was still
based mainly on agricultural exports, with
expansion and diversification relying
heavily on external factors of production
in the form of foreign investment,
imported technology, and an inflow of
immigrant labour from the West African
region

39.  The guiding official principle of cooperation
with France in all fields only cemented the
pre-existing power of French companies,
managers, advisers
 In sum, the entire supply chain of unequal
and uneven exchange remained immediately
after independence in the hands of the same
controlling interests as before.and traders.

40. The politics of last resort: development
crises and structural adjustment
Necessary to consider the
internal benefits of outward-
directed economic
development

41. What finally brought matters to a head
was not development policy as such but a
series of external ‘shocks’. The most
damaging single factor was the
international drop in commodity prices
that followed the short-lived boom of the
mid-1970s. Despite the efforts to diversify
agriculture, Ivory Coast still depended for
the bulk of its export earnings on cocoa
and coffee

42. WHO BENEFITTED???...........
 At least until 1981, when the first crisis of
development became impossible to ignore, the
internal benefits to growth went
disproportionately to ‘the original power elite’
in control of the Ivorian state (Crook 1990:
651). It wasn’t only that a development model
founded on agricultural growth was bound to
generate capital for landowners. -

43. Also that the wealth generated from
state-led industrial development, i.e.
the combination of import-
substitution policy and direct public
investment in domestic
manufacturing, enabled the new
ruling elite to consolidate its political
position.

44. THE KEY INSTITUTIONS IN THIS REGARD
WERE….
Were not only the government and
civil service
Also an expanding machinery of
economic administration and control
Notably the agricultural extension
agency, the Ministry of Agriculture and
the crop-marketing board

45. HOWEVER….
 The Ivorian economy grew at an average rate of
7.2 per cent a year from independence in 1960 to
1981
 Limits of the Ivorian economic ‘miracle’ were
already apparent to some well before the
combined effects of a series of pressures ‘finally
delivered Côte d’Ivoire into the hands of the
international bailiffs or, as they are quaintly
called in development jargon, the “donor
community”’

46.  The subsequent crisis of development has been
blamed in part on political interference in
markets, notably the channelling of payments to
farmers for cash crops through the Caisse de
stabilisation or crop marketing
 As implied by its French name, the basic purpose
of the Caisse was price stabilisation. Instead of
exposing traders and farmers to free market
forces, the Ivorian government operated a
national system of guaranteed purchase and fixed
producer prices

47. DOUBLE EDGED SWORD….
While it safeguarded livelihoods in
periods of slump, it paid sub-market
prices in periods of boom.
The system was thus paradoxical for
farmers and traders, as it benefited
them most when market prices were
low.

48. The government, on the other hand,
clearly benefited from the ‘good
years’, when ‘important elements of
the nation’s budget for expansion and
investment were funded by the Caisse
surpluses’ (Crook 1990: 659).

49. Series of external ‘shocks’. The most damaging
single factor was the international drop in
commodity prices that followed the short-lived
boom of the mid-1970s. Despite the efforts to
diversify agriculture, Ivory Coast still depended
for the bulk of its export earnings on cocoa and
coffee.
 .

50. The loss of foreign exchange
earnings meant that terms of trade
inevitably declined, i.e. Ivory
Coast was forced to pay relatively
more for imports thanks to the
declining value of its exports

51. Commidities fell at a time of
continued foreign borrowing to sustain
public expenditures; of decline in the
value of the US dollar (the currency in
which commercial loans were
denominated); and of rising prices for
imported oil.

52. The cumulative effect was a dramatic
increase in national indebtedness. By
1981, Ivory Coast’s external debt was
ten times higher than it had been
only three years earlier, ‘and debt-
service costs had increased even
faster

53.  First structural adjustment programme (SAP)
for Ivory Coast was introduced in 1981 and
updated periodically throughout the decade.
The changes demanded were a ‘one size fits
all’ programme of currency devaluation,
liberalization of prices and interest rates,
fiscal restraint and austerity (i.e. cuts in state
expenditure), and trade liberalisation (Ridler
1993: 303).

54. As with so many African countries,
negative economic growth and an
increasingly unsustainable debt
burden were for Ivory Coast the
dark at the end of the adjustment
tunnel

55. The Ivorian government has
been doubly blamed for the
new ‘manifestly impossible
austerity programme’
demanded by the IMF and World
Bank in February 1990.

56. The regime in power failed to
fully implement its SAPs –
refusing, for example, to cut
the salaries of public sector
employees as demanded by
fiscal austerity

57.  An obvious factor in this regard has been
high rates of growth, which have helped to
paper over the contradictions of outward-
oriented development. Contradictions are
more easily exposed in periods of downturn
and reversal – which are inevitable for cash
crop exporters in particular.

58. Price volatility of international
commodities, declining terms of trade
can be unpredictably sudden and
sharp. This happened to Ivory Coast,
for example, between 1985 and 1990
when the world prices of cocoa more
than halved

59. Post-independence African state’s ‘credit
with the public’ stems from a combination
of financial means, administrative power,
and distribution of goods. In this light, the
determination of the Ivorian government to
keep the cocoa trade going and maintain a
large civil service makes political sense.

60. THE EFFECTS OF ADJUSTMENT:
DEPROLETARIANIZATION AND
MODERN SLAVERY

61. Colonial political economy was
typified by cash crop
dependence, enforced
production of cash crops, and
supply chain control

62. Cash crop dependence has only
intensified under the IMF’s
generalised framework of export
promotion and market-led growth.

63.  1993- Ivorian government entered into a
concessional loan agreement through the IMF’s
Enhanced Structural Adjustment Facility (ESAF)
for low income countries.
 In return for a low interest loan of 0.5 per cent
(to be repaid over 5–10 years), the ‘international
bailiffs’ demanded a standard policy package of
currency devaluation, cuts in government
spending, and (most tellingly) the liberalisation
of banking and trade.

64.  The donor community echoed the old ‘apologists for
colonialism’ who argued that African farmers would derive
positive benefits from the opportunity to produce coffee,
cocoa and palm oil
 Contemporary donors insisted that a flourishing free market
would benefit Ivorian farmers by freeing them from
government interference and allowing them access to the
true price of their commodities on the world market

65.  The national currency was devalued by 50 per
cent in 1994 at the same time as export taxes
were eliminated. These measures have been
thanked for a subsequent economic comeback
marked by a jump in growth rates and a drop
in inflation. But fortuitous timing was equally
significant. The donor-mandated reforms
coincided with improved international prices
for cocoa and coffee

66. The combined effect of externally-
imposed policies and world market forces
was an immediate explosion of cocoa
production (up 44 per cent from 1994 to
1996) and Ivory Coast’s movement to the
top of the ranks of world cocoa producers.
The country now accounts for 40 per cent
of global supply

67.  The country’s protected tropical forests have become
increasingly vulnerable to illegal logging and cocoa
expansion. As for the Ivorian government, structural
adjustment initially was a double-edged sword. While it
brought the traditional benefits of growth (as described
earlier) it also undermined state capacity for economic
administration and control at a delicate time of political
transition. In this context, the Bedie government trod the
familiar African path described by Mbembe (2001: 76). It
became increasingly repressive and reliant on control of
the forces of coercion to try to stifle dissent.

68. Farmers and planters would have to
be the clear beneficiaries of a
programme of reforms designed to
limit state power and expose them
more fully to world market forces –
but only as long as the price of their
commodities remains high and
(equally importantly) buyers pay
producers the true market rate.

69.  agricultural producers, basic economic logic
of supply and demand dictates that prices
must inevitably fall. Cocoa (like other
exportable cash crops) ‘is characterised by
boom and bust cycle – as global
production/supply rise, price of cocoa beans
fall and vice versa’ (International Labor
Rights Fund, undated: 4

70.  An apt illustration of the consequences of
‘boom and bust’ economics (i.e. a period of
economic expansion followed inevitably by a
period of recession) is what happened when
world cocoa prices plummeted in 1999.
Ivorian farmers were particularly hard hit
because the drop coincided with the final
abandonment of the Caisse system of
guaranteed prices. Ivorian cocoa production
is labour-intensive and historically reliant on
workers from the West African region.

71. With the donor-enforced completion
of the process of trade liberalisation,
both the migrant workforce and the
70 per cent of the Ivorian population
engaged in agricultural activity were
therefore negatively exposed to the
full force of structural adjustment.

72.  Dominant brand-owners such as Cadbury and
Mars are the ‘big business interests’ that
arguably dominate the entire cocoa supply
chain (Tiffen 2002). Their relative commercial
dominance, rather than proximity to any
actual slaves, placed them at the centre of
the ‘chocolate slavery debate’ mentioned
earlier. But the multinationals are not the end
of the chain. Beyond them are two other links.
2).

73.  One is the retail outlets that may squeeze
manufacturers by refusing to countenance price
increases on the finished products they sell (Cowell
2002: 4). The other is assorted consumers like us, who
contribute directly to global demand. Furthermore, if
cocoa is indeed a ‘conflict resource’ that has
‘contributed to funding armed conflict’ (Global
Witness 2007: 3) then consumers of chocolate
containing cocoa from the Ivory Coast have helped
indirectly to sustain situations of ‘divided leadership
and associated human rights abuses’ (Furman 2010:

74.  Overseeing the whole commodity chain are the new
agents of ‘informal empire’ – the IMF and World Bank
and, arguably, the World Trade Organization. From
their command centres in Washington DC, this ‘unholy
trinity’ of multilateral institutions governs a world
economy ‘that their neoliberal ideology insists is best
left institutionally ungoverned’ (Peet 2003: 23). This
inherent contradiction exposes the triumvirate to
powerful dissent and may well undermine it
eventually. No empire lasts forever, not even the most
powerful

75. In the meantime, all three institutions
are sustained by a combination of
institutional learning and powerful
support. They ‘have learned that a little
spin and some confessions of partial
failure . . . excuse many abuses in the
exercise of power’ (Peet 2003: 24). Even
more importantly, the ‘unholy trinity’
represents a conglomerate of economic
and political interests.

76.  At its economic heart are the major beneficiaries of
neo-liberalism – multinational corporations in general
and, according to Peet (2003: 202), investment
banking in particular. At its political heart are the
governments of the leading capitalist countries.
Counted among their ranks are the former colonial
powers. They (like France in the Ivory Coast) may still
turn to military means to protect their vital interests
– but only when informal strategies fall short of the
mark or misfire.

77. Is today’s world post colonial or neo
colonial?
Depend on two inter-related factors.
One is meaning – the issue of how key
concepts in the question are
understood and defined in their own
terms as well as differentiated from
other similar concepts.

78. me key concepts are interpreted from
within a particular theoretical
framework. Concepts and theory
together determine intellectual focus
and approach – the ways in which
arguments are presented and
evidence marshalled

79. POST COLONIALISM
 The fundamental issue with the term ‘postcolonial’ is
whether the post in the term signals after. The
perspective from which this issue is considered is
‘postcolonial theory’ – a term that is itself open to
interpretation thanks to the diversity of self-
consciously postcolonial scholarship. Postcolonialism
is best seen as a ‘site of critical inquiry’ (Slater 1998:
655) or a set of shared ideas rather than a single
theory or unified body of thought

80. Postcolonial theory, first of all, refuses to
treat ‘postcolonial’ as a synonym for
‘European decolonisation’. The world can
only be considered ‘postcolonial’ if we
assume that historic patterns of economic
control and command necessarily ended
with formal