By
Tom Odhiambo
Title: Taxing Colonial Africa – The Political Economy of British Imperialism; Author: Leigh A. Gardner; Hardcover, 271 pages; Publisher: OUP Oxford, 2 December 2012; Language: English
Most of modern Africa, with the exception of bits of the continent, is largely a colonial creation. And by this we do not mean the geographic boundaries and the political systems only. We also mean the structures that define the lives of Africans today, from culture, to social conduct, religious beliefs, politics to economics etc.
Today’s African, even when she claims to not follow the European, Asian or Arabic religion; or when he proclaims his ‘Africanness’ for everyone to hear (mostly in a European language); or when they conduct their lives in what has become commonly known as the ‘African traditional’ way, are still products of European thought and practice.
Thus, although we speak today of a globally connected Africa, an Africa that aspires to develop on its own, many commentators still argue that African progress won’t happen until Africans decolonize their minds and ways of life.
But is this possible, or even a worthy effort? Can Africa set itself free from its colonial heritage? Is it even possible to think of Nigerians, Ghanaians or Kenyans not behaving in some kind of ‘British’ manner?
Can the Congolese, Ivorians or Algerians fully exorcise the ghosts of their French connection? Much of Francophone Africa still designates its currency in the shadow or image of the French franc despite France itself using the Euro.
Africa will always be a child of its colonial ancestry. Which is why even in tax matters, there are still lessons to be learnt from the colonial enterprise, considering that economic historians have always argued that the British Empire was first a business and only later a state.
The settler economies were really private business entities, which only later needed an organized state structure to protect them against competition from business by the other races in the specific country, or from likely external aggression.
Thus, in Kenya – and other colonies – non-Europeans couldn’t farm specific crops or trade in certain goods or render particular services.
However, a modern state needs money all the time to survive. Bureaucracies tend to consume without producing much. Taxes keep most states going, especially if they have nowhere to borrow from.
Colonial states had to find ways of economic survival beyond what their mother country could give them. Therefore one may argue that by understanding the tax models of the colonial state, we might gain better insights into the operations of the (postcolonial) modern state.
This is why a book such as Taxing Colonial Africa: The Political Economy of British Imperialism by Leigh Gardner (Oxford, 2010) is worth reading today. The book is based on colonial taxation records in Kenya and Zambia.
Gardner digs into an incredible amount of colonial data to show how the British colonies of Kenya and Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) raised revenue/taxes; how the collected taxes were used; where they were spent; what were the economic and political implications of the tax policies; who collected the taxes; who decided where they were spent; what were the implications for the colonies as they progressed to independence, among other considerations.
The broader question here is: what can we learn from this taxation history today?
Taxing Colonial Africa makes a compelling case about the ‘burden of the Empire.’ What really was the cost of running the colonies? Who bore that cost? Where would the colonial government have raised revenue from if there weren’t any significant exports?
Were there direct material benefits for the British government? Who gained from the colonial enterprise in the end? The British or the independent states?
Gardner shows, in various ways that the answers to these questions are difficult to come by, mainly because few people have bothered to study how the colonial system was financed.
But Gardner argues that there is no doubt that that much of the money needed to pay for goods and services to oil the colonial administrative machinery had to come from the native populations.
The poll or hut tax was a major form of raising money in the colonies as it was easy to collect.
But revenue could also be extracted from taxing trade – exports and imports, where such happened; the government could also raise taxes from minerals and other local resources such as cash crops; it could levy local excise duties; it could raise fines, say from the courts; it often could earn or impose fees from services it rendered; or road and transport toll.
However, the colonial administration was generally expensive because the salaries of the administrators was set in London, according to Gardner. Yet they had to be paid from local resources.
Consequently, the local administrators had to find means to enforce revenue collection to guarantee the running of government services. Gardner argues that the colonial administrators would often find a way of working with the local elites in order to ensure less resistance to their rule as well as to their tax policies and practices.
Indirect rule was one of the ways of ensuring that the local chiefs and councils of elders were complicit in the taxing of Africans for the benefit of the colonial administration.
Yet the colonial administration struggled to balance its books from local taxes. The poor revenues in the colonies could account for the poor public expenditure. In other words, the government could not commit itself to spending money on schools, hospitals, roads etc, when it actually didn’t have the money.
This scenario explains why most newly independent African countries weren’t really worth anything much, economically. They had no educated and skilled people to take over from the departing administrators and professionals.
They didn’t have adequate roads and transport services, making intra-country administration and governance difficult. In some places medical services were missing and have hardly been established up to today.
These countries were also saddled with the expense of paying the departing colonial officers compensation for terminated services as well as retirement benefits in foreign currencies. Many African governments discovered that they couldn’t easily enforce tax collection.
The struggle for independence had been waged precisely because of unfair taxation. They had debts, owed to the former colonial masters.
For instance, Kenya had to take a loan from the British to ‘buy’ back land from the British settlers; which mostly ended up the property of the new/old African elite in the country, who were less inclined to pay taxes on it.
Although some colonial states had budget surpluses at some point or another in time, most of them were struggling financially at the time of decolonization.
Even more troubling for the newly independent African countries, the colonial administration hadn’t invested in policies, structures and manpower to enable the new government collect taxes in an acceptable manner.
Tax evasion and poor tax collection that most African countries suffer today are direct consequences of colonialism.
It seems as if there is a congenital problem in paying taxes in Africa considering that as a form of modern economic and political order, taxation by government tends to be seen as discriminating to the poor.
The common person tends to argue that the rich hardly pay taxes and the government generally wastes the monies it collects.
Although based on the analysis of the tax policies and practices in two former British colonies, Taxing Colonial Africa is a worthy book to read.
It leaves no doubt that in order to understand how and why the question of taxes and taxation is a vexing one in Africa today, everyone interested in it has to go back to the archives and decode how the mzungus decided on levies, collected and used them.
The writer teaches literature at the university of Nairobi. Tom.odhiambo@uonbi.ac.ke. He can also be contacted at +254720009155.
