Manning’s latest addition to the growing body of scholarly speculation concerning Africa’s demographic past continues the recent trend toward ever higher estimates of pre-colonial – and here also colonial – population. In place of slow growth interrupted by the devastating impact of slave trading, we now face two-and-a-half centuries of near-stagnation giving way to sluggish recovery.
Where Frankema & Jerven proposed something just under a doubling of the continental total in the century to 1950 – itself a pessimistic growth assessment compared to the earlier guesstimates of McEvedy & Jones and (to a lesser extent) Caldwell – Manning offers a picture of overall decline in the century to 1880 followed by an increase of little over half over the next six decades.
The picture isn’t one of unrelieved gloom, though it comes perilously close: the northern and southern ends of the continent get to grow throughout the nineteenth century (though until 1920 at a pitifully slow rate), while the Guinea coast – the first region to feel the impact of European slave shipments – more-or-less holds its own after the post-1792 decline in removals to the New World.
All present-day estimates of Africa’s mid-twentieth century population seem to agree broadly that the continent contained around 280 million people in 1960 and 220m or so in 1950. There the agreement ends. For 1920, Manning’s estimate of 159m compares with the 147m of Frankema & Jerven, Caldwell’s 142m, and fewer than 135m implied by MacEvedy & Jones. Further back in time, the gap widens: in 1900, 145m (Manning), 137m (Frankema), 129m (Caldwell), 110m (McEvedy); for 1880, 142m, 128m, 120m and under 100m respectively. Manning’s total for 1800 is fully twice McEvedy’s, and 50% greater than the level indicated by Caldwell.
The sources of these large discrepancies are inevitably complex, but for the pre-colonial era they boil down chiefly to the degree to which slave removals and related deaths were offset by demographic recovery, ongoing growth through continued expansion of cultivation, and later the spread of new crops and (toward the end of the period) the beginnings of economic development. For the colonial period, the principal issue is the extent to which early census returns underreported total numbers.
Taking the latter period first (since all the estimates are essentially back-projections from the more reliable data for the 1950s and subsequent decades) there is little disagreement that colonial censuses – many of them barely worthy of the name – generally understated African populations. Contemporary estimates around 1950 indicated a continental total of only around 200 million, roughly a tenth below the true level. Nigeria’s population was widely believed to be only around 25m before the 1952-53 census returned a population of 30m, itself an undercount.
Manning is thus right to raise many of the official colonial population returns. But his procedure goes far beyond mere adjustment of deficient counts and government estimates: what he has done is effectively to discard all the pre-1950 data on the basis of a glib rejection of a few patently flawed guesstimates from the 1930s. This overlooks the wealth of intervening scholarly and indeed bureaucratic revision. European colonial officials were themselves aware by the 1930s of the shortcomings of their raw data, limited as they were by meagre administrative resources and legitimate native distrust of head-counts: the author of Nigeria’s 1931 census report for instance inflated the crude return by a tenth to compensate for under-enumeration and evasion. (Nor were earlier errors in population estimation all in the same direction, unless one is to accept figures of up to 4½m for Uganda in the 1900s.)
For the thus abandoned contemporary figures Manning substitutes assumed “default growth rates” which are themselves highly questionable. For these he draws on trends from the more complete census data for British-ruled India, which he then adopts as maxima for Africa given the continent’s disturbed condition prior to 1920. But this overlooks the very different character of the two regions: India was a long-settled society already boasting extensive dense occupation and highly developed state structures long before the Atlantic slave trade: Africa, by contrast was still in the throes of internal agricultural colonisation, as Caldwell concluded in his 1985 General history chapter (favourably cited by Manning), basing his projections on the assumption that:
the neolithic revolution has been slowly moving through sub-Saharan Africa for three thousand years bringing with it more intensive land use and denser settlement.
Furthermore Caldwell considered the resulting population growth to be accelerating in the nineteenth century through expansion into the forest belt and the spread of new crops (though the latter process was to be more marked during the colonial period). To these developments one might add the ongoing movement of Nguni and other Bantu-speaking peoples into today’s South Africa, nineteenth-century growth in Egypt and the beginnings of European settlement and agricultural transformation. Such an evolution has important implications for long-run estimates, because African population must in the past have been a good deal less than at the start of the colonial era, even allowing for intervening losses to slaving.
Manning’s default rates are not themselves obviously outlandish, the lower bound of his 0.2-0.3% pre-1920 annual range corresponding as it does to the increment needed to raise McEvedy’s “optimistic” 16½m Africans of AD1 to the billion of 2010: indeed given annual growth well in excess of 2% since the 1950s, rates must have been a good deal lower even than this for most of Africa’s past. But to assume such sluggish growth into the modern era reckons without the falling continental population share of the (until 1800) slower-growing north and the geographically ever more constrained hunting & gathering peoples to the south. It may be, of course, that sub-Saharan cultivators’ rate of increase fell markedly following their initial expansion through the southern half of the continent, but this does not appear to have been addressed, nor is there an especially strong case for it given that the global erosion of non-farming populations is likely to have been replicated on a smaller scale even in and around already settled areas.
While growth rates before the twentieth century remain a matter of conjecture, there is far less basis for the severity of Manning’s wholesale downward revision of those for the colonial period. While census-taking was at best patchy and in some areas subject to deterioration, the data for 1910-50 offer a consistent enough picture of quickening growth. That annual growth in the 1950s in most territories comfortably exceeded 2% a year itself suggests that there is nothing intrinsically implausible in rates of 1% or more in the century’s early decades or even of 2% in some areas from the 1930s. Manning’s default rates may be reasonable for the centuries to 1800, but appear at odds with the mounting demographic evidence as we move into the census period, conflicting even with the Indian evidence on which they are supposedly based.
The impact of Manning’s gloomy assumptions can be seen most clearly in the case of Egypt and South Africa, generally considered the continent’s fastest-growing nineteenth-century territories. Where French observers reckoned 2½m Egyptians following Bonaparte’s arrival in 1798 – since raised by twentieth-century scholarship to some 3-5m – Manning estimates 10½m, more than were counted in the census of 1897, usually considered the first reasonably accurate enumeration. For South Africa, his procedure gives 6.3m inhabitants in 1800 against only 5.2m counted in 1904 (the latter doubtless an underestimate, but coming after a century of colonisation both black and white): though probably an understatement like many of his numbers, McEvedy’s figure of a mere 1½m for the earlier year looks far more plausible given that much of the interior remained to be settled, particularly its western half.
There is a further problem with Manning’s projections: recall that these are his “default” rates, extended to the entire period to 1920 on the grounds of the continent’s experience of slave shipments and conquest by European powers. But what he then does is to apply a range of “situational modifications” representing (among others) these same factors, thereby effectively double-counting the losses and disorders which underlie his pessimistic global model. It is the compounding of these various elements which produces the pre-1890 population standstill, where a more plausible underlying growth rate subject to similar modifications would have shown a century of modest but quickening growth, preceded it is true by net losses in at least parts of the continent in the latter decades of the eighteenth century.
In sum, Manning’s estimates are an interesting but seriously flawed contribution to an area of historical demography in need of more work, on colonial demography and on the impact of slave removals & raiding on African populations. By selecting a set of growth rates and countervailing adjustment factors which effectively preclude dynamic development anywhere until well into the last century, he has constructed a model of built-in stagnation which inadvertently minimises Africans’ regenerative capacities and all but ignores widely divergent trends within the continent. There may well be grounds for raising all estimates of past African population, but approaches which offer so little scope for directly observed data and local variation are unlikely to offer a lasting way forward.
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