Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

The Belgians in the Congo rejected any effort to extend political or cultural life to their native peoples, but instead sought to provide them with skills as trained laborers and to build up a prosperous economic basis for a high native standard of living while at the same time allowing them to get no glimpse of European life, the outside world, political training, or cultural and intellectual ideas. As a result, when independence came to the Congo in 1960, that vast area had one of the highest native standards of living in tropical Africa but had fewer natives who had attended a university or had even traveled abroad than any French or British territory.

The Portuguese were concerned with conversion of natives to Christianity and with little else, believing that their control of their areas could be maintained best if all other kinds of change were kept minimal. They practiced racial equality and were willing to admit to Portuguese citizenship any native who was individually successful in obtaining a Portuguese education, but on the whole they did not encourage even this kind of development.

The background of the whole process of African decolonization was built up in the wartime and early postwar periods, but the trigger on the chain reaction of the decolonization process was the defeat of the Anglo-French effort at Suez because of America and Soviet pressure in October 1956. As might, perhaps, be expected, the process began in a British colony, the Gold Coast, now called Ghana.

The independence of Ghana was a personal achievement of Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, who returned to Accra from an educational process in Pennsylvania and the London School of Economics. The year before, in 1946, the Gold Coast obtained the first British African Legislative Assembly that was allowed a majority of Africans. Nkrumah’s agitations, including the founding of a new political party, the Convention People’s Party, under his own control, earned him a two-year jail sentence. While he was still in jail, his party won 34 of the 38 seats in the Assembly in the election of 1951; therefore he was released from confinement to take control of the administration. With good will on both sides, a transition period of six years gave Ghana its independence, under Nkrumah’s rule, in March 1957.

Within a year of independence, Nkrumah faced the typical problems of postcolonialism that we have mentioned: a rapid fall in cocoa prices upon which Ghana’s international trade position depended; disease in the cocoa trees, which required destruction of thousands of trees over the violent protests of their peasant owners; dissension between the pagan, commercial, coastal area, in which the Convention People’s Party was based, and the more pastoral, Islamic, remote interior.

Nkrumah soon showed his readiness to handle all problems with ruthless decision. The “sick” cocoa trees were cut down; political opponents were silenced in one way or another; Nkrumah was ballyhooed as the father of all Africans, the unique genius of the African revolution, the mystic symbol of all black men’s hopes. A Five-Year Plan for economic development (1959-1964) promised to spend over 92 million dollars. In 1960 the previous British-granted constitution was replaced by a new republican constitution that was amended almost at once by a clause allowing Nkrumah to rule without parliament whenever necessary. The leader’s Pan-African hopes were reflected in a clause that permitted “the surrender of the whole or part of the sovereignty of Ghana” to a union of African states. By the end of the same year, political party designations were abolished in Parliament, and the Preventive Detention Act (which allowed Nkrumah to imprison his enemies without charge) was used to arrest the chief members of the political opposition. Ghana embarked on an economic war with the Union of South Africa in protest against the latter’s extreme segregation of the races and on a somewhat weaker system of economic reprisals against France in retaliation for its nuclear-explosion tests in the Sahara. Vigorous activities at the United Nations, in African affairs (chiefly in opposition to any Pan-African movement that would not be dominated by Nkrumah), in balancing the two sides of the Cold War while seeking economic aid from both, in establishing a Ghana shipping line defiantly called the “Black Star Line,” and in constructing a gigantic hydroelectric and aluminum manufacturing complex on the Volta River, kept Nkrumah’s name in the world’s press.

Nigeria, the largest territory in the British colonial empire, larger than any European state and four times the size of the United Kingdom, with 35 million inhabitants, did not become free until 1960. The delay was caused by the internal divisions within the territory. These were not unexpected, for the territory was an artificial creation, cut out of the African wild by Lord Lugard just before World War I. It consisted of three regions—North, West, and East—which had no central assembly until 1946, and continued to have diverse interests and attitudes. Each region had a separate government with a joint federal government at Lagos. The Northern Region is Muhammadan, patriarchal, underdeveloped, poor, ignorant, and feudal, ruled by an aristocratic upper group of emirs descended from pastoral conquerors. The Western Region is small but rich and thickly populated with progressive agriculturalists, chiefly Yoruba. The Eastern Region, dominated by the Ibo peoples, tends to dominate the whole federation. There are tribal and religious differences between the three, since the south is pagan, and government of the federation must be by coalition of two regions against the third. American-educated Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe (known as “Zik”) was the first governor-general, functioning as president and the dominant political figure from the Eastern Region, while the prime minister was Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, a Muslim from the Northern Region. The Opposition was led by Chief Obafemi Awolowo of the Western Region. This rather precarious balance of forces was stabilized by the strength of the English-speaking tradition of moderation and rule of law, both much more securely established in Nigeria than in Ghana, and by the industrious, alert, and balanced character of Nigeria’s chief tribal groups. The economy was also better balanced than that of many African states, with a productive agriculture as well as varied mineral resources.

The key to Africa’s future may rest with the success of former French Africa, since this group seems to provide a nucleus on which the more moderate forces on the continent may congregate. The chief difficulty from which they suffer is that most are arid and all are poor (compared to the Congo or Nigeria).

The impact of war was much more significant in French Africa than in British Africa, because of the defeat of France and the fact that the supporters of De Gaulle’s resistance, rather than of Pétain’s pseudo-Fascism, controlled these territories during much of the war. Such control could be sustained only with the support of the African population, which was loyally given, although few rewards came in return for more

than a decade after the war. Then freedom came swiftly, in sequence to the military disasters in Indochina in 1954 and the rising disaster in Algeria, rather than from the events or struggles in Black Africa itself. The first effort was not toward independence but toward closer union with France, by incorporating the African territories in an elaborate federal structure, the French Union, which gave the Africans representation and even cabinet posts in Paris. One of the incidental consequences of this largely transitory structure was that the neutralism of the African end of the structure tended to spread to the metropolitan end in Paris. At the same time, American support of independence for colonial areas, at a time when Paris was seeking to strengthen its African connections, was one more in a series of American actions that drove France, and especially De Gaulle, toward a neutral position for Paris itself.