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

The French Union was still in process of being established in 1958, after having lost Indochina in 1954, Morocco and Tunis in 1956, when the Fourth French Republic disintegrated beneath the strain of the Algerian crisis, and De Gaulle came in with his constitution for the Fifth Republic. This provided a federal system by which essential powers were reserved to the central authority and other powers devolved upon the “autonomous” member states. The key “Community” functions reserved to France included foreign affairs, defense, currency, common economic and financial policy, control of strategic materials, and (with certain exceptions) higher education, justice, external transportation and communications.

The new constitution was presented to the overseas areas of France with the opportunity to accept or reject it, but with little expectation that any area would reject it because of their need for French economic air and other expenditures of federal funds. Sékou Touré, of Guinea, however, persuaded his area to vote against ratification and was, in retaliation by De Gaulle, instantly ejected from the French Community, and its political and financial support (about $20 million a year) was stopped. The newly independent and outcast area sought support in Moscow, spreading panic in other capitals at this opening of the African scene to Soviet penetration. For about five years, Guinea sought an alternative to the French system, established an authoritarian one-party Leftish regime, signed an act of “union” with Ghana (a meaningless agreement that brought Touré a $28 million loan from Nkrumah), and welcomed Soviet aid and Communist technicians to Conakry. Guinea recognized East Germany, welcomed influences from Red China, accepted American offers of counteraid, and nationalized all schools, churches, and many French-owned business enterprises. For a while, a possible union of Ghana, Guinea, and the Mali Republic (former French Sudan), signed in 1961, threatened to form a “Union of African States,” but this hope faded, along with the anticipation of any substantial Soviet aid or assistance, and Guinea, by 1963, was in process of working its way back into the French African system.

The Guinea exodus from the French Community in 1958, regretted by both sides within a few years, opened the way to independence for all French Africa. Senegal and the Sudanese Republic, linked together briefly as the Mali Republic, obtained freedom in April 1960, and started a flood of declarations of independence led by Madagascar (Malgache Republic). This political disintegration of the French areas in Africa raised at once two acute problems: (1) What would be their relationship with France, a connection that had brought French Africa over two billion dollars in French development funds in the 1947-1958 period? and (2) What arrangements could be made between the newly independent states to prevent the Balkanization of Africa, with its resulting inability to handle problems of transportation, communications, public health, river development, and such, which transcend small local areas?

To answer the first question, a French constitutional law of June 1960 changed the French Community to a contractual association. Fourteen French African states signed a multitude of individual agreements with France that recognized their full sovereignty on the international scene but established “cooperation” with France over a wide range of economic, financial, cultural, and political relationships. Thus by voluntary agreement, French control along the general lines of the existing status quo was preserved.

The effort to prevent Balkanization by some sort of federal arrangement for the French African areas was prevented by the objections of Ivory Coast and of Gabon. The former was the wealthiest of the eight French Western African states, while Gabon was the richest of the four French Equatorial African states. This opposition broke up the Mali union of Senegal and Soudan in 1960, and the latter, taking the name Mali to itself, drifted off toward cooperation with Guinea. This disintegration of French Africa was stopped only because of growing anxiety at the efforts of Ghana’s Nkrumah to form an opposed Pan-African bloc of a Leftish tinge. This effort gave rise to the “Union of Independent African States” and the “All-African Peoples’ Conferences.”

The Union of Independent African States arose from the Pan-African dreams of the late George Padmore and was organized by him for Nkrumah. Its first meeting, at Accra in April 1958, had representatives of the eight states then independent in Africa (Ethiopia, Ghana, Liberia, Libya, Morocco, Sudan, Tunisia, and the United Arab Republic). They demanded an end to French military operations in Algeria and immediate independence for all African territories. Three subsequent meetings in 1959-1960 advanced no further, except to attack the establishment of racial segregation (“apartheid”) in South Africa, and Nigeria blocked efforts to take immediate steps toward a United States of Africa in June 1960.

The All-African People’s Conferences, also sponsored by Nkrumah, were great mass conventions of labor unions, youth groups, political parties, and other organizations from all Africa, including nonindependent areas. They achieved little beyond the usual denunciations of colonialism, apartheid, and the Algerian war. Three of these conferences were held at Accra, Tunis, and Conakry in 1958-1960.

In opposition to these Ghana-inspired movements, in late 1960, Dr. Felix Houphouet-Boigny, the political leader of Ivory Coast, one-time French cabinet minister and French spokesman at the United Nations, took steps to organize a French-centered union of African states. Called the “Brazzaville Twelve,” after their second meeting at Brazzaville, French Congo, in December 1960, these formed a loose organization for cooperation and parallel action in Africa, the United Nations, and the world. In the United Nations they established a bloc to vote as a unit from October 1960. At the same time, they began to work closely as a group with a number of technical, economic, educational, and research organizations that had grown up under the United Nations, or with international sponsorship to deal with African problems. Of the large number of these, we need mention only the Commission for Technical Cooperation in Africa South of the Sahara (head office in London) and its advisory council, the Scientific Council for Africa South of the Sahara (head office in Belgian Congo), the Foundation for Mutual Assistance in Africa South of the Sahara (office in Accra).

As we have said, the Ghana-Guinea Union of May 1959 was expanded, with the accession of Mali in July 1961, into the pompously named Union of African States (UAS). At Brazzaville, in December 1960, six French territories of West Africa and four of Equatorial Africa joined with the Cameroons Federation and the Malgache Republic to form the “Brazzaville Twelve” (officially entitled Union of African and Malagasy States, or UAMS). At a conference at Casablanca in January 1961, the UAS moved a step further by forming rather tenuous links with Morocco, the United Arab Republic, and the provisional government of Algeria. Four months later, at Monrovia, the UAMS formed a more stable and homogeneous grouping of twenty, by adding to the Brazzaville group Liberia, Nigeria, Togo, Sierra Leone, Ethiopia, Somalia, Libya (which had previously been at Casablanca), and Tunisia. This represented a considerable victory over the UAS group, and was the result of several influences: a number of African leaders, led by President Tubman of Liberia, objected to Nkrumah’s efforts to introduce the Cold War into Africa and to his extravagant propaganda, controversy, and cult of personality within the African context; moreover, the Casablanca grouping was paralyzed by the rivalry between Nkrumah and Nasser and by the non-African orientation of the Muslim North Africa members, who constantly sought to drag the African states into non-African issues, such as the Arab hatred of Israel.