The European presence in Africa
was long geared towards resource extraction and exploitation of cheap labour
with the economy structured to meet the demands of the colonial powers as
opposed to the needs of the indigenous populace.
Education, where it existed, was aimed at providing a buffer class of low-ranking bureaucrats who helped preserve the legitimacy of the colonial machine - this meant for instance in the West African Francophone region the imbibing of a specific set of cultural values which taught one to distance oneself from one's own tribal or specifically African identity and learning to view oneself as part of a larger 'progressive' and 'civilizing' force, in this case that of the wider French colonial empire. Full citizenship was offered as a carrot but in practice only a tiny proportion of suitably malleable candidates ever achieved this status; future president Houphoet-Boigny of the Ivory Coast for instance who conformed perfectly to this model first served in one of De Gaulle's cabinets.
If you read some of the Pan-Africanist literature during the immediate post war period there is much internal debate over the questions of identity posed by these 'assimilationist' policies such as found in the concept of 'négritude' and so on. There's a tension generated by two distinctive historical agencies - on the one hand, you have the writings of Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. du Bois (among many others) urging decolonisation and full independence while on the other the colonial powers,(chiefly Britain, France & Portugal) are digging their heels in and maintaining that their respective empires are sacrosanct and in no need of change; decolonisation, if and when it does arrive, will be a long way down the road yet.
It wasn't until after WWII, particularly with returning African soldiers who had served with the Allies and who had sampled the stirrings of independence movements elsewhere, that the struggle to formulate indigeneous networks of resistance to colonial rule really began to kick off. Even after Britain had set up it's gulags in Kenya after the Mau Mau uprising there was no official signals forthcoming that an extended period of dominion was unviable in Africa. Thus, for the bulk of the twentieth century European colonial rule was determined to maintain itself; to sustain the patterns of pre-established hegemony and hierarchy and therefore to make no adjustments in it's characteristic mode of autocracy - no alternative plan was put in place which would prepare for the eventuality of indigenous self-governance.
Many were actually shocked to hear Harold MacMillan talking of the "Winds of Change" and setting dates for independence back in 1960; it was all very much cobbled together hastily to appear magnanimous when in fact the streets would have erupted in protest right across the sub-continent had guarantees not been made. So, the timing and circumstances of de-colonisation were unfortunate to say the least. No long-term plans had been put in place to ensure a smooth transition; no trained doctors, engineers etc. technocrats of every description were in dire need, and in most cases the inbuilt racial prejudices of the white settler elite certainly didn't predispose them to serve under black-led governments.
Coupled with this was the paranoia over Cold War allegiances. Many of the independence leaders espoused socialist philosophies or were financially supported by the Soviet Union with all the negative attention from the CIA and economic sabotage that this entailed. Others were Nasserites and joined the Casablanca Group and this divide announced itself over the course of the Congo crisis when the proposed African Union foundered on the rocks of international acrimony & bitterness over the pro-secessionist UN intervention there - Belgium, the US and the UK conspiring to ensure Union Miniére and other Western mining interests retained an extractive monopoly going so far as to collude in the assassination of the country's first democratically elected president, Patrice Lumumba; a Pan-Africanist who struggled vainly to keep the country from being torn asunder by indigenous ethnic splintering
and neo-colonial plundering.
Some countries should never have been and could only be ruled in practice by a parasitic overlord, be it a colonial power or a newly installed dictatorship cleaving to ethnic loyalties. These artificially inscribed colonial satellite states include Chad, Sudan, Cameroon, Nigeria and several others where a northern Muslim population was opposed to a southern Christian or animist or elsewhere where tribal and/or ethnic cleavages had been magnified by the colonial experience (eg.Rwanda, Burundi). Some of the more outstanding areas of discontent could have done with an international conference to polish off their rougher edges - yet this couldn't happen, be arranged or otherwise dreamt of as the colonial powers were always under the impression that they were there for the long haul.
The early African Union had in fact agreed to respect all colonially derived borders amongst it's members but this was in many cases the nouveau elites simply reinforcing their own power base to the exclusion of wider considerations of the common good. Ethiopia for instance swallowed up in the Ogaden a large proportion of ethnic Somalis; an issue which destabilised Somali politics from the earliest days of independence.
Some governments were forced to radicalise their politics from an early point and thus stand accused of being in the Soviet camp despite assertions to the contrary and their commitment to non-alignment - all on account of their tacit support and encouragement of independence struggles in places like Mozambique, Guinea-Bisseau & Angola who had yet to free themselves from the yoke of the old Portugese imperium. Freedom fighters here were blithely denounced in international circles as 'communists' as indeed were the ANC in South Africa. Scarcely any region in the whole sub-continent in fact was left untouched by the ramifications of Cold War orientated civil wars either spilling into it's borders or else impacting it's domestic politics.
It's all very depressing to look on the mess that was created post-independence and you can point the finger in many directions but the time to pick up the baton and assert a definite policy goal of granting future independence was c. WWI in my estimates - that brief window of short-lived Wilsonian idealism wich nationalists in Ireland at least used to stake out a claim for themselves.
I know we were on a different trajectory in terms of overall development but the marker had got to be laid down; unfortunately what interfered most was that the strongest voices for decolonisation such as Garvey and Du Bois had not only never set foot in Africa but were busy enough fighting discrimination themselves. It was the tacit acknowledgement of racialised hierarchies, of notions of underlying fitness for self-governance which impeded the respective colonial offices from pursuing a fast-track decoupling from the continent.That, in addition to the fact that somewhere along the line vast profits and resources were being plundered.
There's little point in saying retrospectively it was too early for decolonisation and that no preparations had been set in foot when the popular tumult opposing European governance had been allowed reach tidal proportions. The time to begin setting that matter aright was the generation and a half beforehand. It's very difficult to justify another fifty years of hands-on paternalism when the previous fifty had been deployed doing nothing about the chronic levels of inequality, lack of education etc. - and purposely so to boot so as to affect a permanent state of economic subjugation.
European powers were kicked out of there as one country after another became ungovernable and the socialism so-called proved the most popular ideological weapon to rally support simply becasue it represented the exact antithesis of all the exploitation that had proceeded hitherto - how and why so many of these socialist experiments failed to develop is another kettle of fish but the early generation of leaders like Nkrumah & Nyerere were far removed in spirit and character from the clientalist bandits and war-mongers that emerged in the seventies.
There was a widespread ebullience and sense of achievement manifested by just about all social strata which accompanied the wresting of independence from the perennially stubborn colonial powers. Political autonomy didn't just land on people's lap in a gift-wrapped platter from DeGaulle or her Royal Highness it was hard won through decades of campaigning, awareness-raising and often bitter political conflict.
Most independence leaders had spent many years jailed by colonial authorities and no few were projected to the leadership of the 'national struggle' on it's account - they had passed the trial of fire, at least in their people's eyes, by putting their own lives at risk for the overall goal of emancipation.
Whatever else may lay down the road in terms of insuperable difficulties the attitude back then in the wake of the 60's divestment of European political power was one of widespread if guarded jubilation. This is a much commented upon and universally acknowledged phenomenon - the celebrations and sense of optimism in those days were boundless, no more so than in Ghana when Kwamah Nkrumah took power in 1957 at the head of the first newly independent black African country.
The worldwide ramifications of this event were extraordinary for the black diaspora in terms of the confidence it instilled among those who, it must be remembered, were still struggling for civil rights in many of their 'adopted' countries. What was the old tale when Nixon was shaking hands with sundry diplomats and common folk in Accra; "How does it feel to have at last won your independence?" he asked as he pressed paws - "I wouldn't know sir", came the response, "I'm from Georgia".
What happened to Africa after independence can be debated at length but it cannot be denied that the active politicised portion of the African indigenous engaged in that struggle were temporarily elated as would anyone be when their life's goals bear fruition; the real tragedy was that it occurred in the context of cold war animosities - this was scarcely preventable, unlike European reluctance to either let go the reins of power or prepare the continent's institution's for it's eventual departure.
Education, where it existed, was aimed at providing a buffer class of low-ranking bureaucrats who helped preserve the legitimacy of the colonial machine - this meant for instance in the West African Francophone region the imbibing of a specific set of cultural values which taught one to distance oneself from one's own tribal or specifically African identity and learning to view oneself as part of a larger 'progressive' and 'civilizing' force, in this case that of the wider French colonial empire. Full citizenship was offered as a carrot but in practice only a tiny proportion of suitably malleable candidates ever achieved this status; future president Houphoet-Boigny of the Ivory Coast for instance who conformed perfectly to this model first served in one of De Gaulle's cabinets.
If you read some of the Pan-Africanist literature during the immediate post war period there is much internal debate over the questions of identity posed by these 'assimilationist' policies such as found in the concept of 'négritude' and so on. There's a tension generated by two distinctive historical agencies - on the one hand, you have the writings of Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. du Bois (among many others) urging decolonisation and full independence while on the other the colonial powers,(chiefly Britain, France & Portugal) are digging their heels in and maintaining that their respective empires are sacrosanct and in no need of change; decolonisation, if and when it does arrive, will be a long way down the road yet.
It wasn't until after WWII, particularly with returning African soldiers who had served with the Allies and who had sampled the stirrings of independence movements elsewhere, that the struggle to formulate indigeneous networks of resistance to colonial rule really began to kick off. Even after Britain had set up it's gulags in Kenya after the Mau Mau uprising there was no official signals forthcoming that an extended period of dominion was unviable in Africa. Thus, for the bulk of the twentieth century European colonial rule was determined to maintain itself; to sustain the patterns of pre-established hegemony and hierarchy and therefore to make no adjustments in it's characteristic mode of autocracy - no alternative plan was put in place which would prepare for the eventuality of indigenous self-governance.
Many were actually shocked to hear Harold MacMillan talking of the "Winds of Change" and setting dates for independence back in 1960; it was all very much cobbled together hastily to appear magnanimous when in fact the streets would have erupted in protest right across the sub-continent had guarantees not been made. So, the timing and circumstances of de-colonisation were unfortunate to say the least. No long-term plans had been put in place to ensure a smooth transition; no trained doctors, engineers etc. technocrats of every description were in dire need, and in most cases the inbuilt racial prejudices of the white settler elite certainly didn't predispose them to serve under black-led governments.
Coupled with this was the paranoia over Cold War allegiances. Many of the independence leaders espoused socialist philosophies or were financially supported by the Soviet Union with all the negative attention from the CIA and economic sabotage that this entailed. Others were Nasserites and joined the Casablanca Group and this divide announced itself over the course of the Congo crisis when the proposed African Union foundered on the rocks of international acrimony & bitterness over the pro-secessionist UN intervention there - Belgium, the US and the UK conspiring to ensure Union Miniére and other Western mining interests retained an extractive monopoly going so far as to collude in the assassination of the country's first democratically elected president, Patrice Lumumba; a Pan-Africanist who struggled vainly to keep the country from being torn asunder by indigenous ethnic splintering
and neo-colonial plundering.
Some countries should never have been and could only be ruled in practice by a parasitic overlord, be it a colonial power or a newly installed dictatorship cleaving to ethnic loyalties. These artificially inscribed colonial satellite states include Chad, Sudan, Cameroon, Nigeria and several others where a northern Muslim population was opposed to a southern Christian or animist or elsewhere where tribal and/or ethnic cleavages had been magnified by the colonial experience (eg.Rwanda, Burundi). Some of the more outstanding areas of discontent could have done with an international conference to polish off their rougher edges - yet this couldn't happen, be arranged or otherwise dreamt of as the colonial powers were always under the impression that they were there for the long haul.
The early African Union had in fact agreed to respect all colonially derived borders amongst it's members but this was in many cases the nouveau elites simply reinforcing their own power base to the exclusion of wider considerations of the common good. Ethiopia for instance swallowed up in the Ogaden a large proportion of ethnic Somalis; an issue which destabilised Somali politics from the earliest days of independence.
Some governments were forced to radicalise their politics from an early point and thus stand accused of being in the Soviet camp despite assertions to the contrary and their commitment to non-alignment - all on account of their tacit support and encouragement of independence struggles in places like Mozambique, Guinea-Bisseau & Angola who had yet to free themselves from the yoke of the old Portugese imperium. Freedom fighters here were blithely denounced in international circles as 'communists' as indeed were the ANC in South Africa. Scarcely any region in the whole sub-continent in fact was left untouched by the ramifications of Cold War orientated civil wars either spilling into it's borders or else impacting it's domestic politics.
It's all very depressing to look on the mess that was created post-independence and you can point the finger in many directions but the time to pick up the baton and assert a definite policy goal of granting future independence was c. WWI in my estimates - that brief window of short-lived Wilsonian idealism wich nationalists in Ireland at least used to stake out a claim for themselves.
I know we were on a different trajectory in terms of overall development but the marker had got to be laid down; unfortunately what interfered most was that the strongest voices for decolonisation such as Garvey and Du Bois had not only never set foot in Africa but were busy enough fighting discrimination themselves. It was the tacit acknowledgement of racialised hierarchies, of notions of underlying fitness for self-governance which impeded the respective colonial offices from pursuing a fast-track decoupling from the continent.That, in addition to the fact that somewhere along the line vast profits and resources were being plundered.
There's little point in saying retrospectively it was too early for decolonisation and that no preparations had been set in foot when the popular tumult opposing European governance had been allowed reach tidal proportions. The time to begin setting that matter aright was the generation and a half beforehand. It's very difficult to justify another fifty years of hands-on paternalism when the previous fifty had been deployed doing nothing about the chronic levels of inequality, lack of education etc. - and purposely so to boot so as to affect a permanent state of economic subjugation.
European powers were kicked out of there as one country after another became ungovernable and the socialism so-called proved the most popular ideological weapon to rally support simply becasue it represented the exact antithesis of all the exploitation that had proceeded hitherto - how and why so many of these socialist experiments failed to develop is another kettle of fish but the early generation of leaders like Nkrumah & Nyerere were far removed in spirit and character from the clientalist bandits and war-mongers that emerged in the seventies.
There was a widespread ebullience and sense of achievement manifested by just about all social strata which accompanied the wresting of independence from the perennially stubborn colonial powers. Political autonomy didn't just land on people's lap in a gift-wrapped platter from DeGaulle or her Royal Highness it was hard won through decades of campaigning, awareness-raising and often bitter political conflict.
Most independence leaders had spent many years jailed by colonial authorities and no few were projected to the leadership of the 'national struggle' on it's account - they had passed the trial of fire, at least in their people's eyes, by putting their own lives at risk for the overall goal of emancipation.
Whatever else may lay down the road in terms of insuperable difficulties the attitude back then in the wake of the 60's divestment of European political power was one of widespread if guarded jubilation. This is a much commented upon and universally acknowledged phenomenon - the celebrations and sense of optimism in those days were boundless, no more so than in Ghana when Kwamah Nkrumah took power in 1957 at the head of the first newly independent black African country.
The worldwide ramifications of this event were extraordinary for the black diaspora in terms of the confidence it instilled among those who, it must be remembered, were still struggling for civil rights in many of their 'adopted' countries. What was the old tale when Nixon was shaking hands with sundry diplomats and common folk in Accra; "How does it feel to have at last won your independence?" he asked as he pressed paws - "I wouldn't know sir", came the response, "I'm from Georgia".
What happened to Africa after independence can be debated at length but it cannot be denied that the active politicised portion of the African indigenous engaged in that struggle were temporarily elated as would anyone be when their life's goals bear fruition; the real tragedy was that it occurred in the context of cold war animosities - this was scarcely preventable, unlike European reluctance to either let go the reins of power or prepare the continent's institution's for it's eventual departure.
No comments:
Post a Comment