Nationalism and Decolonization in Africa

Title: URL Source: file://pdf.f50e42a0f2186a27b6794947f7ada494/ Markdown Content: # 22 Nationalism and the independence of colonial Africa In 1915, a Baptist minister, John Chilembwe (c. 18711915), led an ill-fated insurrection against British rule in Nyasaland (Malawi). As a young man, he had believed that colonial rule would civilize his native Nyasaland by introducing Christian values and British liberalism. In 1892, he came under the influence of the popular radical Baptist missionary Joseph Booth (1851 1932), whom he accompanied to the United States, where he studied at the black Baptist seminary in Lynchburg, Virginia. Upon his return in 1900, he established the Providence Industrial Mission where, inspired by Booker T. Washington, he preached the gospel of hard work, cleanliness, and respect for the colonial authorities. He became increasingly critical, however, of the harsh treatment and brutality of white settlers toward African laborers on their plantations and the indifference of British officials to these abuses. Convinced that his colonial government would never make good on the promise of social equality he found in English law and the Christian Bible, Chilembwe published a letter in the Nyasaland Times on November 26, 1914, that ran under the heading The Voice of the African Natives in the Present War, in which he laid out his complaints against colonial policies. His message of African grievances and hopes was ignored, and two months later, on January 29, 1915, Chilembwe and two hundred of his followers launched their uprising to establish an independent African state. The colonial authorities retaliated swiftly and ruthlessly. Two weeks later, Chilembwe and many of his supporters were dead and their brick mission church razed to the ground. Chilembwes uprising failed to shake the foundations of British rule in Nyasaland, but it remains a watershed in the history of colonial Africa. Unlike the resistance movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which were organized along local, ethnic, or dynastic lines, Chilembwes rebellion looked to new forms of identity Christianity and the unity of Nyasaland to build a modern nation-state on the foundation of colonial rule. This marked the beginnings of twentieth-century African nationalism and foreshadowed the end of imperial rule. He represented a new generation of African leadership that would play a pivotal role in dismantling the European empires. These men were mission-educated Christians, many of whom had studied in Europe and the United States. They would channel the diffuse discontents of their African followers into the movement for independence and negotiate the end of empire in the language of nationalism and liberalism > 331 > https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139795333.027 Published online by Cambridge University Press 332 independent africa that they had learned from their European rulers. During the four decades that followed the Nyasaland rebellion the pace and direction of this search for independence was often opaque, confused, and disunited, but it was inexorable. Indeed, few people at the time recognized the compelling significance of Chilembwes desperate insurrection, and until the Second World War, only a handful of visionaries dreamed of an Africa free from colonial rule. Today, the movement for African independence appears to have been inevitable, but few of Chilembwes contemporaries anticipated the course or the pace of events that would lead to the end of European rule. Even before the First World War, few recognized that the Europeans were inadvertently sowing the seeds of their own demise. They had introduced new ideologies and technologies that would ultimately undermine their domination in Africa. The condescension, brutality, racism, and despotism that characterized colo-nial rule inexorably alienated its subject peoples, nurturing a resentment that would become apparent during the upheavals of the First World War. The First World Wars impact was felt throughout the continent. The first British shots of the war were fired in the invasion of Togo in August 1914. Thereafter the war relentlessly dragged Africans into the European conflict, as colonial powers sought to occupy the territory of their imperial rivals. The wars insatiable appetite for raw materials placed unprecedented demands on the Africans. Forced labor and requisitioned foods brought privation to Africans, most of whom were subsistence farmers and herdsmen with little surplus for Africa, let alone Europe. One of the colonies most dramatically affected by the war was Nyasaland, where British requisitioning of food-stuffs inadvertently caused famine in parts of the colony, made all the more destructive by the British campaign in neighboring German Tanganyika, which claimed the lives of tens of thousands of Africans. Indeed, Chilembwes revolt was in part a reflection of the bitter resentment felt by Nyasa men who were being pressed by unscrupulous colonial recruiters into service as carriers for the army. Thousands of Africans in the eastern Congo were forced to supply food, labor, and porterage for the Belgian armies in the German colonies of Rwanda and Burundi. Fighting was not confined to German East Africa. South Africa suppressed an internal revolt by German sympathizers and launched a military campaign on its northern border against German forces in South West Africa. In West Africa, British and French troops defeated the Germans in Kamerun (Cameroon). Even those colonies far removed from the actual fighting experienced the relentless demands of war. All of the colonial governments requisitioned men into service as soldiers and laborers. France was particularly aggressive and determined to recruit Africans to fight in Europe to compensate for the devas-tating losses suffered by the French army on the Western Front. Many villages in the Western Sudan lost most of their agricultural laborers, creating hardship for many communities that precipitated demonstrations and in some cases open rebellion. Those soldiers and workers who survived the fierce fighting in > https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139795333.027 Published online by Cambridge University Press Nationalism and the independence of colonial Africa 333 Europe often returned to African village life no longer in awe of colonial rule. Many of them had witnessed Europeans killing other Europeans in France and in Africa; this inevitably undermined the aura of invincibility of their colonial rulers. The end of the war and subsequent peace treaty introduced significant changes in the international order that altered the colonial composition of Africa. Germanys African colonies were transferred to France, Belgium, and Great Britain and justified by the victors on the grounds that Germans had proved themselves unfit to rule Africans. Thus, the subjects of German Africa would be governed with greater concern for their interests as a trusteeship administered by their colonial neighbors on behalf of the newly created League of Nations. This established an important precedent because it granted over-sight of a European colony to an international organization with the intention of ultimate independence. The war also saw the emergence of two new great powers the United States and the Soviet Union that would come to dominate world affairs in the latter half of the twentieth century. Although both countries became ardent oppo-nents of European imperialism for ideologically opposite reasons, the immedi-ate impact on Africa of their anticolonialism was limited. Although President Woodrow Wilson (18561924) was an enthusiastic supporter of the principle of self-determination of nations, which appeared to offer colonized peoples the promise of choosing their form of governance, the realities of the Treaty of Ver-sailles did little for the prospects of African independence. The Soviet Union was a more active champion of colonial peoples, and such anticolonial figures as Ho Chi Minh (18901969) of French Indochina (Vietnam) and I. T. A. Wallace-Johnson (18941965) of Sierra Leone were welcomed in Moscow for training in organizing opposition to colonial rule. Despite their confirmed hostility to colonialism, however, both the United States and the Soviet Union during the interwar years were much too absorbed in their own internal affairs to demonstrate much interest in Africa. At the same time, an increasing num-ber of European intellectuals began to question the ideological justifications of imperialism. The First World War had deeply eroded public enthusiasm for many of the ideologies including nationalism and social Darwinism which had made the conquest of Africa seem morally acceptable. After the war, a new generation of European intellectuals began to criticize colonial rule. In 1926 the French novelist Andr e Gide (18691951) published an account of his travels in French Congo that described the harsh treatment of its people by the French regime. In the 1930s, a few former colonial administrators, such as the English author George Orwell (190350) and the Anglo-Irish writer Joyce Cary (18881957), published novels highlighting the brutality and hypocrisy of empire. Several members of the colonial administration in British Nigeria published critiques of indirect rule for supporting corrupt despots determined to prevent Africans from developing democratic institutions. These authors represented only a tiny minority of Western writers and administrators and > https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139795333.027 Published online by Cambridge University Press 334 independent africa were advocates not of the end of empire but of its reform. At the same time, however, more vociferous African American critics and West Indian intel-lectuals vigorously disputed the legitimacy of European rule in Africa. The most influential of these new voices was the Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey (18871940), whose vision for the continents future was captured in the slo-gan Africa for Africans. Garveys United Negro Improvement Association, which sought to create a closer association of the peoples of the African diaspora, developed a global following during the two decades between the First and Second World Wars. His appeals for African liberation were echoed by other New World intellectuals, particularly the African American W. E. B. Du Bois (18681963). Du Bois played a leading role in the Pan-African Congress held in London in 1900, which demanded that Africans and their descendants be given their civil and political rights. The demobilization of soldiers and laborers in 1918 produced high unem-ployment in Africa as well as Europe, and the painful transition from war to peace by the European economies contributed to postwar inflation and a short-age of basic European commodities imported to Africa. Disease combined with economic plight to exacerbate the misery of the Africans. In 1918, influenza killed millions of Africans, whose colonial governments were ill prepared to respond to the epidemic. The immediate postwar economic problems, how-ever, did not disappear like the influenza. During the 1920s, numerous protests emerged among African workers in the growing urban areas. Strikes broke out in the mining towns of the Belgian Congo and British Northern Rhodesia, on the railways of Southern Rhodesia, and on the docks of Kenya and South Africa. In the rural areas tax collection, land expropriation, and labor con-scription resulted in demonstrations and even insurrections. All these forms of protest were suppressed by the colonial authorities, for virtually all strikes were illegal, and punitive raids against rebellious rural subjects often resulted in the destruction of villages and the slaughter of their inhabitants. These outbursts of discontent did not threaten the domination of colonial government in Africa, but collectively they produced a smoldering resentment toward colonial rule that would be exploited by advocates of political reform. During the 1930s, a small group of educated Africans and trade union leaders began forming associations to lobby for a role in colonial gover-nance. The most influential of these organizations were in the British West African colonies, for the British policy of indirect rule was predicated on the assumption that British colonies were politically separate from the national government in London. This distinction sharply contrasted with the policies of France and Portugal, who regarded their African possessions as overseas territories represented in the legislatures of Paris and Lisbon. Consequently, in British West Africa, politicians could discuss political autonomy without fear of being arrested for sedition. In 1917, Great Britain had accepted the eventual independence of India, and thus British officials in the Gold Coast and Nigeria were prepared to tolerate a degree of political criticism. A key figure was the > https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139795333.027 Published online by Cambridge University Press Nationalism and the independence of colonial Africa 335 Nigerian journalist Benjamin Nnamdi Azikiwe (190496, known as Zik), a mission-educated Christian who spent much of the 1920s in the United States, where he attended the University of Pennsylvania and was acquainted with Garveyism. He returned to West Africa in the early 1930s and worked as a journalist in Liberia and the Gold Coast before returning to his native Nige-ria where he became the leading writer for the West Africa Pilot , advocating self-government for Nigeria within the British Empire. Ziks vision of Nigeria as an independent sovereign state would come to be challenged by an emerging African elite who sought to replace the colo-nial order with a pan-African union of all the former colonies. This politi-cal doctrine advocated by black intellectuals in the Americas and in Africa known as pan-Africanism had first appeared in the late nineteenth century. The pan-Africanists aspired to forge the former colonies into a United States of Africa, a homeland for blacks throughout the world. It would be the instru-ment to end colonial rule and provide an alternative to the arbitrary divisions of ethnicities imposed by the boundaries of colonialism. W. E. B. Du Bois was one of its most enthusiastic spokesmen and helped to organize a series of international meetings to protest colonial rule and promote pan-Africanism. Pan-Africanism had its greatest following among English-speaking Africans. Within the French-speaking regions of the African diaspora, intellec-tuals focused on cultural rather than political liberation. When British colonial policies were giving English-speaking Africans limited political freedom, the French policy of assimilation was creating a dilemma for many intellectuals, who were concerned that their African cultural identity would be subsumed by language and culture into the larger Francophone world. Moreover, the French had been willing to admit a few of these assimilated intellectuals as repre-sentatives in the French Assembly in Paris. Although small in number, these influential African politicians were the living symbols that the French political system was willing to share in the fullness of time political equality with its colonial subjects. It was precisely this fear of assimilation that encouraged the African subjects of the French empire to focus on cultural rather than political liberation. The Caribbean poet Aim e Cesair e (19132001) coined the term n egritude to describe a unique identity shared by all peoples of the African diaspora. N egritude inverted social Darwinism by accepting the premise that humanity was divided into different races, each of which had its own innate characteristics, but that the Negro identity possessed equal merit with that of Caucasian Europeans. During the interwar era, most of these debates took place in Europe and North America, and their influence in Africa was negligible. Of greater con-cern for most Africans was the beginning of the global depression in 1929, which quickly had a devastating impact on the fragile economies of the con-tinents colonies. Ironically, the arrival of the depression in Africa coincided with a time when the colonial authorities were finally establishing effective administration over their African subjects. By 1929, even the most isolated > https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139795333.027 Published online by Cambridge University Press 336 independent africa communities had become integrated into the colonial administrative system, and many villagers found themselves for the first time accountable to colonial tax collectors, police, and courts. To meet these new obligations of hut and poll tax, traditional subsistence farmers had been pulled, usually with great reluctance, into the colonial economy as cash-crop farmers, miners, plantation laborers, and service workers in the rapidly expanding colonial cities. The increasing number of wage laborers resulted in the farmers becoming more dependent on foreign markets for their produce in return for imported com-modities, often including essential foodstuffs. The incorporation of Africans into the money economy had produced thriving import, export, transport, and marketing services, as well as the expansion of the colonial bureaucracies that required African functionaries to protect and tax the new wealth. Thus, when the depression struck, vast numbers of Africans dependent on the export econ-omy for their livelihood were thrust into poverty. Farmers and herdsmen found international demand for their products drastically curtailed. With the export trade slackening dockworkers became unemployed. Miners could no longer expect a steady demand for their labor. African clerks were the first to be laid off when colonial bureaucracies retrenched. Thus, at the time when members of the incipient African middle class were agitating for reform of colonial gov-ernance, their rural agrarian and urban industrial compatriots were becoming increasingly frustrated by the inability of their colonial rulers to improve their situation. African peasants, workers, and elites expressed their grievances during the depression in many ways, but by the eve of the Second World War no coherent organization or movement emerged to channel this discontent into a common cause. Political associations, where they existed before 1940, were dominated by the few educated Africans who lobbied for some influence over state policy. Their demands were usually ignored by colonial officials, who dismissed these detribalized Africans as not representative of mainstream African opinion, unlike the loyal traditional chiefs, who were recognized as better qualified to know the legitimate interests of their people. If the colonial officials in Africa resisted reform, those in London and Paris were more sensitive to the events of the interwar years the creation of the League of Nations and its trusteeships, the depression and its dislocations, the Italian invasion of independent Ethiopia in 1935, and the increasing criticism of colonialism by intellectuals. They abandoned the illusion that the colonies should be economically self-sufficient and had begun to invest in colonial development and contemplate minor political reforms when the Second World War broke out. The war would transform colonial Africa. The rapid defeat of France by Nazi Germany in 1940 placed her African colonies under the rule of the collaborationist Vichy regime, leaving French subjects in Africa to choose between a fascist, racist regime in Vichy or the Free French in London led by General Charles de Gaulle (18901970). Only one province, French Equatorial Africa, whose governor was F elix Ebou e > https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139795333.027 Published online by Cambridge University Press Nationalism and the independence of colonial Africa 337 (18841944), a black West Indian, defied the Vichy administration and sup-ported de Gaulle, giving the Free French a crucial base in equatorial Africa. After the fall of France, Great Britain mobilized all the resources of her empire to fight both Germany and Japan, and her African colonies instantly became a vital economic and strategic asset. Minerals from African mines, foods from African farms, and soldiers from African villages were desperately needed to make war, but the demands for men and materials were too many and too much to be requisitioned by coercion, as in the First World War. Although many of Africas elites and chiefs rallied to support the empire, its farmers, laborers, and soldiers would have to be given incentives to support the allied cause. British propaganda, disseminated through colonial newspapers, radio, and cinemas, promised that victory would lead to better economic opportuni-ties and improved political status for Africans. Events seemed to give some truth to the propaganda. When Italy allied with Nazi Germany in 1940, the first substantial allied victory was the conquest of the Italian East African empire and the return to Ethiopia of Emperor Haile Selassie (18921975) in May 1941. In August, the U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt (18821945) and British prime minister Winston Churchill (18741965) signed the Atlantic Charter, which proclaimed that the war was being fought to liberate subject peoples. Churchill interpreted this declaration as applying only to the people of occupied Europe, but many Africans antici-pated that the charter would bring important changes for Africa at the end of the war. Moreover, the demands of war revived the economic growth in Africa that had been interrupted by the depression. The allies invested in new roads, rail lines, and improved port facilities in an effort to speed the movement of men and material to the war zones. The people best poised to take advantage of the revived economic situation were white settlers, but African farmers and workers also found their produce and labor in greater demand. However, the wartime economy also brought hardships. Colonial governments fixed prices on export goods as a wartime expedient, limiting the profits of farmers and merchants. Imported goods were scarce and expensive. During the war most people accepted these problems as necessary; afterward they would become intolerable. Large numbers of African men were recruited into the allied armies, often for service far from home and alongside black soldiers from the African diaspora. War service in the Second World War had a deeper and more widespread influence on African troops than that in the First World War, for they were far more likely to see combat. Indeed, British recruitment propaganda touted the achievements of a Nigerian officer in the Royal Air Force. Although such positions of responsibility were rare, the significance of this unprecedented recognition of ability was not lost on the African trooper. Africans also served alongside soldiers from other parts of the empire, many of whom enjoyed greater political representation and economic opportunities. African troops also were exposed to African American soldiers who, unlike > https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139795333.027 Published online by Cambridge University Press 338 independent africa them, received the same pay as their white compatriots. These experiences made them aware that the colonial system denied them political and economic opportunities that were taken for granted throughout the rest of the African diaspora. When the war ended in 1945, the colonial powers had emerged victori-ous in no small part because of the contributions from their African empires. Although few observers in 1945 were prepared to accept an imminent end to colonial rule in Africa, there was general agreement that some transformation of colonialism was necessary. France had already sought to institute reform in 1944 when Charles de Gaulle held a conference in Brazzaville to discuss the political future of French Africa. No Africans were invited to participate, and the French delegates emphatically refused to contemplate independence for their African colonies. They did, however, abolish some of the more odi-ous aspects of the colonial administration, particularly the hated corv ee, or forced labor, and publicly acknowledged that Africans had earned the right to a reform of colonial administration. In the same year, the government of Kenya appointed the first African to its legislative council, and during the next four years, Britain introduced new constitutions into their West African colonies. These moderate constitutions did little to satisfy the rising expecta-tions of African politicians, and although proclaimed with much fanfare as the harbingers of reform, they were more a symbol of British self-delusion than an acceptable response to the aspirations of their subjects. The end of wartime controls unleashed a ferment of political activity in West Africa that was exacerbated by the slackening demand for African commodi-ties and the scarcity of imported goods, neither of which could be satisfied by the wreckage of the European war-torn economies. Nnamdi Azikiwe, who had been advocating independence for Nigeria since the late 1930s, now found support from other African activists both within and outside Africa. In October 1945, the Pan-African Conference in Manchester, England, had called for the complete and absolute independence of the people of West Africa. In Nigeria during the war, Zik had organized a political party called the National Council of Nigeria and Cameroon (NCNC) to educate Nigerians about self-government. The task was formidable Nigeria was a vast colony with significant geographic, cultural, religious, and ethnic differences but by the end of the war, Zik and politicians like him were determined to create political alliances across class and ethnic lines to work toward independence. The other center of anticolonial agitation in West Africa in the late 1940s was the Gold Coast colony. During the war, a student from the Gold Coast named Kwame Nkrumah (190972) had helped organize the Pan-African Conference in Manchester. Like Zik, Nkrumah had studied in the United States, where he had become an admirer of Marcus Garvey. After the war, a small group of politicians in the Gold Coast created the United Gold Coast Convention and invited Nkrumah to return from Britain to serve as its organizing secretary. His arrival in 1947 coincided with widespread discontent, which culminated > https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139795333.027 Published online by Cambridge University Press Nationalism and the independence of colonial Africa 339 in an incident in which British troops fired on a crowd of protestors, killing several veterans. Nkrumahs outspoken condemnation of British handling of the ensuing riots thrust him into the leadership of the exuberant political scene. Azikiwe and Nkrumah emerged as powerful spokesmen against colonialism at the same time that the relationship between Europe and Africa had reached a crossroads. Virtually everyone agreed that the war and its aftermath precluded any return to the colonialism of the past, but there was a deep division of opinion as to the nature of any new relationship between Europe and Africa. The British and French envisaged that change would come gradually by the combination of limited constitutional reforms and state-sponsored economic development that had been accepted by their governments even before the war. In the immediate postwar years, the political and economic manifestations of these policies would be systematic steps toward self-government a few even anticipated eventual independence combined with significant funds for development. There was little altruism in these plans: they were designed to create political stability in the African colonies, on the one hand, and to produce cheap African commodities oils, cocoa, rubber, cotton for British and French consumers, on the other. To African nationalists this renewed commitment in London and Paris appeared little more than heavy-handed paternalism that did not address Africas postwar problems, which included the continuation of the demographic boom that had been underway since the First World War. This placed increasing pressure on African cultivators, a situation that was exacerbated by the arrival of new white immigrants in Kenya, Southern Rhodesia, South Africa, and the Portuguese colonies. Land hunger in turn produced numerous problems for African farmers, including soil exhaustion and increased erosion. To combat this degradation of the land colonial officials introduced scientific farming techniques that were bitterly resented by African farmers and herdsmen and often failed to improve the soils. These policies drove many rural Africans into alliance with urban lead-ers who offered appealing and understandable solutions. Kwame Nkrumah was one of the first to recognize that the simple demand for independence could mobilize the African masses in the countryside as well as the city. Although more moderate politicians and elites were agitating for greater influ-ence over colonial policies, Nkrumah electrified crowds with the tantalizing prospect of an immediate end to British rule that would resolve all of the post-war grievances the tyranny of traditional authorities, inflation, shortages, colonial marketing boards that paid cheap prices for farm produce, and unem-ployment. Nkrumah stoked unrealistic expectations, insisting that the many problems of the Gold Coast could be resolved by an independent African government. He would have to deal with their disappointments later, but at the time, his demands for independence proved irresistible. Before the Second World War, most African politicians had thought in terms of reforming colonial rule, rather than overthrowing it, and of winning greater > https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139795333.027 Published online by Cambridge University Press 340 independent africa influence in colonial governance to secure economic and legal equality for at least some Africans. Early political movements focused on specific issues improving wages, eliminating government price controls, and removing racist legal restrictions. After the war, events moved quickly, however, and the most ambitious demands of the 1930s seemed hopelessly inadequate by 1951, when the first popular elections were held in the Gold Coast. The realization that African independence was on the horizon mobilized elites, ethnic groups, and labour organizations to become involved in a political debate in which they had previously demonstrated little interest. Nkrumahs Congress Peoples Party (CPP) in the elections of 1954 moti-vated anxious Asante activists to create a rival ethnically based party, the National Liberation Movement. In the Belgian Congo, the governments abrupt announcement in 1957 of impending elections led to the precipitous birth of more than a hundred ethnically based parties, the larger of which claimed to represent Bakongo, Luba, and Lunda interests. In neighboring Congo-Brazzaville, the generic names of early political parties such as the Congolese Progressive Party and the African Socialist Movement masked their predom-inantly ethnic identity. On the eve of independence Bugandan nationalists founded the Kabaka-Yakka Party, which was committed to preserving the prerogatives of the monarchy. The sudden appearance of these ethnically based parties was an inevitable response to colonial administration, which had made a fetish of customary law and favored tribal leaders. Not surprisingly, these traditional rulers felt threatened by the nationalists, who sought to subsume the power of royal insti-tutions and ethnic minorities within a unitary state. In turn, African urban politi-cians perceived these ethnically based parties and their traditional rulers as a threat to the integrity of the postcolonial state. They often viewed royal and ethnic parties as tools of the colonial authorities and as a potential impediment to national integration. They despised them as a retrograde form of tribal-ism that was antithetical to their modernizing agenda. They also suspected the leadership of these ethnic entities of defending narrow regional economic interests petroleum in southern Nigeria, cocoa-farming among the Asante, or the mineral wealth of the Katanga region of the Belgian Congo dominated by the Luba. In the rush to independence nationalist leaders Nkrumah in Ghana, Lumumba in Congo outmaneuvered these popular ethnic parties, but the anxieties that spawned them did not diminish. By the late 1960s, when independent governments had failed to deliver on the promises that had swept them into office, the political aspirations of the tribally based parties, which had been marginalized in the race to independence, resurfaced to jeopardize the stability of the young nations. After Ghana become independent in 1957, it became impossible for British and French negotiators to convince most African politicians to settle for any-thing less. In retrospect, the creation of dozens of separate, independent states on the ashes of the former colonial empires appears to have been almost > https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139795333.027 Published online by Cambridge University Press Nationalism and the independence of colonial Africa 341 inevitable, but in the 1950s, several schemes were proposed to consolidate existing colonies into larger political units. The British proposed a federation of its East African territories and in 1953 created the Central African Fed-eration consisting of the colonies of Southern Rhodesia, Northern Rhodesia, and Nyasaland. The French in 1958 sought to cajole their Central and West African colonies into joining a federation that would leave France in control of their defense and foreign policy. Both proposals foundered on the resistance of African nationalists, who dismissed them as cynical attempts to maintain colonial influence. In 1960, the British prime minister, Harold Macmillan (18941986), deliv-ered a speech in the South African parliament that warned of the Winds of Change sweeping the continent. In that same year, France granted indepen-dence to all of her sub-Saharan possessions, and within five years Great Britain had relinquished control over all of her colonies. In those French and British territories that had insignificant white settler populations the transfer of power was relatively peaceful, the result of protracted negotiations throughout the decade following the war, culminating in parliamentary elections and conclud-ing with a grand ceremony celebrating the passage from colony to independent sovereign state. Unfortunately, Africans living under other colonial regimes would experience a more protracted and violent journey to independence. In 1960, the abrupt end of Belgian rule in the Congo precipitated a col-lapse of order, necessitating the deployment of a peacekeeping force under the aegis of the United Nations. The violent disturbances that swept through the Congo were largely the result of Belgian colonial policies since the end of the war. Unlike Great Britain, Belgium had refused to consider any political reforms that would devolve real power into the hands of its African subjects. No effort was made to prepare Africans for leadership positions in the colonial administration. Consequently, in 1958, when the Belgian government, under international pressure, legalized political parties, over a hundred ethnically based associations appeared almost overnight. Because the Belgian govern-ment had failed to provide public education beyond primary school, the few literate Africans in the Congo had received their education either in the colonial army or the mission schools of the Roman Catholic Church. At independence there were only a handful of college graduates available to administer one of the largest and potentially wealthiest states in Africa. This tiny community of potential leaders faced the daunting task of ruling a state whose sheer size and diversity made communication and thus administration very difficult. The young government of Congo was plagued also by the meddling of foreign governments particularly Belgium and the United States, who were anxious to control the nations substantial mineral wealth. Belgiums precipitous withdrawal from the Congo was the result of a politi-cal calculation that all colonial powers were forced to make during the decade after the war. Would the benefits of clinging to power be greater than the costs? Each imperial power had a slightly different set of priorities. The businessmen > https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139795333.027 Published online by Cambridge University Press 342 independent africa and shopkeepers of Belgium were not prepared to bear the huge financial expense of a protracted military occupation of Congo. Because the motives for conquest of the Congo had been from the beginning to seize its rubber and mineral wealth, the decision to sever the imperial connection was a financial one that was made with little concern as to the effect of withdrawal on the African populace. Britains liquidation of its empire in Africa was undertaken in part to curry favor with the United States, but Britains rulers were also anx-ious to be relieved of the financial responsibility for the colonies, particularly if the new states could be persuaded to remain within the British Common-wealth. Moreover, the British could leave most of their colonies in the hands of bourgeois, mission-educated African leaders who had promised to protect private property and respect the rule of law. There was, however, a formidable obstacle to the transfer of power to the Africans: the resistance of white settlers in Kenya, Southern Rhodesia, and South Africa. In Kenya, the Mau Mau con-flict in the 1950s, which resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Africans, had convinced British officials that white rule was unsustainable, and Kenya became an independent democracy in 1963. The white minority governments in Southern Rhodesia and South Africa, unwilling to cede power to an African majority, severed their connections to Great Britain in the 1960s. Because Portugal considered her colonies to be overseas provinces, any dis-cussion of independence was regarded as seditious, a fact that inexorably led to violent confrontations between the colonizer and the colonized. The Por-tuguese had been the first Europeans to arrive in Africa, in the fifteenth century. By the end of the 1960s Portugal, the first European state to establish a colony in Africa, was the only European empire remaining on the continent. Portuguese policy was particularly obdurate in part because of the fear that the loss of her tropical colonies would prove disastrous for her fragile economy. Portugal was also ruled by a fascist regime whose claims to legitimacy were tied to the nations long colonial history in Africa and Asia. There was also a significant number of poor white settlers in Mozambique and Angola, who were firmly against any kind of political reform. When the Portuguese government refused to negotiate any reform of the colonial government, the anticolonial movement in Portuguese Africa became a guerrilla war for liberation. Moreover, the Portuguese forces in Angola and Mozambique could rely on military and moral support from the white-dominated states of South Africa and Southern Rhodesia. Together these three powers formed a bloc in southern Africa that was committed to resisting any political reform that would chal-lenge white privilege. The rebels could count on support from the socialist countries Russia, China, and even Cuba that turned the guerrilla war into an extension of Cold War rivalry. Innovations in military technology worked to the advantage of mobile guerrilla armies, and international opposition to the racist policies of these states made them diplomatic pariahs. Portugal was the first to crack. As the guerrilla wars in Angola and Mozambique dragged on at great economic and human cost, disgruntled officers in Portugal staged a coup > https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139795333.027 Published online by Cambridge University Press Nationalism and the independence of colonial Africa 343 in 1974. Within a year, the new regime had liquidated the African empire. With a new government in Mozambique that was hostile to neighboring Southern Rhodesia, African guerrillas in that country now had supply lines to the outside world and training camps for their soldiers. Within five years of the end of Portuguese rule in Africa, the settler regime in Southern Rhodesia had given up its opposition to democratic reform. New elections in 1980 created the Republic of Zimbabwe. The only remaining vestige of colonial rule on the continent was the settler state of South Africa. Further reading Birmingham, David, The Decolonization of Africa , London: University College of London Press, 1996. Cooper, Frederick, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Davidson, Basil, The Black Mans Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State ,New York: Times Books, 1992. Manning, Patrick, Francophone Sub-Saharan Africa, 18801985 , Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 1988. Shepperson, George, and Thomas Price, Independent African: John Chilembwe and the Origins, Setting and Significance of the Nyasaland Native Rising of 1915 ,Edinburgh: The University Press, 1987.

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# 22 Nationalism and the independence of colonial Africa

In 1915, a Baptist minister, John Chilembwe (c. 18711915), led an ill-fated insurrection against British rule in Nyasaland (Malawi). As a young man, he had believed that colonial rule would civilize his native Nyasaland by introducing Christian values and British liberalism. In 1892, he came under the influence of the popular radical Baptist missionary Joseph Booth (1851 1932), whom he accompanied to the United States, where he studied at the black Baptist seminary in Lynchburg, Virginia. Upon his return in 1900, he established the Providence Industrial Mission where, inspired by Booker T. Washington, he preached the gospel of hard work, cleanliness, and respect for the colonial authorities. He became increasingly critical, however, of the harsh treatment and brutality of white settlers toward African laborers on their plantations and the indifference of British officials to these abuses. Convinced that his colonial government would never make good on the promise of social equality he found in English law and the Christian Bible, Chilembwe published a letter in the Nyasaland Times on November 26, 1914, that ran under the heading The Voice of the African Natives in the Present War, in which he laid out his complaints against colonial policies. His message of African grievances and hopes was ignored, and two months later, on January 29, 1915, Chilembwe and two hundred of his followers launched their uprising to establish an independent African state. The colonial authorities retaliated swiftly and ruthlessly. Two weeks later, Chilembwe and many of his supporters were dead and their brick mission church razed to the ground. Chilembwes uprising failed to shake the foundations of British rule in Nyasaland, but it remains a watershed in the history of colonial Africa. Unlike the resistance movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which were organized along local, ethnic, or dynastic lines, Chilembwes rebellion looked to new forms of identity  Christianity and the unity of Nyasaland  to build a modern nation-state on the foundation of colonial rule. This marked the beginnings of twentieth-century African nationalism and foreshadowed the end of imperial rule. He represented a new generation of African leadership that would play a pivotal role in dismantling the European empires. These men were mission-educated Christians, many of whom had studied in Europe and the United States. They would channel the diffuse discontents of their African followers into the movement for independence and negotiate the end of empire in the language of nationalism and liberalism

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that they had learned from their European rulers. During the four decades that followed the Nyasaland rebellion the pace and direction of this search for independence was often opaque, confused, and disunited, but it was inexorable. Indeed, few people at the time recognized the compelling significance of Chilembwes desperate insurrection, and until the Second World War, only a handful of visionaries dreamed of an Africa free from colonial rule. Today, the movement for African independence appears to have been inevitable, but few of Chilembwes contemporaries anticipated the course or the pace of events that would lead to the end of European rule. Even before the First World War, few recognized that the Europeans were inadvertently sowing the seeds of their own demise. They had introduced new ideologies and technologies that would ultimately undermine their domination in Africa. The condescension, brutality, racism, and despotism that characterized colo-nial rule inexorably alienated its subject peoples, nurturing a resentment that would become apparent during the upheavals of the First World War. The First World Wars impact was felt throughout the continent. The first British shots of the war were fired in the invasion of Togo in August 1914. Thereafter the war relentlessly dragged Africans into the European conflict, as colonial powers sought to occupy the territory of their imperial rivals. The wars insatiable appetite for raw materials placed unprecedented demands on the Africans. Forced labor and requisitioned foods brought privation to Africans, most of whom were subsistence farmers and herdsmen with little surplus for Africa, let alone Europe. One of the colonies most dramatically affected by the war was Nyasaland, where British requisitioning of food-stuffs inadvertently caused famine in parts of the colony, made all the more destructive by the British campaign in neighboring German Tanganyika, which claimed the lives of tens of thousands of Africans. Indeed, Chilembwes revolt was in part a reflection of the bitter resentment felt by Nyasa men who were being pressed by unscrupulous colonial recruiters into service as carriers for the army. Thousands of Africans in the eastern Congo were forced to supply food, labor, and porterage for the Belgian armies in the German colonies of Rwanda and Burundi. Fighting was not confined to German East Africa. South Africa suppressed an internal revolt by German sympathizers and launched a military campaign on its northern border against German forces in South West Africa. In West Africa, British and French troops defeated the Germans in Kamerun (Cameroon). Even those colonies far removed from the actual fighting experienced the relentless demands of war. All of the colonial governments requisitioned men into service as soldiers and laborers. France was particularly aggressive and determined to recruit Africans to fight in Europe to compensate for the devas-tating losses suffered by the French army on the Western Front. Many villages in the Western Sudan lost most of their agricultural laborers, creating hardship for many communities that precipitated demonstrations and in some cases open rebellion. Those soldiers and workers who survived the fierce fighting in

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Europe often returned to African village life no longer in awe of colonial rule. Many of them had witnessed Europeans killing other Europeans in France and in Africa; this inevitably undermined the aura of invincibility of their colonial rulers. The end of the war and subsequent peace treaty introduced significant changes in the international order that altered the colonial composition of Africa. Germanys African colonies were transferred to France, Belgium, and Great Britain and justified by the victors on the grounds that Germans had proved themselves unfit to rule Africans. Thus, the subjects of German Africa would be governed with greater concern for their interests as a trusteeship administered by their colonial neighbors on behalf of the newly created League of Nations. This established an important precedent because it granted over-sight of a European colony to an international organization with the intention of ultimate independence. The war also saw the emergence of two new great powers the United States and the Soviet Union  that would come to dominate world affairs in the latter half of the twentieth century. Although both countries became ardent oppo-nents of European imperialism for ideologically opposite reasons, the immedi-ate impact on Africa of their anticolonialism was limited. Although President Woodrow Wilson (18561924) was an enthusiastic supporter of the principle of self-determination of nations, which appeared to offer colonized peoples the promise of choosing their form of governance, the realities of the Treaty of Ver-sailles did little for the prospects of African independence. The Soviet Union was a more active champion of colonial peoples, and such anticolonial figures as Ho Chi Minh (18901969) of French Indochina (Vietnam) and I. T. A. Wallace-Johnson (18941965) of Sierra Leone were welcomed in Moscow for training in organizing opposition to colonial rule. Despite their confirmed hostility to colonialism, however, both the United States and the Soviet Union during the interwar years were much too absorbed in their own internal affairs to demonstrate much interest in Africa. At the same time, an increasing num-ber of European intellectuals began to question the ideological justifications of imperialism. The First World War had deeply eroded public enthusiasm for many of the ideologies  including nationalism and social Darwinism  which had made the conquest of Africa seem morally acceptable. After the war, a new generation of European intellectuals began to criticize colonial rule. In 1926 the French novelist Andr e Gide (18691951) published an account of his travels in French Congo that described the harsh treatment of its people by the French regime. In the 1930s, a few former colonial administrators, such as the English author George Orwell (190350) and the Anglo-Irish writer Joyce Cary (18881957), published novels highlighting the brutality and hypocrisy of empire. Several members of the colonial administration in British Nigeria published critiques of indirect rule for supporting corrupt despots determined to prevent Africans from developing democratic institutions. These authors represented only a tiny minority of Western writers and administrators and

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were advocates not of the end of empire but of its reform. At the same time, however, more vociferous African American critics and West Indian intel-lectuals vigorously disputed the legitimacy of European rule in Africa. The most influential of these new voices was the Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey (18871940), whose vision for the continents future was captured in the slo-gan Africa for Africans. Garveys United Negro Improvement Association, which sought to create a closer association of the peoples of the African diaspora, developed a global following during the two decades between the First and Second World Wars. His appeals for African liberation were echoed by other New World intellectuals, particularly the African American W. E. B. Du Bois (18681963). Du Bois played a leading role in the Pan-African Congress held in London in 1900, which demanded that Africans and their descendants be given their civil and political rights. The demobilization of soldiers and laborers in 1918 produced high unem-ployment in Africa as well as Europe, and the painful transition from war to peace by the European economies contributed to postwar inflation and a short-age of basic European commodities imported to Africa. Disease combined with economic plight to exacerbate the misery of the Africans. In 1918, influenza killed millions of Africans, whose colonial governments were ill prepared to respond to the epidemic. The immediate postwar economic problems, how-ever, did not disappear like the influenza. During the 1920s, numerous protests emerged among African workers in the growing urban areas. Strikes broke out in the mining towns of the Belgian Congo and British Northern Rhodesia, on the railways of Southern Rhodesia, and on the docks of Kenya and South Africa. In the rural areas tax collection, land expropriation, and labor con-scription resulted in demonstrations and even insurrections. All these forms of protest were suppressed by the colonial authorities, for virtually all strikes were illegal, and punitive raids against rebellious rural subjects often resulted in the destruction of villages and the slaughter of their inhabitants. These outbursts of discontent did not threaten the domination of colonial government in Africa, but collectively they produced a smoldering resentment toward colonial rule that would be exploited by advocates of political reform. During the 1930s, a small group of educated Africans and trade union leaders began forming associations to lobby for a role in colonial gover-nance. The most influential of these organizations were in the British West African colonies, for the British policy of indirect rule was predicated on the assumption that British colonies were politically separate from the national government in London. This distinction sharply contrasted with the policies of France and Portugal, who regarded their African possessions as overseas territories represented in the legislatures of Paris and Lisbon. Consequently, in British West Africa, politicians could discuss political autonomy without fear of being arrested for sedition. In 1917, Great Britain had accepted the eventual independence of India, and thus British officials in the Gold Coast and Nigeria were prepared to tolerate a degree of political criticism. A key figure was the

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Nigerian journalist Benjamin Nnamdi Azikiwe (190496, known as Zik), a mission-educated Christian who spent much of the 1920s in the United States, where he attended the University of Pennsylvania and was acquainted with Garveyism. He returned to West Africa in the early 1930s and worked as a journalist in Liberia and the Gold Coast before returning to his native Nige-ria where he became the leading writer for the West Africa Pilot , advocating self-government for Nigeria within the British Empire. Ziks vision of Nigeria as an independent sovereign state would come to be challenged by an emerging African elite who sought to replace the colo-nial order with a pan-African union of all the former colonies. This politi-cal doctrine advocated by black intellectuals in the Americas and in Africa known as pan-Africanism had first appeared in the late nineteenth century. The pan-Africanists aspired to forge the former colonies into a United States of Africa, a homeland for blacks throughout the world. It would be the instru-ment to end colonial rule and provide an alternative to the arbitrary divisions of ethnicities imposed by the boundaries of colonialism. W. E. B. Du Bois was one of its most enthusiastic spokesmen and helped to organize a series of international meetings to protest colonial rule and promote pan-Africanism. Pan-Africanism had its greatest following among English-speaking Africans. Within the French-speaking regions of the African diaspora, intellec-tuals focused on cultural rather than political liberation. When British colonial policies were giving English-speaking Africans limited political freedom, the French policy of assimilation was creating a dilemma for many intellectuals, who were concerned that their African cultural identity would be subsumed by language and culture into the larger Francophone world. Moreover, the French had been willing to admit a few of these assimilated intellectuals as repre-sentatives in the French Assembly in Paris. Although small in number, these influential African politicians were the living symbols that the French political system was willing to share  in the fullness of time  political equality with its colonial subjects. It was precisely this fear of assimilation that encouraged the African subjects of the French empire to focus on cultural rather than political liberation. The Caribbean poet Aim e Cesair e (19132001) coined the term

n egritude to describe a unique identity shared by all peoples of the African diaspora. N egritude inverted social Darwinism by accepting the premise that humanity was divided into different races, each of which had its own innate characteristics, but that the Negro identity possessed equal merit with that of Caucasian Europeans. During the interwar era, most of these debates took place in Europe and North America, and their influence in Africa was negligible. Of greater con-cern for most Africans was the beginning of the global depression in 1929, which quickly had a devastating impact on the fragile economies of the con-tinents colonies. Ironically, the arrival of the depression in Africa coincided with a time when the colonial authorities were finally establishing effective administration over their African subjects. By 1929, even the most isolated

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communities had become integrated into the colonial administrative system, and many villagers found themselves for the first time accountable to colonial tax collectors, police, and courts. To meet these new obligations of hut and poll tax, traditional subsistence farmers had been pulled, usually with great reluctance, into the colonial economy as cash-crop farmers, miners, plantation laborers, and service workers in the rapidly expanding colonial cities. The increasing number of wage laborers resulted in the farmers becoming more dependent on foreign markets for their produce in return for imported com-modities, often including essential foodstuffs. The incorporation of Africans into the money economy had produced thriving import, export, transport, and marketing services, as well as the expansion of the colonial bureaucracies that required African functionaries to protect and tax the new wealth. Thus, when the depression struck, vast numbers of Africans dependent on the export econ-omy for their livelihood were thrust into poverty. Farmers and herdsmen found international demand for their products drastically curtailed. With the export trade slackening dockworkers became unemployed. Miners could no longer expect a steady demand for their labor. African clerks were the first to be laid off when colonial bureaucracies retrenched. Thus, at the time when members of the incipient African middle class were agitating for reform of colonial gov-ernance, their rural agrarian and urban industrial compatriots were becoming increasingly frustrated by the inability of their colonial rulers to improve their situation. African peasants, workers, and elites expressed their grievances during the depression in many ways, but by the eve of the Second World War no coherent organization or movement emerged to channel this discontent into a common cause. Political associations, where they existed before 1940, were dominated by the few educated Africans who lobbied for some influence over state policy. Their demands were usually ignored by colonial officials, who dismissed these detribalized Africans as not representative of mainstream African opinion, unlike the loyal traditional chiefs, who were recognized as better qualified to know the legitimate interests of their people. If the colonial officials in Africa resisted reform, those in London and Paris were more sensitive to the events of the interwar years  the creation of the League of Nations and its trusteeships, the depression and its dislocations, the Italian invasion of independent Ethiopia in 1935, and the increasing criticism of colonialism by intellectuals. They abandoned the illusion that the colonies should be economically self-sufficient and had begun to invest in colonial development and contemplate minor political reforms when the Second World War broke out. The war would transform colonial Africa. The rapid defeat of France by Nazi Germany in 1940 placed her African colonies under the rule of the collaborationist Vichy regime, leaving French subjects in Africa to choose between a fascist, racist regime in Vichy or the Free French in London led by General Charles de Gaulle (18901970). Only one province, French Equatorial Africa, whose governor was F elix Ebou e

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(18841944), a black West Indian, defied the Vichy administration and sup-ported de Gaulle, giving the Free French a crucial base in equatorial Africa. After the fall of France, Great Britain mobilized all the resources of her empire to fight both Germany and Japan, and her African colonies instantly became a vital economic and strategic asset. Minerals from African mines, foods from African farms, and soldiers from African villages were desperately needed to make war, but the demands for men and materials were too many and too much to be requisitioned by coercion, as in the First World War. Although many of Africas elites and chiefs rallied to support the empire, its farmers, laborers, and soldiers would have to be given incentives to support the allied cause. British propaganda, disseminated through colonial newspapers, radio, and cinemas, promised that victory would lead to better economic opportuni-ties and improved political status for Africans. Events seemed to give some truth to the propaganda. When Italy allied with Nazi Germany in 1940, the first substantial allied victory was the conquest of the Italian East African empire and the return to Ethiopia of Emperor Haile Selassie (18921975) in May 1941. In August, the U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt (18821945) and British prime minister Winston Churchill (18741965) signed the Atlantic Charter, which proclaimed that the war was being fought to liberate subject peoples. Churchill interpreted this declaration as applying only to the people of occupied Europe, but many Africans antici-pated that the charter would bring important changes for Africa at the end of the war. Moreover, the demands of war revived the economic growth in Africa that had been interrupted by the depression. The allies invested in new roads, rail lines, and improved port facilities in an effort to speed the movement of men and material to the war zones. The people best poised to take advantage of the revived economic situation were white settlers, but African farmers and workers also found their produce and labor in greater demand. However, the wartime economy also brought hardships. Colonial governments fixed prices on export goods as a wartime expedient, limiting the profits of farmers and merchants. Imported goods were scarce and expensive. During the war most people accepted these problems as necessary; afterward they would become intolerable. Large numbers of African men were recruited into the allied armies, often for service far from home and alongside black soldiers from the African diaspora. War service in the Second World War had a deeper and more widespread influence on African troops than that in the First World War, for they were far more likely to see combat. Indeed, British recruitment propaganda touted the achievements of a Nigerian officer in the Royal Air Force. Although such positions of responsibility were rare, the significance of this unprecedented recognition of ability was not lost on the African trooper. Africans also served alongside soldiers from other parts of the empire, many of whom enjoyed greater political representation and economic opportunities. African troops also were exposed to African American soldiers who, unlike

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them, received the same pay as their white compatriots. These experiences made them aware that the colonial system denied them political and economic opportunities that were taken for granted throughout the rest of the African diaspora. When the war ended in 1945, the colonial powers had emerged victori-ous in no small part because of the contributions from their African empires. Although few observers in 1945 were prepared to accept an imminent end to colonial rule in Africa, there was general agreement that some transformation of colonialism was necessary. France had already sought to institute reform in 1944 when Charles de Gaulle held a conference in Brazzaville to discuss the political future of French Africa. No Africans were invited to participate, and the French delegates emphatically refused to contemplate independence for their African colonies. They did, however, abolish some of the more odi-ous aspects of the colonial administration, particularly the hated corv ee, or forced labor, and publicly acknowledged that Africans had earned the right to a reform of colonial administration. In the same year, the government of Kenya appointed the first African to its legislative council, and during the next four years, Britain introduced new constitutions into their West African colonies. These moderate constitutions did little to satisfy the rising expecta-tions of African politicians, and although proclaimed with much fanfare as the harbingers of reform, they were more a symbol of British self-delusion than an acceptable response to the aspirations of their subjects. The end of wartime controls unleashed a ferment of political activity in West Africa that was exacerbated by the slackening demand for African commodi-ties and the scarcity of imported goods, neither of which could be satisfied by the wreckage of the European war-torn economies. Nnamdi Azikiwe, who had been advocating independence for Nigeria since the late 1930s, now found support from other African activists both within and outside Africa. In October 1945, the Pan-African Conference in Manchester, England, had called for the complete and absolute independence of the people of West Africa. In Nigeria during the war, Zik had organized a political party called the National Council of Nigeria and Cameroon (NCNC) to educate Nigerians about self-government. The task was formidable  Nigeria was a vast colony with significant geographic, cultural, religious, and ethnic differences  but by the end of the war, Zik and politicians like him were determined to create political alliances across class and ethnic lines to work toward independence. The other center of anticolonial agitation in West Africa in the late 1940s was the Gold Coast colony. During the war, a student from the Gold Coast named Kwame Nkrumah (190972) had helped organize the Pan-African Conference in Manchester. Like Zik, Nkrumah had studied in the United States, where he had become an admirer of Marcus Garvey. After the war, a small group of politicians in the Gold Coast created the United Gold Coast Convention and invited Nkrumah to return from Britain to serve as its organizing secretary. His arrival in 1947 coincided with widespread discontent, which culminated

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in an incident in which British troops fired on a crowd of protestors, killing several veterans. Nkrumahs outspoken condemnation of British handling of the ensuing riots thrust him into the leadership of the exuberant political scene. Azikiwe and Nkrumah emerged as powerful spokesmen against colonialism at the same time that the relationship between Europe and Africa had reached a crossroads. Virtually everyone agreed that the war and its aftermath precluded any return to the colonialism of the past, but there was a deep division of opinion as to the nature of any new relationship between Europe and Africa. The British and French envisaged that change would come gradually by the combination of limited constitutional reforms and state-sponsored economic development that had been accepted by their governments even before the war. In the immediate postwar years, the political and economic manifestations of these policies would be systematic steps toward self-government  a few even anticipated eventual independence  combined with significant funds for development. There was little altruism in these plans: they were designed to create political stability in the African colonies, on the one hand, and to produce cheap African commodities  oils, cocoa, rubber, cotton  for British and French consumers, on the other. To African nationalists this renewed commitment in London and Paris appeared little more than heavy-handed paternalism that did not address Africas postwar problems, which included the continuation of the demographic boom that had been underway since the First World War. This placed increasing pressure on African cultivators, a situation that was exacerbated by the arrival of new white immigrants in Kenya, Southern Rhodesia, South Africa, and the Portuguese colonies. Land hunger in turn produced numerous problems for African farmers, including soil exhaustion and increased erosion. To combat this degradation of the land colonial officials introduced scientific farming techniques that were bitterly resented by African farmers and herdsmen and often failed to improve the soils. These policies drove many rural Africans into alliance with urban lead-ers who offered appealing and understandable solutions. Kwame Nkrumah was one of the first to recognize that the simple demand for independence could mobilize the African masses in the countryside as well as the city. Although more moderate politicians and elites were agitating for greater influ-ence over colonial policies, Nkrumah electrified crowds with the tantalizing prospect of an immediate end to British rule that would resolve all of the post-war grievances  the tyranny of traditional authorities, inflation, shortages, colonial marketing boards that paid cheap prices for farm produce, and unem-ployment. Nkrumah stoked unrealistic expectations, insisting that the many problems of the Gold Coast could be resolved by an independent African government. He would have to deal with their disappointments later, but at the time, his demands for independence proved irresistible. Before the Second World War, most African politicians had thought in terms of reforming colonial rule, rather than overthrowing it, and of winning greater

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influence in colonial governance to secure economic and legal equality for at least some Africans. Early political movements focused on specific issues  improving wages, eliminating government price controls, and removing racist legal restrictions. After the war, events moved quickly, however, and the most ambitious demands of the 1930s seemed hopelessly inadequate by 1951, when the first popular elections were held in the Gold Coast. The realization that African independence was on the horizon mobilized elites, ethnic groups, and labour organizations to become involved in a political debate in which they had previously demonstrated little interest. Nkrumahs Congress Peoples Party (CPP) in the elections of 1954 moti-vated anxious Asante activists to create a rival ethnically based party, the National Liberation Movement. In the Belgian Congo, the governments abrupt announcement in 1957 of impending elections led to the precipitous birth of more than a hundred ethnically based parties, the larger of which claimed to represent Bakongo, Luba, and Lunda interests. In neighboring Congo-Brazzaville, the generic names of early political parties such as the Congolese Progressive Party and the African Socialist Movement masked their predom-inantly ethnic identity. On the eve of independence Bugandan nationalists founded the Kabaka-Yakka Party, which was committed to preserving the prerogatives of the monarchy. The sudden appearance of these ethnically based parties was an inevitable response to colonial administration, which had made a fetish of customary law and favored tribal leaders. Not surprisingly, these traditional rulers felt threatened by the nationalists, who sought to subsume the power of royal insti-tutions and ethnic minorities within a unitary state. In turn, African urban politi-cians perceived these ethnically based parties and their traditional rulers as a threat to the integrity of the postcolonial state. They often viewed royal and ethnic parties as tools of the colonial authorities and as a potential impediment to national integration. They despised them as a retrograde form of tribal-ism that was antithetical to their modernizing agenda. They also suspected the leadership of these ethnic entities of defending narrow regional economic interests  petroleum in southern Nigeria, cocoa-farming among the Asante, or the mineral wealth of the Katanga region of the Belgian Congo dominated by the Luba. In the rush to independence nationalist leaders  Nkrumah in Ghana, Lumumba in Congo  outmaneuvered these popular ethnic parties, but the anxieties that spawned them did not diminish. By the late 1960s, when independent governments had failed to deliver on the promises that had swept them into office, the political aspirations of the tribally based parties, which had been marginalized in the race to independence, resurfaced to jeopardize the stability of the young nations. After Ghana become independent in 1957, it became impossible for British and French negotiators to convince most African politicians to settle for any-thing less. In retrospect, the creation of dozens of separate, independent states on the ashes of the former colonial empires appears to have been almost

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inevitable, but in the 1950s, several schemes were proposed to consolidate existing colonies into larger political units. The British proposed a federation of its East African territories and in 1953 created the Central African Fed-eration consisting of the colonies of Southern Rhodesia, Northern Rhodesia, and Nyasaland. The French in 1958 sought to cajole their Central and West African colonies into joining a federation that would leave France in control of their defense and foreign policy. Both proposals foundered on the resistance of African nationalists, who dismissed them as cynical attempts to maintain colonial influence. In 1960, the British prime minister, Harold Macmillan (18941986), deliv-ered a speech in the South African parliament that warned of the Winds of Change sweeping the continent. In that same year, France granted indepen-dence to all of her sub-Saharan possessions, and within five years Great Britain had relinquished control over all of her colonies. In those French and British territories that had insignificant white settler populations the transfer of power was relatively peaceful, the result of protracted negotiations throughout the decade following the war, culminating in parliamentary elections and conclud-ing with a grand ceremony celebrating the passage from colony to independent sovereign state. Unfortunately, Africans living under other colonial regimes would experience a more protracted and violent journey to independence. In 1960, the abrupt end of Belgian rule in the Congo precipitated a col-lapse of order, necessitating the deployment of a peacekeeping force under the aegis of the United Nations. The violent disturbances that swept through the Congo were largely the result of Belgian colonial policies since the end of the war. Unlike Great Britain, Belgium had refused to consider any political reforms that would devolve real power into the hands of its African subjects. No effort was made to prepare Africans for leadership positions in the colonial administration. Consequently, in 1958, when the Belgian government, under international pressure, legalized political parties, over a hundred ethnically based associations appeared almost overnight. Because the Belgian govern-ment had failed to provide public education beyond primary school, the few literate Africans in the Congo had received their education either in the colonial army or the mission schools of the Roman Catholic Church. At independence there were only a handful of college graduates available to administer one of the largest and potentially wealthiest states in Africa. This tiny community of potential leaders faced the daunting task of ruling a state whose sheer size and diversity made communication  and thus administration  very difficult. The young government of Congo was plagued also by the meddling of foreign governments  particularly Belgium and the United States, who were anxious to control the nations substantial mineral wealth. Belgiums precipitous withdrawal from the Congo was the result of a politi-cal calculation that all colonial powers were forced to make during the decade after the war. Would the benefits of clinging to power be greater than the costs? Each imperial power had a slightly different set of priorities. The businessmen

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and shopkeepers of Belgium were not prepared to bear the huge financial expense of a protracted military occupation of Congo. Because the motives for conquest of the Congo had been from the beginning to seize its rubber and mineral wealth, the decision to sever the imperial connection was a financial one that was made with little concern as to the effect of withdrawal on the African populace. Britains liquidation of its empire in Africa was undertaken in part to curry favor with the United States, but Britains rulers were also anx-ious to be relieved of the financial responsibility for the colonies, particularly if the new states could be persuaded to remain within the British Common-wealth. Moreover, the British could leave most of their colonies in the hands of bourgeois, mission-educated African leaders who had promised to protect private property and respect the rule of law. There was, however, a formidable obstacle to the transfer of power to the Africans: the resistance of white settlers in Kenya, Southern Rhodesia, and South Africa. In Kenya, the Mau Mau con-flict in the 1950s, which resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Africans, had convinced British officials that white rule was unsustainable, and Kenya became an independent democracy in 1963. The white minority governments in Southern Rhodesia and South Africa, unwilling to cede power to an African majority, severed their connections to Great Britain in the 1960s. Because Portugal considered her colonies to be overseas provinces, any dis-cussion of independence was regarded as seditious, a fact that inexorably led to violent confrontations between the colonizer and the colonized. The Por-tuguese had been the first Europeans to arrive in Africa, in the fifteenth century. By the end of the 1960s Portugal, the first European state to establish a colony in Africa, was the only European empire remaining on the continent. Portuguese policy was particularly obdurate in part because of the fear that the loss of her tropical colonies would prove disastrous for her fragile economy. Portugal was also ruled by a fascist regime whose claims to legitimacy were tied to the nations long colonial history in Africa and Asia. There was also a significant number of poor white settlers in Mozambique and Angola, who were firmly against any kind of political reform. When the Portuguese government refused to negotiate any reform of the colonial government, the anticolonial movement in Portuguese Africa became a guerrilla war for liberation. Moreover, the Portuguese forces in Angola and Mozambique could rely on military and moral support from the white-dominated states of South Africa and Southern Rhodesia. Together these three powers formed a bloc in southern Africa that was committed to resisting any political reform that would chal-lenge white privilege. The rebels could count on support from the socialist countries  Russia, China, and even Cuba  that turned the guerrilla war into an extension of Cold War rivalry. Innovations in military technology worked to the advantage of mobile guerrilla armies, and international opposition to the racist policies of these states made them diplomatic pariahs. Portugal was the first to crack. As the guerrilla wars in Angola and Mozambique dragged on at great economic and human cost, disgruntled officers in Portugal staged a coup

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in 1974. Within a year, the new regime had liquidated the African empire. With a new government in Mozambique that was hostile to neighboring Southern Rhodesia, African guerrillas in that country now had supply lines to the outside world and training camps for their soldiers. Within five years of the end of Portuguese rule in Africa, the settler regime in Southern Rhodesia had given up its opposition to democratic reform. New elections in 1980 created the Republic of Zimbabwe. The only remaining vestige of colonial rule on the continent was the settler state of South Africa.

Transcript for:Nationalism and Decolonization in Africa

Transcript for:
Nationalism and Decolonization in Africa