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Freedom in Africa: The Next Stage


PUBLISHED: June 30, 1960

For about a quarter of a century, Africa has been shaking off the rule of the two major colonial powers. The struggle against colonialism has been the live issue—although in fact it has been less of a struggle than a series of deals. In order to create a national myth, and a gallery of national heroes, the emergent African leaders have naturally made the most of their tussle, but it was from the very start inherent at least in British policies, if not so clearly in those of France, that the rulers would train their wards for self-government, and withdraw as soon as the people were fit to manage their own affairs.

The main point at issue, from the very start, was the timing of this withdrawal. The rising generation of educated Africans wished to accelerate it, while the colonial powers endeavoured to delay it until education had percolated down, at least to a certain extent, into the mass of an ignorant and illiterate peasantry, and until the leaders had acquired a minimum of experience in the management of affairs. Naturally, as time went on, vested interests in colonialism arose, and with them a tendency to postpone to a dim future the moment when fitness for self-rule would become evident.

Despite this, official British policy remained firmly based upon the principle of abrogation—less, perhaps, for reasons of altruism than for those of economy. Colonies, contrary to general notions, have nearly always been sources of expense rather than of income, and countries that have got rid of them have generally prospered more than before.

The French aim was formerly to integrate their African territories with metropolitan France in a permanent association. The indigenes were to fulfill their natural political ambitions within the French orbit, father than outside it, as equal citizens of an empire looking to ancient Rome for its model. In the event, it has been the British concept, rather than the French, that has fired the African imagination, and the so-called French Community, although a good deal less amorphous than the British Commonwealth, has had progressively to loosen its bonds.

Now the “struggle against colonialism” is virtually over. In 1946, there were three independent African states: Liberia, Ethiopia, and Egypt, and even Egypt’s independence was incomplete. By the end of 1960 there will be at least fifteen independent states, and nearly all the rest will have reached the last stage before full self-determination, that of responsible government, or autonomy.

Only that portion of the continent lying south of the Zambesi River will still remain under the control of pale-skins: and even the northern part of that, the territory of Southern Rhodesia, has a destiny in doubt. The Union of South Africa, with its unyielding Afrikaner doctrine of apartheid, is set upon a course of white supremacy that only revolution now can alter. This revolution most people think inevitable, but two and a half million whites, if they are prepared to be ruthless enough, may hold it at bay for some time. At the continent’s other extremity, civil war has gone on for five years between authority and Algeria’s million French colons on the one hand, and the bulk of the nine million Muslims on the other. This deadlock General de Gaulle has attempted to break by his policy of self-determination, which will give to the Muslim majority power to decide whether they will abandon the French connection, join the Arab world, and leave the French settlers out on a limb.

In between these two ends of Africa, with their considerable settled population of whites, lies the vast bulk of the continent whose Negro, Bantu, and Hamitic peoples stand at the threshold of a new freedom, their future to make with their own brains and hands. Of the four colonial powers in Africa, three of them have simply given way, less to force majeure than to their own theories of government. Only Portugal holds back from these great changes, pursuing a policy she has followed for over three hundred years. Rut it seems unlikely that even Portugal can opt out of history for much longer.

II

With the end of the colonial era a new set of issues, hitherto obscured, is beginning to appear. The first arises from the obvious fact that Africa is not a unity. It is a continent considerably larger than the United States, China, Tibet, India, and Pakistan combined, with 230 million people, of at least six major races—leaving aside Europeans and Asians —divided into innumerable tribes. No one knows how many tribes there actually are, but at least a thousand languages are spoken between the Zambesi and the Sahara, taking no account of the Arab north.

Until, less than a century ago, the colonial powers took over the interior, the chronic state of these tribes, all by Western standards backward and savage, was one of intertribal warfare. Military conquests, like those of Chaka among the Zulu, were the exception; as a rule the tribes co-existed in an uneasy state of semi-hostility, semi-tolerance, and permanent suspicion, sometimes trading and sometimes raiding: a state that occupied young men congenially and colourfully with spear and sword, old men no less congenially with debate and negotiation, witchdoctors with medicine-making and omen-reading.

European powers, with their tiresome complacency, are even now apt to pat themselves on the back for bringing to the ignorant savages surcease from inter-tribal warfare. They seldom pause to reflect that warfare is the normal condition of mankind and that, on the tribal level as at the pre-gun-powder stage, the male half of the population on balance thoroughly enjoys it. The ending of tribal warfare wiped out at one stroke much of the colour, drama, and interest of life for the males, and, by depriving them of their opportunity to display prowess, struck at the roots of their sexual pride.

It is this eclipse of warfare’s drama and danger, and its replacement by boredom, that underlies Africa’s major human problems today. All societies, of course, as they evolve from the primitive towards the more civilised, have to find substitutes for warfare, but most of them, in the past, have had more time to do so; the need has come to them gradually enough to make adjustment possible: even so, their success has been incomplete. Not all young men can be football stars, automobile racers, or space travellers, whereas all could be warriors; and war has still to be eliminated. It is the suddenness of the changes that have come to Africa, the fantastically abrupt, speed-of-light transition from truly primitive to ultra-modern, that makes today’s problems so intransigent.

The scramble for Africa carved the continent into purely arbitrary divisions depending upon accident and bargaining, in no way upon ethnology or topography. Boundaries ruled on maps in London, Paris, Brussels, or Berlin often cut straight through tribal territories, and now educated young folk of a single tribe may speak English or French according to which side of the line their villages happen to lie. This has created several tense situations for today and tomorrow. The Somalis, for instance—a proud, tough, warlike people—were split under four different administrations: those of France, Britain, Italy, and Ethiopia. On July 1st this year the Italian segment gains its independence as Somalia. Both the French and the British Protectorates are likely to merge into a greater Somalia when this can be arranged, but Ethiopia has not the least intention of relinquishing her Somali grazing-grounds. Here is one of the trouble-spots of Africa, and sooner or later trouble will almost certainly arise.

Wherever ethnic bisection occurs—and it occurs pretty often—there is liable to be discontent. But the problem of tribalism goes much deeper. Broadly speaking, it is this: can a deeply imbued spirit, built up over centuries of common history, custom, and tradition, be sublimated in a single generation? (And a single generation is all there generally is between modern Africa and a life more primitive than that of Europe’s Dark Ages.) To the new African leaders, mostly young, immensely hopeful, impatient, and passionate, this is the key problem whose solution, they know, will make or break the new Africa.

The very word “tribe” is suspect now. The young African politician, lawyer, editor, teacher, is at pains to brush aside, make light of, or even deny his tribal origins. “We are all Africans, all brothers,” he will say. But he is whistling in the dark. He himself, perhaps a B.A. Oxon or B.Sc. from Berkeley, may have purged his mind of his hereditary loyalties, but still to thousands of his fellows the membership of clan and tribe is the greatest reality, the proof of existence, the matrix of the soul. All that Africa can offer in the field of culture has its origins, as all culture ultimately does, in some village, some language, some close-knit human group which fed the roots of the creative spirit.

Tribal or regional groups, as every ambitious ruler from King Alfred to Stalin has been well aware, are enemies of unity and of internal peace. You cannot build a nation-state on a foundation of warring clans and mutually antagonistic races. Sometimes these jealous entities may unite against a common foe. In Africa, to some extent, the various tribes have overcome their mistrust of each other to form a common front against the colonial power, but directly that power withdraws—even before sometimes—the front is apt to crumble and the real trouble to begin.

Regard, for instance, the Belgian Congo, where last year a remarkable turnabout of policy occurred. Almost without warning, the Belgians abandoned their intention to isolate their huge colony from political change by concentrating solely on economic advancement, and announced independence for the Congo this year. Whereupon the Bahutu, a tribe previously dominated by the tall, aristocratic, and harsh Watutsi people, attacked their erstwhile overlords with such ferocity that hundreds were killed or beleaguered and the Belgians had to show that they were still in control by flying in several battalions of troops.

Order was restored; but who will restore it when the Belgians really do go? Authority, of course, will devolve upon the African rulers who supersede the Belgians. And here we reach the heart of the matter.

Who is to select these rulers, who is to control them, and how is justice to be meted out among the tribes while tribalism remains a living force? What is to prevent one tribe from dominating another, the strong from oppressing the weak? How is power to be tested and decided? And, once decided, how is it to be changed? Is a form of dictatorship, and the domination of the weak by the strong, an inevitable consequence of the end of colonialism at the present stage of African development? The answers will not be plain for, perhaps, twenty years.

III

The first Europeans to penetrate deeply into Africa’s interior were propelled by zeal to spread the Christian faith. Sometime between the wars probably—it would be a fascinating study to determine with more precision when and where—the moral basis on which most Europeans seek to ground their actions changed from a religious to a political theory. Instead of coming to spread Christianity, the British and French—the Portuguese and Belgians were less concerned with moral theories—saw themselves as bringers of a better material life, and especially as harbingers of democracy. Self-government was the ultimate aim, but self-government of a special nature: government by ballot-box, the introduction of parliamentary democracy on the model of Westminster. Like all religions, it had its dogma and ritual: universal adult suffrage, political parties, secret ballots, popular assemblies, elected ministers, trade unions, a frenetic press, a spoils system, almost everything else which the Western world has grown to regard as the hallmark of freedom, down to the very mace that lies before Mr. Speaker on his dais, to the very wig he wears.

The eagerness with which these democratic aims were adopted by the small class of educated Africans capable of understanding what they meant was mainly due less to the ardour of a convert, than to an appreciation of the invincible arguments they provided in favour of putting an immediate end to colonial rule. Never before in history, probably, have the main energies of the colonial powers been devoted to teaching their subject peoples how best and quickest to get rid of their masters. In their cadre of administrators, both the French and the British had an able and devoted band of political missionaries whose job has been described as sawing off the branch they sat on. This they have done, on the whole, with honest devotion, if not without misgiving now and then. At the end, the pace has quickened to a point where some are leaving either sadly or cynically, in the fear that the work has been left half-done and that much of what they built so carefully will crumble away.

If asked the reasons for their doubts, many would explain why nations that are not nations, but arbitrary collections of different, often hostile tribes and ethnic groups, cannot govern themselves through the machinery evolved by Western democracy. The ballot-box and all that goes with it must rest upon a solid basis of common tradition, common aims, and common acceptance of certain precepts. As a rule, though not invariably, there is a common language and a common faith. And the image of the nation must hold in peoples’ minds a place more honoured than the image of the triumph of their own particular group, race, or community.

Any nation where the popular voice is to be heard must either assimilate or pulverise the different human groups of which it is composed. That is why so much of English history is taken up, after the Reformation, with Popish plots and efforts to crush them—England could not continue as a nation if important elements within her owed their first allegiance not to the Sovereign, but to a foreign Pope. That is why Jews have so often been persecuted; that is why in the United States, which has been obliged to assimilate so quickly so many foreigners, schoolchildren start their day by repeating an oath to the flag.

There is no emergent state in Africa whose peoples’ loyalties to the central government are stronger than their loyalties to their tribe, faith, clan, or family. That is Africa’s central political problem today. The new nations have quickly to create that loyalty, or to disintegrate. And as a weapon for creating loyalties, democracy is a blunt instrument. Democracy asks: “Whom would you like to represent you? X or Y? Both are good men and true, loyal citizens belonging to loyal teams divided only by their opinions on the best way to serve your interests. Listen to what they have to say, then choose one team or the other for the next four years; if you don’t like them, you can throw them out and try again.”

In the context of modern Africa, none of this makes sense. X and Y are not loyal citizens of a country, because your country scarcely exists. One may be a Yoruba and one an Ibo; one a Ga and one an Ashanti; one a Kikuyu and one a Luo; one a Bahutu and one a Watutsi. If you are a Yoruba—I refer here to the masses living under tribalism, not to the educated folk who, in any African community, still form a tiny percentage of the whole—X is your man; it would be absurd to vote for Y, a member of a tribe you fear or despise. Or the division may cut along the line of faith, as between Christo-pagans and Muslims. At any rate it is nearly always there, and when the average voter is illiterate, or at best semi-literate, as he is in almost every African country, the difficulties become even greater. The illiterate are no less intelligent than those who have acquired schooling, but they are generally less well informed, nearly always a prey to rumours, and relatively easy for unscrupulous party bosses to intimidate. It is hard for Europeans and Americans to realise the extent to which African peasants can still be frightened into putting a cross on a paper, either directly by threats or indirectly by witchcraft, still a constant element in their lives. Strikers, for instance, have been called out by threats to cut off their ears, and by placing evil magic on locomotives. The whole Mau Mau movement in Kenya was a successful effort by a fanatical minority to terrorise a tribe of one million persons into a gruesome revolt.

IV

If democracy cannot seal over the cracks of tribalism, it is possible that individuals can. The way by which most of these emergent nations can stay in one piece is to be strongly governed by a trusted leader. And the only way a strong leader can rule effectively is to by-pass most of the realities of democracy, even if he retains, for outward show, a few of the trappings.

This trend has displayed itself even sooner than most people expected. In 1956 the British evacuated the Sudan, leaving a democratic system in working order. Two years later General Abboud set up a military dictatorship. In 1957, the British handed over the Gold Coast to the democratically elected government of Dr. Kwame Nkrumah. He renamed his country Ghana and established what is virtually a one-party rule, with himself as leader. Within three years Dr. Nkrumah has imprisoned most of his active political opponents without trial; deported or confined trouble-makers and banished Dr. Busia, the Opposition leader; brought in the death penalty for treason; limited the freedom of the press; and taken other measures generally associated in the minds of Westerners with dictatorship. His Convention People’s Party has as great a hold on the country as the Nazis had in Germany or the Falangists have in Spain, although it would be unfair to suggest that their hold is as repressive or their motives as sinister.

Democratic believers have attacked Dr. Nkrumah, if more in sadness than in anger, for these lapses, which only a purblind optimist would suppose to be temporary. In fact, he probably had no alternative. Nearly one million of Ghana’s four and a half million inhabitants belong to the Ashanti people, who have a long history of military conquest, barbaric culture, and political cohesion under their Asantehene, or king. They hold in some contempt the coastal tribes from whom nearly all Dr. Nkrumah’s supporters are drawn and, when independence loomed, threw up a separatist movement that would have kept Ashanti as a little semi-independent kingdom within a state. So strong was this feeling in Ashanti that the British, before they left, set up an organisation of regional assemblies which might have become semi-autonomous and led towards a kind of federation, rather than a single unitary state.

Dr. Nkrumah saw the dangers from the start and lost no time, when he came to power, in stamping ruthlessly on the shoots of Ashanti separatism. He abolished the regional assembly, stripped the Asantehene of all his powers save only ceremonial ones, imprisoned some of the Ashanti leaders, and by various means, including the withholding of funds for schools and other public services, he brought the Ashanti people to heel. An armed revolt became their only hope of gaining their ends. This they probably planned, although the story is obscure; arrests were made, arms seized, and Ashanti separatism is pretty well a dead duck. None of this is democratic, but all of it is probably necessary if the emergent African states are to survive as entities and not disintegrate into disorder, civil war, and possibly a welter of petty states.

Although Nkrumah has dealt with the situation inside Ghana, the dangers are increasing elsewhere. The French Cameroon, until January 1st this year a Trusteeship Territory, celebrated its independence with a flare-up of a chronic civil war which killed at least forty people. Ignored by the outside world, this war has continued with increasing brutality and bitterness. On the borders of Ghana, Togoland’s future is no less dubious. Dr. Nkrumah has publicly announced his belief that it should be incorporated into Ghana, a prospect altogether displeasing to its premier, M. Sylvanus Olympio, who led its one million inhabitants into full independence on April 1st.

V

The danger that, the cohesive force of colonialism having been dissolved, all these African territories will fall apart into little globules, as it were, of tribalism, is fully grasped by Dr. Nkrumah. His remedy—and now his overpowering vision—is a pan-African doctrine of which he was the first vocal exponent, and is now the prophet and evangelist.

Dr. Nkrumah’s vision is that of a United States of Africa stretching from the borders of the Sahara down to—no one knows where, exactly, but he may well have in mind the Cape of Good Hope as an eventual objective. This could come about only after the defeat of South Africa’s whites in a major war or revolution, and for the time being he would no doubt settle for the Zambesi as a southern border. In this area there are at present 36 separate states of which, by the end of 1960, 15 will be independent and another seven autonomous within the French Community, which means they can declare for independence at any time they choose. Most of the remaining fourteen states—or statelets: one, the Gambia, has a population of 275,000—will be well on the way towards independence, with the exception perhaps of three Portuguese territories and the tiny little outpost of Spanish Guinea with only 200,000 inhabitants.

Even in his most optimistic moments Dr. Nkrumah must regard the unification of these scattered and widely differing countries, some with French and some with English as their lingua franca, some sunk in backwardness and some eagerly on the march, as a very distant objective. But he does mean to make a start, and to that end has concluded an agreement with M. Sekou Toure, the forceful and able premier of Guinea, which paves the way for a merger of these two independent countries. Since this treaty was announced with a considerable fanfare of trumpets, few practical steps towards unity appear to have been taken; but the agreement is there as a practical expression of Nkrumah’s ideal.

Hitherto, Dr. Nkrumah has dominated the African political stage south of the Sahara. With the emergence of other African states into independence, notably the Federation of Nigeria which, with a population of nearly forty millions, will be the largest free nation in the whole continent, Dr. Nkrumah’s leadership is certain to be challenged. Nigeria’s federal premier, Alhaji Abukabar Tafawa Balewa, has already expressed his country’s lack of interest, at least for the time being, in the pan-African idea.

Nigeria is a vast, sprawling federation of three semi-autonomous regions, each with its premier and assembly and each the homeland of a society very different from its neighbours’ in race, custom, tradition, faith, and language. It is an uneasy partnership whose abundant energies will be fully employed, for some years to come, in forging a nation out of such diverse elements having little in common beyond a short history of sixty years under British rule. Whatever else Nigerians want, it is not the leadership of Dr. Nkrumah, and there is little doubt that, once Nigerians are free to crowd the stage, his influence will wane. To counter this, Nkrumah may well be driven to stronger measures to entrench his power at home and to even more flamboyant acts and speeches to hold his leadership abroad.

An older rival for the centre of the African stage is Colonel Nasser, who, at one time, with his Afro-Asian Solidarity Movement, looked as if he might carry with him many African nationalist leaders into an association with the Arab states. His powerful radio transmitters in Cairo poured a flood of anti-white, anti-Western, pro-Arab propaganda down the spine of Africa and, in particular, to the eastern territories, which have considerable Muslim minorities. Among the Somalis of the Horn of Africa, the Arabs of Kenya and Zanzibar and some of the Muslim peoples around Lake Victoria, these rallying-cries had a considerable effect, but among the bulk of the Negro and Bantu peoples Nkrumah’s authentic Africanism proved stronger. It would be a mistake to underrate the deep racial feeling animating most African tribes, a far stronger pull than economics or religion. Nkrumah played on this, struck back with his All-African Peoples’ Conference and is building a radio station even more powerful than Nasser’s. Throughout black Africa, he has pretty well won the day.

VI

The greatest single factor in changing dramatically the tempo of events was perhaps the All-African Peoples’ Conference in Accra in December, 1958. This, the culmination of a series of nationalist moves and schemes, made an open declaration of war upon the surviving bastions of colonialism, not ruling out the use of force to achieve nationalist ends. Mr. Tom Mboya from Kenya, three thousand miles away on the other side of the continent, was elected chairman. Dr. Hastings Banda of Nyasaland attended and, within two months, had rallied the Africans of Nyasaland to such a pitch of fervour that widespread rioting took place, a state of emergency was declared, and the British had to arrest and detain some five hundred leaders. The repercussions of this event are still disturbing central Africa and bringing into doubt the whole future of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, set up as recently as 1953 to further the economic development of these three territories, into which Nyasaland was pushed against the strongly expressed wishes of the nationalist elements in this backward British Protectorate with less than two and a half million Africans and meagre resources.

It is on the two areas where Europeans have settled in permanent communities that attention is focused now. These are Kenya in the east, and the Federation I have just mentioned in the centre. The problem here is not one of Africans governing themselves, but of Africans governing other people—and not only that, but other people with higher standards of living, of education, and of public morality. African rule would place the fortunes of the European and Asian minorities who have created the economy, and maintain in Africa an alien way of life, at the mercy of newly enfranchised black masses, led in many cases by demagogues, for the most part illiterate and ignorant of the world outside their tribal corner, inexperienced in any form of government save that of the elders’ council, and imbued with a raw nationalism which has convinced them there is nothing in heaven or earth their leaders cannot do, with very little work or effort on their part. Many of these leaders (though not all—Dr. Banda is an elderly medico) are lately out of school or college, lack experience of business or management, are often astonishingly naive, and given to a rhodomontade which, while refreshing in its lack of inhibition, does everything to inflame the passions and almost nothing to enlighten and prepare African opinion for the hard realities of running countries, or making a living in the modern world.

This may seem a harsh assessment, and of course there are individuals, both in public life and out of it, of wisdom and sobriety. Nor have Africans less common sense than any other race. But they have simply not had time to assimilate all the new forces and ideas that have burst the barriers of centuries and flooded over their heads. Education, of a sort, has spread down from very small minorities to the ordinary peasant only within the last ten or fifteen years at most, and is still very far short of being universal. In countries like Tanganyika, which is to attain responsible government—the step just short of independence—this year, little more than ten per cent of the children of all ages receive any schooling, and only about half those of an age for primary education get even that amount of basic instruction. Out of a population of nine millions, only about two hundred are currently receiving a college or a university training. In Nyasaland the number is seventeen.

VII

This is the background to the fear with which white folk in Kenya and in the Rhodesias, where Europeans own land and have made their homes, regard the prospect of rule by newly enfranchised Africans on the basis of “one man one vote,” now a rallying-cry over black Africa. Their fears are probably well founded. Africans, like everyone else, must learn by their mistakes. They have much to learn and, when they make mistakes, the temptation to blame their failures on the white minorities, who are in addition much richer than the black majority, will surely be overwhelming.

Until only a few years ago, the prospect that the socially and educationally advanced white and brown minorities—there is a large Asian community in East Africa in control of the retail trade—would be governed by a black electorate seemed to the minorities both remote and unthinkable. In the last two years, it has become both imminent and inevitable. In Tanganyika, where white settlers arc few in numbers, scattered, and politically impotent, the Europeans have capitulated and expressed their faith in Mr. Julius Nyerere, the African leader, who has succeeded to a remarkable degree in winning European and Asian confidence.

Kenya’s future is more obscure. The British Colonial Secretary, Mr. Ian Macleod, last February signed an agreement with the African leaders, including Mr. Tom Mboya, to introduce an African majority into the Legislative Council as soon as elections could be held on a franchise so wide as to amount almost to “one man one vote.” At the same time, that part of the highlands hitherto reserved for European farmers is to be thrown open to men of all races, backed by large government loans. This may spell the end of white settlement in Africa; yet Kenya’s economy is founded on the capital and enterprise of its seventy thousand Europeans, and these sudden political changes have undermined confidence, caused a flight of capital, and called into question the country’s future progress.

Some Europeans remain confident both that Africans, once they have political freedom, will wish to preserve the economic sinews which Europeans and Asians have built and now maintain, and that a multi-racial society free from racial hatred really can develop on a basis of individual equality before the law, combined with freedom for each race to retain its own social customs. For this view they find support in the Caribbean, where universal suffrage in countries where whites are greatly outnumbered has brought no setbacks or disasters. But others feel less optimistic. Under African rule standards of administration, they fear, may fall to a level where whites must either turn cynical or be fleeced, and Africans will prove themselves unable to resist pressure to milk the fat white cow bone-dry. And racial arrogance in the past may be repaid by racial oppression in future. Historically, privileged minorities, once they have relinquished their hold, have not fared well at the hands of newly empowered majorities. One-man-one-vote democracy has never yet been tried in Africa. It may succeed, but many realists fear that it will not.

In Central Africa, also, the situation is still unresolved. South of the Limpopo River stretches the Union of South Africa, dedicated to the proposition that whites must be supreme and to the doctrine of apartheid, the separate development of white and Bantu races. To the north and east lie territories now launched upon the wide stream of African self-rule and self-development. In between lie three countries uneasily united in a reluctant partnership into which they were persuaded, in 1958, partly by Sir Roy Welensky, a remarkable ex-locomotive-driver, ex-trade unionist, ex-pugilist, who rose to political prominence in Northern Rhodesia and has identified his political career with the cause of welding these three territories into a federation based upon a partnership between the races. Africans claim, however, that this partnership is only a respectable mask for the white domination Welensky and his followers are determined to maintain. This is to some extent unfair, in that since federation came into being, with Welensky as federal prime minister, the colour-bar has been steadily eroded. There are now such concrete evidences of partnership as a multi-racial university in Salisbury and, after a long, unfinished battle with the trade unions, Welensky’s government has secured the principle of African advancement into skilled industrial jobs hitherto jealously reserved for Europeans. But Africans are still far from convinced that partnership is genuine. Their leaders in Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland seem resolved at all costs to break up the federation and attain the same sort of untrammeled political freedom as their compatriots already enjoy in West Africa, and so soon will in Tanganyika and the Belgian Congo.

The decision which the British Government will soon have to make here is the most difficult of its remaining political problems in Africa. If the federation breaks up, there would seem little alternative for the whites of Southern Rhodesia but to associate in some way with the apartheid-committed Union to the south. Africa would then split at the Zambesi. South of it, the whites would endeavour to hold what they have; north would stretch a chain of black states struggling, no doubt with different degrees of success, to establish stable governments, subdue tribalism, develop resources, and join as fully participating members the rat-race of the twentieth century. How long this border would remain a peaceful one is anybody’s guess. Africa is a turbulent, yeasty, hopeful, feckless, indolent, and violent continent where the crust of centuries is cracking before the ferment of change, and peace is probably the last thing it either wants, or is likely to achieve. Open conflict between the white south and the black west and centre is a possibility that cannot be ruled out.

VIII

A common error of Western nations has been to project upon Africa a realisation of ideals they themselves have failed to achieve. Among, especially, European and American liberals, Africa has assumed the role of the classic Utopia, a place where all the rosier dreams of mankind come true, where failures in our own society are redeemed by successes in theirs. Since all fairylands must have their ogre, colonialism plays this brutish part; once it has been slain, the people can go forward towards that ideal, harmonious realisation of the full potentialities of the human spirit that hovers like an angel just out of sight. This view of Africa as a screen for the projection of Western ideals is generally unconsciously held, but lies at the heart of the liberal approach to African questions, and explains the passion with which they are so often debated.

The two things that civilised liberal opinion in the West most passionately desires are peace and democracy. It therefore assumes that Africans desire them with an equal passion. This is almost certainly an illusion. The condemnation of violence in which Europeans so often indulge strikes many Africans as both hypocritical and silly. Within the last fifty years those white rulers who so roundly condemn, and severely punish, the tribal cattle raid, with its primitive excitement and handful of casualties from spear-wounds, have led their African subjects into two wars which have dwarfed the greatest tribal affray as the sun dwarfs a bonfire. Few Africans take seriously the European view that a riot is the worst of disasters and law and order the greatest of goods.

If the truth were told—which it is not, on this matter—most Africans, without admitting it, are bored to tears with the dullness of a life dedicated to law and order, where murders, essentially a family matter in their philosophy, are the affair of the state, where dances may be forbidden by stern missionary sects, where all the brighter customs have been dismissed as examples of savagery. There is an enormous force of pent-up longing for drama and individual action, as against the all-pervading, grandmotherly concern of the state. And then the state, in African tradition, was never an entity but a person: a chief, a king, a magician, a warrior. Ideas have never counted for as much as actions, abstractions for as much as individuals. Even the spirits, which really ruled Africa before the colonial era, were particularised. If a misfortune befell, it was because a particular spirit was offended—uncle so-and-so, or the lately deceased chief; to mend matters, that particular spirit had to be identified and appeased. It was never just the spirit world that was upset, or supernatural forces. Inimical forces could always be identified, if the intermediary had the skill.

From all this it follows that Africa seems unlikely, in the first flush of independence, to proceed towards its destiny in a peaceful, bloodless fashion; and that the tree of Western parliamentary democracy, transplanted with such hope and care by the colonial powers, is unlikely to bear the fruit that was expected of it in this alien soil. This is not to say that democracy will everywhere vanish from the continent and be replaced by a Russian or a Chinese form of Communism, or even by an efficient dictatorship. Africans generally have participated in their own government, in one way or another, and probably always will; but since the impact of the West has toppled down all the ancient, indigenous forms of government which, while often based upon the kingship pattern, had within them strong elements of participation by the common folk, a new system has to be built up. That this will achieve perfection, or anything like it, at the first attempt is altogether too much to hope.

The real revolution has been a social one. African society was always strongly stratified, responsibility for public affairs increasing by stages, according to age, until the point of imbecility. Behind this lay the theory that the older a man grew, the closer he approached the community of spirits, and the more wisdom he was likely to have. The place of young men was to fight, never to govern, and the place of women was to work, never to approach equality with men. But one-man-one-vote, something wholly alien to the old Africa, gives as much power to the youth of twenty-one, with no experience of anything but chatter and examinations, as to the ripened father of a grown family who has gained thirty years’ experience of men and affairs. As, thanks to a rocketing population increase, there are more young men than elders, this effectively transfers power to the group of under thirty or at most thirty-five, with all their brashness, confidence, vigour, and ambition. Lacking all experience, it is these young men who have to build a new world and a new system of government. Even more revolutionary, the women are voting with the men and, for the first time in all history, having a say in the mysteries of government.

In the long run, probably only young men and women can handle this revolution; in the short run, they can scarcely fail to find the exercise of so much unaccustomed power, with no traditional restraints, a pretty heady draught. They need, and they will get, strong and ruthless leaders, parties to rally them, a chain of command. The personal rule of nationalist leaders and their organized henchmen is becoming the next stage of African development.

IX

This is not what the departing colonial powers intended, still less what Western liberal opinion expected, or is even prepared to recognize now it is on the way. Liberal opinion flinches from such an uncongenial outcome to its hopes, reluctant to recognize that many millions of Africans will find that their personal freedom, their freedom to secure justice without bribery and to speak their minds without fear, may well prove to have reached its zenith under the repugnant system of colonialism, and now to be in sharp decline.

Everywhere in Africa, where independent regimes are forming or have newly arrived, there is intimidation—threats of violence to those who do not join the party, huts mysteriously burning in the night, violence and injury to those who keep out of strikes or boycotts, many little incipient Mau Maus. One-man-one-vote comes often to mean that your one vote must go to one man, and to any other at your peril. Africans are for the most part too confused, or possibly indifferent, to risk lives and property for an idea of freedom in itself new to them, at least in that particular form. Freedom, to them, really means freedom from white interference, not freedom to vote, think, and act, within the law, as they please.

This loss of personal freedom to match the gain of national liberty is not so great a tragedy for most Africans as for departing administrators. Even if colonialism should be replaced by petty tyranny and dictatorship in some countries, by tribal struggles in others, by a decline in standards of administrative efficiency and honesty in all, and by economic difficulties, these things cannot but be stages on the road to new developments, perhaps to a regrouping and realignment of states. Nor will the Western powers lose their interest in Africa merely because they withdraw their officers. They cannot afford to do so, if only because of threat of Russian intervention, which has grown so quickly in the last year that there are now far more Czech technicians in the independent state of Guinea than ever there were French administrators in colonial days. There are more ways to rule a country than to hoist flags and sing anthems. Czechs are nosing round the Congo, Russian missions reach Somalia, Ghana invites Mr. Khrushchev to a visit, Chinese radio stations broadcast in African tongues. It is indeed probable that the Western nations are resigning their authority not to democratic, independent parliaments but to future puppet governments whose strings will be jerked in Moscow and Peking.

The biggest single factor in the changing face of Africa today is the spectacular rise in population, still only at its start. This cannot fail to grow with snowball vigour in the next thirty years, and to present the greatest single challenge to the new nationalist governments. Already it is bringing immense difficulties of unemployment above all, scarcely less of education, health, food—of how to find outlets for this leaping fountain of human demands.

Africa’s greatest need today is less for votes, governments, and constitutions than to bring about an industrial revolution in the twinkling of an eye. It is a need for capital investment, for technical skill, for communications, for education, for planning: a need which in no circumstances can Africa’s own peoples provide for by themselves. Outside help is vital and the call for it is urgent. Most new African leaders recognise this: but can they create the conditions of stability needed to attract and deploy the outside skill, capital, and generalship? Upon the answer to that question, the future of the whole continent may depend.

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