Black Africa—What Went Wrong?

By DAVID WILLIAMS

NATIONALISM in independent West Africa still has no nations through which to express itself. This, with the deficiencies of politicians, is the main reason why the movements which brought independence to the fourteen artificial administrative units established by British and French colonialism can easily turn sour, when deprived of the cause which gave them their dynamic.

Nationalist parties after independence have bad to act as surgical clamps for new countries which lacked all the attributes of nations, except flags and anthems. Many are 'right-angled' countries, formed by European powers who drew lines at right angles to the coast (and often other lines at right angles to these), to mark frontiers, enclosing an arbitrary mixture of peoples.

All states lack a common tongue, French or English being their official language. All are made up of a number, in some a bewildering number, of tribes with different traditions, customs, dress, laws. None has a separate his- tory as a unit antedating colonialism, however ancient and remarkable the histories of many of the component groups. Many have deep religious divisions between Islam and Chris- tianity, few have religious unity.

Many frontiers drawn by the colonial powers cut through tribes, and sometimes families, even if some frontiers were much more carefully sur- veyed than is generally realised. For example, the Ewe of Ghana are related, not to their neigh- bours in Ghana, but to fellow-tribesmen in Togo. The Gambia's main tribes are also the main tribes of Senegal.

It is too late now, however, merely to call the West African frontiers artificial. They have come to stay and the important thing is their reality, not their artificiality. The use of a common official language for administration, politics, trade, and much of education, for newspapers and radio (though vernaculars have always been well-treated in this medium) makes communica- tion easy inside a particular state, while raising a barrier against neighbouring states with a different official language. Adoption of a legal system, administrative procedures, educational standards and political institutions from a metro- politan country help to unite an African state while cutting it off from countries adopting a different tradition.

For the politicians, experience of working to- gether, from whatever part of a country they came, against (or often with) the colonial rulers has given a unity which could survive the winning of independence, though many have reverted to tribalism or parochialism. African civil servants and employees of big firms have long been posted to different parts of their countries, and so have learned to work with fellow-citizens of different origins.

All this, however, while dividing the African states from each other, and giving them a basis for nation-building, does not make them naticins. And to tensions arising from the enclosure inside rigid frontiers of groups so varied are added the tensions arising from poverty, unemploy- ment and inflation.

Nationalist parties, then, faced enormous tasks in West Africa after independence. Why, on the whole, have they proved unequal to them?

With the exception of Guinea, where the rup- ture with France was sudden and bitter, inde-

pendence came by amicable negotiation. Even in Ghana, where Dr. Nkrumah and some of his colleagues had served short jail sentences, these were almost forgotten when independence finally came. After independence there were no martyrs whose blood could be invoked to water the tree of a party's popularity.

West African nationalism lacks, too, the appeal of the classic nationalisms of Europe or Asia. Ancient kingdoms, it is true, were engulfed by the colonial rulers. But it is not for Benin or Abomey, Sokoto or Ashanti, that modern nationalism has demanded independence, but for the colonial units into which a hundred million people had been divided by Europe during the last seventy years. Dr. Nkrumah attempted, by calling his country Ghana, to evoke a devotion to it which no merely colonial memory could. But no West African today supposes that in his own country he is re-creating a proud and glorious kingdom, whose freedom must trans- cend material considerations.

For West Africans of all kinds everywhere, whatever other, more idealistic, expectations they entertained, independence meant, if it meant anything, a higher standard of living and greater personal opportunities—as the politicians tended to promise. The independent governments would have to justify themselves by their material achievements.

Nor has racialism sustained the impetus of West African nationalism, as it might in other parts of Black Africa. Dr. Nkrumah has never been racialist or used racialism as a nationalist argument. His mystical devotion to the ideal of complete African unity is political, not racial, in inspiration, and he included the North African Arabs in his plans. For years nearly all leaders of French-speaking Africa demanded not inde- pendence and separation from France—ideas they opposed—but complete equality with Frenchmen and the closest ties with France. Throughout West Africa, whatever individual resentments may have been aroused by arrogant European officials or small-minded European businessmen, no political pa:rty has ever earned, even if it has been given, the label 'anti- European.'

So, deprived of support from race and history, the nationalist parties have embarked on inde- pendence. They have been unlucky in that in most cases their terms of trade have deteriorated because of the‘fall in their commodity prices (though, it is often forgotten, this is largely offset by increased production). Yet clearly the politi- cians have not even justified the modest expecta- tions of people outside West Africa. Corruption, nepotism, extravagance, arbitrary power, have been the rule rather than the exception. Dr. Nkrumah, in particular, whose preoccupation with world as well as African affairs was not meant to be a diversion for his people, bbt only showed his belief in his own strength inside Ghana, has brought tropical Africa's richest country to the verge of bankruptcy by economic politics based on unrealistic theories, ignoring public warnings even by his own officials.

Most West African states have become one- party, but for the ordinary citizen different sys- tems have been oppressive to different degrees. Yet, with the exception of the Gambia, multi- party states have also experienced oppressive rule by dominant parties, and in no case can inde- pendence be said to have advanced individual liberty. But it was not to bring freedom that the armies took over.

In all these states young educated people have been more or less disillusioned by the per- formance of the politicians. Yet, however much they may have wanted radical change, they have felt themselves powerless and have taken refuge in cynicism. In these states, however, army officers are to be counted among the intellec- tuals, but intellectuals whose training and organi- sation enable them to do what university lecturers and civil servants can only hope to do.

In a majority of West African states one-party -systems have been established. But for ordinary citizens it has made very little difference whether they have lived in one-party or multi-party states. Sooner or later, it now seems inevitable, corrup- tion and mismanagement by politicians reach the point where army officers feel the time has come to take over power. Sometimes, as is probably the case in Ghana, they do so in co-operation with civilians. But in no case are they conspiring with politicians, since the essence of army regimes is that they are opposed to all politicians.

Military regimes, obviously, are faced with the same economic and social problems as their civilian predecessors. The important thing is that they are able to use the talents of the Afri- can civil servants, who have been frustrated by the politicians, and, by their anti-corruption claims, to attract overseas help. This may only be of short-term importance. But the African civil servants, particularly in Commonwealth countries, have shown such an extraordinary capacity since independence that, for the time being, to release their energies and to direct them into constructive channels is the best prospect that the military regimes hold out.