8.5: Africa during the Great Depression - Emerging Nationalism

The Effects of the Great Depression on Africa

Africans and the African Diaspora were hard hit by the Great Depression but at the same time, these economic hardships strengthened Black activist movements for equality.  One major problem was that many Africans were involved in primary product production which was perhaps the hardest hit sector during the Great Depression. During the 1920s, Africa was tied even closer to the global economy and became more dependent on producing primary products. There was a push to produce more cotton, ground nuts, palm oil, coffee, and cocoa. Wealth was extracted, but the European powers spent little on healthcare, education, and other vital services for the Africans themselves. There were some elementary schools but very few secondary schools.  The only university in British West Africa was in Sierra Leone. As prices for agricultural goods plummeted, wages dropped, and unemployment increased. Additionally, the governments of colonial Africa did very little to address this increasing poverty or the racism which denied Africans employment and educational opportunities. Africans then began to intensify their calls for governments to really put in place policies that would improve their lives and reduce racism in their societies. 

The European governments promoted policies in Africa that only generated more poverty. These governments encouraged farmers to grow more but that only reduced prices. Additionally, the oversupply of primary products became an even bigger problem because primary product production in Asia increased as well.  Less land was used to grow food and primary product producers needed cash to purchase food. As a result, Africa experienced more famines, and the depression lasted into the 1940s for some colonies.

The Rise of Modern African Nationalism 

Before the Great Depression, many Europeans and Africans believed that European imperialism brought growth and opportunities. This optimism was shattered by the Great Depression as wages and prices fell and unemployment soared.  During the 1930s, the European governments were less able to collect export-import taxes so taxes went up on Africans. Many farmers could not pay the higher taxes and migrated to the cities where they joined the urban poor. At the same time, government spending on social services that benefited Africans was slashed.  By the 1930s, more of the younger Africans had studied in Europe and the USA where they were exposed to the ideas of African independence and Black Pride coming from thinkers such as Marcus Garvey in the Americas.  Also, more Africans were thinking regionally beyond just their tribe or ethnic group. The protests of the Great Depression formed the foundation for the independence movements that came later.

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Kwame Nkrumah on Time, 1953, by Boris Chaliapin, in the Public Domain

During the 1930s, a new generation of urban, foreign-educated Africans emerged as leaders in the 1930s. They studied abroad in Britain and the USA.  In figure 8.5.1, Kwame Nkrumah is pictured on the cover of Time Magazine in 1953. He was an African nationalist who studied in the USA during the 1930s. What ideas might he have picked up? These leaders forged contacts with Black people in other parts of Africa, the Caribbean and the USA. The members of the new generation of Western-educated Nigerians became the leaders of the anti-colonial struggle and were beginning to develop full-scale, pan-Nigerian nationalist movements. The nationalism of these educated Nigerians promoted African unity. These leaders focused on the inequalities between the African subjects and their foreign white European rulers. The Nigerian Youth movement demanded better opportunities for higher education and called for African self-rule but not independence. These leaders were born after the British established a colony in Nigeria. Therefore, they had never known anything but the colonial boundaries of Nigeria. Additionally, Africans began to form their own Christian congregations which demanded more rights. The government then censored the press. However, public demonstrations increased due to opposition to taxation and government oppression. Nevertheless, these movements lacked a broad base and were primarily urban. For the most part, the educated elite lacked links to the cash crop producers in the countryside.

French West Africa faced many of the same problems. Much of the economy in French West Africa was centered around the production of groundnuts which faced lower prices and overproduction. The groundnut growers tried to raise prices by cutting production. However, this was unsuccessful, because the French controlled the import-export trade.  With a decline in revenues from trade, taxes went up in French West Africa even though farmers were experiencing more poverty. The resistance to French rule centered in the cities which were growing due to increased migration from the impoverished countryside.   Similar to British West Africa, the protests were led by the western educated urban middle class. A large number of urban small businessmen joined the protests because they were harmed by increasing taxes.  Many of the protesters were labeled communists by French officials. The French Popular Front government championed the rights of workers, but similar to the New Deal, there was very little done to promote racial equality within the French Empire. The Popular Front did not support increased political power for Africans, but it legalized labor unions in French West Africa

Review Questions

• How did the Great Depression affect Africa?
• What factors account for the rise of the equal rights movements in Africa?