10.6: The New Nations of Africa

Ghana

In Sub-Saharan Africa, independence came first to Ghana. After World War II all levels of society of this small African country – then called the Gold Coast – pressed for independence. British colonial schools produced high school and college students from all ethnic groups who now shared a common English language. Upon graduation they also shared a common hardship, finding few opportunities for advancement yet found hope advocating for self-rule. Farmers who had organized mass protests against British trade monopolies earlier in the 1930’s now believed independence would allow them to sell their crops directly on the global market. Prosperous colonial towns had swelled into slum cities and the shanty towns of newly arrived rural migrants, seeking the amenities of the modern life, became centers of urban discontent. Veterans also protested for better pensions but it was a political leader, Kwame Nkrumah, who unified these various groups into a national party – the Convention People’s Party. Festive rallies, strikes, and even riots drew public attention and popular support for Nkrumah along with imprisonment by the colonial authorities, yet these same protests convinced the British that local elections and steps towards independence must begin. In 1951, when his party won over 90% of the popular vote, Nkrumah was released from prison to head a transitional government. Over the next six years Nkrumah carefully prepared Ghana for independence by building public utilities, negotiating with traditional rulers, and blueprinting a national economy and government. When Ghana declared independence in 1957 and joined the United Nations it seemed the future of Africa, should it follow the example of Ghana, would be bright.

Kwame Nkrumah represented a new type of African leader emerging by the 1950’s and 60’s. Eager and determined, these spokesmen for modern African nationalism were equally adept at mobilizing local support as at charming Western publics. They formed a tiny elite tier of Africans, being educated in the United States or Europe – Nkrumah went to school in both – and were often inspired by the Pan-Africanist movement. These African nationalists pragmatically used old colonial institutions, languages, and practices in nation building efforts while embracing new ideas like socialism that they hoped would transform their countries into modern states. Yet this new type of African leader would also often find resisting authoritarian rule easier as a revolutionary than when in power. In 1960, three years after independence the “Redeemer of Ghana” Nkrumah would declare Ghana a one-party state and himself president for life.

Primary Sources: Pan-Africanist Speech to the African Union by President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana Excerpt (1963)

Discussion Questions

• What challenges does Africa face after independence according to Nkrumah?  
• How does Nkrumah hope Africa will use its riches and resources?
• What countries or regions does Nkrumah compare Africa to?

On this continent [Africa] it has not taken us long to discover that the struggle against colonialism does not end with the attainment of national independence. Independence is only the prelude to a new and more involved struggle for the right to conduct our own economic and social affairs; to construct our society according to our aspirations, unhampered by crushing and humiliating neo-colonialist controls and interference.

From the start we have been threatened with frustration where rapid change is imperative and with instability where sustained effort and ordered rule are indispensable. No sporadic act nor pious resolution can resolve our present problems. Nothing will be of avail, except the united act of a united Africa. We have already reached the stage where we must unite or sink into that condition which had made Latin-America the unwilling and distressed prey of imperialism after one-and-a-half centuries of political independence.

The movement of the masses of the people of Africa for freedom from that kind of rule was not only a revolt against the conditions which it imposed. Our people supported us in our fight for independence because they believed that African Governments could cure the ills of the past in a way which could never be accomplished under colonial rule. If, therefore, now that we are independent, we allow the same conditions to exist that existed in colonial days, all the resentment which overthrew colonialism will be mobilized against us.

When the colonies of the American Continent sought to free themselves from imperialism in the 18th century there was no threat of neo-colonialism in the sense in which we know it today. The American States were therefore free to form and fashion the unity which was best suited to their needs and to frame a constitution to hold their unity together without any form of interference from external sources. We, however, are having to grapple with outside interventions. How much more, then do we need to come together in the African unity that alone can save us from the clutches of neo-colonialism.

We have the resources…With capital controlled by our own banks, harnessed to our own true industrial and agricultural development, we shall make our advance. We shall accumulate machinery and establish steel works, iron foundries and factories; we shall link the various states of our continent with communications; we shall astound the world with our hydroelectric power; we shall drain marshes and swamps, clear infested areas, feed the undernourished, and rid our people of parasites and disease. It is within the possibility of science and technology to make even the Sahara bloom into a vast field with verdant vegetation for agricultural and industrial developments. We shall harness the radio, television, giant printing presses to lift our people from the dark recesses of illiteracy. A decade ago, these would have been visionary words, the fantasies of an idle dreamer. But this is the age in which science has transcended the limits of the material world, and technology has invaded the silences of nature. Time and space have been reduced to unimportant abstractions. Giant machines make roads, clear forests, dig dams, lay out aerodromes; monster trucks and planes distribute goods; huge laboratories manufacture drugs; complicated geological surveys are made; mighty power stations are built; colossal factories erected – all at an incredible speed.

The world is no longer moving through bush paths or on camels and donkeys. We cannot afford to pace our needs, our development, our security, to the gait of camels and donkeys. We cannot afford not to cut down the overgrown bush of outmoded attitudes that obstruct our path to the modern open road of the widest and earliest achievement of economic independence and the raising up of the lives of our people to the highest level.

Your Excellencies, the remedy for these ills is ready to our hand. It stares us in the face at every customs barrier, it shouts to us from every African heart. By creating a true political union of all the independent states of Africa, we can tackle hopefully every emergency, every enemy, and every complexity. This is not because we are a race of supermen, but because we have emerged in the age of science and technology in which poverty, ignorance and disease are no longer the masters, but the retreating foes of mankind. We have emerged in the age of socialized planning, when production and distribution are not governed by chaos, greed and self-interest, but by social needs. Together with the rest of mankind, we have awakened from Utopian dreams to pursue practical blueprints for progress and social justice.

When the first Congress of the United States met many years ago at Philadelphia one of the delegates sounded the first chord of unity by declaring that they had met in “a state of nature”. In other words, they were not in Philadelphia as Virginians, or Pennsylvanians, but simply as Americans. This reference to themselves as Americans was in those days a new and strange experience. May I dare to assert equally on this occasion, Your Excellencies that we meet here today not as Ghanaians, Guineans, Egyptians, Algerians, Moroccans, Malians, Liberians, Congolese or Nigerians but as Africans. Africans united in our resolve to remain here until we have agreed on the basic principles of a new compact of unity among ourselves which guarantees for us and future a new arrangement of continental government.

ANkrumah, K. (1997). ‘Conference of African heads of state and Government’, S. Obeng (ed.) Selected speeches of Kwame Nkrumah Vol. 5, 30-46, Accra: Afram Publications.

Nigeria

In 1960 Nigeria celebrated independence from British colonial rule. With the largest population on the continent, many people both inside and outside of the country believed Nigeria would inevitably rise to claim a leading position in African and world affairs. The borders of this “Giant of Africa” brought together hundreds of communities and three major ethnic groups. In the north lived the Muslim Hausa/Fulani. Their feudal order and Islamic practices the British had left intact and their martial prowess meant they had to come fill in the ranks of the Nigerian military. In the west resided the Yoruba, often animists whose wealth from palm oil plantations and entrepreneurial merchants had transformed the ancient city of Lagos into a vast commercial center. In the east, where influence from missions and colonial education was strongest, lived the Igbos, who embraced Christianity and became the state’s administrative class serving as civil servants, engineers, and teachers across the country. By the time of independence, ethnic political parties had hardened a sense of regional identity in Nigeria; a Yoruba-dominated Western Region, an Igbo-dominated Eastern Region, and a Hausa/Fulani-dominated Northern Region.

Proponents of national unity remained but as the initial joy over independence began to fade, fear and dysfunction slowly seeped into the national government. Southerners from both the Eastern and Western regions feared politicians would divert national wealth to the impoverished Muslim north at the expense of the south and gradually Islamize the whole country. Northerners feared that southern economic and educational advantages would lead to the perpetual subordination of the north and resented the Igbos who staffed the civil service and government institutions. In 1966 when a failed military coup killed several northern politicians, a wave of pogroms against the Igbos swept across the north, killing thousands and sending tens of thousands more fleeing the region. With Nigeria’s government unable or unwilling to protect its own citizens and fearful when a second successful coup placed northern military leaders in government, followed by more pogroms, the Igbos of the Eastern Region declared their secession as the Republic of Biafra.   

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Soldiers during the Nigerian Civil War, in the Public Domain (During the late 20th century most African countries fell under military rule including Nigeria. These military strongmen held together their young states through force of arms at the price of liberty and rule of law. Military coups remain a declining yet still present feature in African politics.)

A three-year civil war followed exemplifying a challenge newly independent states of the mid-20th century faced, secession. Like Nigeria, the large and populous countries of Indonesia, Pakistan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo all faced secessionist movements. For secessionists like the Igbos of Biafra, whatever the merit of their claim to self-determination, they faced severe obstacles to obtaining independence. Beyond having to fend off a well-equipped national army and establishing a functional state, secessionists sought but often failed to gain international recognition. When the Republic of Biafra declared independence, almost all African countries and the United Nations refused to recognize the nation. By the 1960’s most African states had tacitly accepted colonial boundaries in part to stymie secessionist movements and while the United Nations supported decolonization it also reasoned that self-determination alone could not justify redrawing borders should a people already have representation. That newly independent states could be as oppressive to a people as the empires before them or even more so seemed an uncomfortable possibility which much of the world did not wish to consider. Without a modern army or serious international support, the Republic of Biafra collapsed. In victory the national government wisely pursued reconciliation declaring “no victor, no vanquished” to the conflict, yet military rule governed Nigeria for the next 30 years.

Discussion Questions

What groups did Kwame Nkrumah organize as part of Ghana’s independence movement?

In Nigeria, why did a civil war happen soon after independence?

French Africa

Figure \(\PageIndex{2}\): (Africa in the middle of decolonization, Library of Congress, in the Public Domain (Map shows newly independent African states beside African territories which remain European colonies.)

Africa became the refuge of French sovereignty during World War II thanks to the actions of “a great French African.” Felix Eboue, the black governor-general of Chad, had been the first colonial official to raise the Free French banner against Nazism. To some, men like Eboue stood as living proof of the universal spirit of the French Empire; where the French language, republican values and civilizing mission opened the highest honors and posts of France to all. When Eboue was buried in the Pantheon in Paris upon his death, General de Gaulle declared that he had “entered into the spirit of France.” Such symbolism led not just many French but also French Africans to imagine France able to see beyond color, yet such ideals belied a hard numeric reality: in 1945 only 1 out of every 10,000 French West Africans held French citizenship.

As Marshall Plan funds flooded the French government coffers after World War II this financial aid came with a cost: the Americans expected France to dismantle her colonial empire. In principle the French agreed, but determined to remain a world power, France planned to end the empire on her own terms. In 1946 the founders of the Fourth French Republic sought to reform and rebrand the empire into a new structure, the French Union. Rather than shrink her borders, France would expand them as the French formally designated several overseas possessions, most in the Caribbean, as integral parts of France. Even today overseas possessions like French Guiana in South America form an equal part of France, much as Hawaii is a state of the United States. With polls showing the French public willing to offer the vote and citizenship to colonial subjects, France at first treated decolonization in Africa as assimilation and seemed to proclaim that anyone, anywhere could be French.

Yet as Africans began to serve as delegates in the French National Assembly, the French Union became an unworkable project. Many metropolitan French while advocates of equality were reluctant to place themselves under the rule of growing overseas populations nor did many Africans wish to assimilate entirely and become simple provinces of a Greater France. Contradictory laws and ever-changing French governments – 20 from 1945 to 1955 – gave little clarity to the fundamental question of French identity and did even less to forestall the rise of independent movements across French Africa.

Algeria

One of the most violent struggles for independence of the period of decolonization in Africa occurred in the French territory of Algeria. The struggles surrounding Algerian independence, which began in 1952, were among the bloodiest wars of decolonization. Hundreds of thousands of Algerians died, along with tens of thousands of French and pieds-noires ("black feet," the pejorative term invented by the French for the white residents of Algeria). The heart of the conflict had to do with a concept of French identity: particularly on the political right, many French citizens felt that France’s remaining colonies were vital to its status as an important geopolitical power. Likewise, many in France were ashamed of the French defeat and occupation in World War II and refused to simply give up France’s empire without a struggle. This sentiment was felt particularly acutely by the French officer corps, with many French officers having only ever been on the losing side of wars (World War II and Indochina). They were thus determined to hold on to Algeria at all costs.

On the other hand, many French citizens realized all too well that the values the Fourth French Republic supposedly stood for – liberty, equality, and fraternity - were precisely what had been denied the native people of Algeria since it was first conquered by France during the restored monarchy under the Bourbons in the early nineteenth century. In fact, “native” Algerians were divided legally along racial and religious lines: Muslim Arab and Berber Algerians were denied access to political power and usually worked in lower-paying jobs, while white, Catholic Algerians (descendants of both French and Italian settlers) were fully enfranchised French citizens. In 1954, a National Liberation Front (FLN) composed of Arab and Berber Algerians demanded independence from France and launched a campaign of attacks on both French officials and soon, pieds-noires civilians.

The French response was brutal. French troops, many fresh from the defeat in Indochina, responded to the National Liberation Front with complete disregard for human rights, the legal conduct of soldiers in relation to civilians, or concern for the guilt or innocence of those suspected of supporting the rebellion. Infamously, the army resorted almost immediately to a systematic campaign of torture against captured rebels and those suspected of having information that could aid the French. Algerian civilians were often caught in the middle of the fighting, with the French army targeting the civilian populace when it saw fit. While the torture campaign was kept out of the press, rumors of its prevalence soon spread to metropolitan France, inspiring an enormous debate as to the necessity and value of holding on to Algeria. The war grew in Algeria even as France itself was increasingly torn apart by the conflict.

Figure \(\PageIndex{3}\): A soldier interviewing men in Algeria, in the Public Domain (A search for insurgents. During the Algerian War of Independence Algerian FLN fighters, who were unable to match the French in open battle, often hid amongst the general populace. For the French, determining who was an insurgent was a difficult and painstaking game of cat and mouse.)

Within a few years, as the anti-war protest campaign grew in France itself, many soldiers both in Algeria and in other parts of France and French territories grew disgusted with what they regarded as the weak-kneed vacillation on the part of republican politicians. Those soldiers created ultra-rightist terrorist groups, launching attacks on prominent intellectuals who spoke out against the war (the most prominent French philosopher at the time, Jean-Paul Sartre, had his apartment in Paris destroyed in a bomb attack). Troops launched an attempted coup in Algeria in 1958 and briefly succeeded in seizing control of the French-held island of Corsica as well. It was in this context of near-civil war, with the government of the Fourth Republic paralyzed, that the leader of the Free French forces in World War II, Charles de Gaulle, volunteered to “rescue” France from its predicament, with the support of the army.

De Gaulle placated the army temporarily, but when it became clear he intended to pull France out of Algeria, a paramilitary terrorist group twice tried to assassinate him. He narrowly survived the assassination attempts and forced through a new constitution that vested considerable new powers in the office of the president. De Gaulle opened negotiations with the FLN in 1960, leading to the ratification of Algerian independence in 1962 by a large majority of French voters. Despite being an ardent believer in the French need for “greatness,” De Gaulle was perceptive enough to know that the battle for Algeria was lost before it had begun. In the aftermath of the Algerian War, millions of white Algerians moved to France, many of them feeling betrayed and embittered.

Review Questions

• How did the plan to replace the French Empire with the French Union fail?
• Why was the French military so determined keep Algeria as part of France?
• At the end of the Algerian war, why did the pieds-noires leave?