Africa

on the World Today

THE psychological climate of Africa south of the Sahara is full of perplexity, anxiety, and the morbid states that inevitably accompany profound change. In his own society the African is forever frightened. Fear of disease, famine, tribal warfare, and the unseen world haunt the African; but he does find security in immutable custom and succor in magic. The submission of the individual to clan and tribe is often so complete that he ceases to have any real existence of his own.

But when the African is sucked into some part of the European orbit, the security to which he is accustomed suddenly disappears. If the uprooted African is accepted by the community into which he has been drawn, he can derive from it a new sense of security: the Portuguese, for example, have been eminently successful in making the African feel at home in a twentieth-century world. But when the African is rejected, as he is in parts of British Africa, by the very people who have brought him out of the bush and into a money economy, the experience may be dangerously traumatic and may lead to convulsions like Mau Mau.

Despite the impact of Europe, Africa remains amazingly faithful to itself. Behind a façade of modern European political institutions, the African world lives on. Sorcerer and witch doctor, grigri and juju, are still an integral part of the African pattern, and no amount of European persuasion has been able to make the African put aside such barbarous practices as female excision, the sacrifice of animals, and ritual murder. It is significant that among the objectives of the Mau Mau movement, the maintenance of female excision is second only to the recovery of land.

The Gold Coast

White settlement in British East and Central Africa has always meant racial segregation, white domination, and paternalism. In their West African territories, where there is no white settlement, the British have preferred to foster the emergence of purely black states. The system appeals to African nationalists because it gives them precocious power in countries where everything has been done for them. But these African reservations, in which white settlement is forbidden, represent in effect the ultimate development of apartheid, the South African doctrine of racial separation and purity.

Of the new black states in West Africa, the Gold Coast is the most notable example. This lush little country, with a population of about 4.5 million, used to be run as an ordinary crown colony by wellstarched British administrators, but by 1948 all the elements of a good explosion were there. World War II had left a legacy of inflation and turmoil. Feeling ran high against the foreign importing firms, and smalltime profiteering was rampant.

The top blew off when a gang of disgruntled African ex-servicemen was forcibly prevented from marching on Government House at Accra to present a bill of grievances. Two were shot dead. In the riot that ensued the city was looted. More than 2 million pounds’ worth of goods, mostly spirits, vanished. The official death toll was twenty-three. A commission of “inquiry,” hastily sent out by London to put matters right, outlined a brand-new constitution for the Gold Coast embodying a large measure of self-government in line with the anticolonialism of the Labor Government then in power.

The assumption was that the chief beneficiaries of the change would naturally be the Gold Coast nationalists led by James B. Danquah, a prosperous lawyer. But it was not long before an obscure young fellow named kwame Nkrumah showed the British how weak the old-line nationalists really were. Imbued with Marxist theory and practice mostly acquired in England, Nkrumah easily outflanked Danquah’s United Gold Coast Convention by the simple expedient of mustering the crowds to the electrifying cry of “Self-government now!” When the 1952 elections swept Nkrumah’s party into power, the British, concluding that Danquah was after all just an African Mikhailovitch, switched their support to Nkrumah.

Since then Nkrumah, who makes no secret of his determination to become, as he puts it, “master in my own house,” has been building a tight racial dictatorship around his party and its affiliated trade unions. The power and prestige of the traditional tribal chiefs are being destroyed in the process. It is curious that an “Africafirster” like Nkrumah should have done more than anyone else to ruin the indigenous social structure of his country.

An all-African cabinet responsible to an all-African legislature became a reality for the first time in colonial Africa after the Gold Coast general election in June, 1954. The British Governor, Sir Charles Noble ArdenClarke, remains responsible for defense, internal security, and foreign relations. He also has the job of protecting the rights of some 3000 British civil servants there. But Nkrumah has made it abundantly clear that these arrangements are for a limited transitional period, pending full independence and dominion status.

French Africans

Developments in French Africa may turn out to be more hopeful for the continent as a whole than those that have so often made the headlines from British West Africa. In 1946 a new constitution was promulgated in France. Under it the old distinction between subject and citizen disappeared wherever the French flag flew, and with it such practices as requisitioned labor and separate native justice. The inhabitants of French West and Equatorial Africa — some 20 million souls — became French citizens automatically without prejudice to native customs and personal status. Many white settlers were appalled. They spoke contemptuously of the constitution as the work of “ idealists” and “visionaries” in Paris and predicted evil days to come.

The event has proved them wrong. The notion of a common citizenship has made its way. It has “polarized” in a direction different from that of African nationalism the political life of a land mass thirteen times the size of continental France. Nkrumah’s name is a household word in British Africa from the Nile to the Limpopo but it is practically unknown on the French Ivory Coast only a few miles from the village where the “redeemer” was born. For the moment, at least, the French Africans do not appear to find any particular virtue in the nationalist medicine dispensed by Nkrumah.

An elected territorial assembly with white and African representation exists in each of the eight territories of French West Africa, in each of the four territories of French Equatorial Africa, and in the French trust territories — French Togoland and French Cameroons. The primary function of these bodies is to vote the budget and to approve economic development projects, but from the start they have had an insistent way of widening the scope of their action. There is a superassembly, operating on the federal level, at Dakar, and another at Brazzaville. In addition, every territory sends white and African representatives to the National Assembly in Paris as well as to the Council of the Republic and the Council of the French Union.

On the executive side, it must be admitted, the system has not worked out so well. The administration remains essentially white, although a few Africans have distinguished themselves in government service. The liberal professions, notably law and medicine, attract many Africans; the administration, almost none.

In French Africa political advance has, no doubt, made it possible for a few politicians to lord it over their more ignorant and credulous brethren. At the same time, an interracial community of interest does in fact seem to be emerging. Six years ago Félix Houphouet-Boigny, political boss of the Ivory Coast, was working hand-in-glove with the Communists. His Rassemblement Démocratique Africain, officially allied with the French Communist Party in the National Assembly, was committed to a hate-the-white-man policy locally. The Ivory Coast lived through a troubled and anxious period until Houphouet, for reasons of political expediency, threw over his Communist friends in 1950 and affiliated with former Premier René Pleven’s Social and Democratic Union.

At the municipal election in Abidjan in June, 1954, Houphouet’s Rassemblement and the white settlers put up a joint slate of candidates that swept the polls. The event deserved much more attention than it got.

Belgian segregation

The traveler who takes the ferry across Stanley Pool from Brazzaville in French Equatorial Africa to Léopoldville in the Belgian Congo sets the clock ahead a dozen years or so. He exchanges the quiet charm of the one bank for the vitality of the other, for Leopoldville is the throbbing capital of the most highly developed colony in Africa.

In the matter of race relations the Belgians lag behind the French, yet it cannot be denied that the African in Belgian territory is, all things considered, well-off. No other African can, at the price of a little work, enjoy material benefits of the same order. Opportunity beckons him ahead, and there is plenty of scope for his initiative. But the Belgians, who say they practice segregation out of respect for African particularism, have built racial inequality into their system, However proud they may be of their success in the economic and social spheres, the more perceptive of them are troubled by uneasy premonitions.

By and large, the Belgians rely on the traditional tribal chiefs as the best channels through which to maintain order, prevent sedition, and ensure the permanence of their authority. But, as they are now beginning to realize, you simply cannot preserve the integrity of African society within the framework of a dynamic economy, nor can you indefinitely keep edueated Africans, men of skill and responsibility, under the authority of ignorant and backward chiefs.

Serious breaches have already been made in the Belgian wall of segregation. Machinery was set up last spring to enable a few educated Africans to achieve European status, and town councils with African as well as white representation have made their appearance. This is quite an innovar tion for the Belgian Congo, long known as a white man’s colony par excellence.

Portuguese assimilation

It is the Portuguese who, in Africa, have carried the concept of assimilation to its fullest, expression. A Portuguese will not be turned from the conviction that his approach is the best, if not the only, answer to the race problem in Africa, and that it is proof against African nationalism in all its forms. People in Luanda are sure that, even if severed from Portugal itself, Angola will remain, like Brazil, Portuguese forever.

For Portuguese assimilation is not merely political, as in French territory, but racial as well, with roots running right down into the heart of the indigenous population. In Portuguese Africa, the half-castes and emancipated Africans are, taken together, almost as numerous as the white settlers, and just as Portuguese.

In the Portuguese view, the native must be taught and protected as though he were a child until he comes up to European standards. Then he must be accepted as an equal. The distinction between “civilized” and “ non-civilized ” Africans is very sharp, just as in an all-black country like Liberia. But there is virtually no color bar, and the Portuguese have a strong feeling of repugnance for South African apartheid, which they hold to be “suicidal” because it tends to throw the two races into hostile camps, with the force of numbers on the side of the Africans.

The “civilized” African in Portuguese territory enjoys European status and with it such political rights as are available under a one-party system. Accession to European status is an administrative procedure involving in the first instance the grant of a revocable certificate of assimilation. The postulant must be sponsored by a Portuguese administrator or two Europeans of good repute. A searching inquiry is made into his way of life. Polygamy and animism are equally forbidden.

It is notable that the Portuguese have fostered African colonization alongside large-scale white settlement designed to relieve the population pressure in Portugal. African families are constantly being settled on specially prepared plots with a view to binding them to the land by the power of productive and remunerative ownership. There is, however, no mollycoddling of the native in Portuguese territory. Work is an obligation, almost a cult, and impressed labor of a sort is still practiced. But that does not prevent the Portuguese from being perfectly sincere when they declare that nothing durable can be accomplished without a spark of love.

A visit to Angola is a reassuring experience. It suggests that convulsion and anxiety may not have to be an inseparable part of the African picture after all, and that the avenues of the future can still be kept open in Africa.