There are often at least two versions of the story.
Africa’s colonial past is not an exception. On the one hand, the research in
legal and political sciences, sociology, history and many other disciplines
directly link the way in which Africa was “apportioned” by European empires at
the time (mainly but not only, the British and French empires) with the current
struggles in most parts of the continents. On the other hand, scientific
literature assesses the same facts under a very different light by either
negating the European responsibility in relation to the African experience or highlighting
the good intentions behind the partition and some positive results.
As a way of example, two documents below offer these
two very different views about the same facts:
Account
1
In
the aftermath of World War II, the two most powerful colonial powers, Britain
and France, needed both to expand the economic utility of their African
territories and to reinforce the legitimacy of holding colonies to a world in
which such claims were becoming increasingly contested. For both economic and
political reasons, colonized people could no longer be regarded as passive
subjects. If they were to remain in the imperial polity, the basis of their
belonging would have to be taken seriously: as active contributors to economic
development, as people with legitimate interests in raising their standard of
living and levels of education, and as participants in political institutions.
The costs of tutelage, investment, and
the containment of disorder or revolution turned out to be something neither
France nor Great Britain wanted to pay. The modernization argument instead
proved useful in convincing enough of the political elite at home that African
territories could become self-governing, that they could be brought enough into
the world economy and international institutions, that they would have an
interest in further interaction and cooperation, and that European norms really
were universalistic aspirations that Africans themselves would seek to emulate.
The development process went from something that had to be directly controlled
to something that painful implementation of which could be passed on to African
elites. The main difference was that Europeans could now pass onto Africans
responsibility for the consequences of a history in which they had been prime
actor.
Empire
was in some ways more essential than ever. Damaged economically by World War
II, both powers saw in their colonies the only real hope of earning hard
currency via the sale of tropical products for dollars. Both powers recognized
that the legitimacy of empire was now a more salient and delicate question than
it had been before.
The
initial reaction in Africa of both British and French governments was to deepen
commitments rather than to end them: to forge a development-oriented
colonialism that would allow for colonies to contribute more effectively to the
recovery of imperial economies, while raising the standard of living of the
colonized, sustaining a slow and carefully controlled evolution toward fuller
participation of Africans in political affairs, whether at the territorial or
the imperial level. It was a project that turned out to be vulnerable in its
own terms, and that is why focusing on the politics of citizenship reveals a
great deal about how France and Britain convinced themselves that they could
and had to give up empire. The claims that were being made upon colonial
regimes in terms of citizenship were certainly for political voice, but they
were also quite material – about wages, benefits, access to public services on
a nonracial basis, for education and health services equivalent to those
available in the metropole. If empire were to be reformed and made into a
meaningful unit of participation, then workers, farmers, students, and others
might pose a claim on the resources of the empire as a whole. Such claims
revealed that people working within the ideology and institutions of empire
could make empire unsustainable.
Decolonization and Citizenship in Africa
Account 2
There
is no reason why, in Africa, the border between Ghana and the Ivory Coast, or
between Nigeria and Niger, should be regarded as more artificial than, for example,
the border between Hungary and Yugoslavia, that between Switzerland and France,
or the frontier between the United States and Canada. The description of
African borders as artificial is sometimes intended to suggest that they were
drawn in total disregard of local conditions. This view is inaccurate-although
the consideration and attention given to local circumstances was indeed
insufficient. Many African colonial borders took shape gradually, in several
stages, in the course of which attempts were made to take various local
considerations into account, and they were changed and amended over the years
by demar- cation commissions. Sometimes the location of villages with respect to
their lands influenced the drawing of a frontier. More often, the delimitation
was influenced by the requirements of the respective colonial governments, such
as their concern with administrative con- venience, communications and access
to certain areas, or trade routes. The arrangements then made today serve the
independent African states, and, to the extent that they were satisfactory,
they contribute to the present relative stability of borders in Africa.
Africa’s
frontiers
Jorge Emilio Núñez
Twitter:
@London1701 02nd October 2018
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