TROPICAL

AFRICA

v o l u m e

II

S O C I E T Y

AND

POLI TY

P A R T I C I P A N T S

IN

T H E

S T U D Y

CONSULTANTS! Sir Philip Mitchell, G.C.M.G., Chief Consultant; Stanley G. Browne, M.D., B. J. Gamier, J. H. G. Lebon, J. Gus Liebenow, Leo Silberman. C O N T R I B U T O R S OF WO R K I N G P A P E R S : David E. Apter, Nancy Gouinlock Berg, Kenneth Bradley, George W. Carpenter, R. J. Harrison Church, James S. Coleman, L. Gray Cowan, Frank Debenham, Hubert Deschamps, Walter Deshler, St. Clair and Elizabeth Drake, Eugene P. Dvorin, F. Grevisse, Alfred and Grace G. Harris, George R. Homer, D. Hobart Houghton, Sir Bernard A. Keen, Hibberd V. B. Kline, Jr., Gaston Leduc, Jacques Lefebvre, Jacques J. Maquet, Jacques M. May, M.D., Peveril Meigs, Paul Mercier, N. C. Mitchel, Eduardo C. Mondlane, William Dawson Moreland, Jr., W. B. Morgan, Thomas G. Murdock, Margaret Naim, B. S. Platt, R. M. Prothero, Tor Fr. Rasmussen, Rebecca Reyher, Kurt Roselius, Cecil W. Scott, Ruth C. Sloan, Helmer Smeds, Hugh Tracey, Glenn T. Trewartha, Kimani Waiyaki, A. T. de B. Wilmot, Alvin D. Zalinger, Wilbur Zelinsky. M A P S : Robert C. Kingsbury, Cartographic Editor; Patricia R. Kingsbury and Jean Paul Tremblay, Cartographers. PHOTOGRAPHS: Omar Marcus, Photographer; Anita Ventura, Picture Editor.

TROPICAL AFRICA
V O L U M E T W O

SOCIETY
AND P O L I T Y

BY

GEORGE

H.

T. K I M B L E

THE

TWENTIETH

CENTURY
NEW YORK

FUND
1960

Information obtainable in the summer of 1960 is included in Selected Territorial Data (p. 4 4 5 ). Elsewhere the record is brought up to the end of 1959 or early 1960, within the limits of the data available at that time.

Copyright 1960 by the Twentieth Century Fund, Inc. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 60-15160 Manufactured in the United States of America by The Lord Baltimore Press, Inc., Baltimore, Maryland
T he following firms in Germany generously presented the studys photographer with photographic equipm ent: Albert Schacht G .m .b.H ., Optical Equipm ent, U lm , D onau; Multiblitz, Mannesmann Electronic Equipm ent, Porz-W esthoven, Cologne; Agfacolor, AG FA A .G ., Leverkusen.

C O N T E N T S

V O L U M E

II

SOCIETY

AND

POLITY P AGE 3 53 93 159 183 22 3 271 30 3 361 393 43 3 443 445 471 473

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

The Old Order Social Change The Assault on Ignorance The Assault on Sickness The Rise of the Voluntary Organization Colonial Policies Nationalism and Politics The Machinery of Government The New Elite The Price of Growth The Shape of Things

Epilogue Selected Territorial Data List of Working Papers Index

T A B L E S

V O L U M E

II

AGE 50 Percentage Distribution of Adult African Males (16 plus) by Occupational Category and Level of Education, Stanleyville, Belgian Congo, Mid-1950s French Tropical Africa: Number of Public and Private Educational Institutions, January 1, 1957 French Tropical Africa: Number of Students in Public and Private Schools, 1946 and 1957 Daily Newspapers: Numbers, Estimated Circulation, and Copies per 1,000 Population Radio Broadcasting: Transmitting Stations and Receiving Sets Expansion of Medical Services in Nigeria, 1900-1951 Mortality Rates of Selected Territories, 1947-1957 Infant Mortality Rates of Selected Territories, 1947-1957 Uganda: Content of Courses, Local Government and Com munity Development Training Centre, Entebbe, 1954 Africanization of the Gold Coast Senior Civil Service, 1949-1957 Public and Private Capital Entering Selected Territories Between 1870 and 1936 Estimated Gross Fixed Capital Formation, Selected Territories, 1956 Average Per Capita Income, Selected Territories, 1956-1957 Budgetary Revenue, Selected Territories, 1956 Government Expenditure Under Development Plans, Selected Territories Financing of Development Plans of British West and British East Africa Total Appropriations Authorized by FIDES in French Tropical Africa, 1947-1958

84
110
110

51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64

142 153 160 167 167 192 355 395 395 397 402 405 407 412

IL L U S T R A T IO N S

VOLUME

II

35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

Sleeping Sickness and Tsetse Fly Areas Distribution of Leprosy, 1952 Helminthiases (Areas and Prevalence) Selected Nutritional Deficiency Diseases Diets Distribution of Yaws Rickettsial Diseases Distribution of Dengue and Yellow Fever Photographs, following page Major Political Divisions, 1959 Internal Political Divisions of South Tropical Africa, 1959 Internal Political Divisions of Central Tropical Africa, 1959 Internal Political Divisions of East Tropical Africa, 1959 Internal Political Divisions of West Tropical Africa, 1959

PAGE 37 39 41 43 43 46 49 50 182 308 313 322 326 329

S O C I E T Y

A N D

P O L I T Y

C H A P T E R 14

The Old Order

THE FAMI LY T H E COM M U N I T Y EDUCATION RELIGION THE ARTS

H E A L T H AND D I S E A S E

r o p i c a l Africa is more than a fabric of physical and economic threads of lands and livelihoods. It is a mosaic of peoples, cultures and beliefs. Within its borders live Bantu and Bushman, Semite and Hamite, European and Asian and Colored. Its market places and mines echo with the confusion of a hundred tongues. Its governments employ republican and monarchist, tribalist and nationalist, neutralist and Communist. Its schools and colleges teach animist and Christian, Hindu and Moham medan. Its homes shelter prince and commoner, the learned and the unlettered, the very rich and the wretchedly poor. But it is a mosaic with a difference. Some of the pieces in it are any thing but fixed and durable, being given to changing both their shape and position; and there are some that have been unable to withstand the disintegrating influence of time, and the wear and tear of alien forces. All the same, there is much in the mosaic that still recalls the antique world of its originators, and much to suggest that that world continues to inspire the thought and fortify the will of those who are its inheritors. Accordingly, examination of the changing society and polity of tropical Africa is best begun by recalling the matrix from which the larger in digenous pieces in the mosaic were cut.

T H E OLD ORDER

TH E FAM ILY The heart of any society is the family, and the strength of its beat is the measure of that societys vitality. In the African body social, the heart has always been strong; for it is sustained by devotion and service, and it is the creator and upholder of almost all things. It is, in Malinowski's words, "the very workshop of cultural development, 1 and around it is built an exceedingly strong sentiment. In its simplest expression the family consists of husband and wife, or wives, with their children. They form an economic unit in so far as they cooperate in the maintenance of their common household. This cooperation is not necessarily complete, for very often husband, wife, and even halfgrown children have their own indi vidual property, to which they devote part of their work. On the other hand, the family unit is not only economic, for the members, by sharing common work, care, and experiences, grow into a real living community in which love and selfsacrifice are not unknown.2 This is not to say that the family is conceived in Western terms. On the contrary, the differences are very considerable, especially in matriarchal (matrilineal) groups, those in which the children belong to the mothers group and descent is reckoned through the mother. Here it is the mothers brother rather than the father that is the guardian of her children. Then, too, African family ties are more often thought of as categorical than in dividual. Indeed, most terms of relationship are applied not to the indi vidual but to a group of persons. Thus, all members of the same generation within a group of relations, or group regarded as relations, may call each other brothers and sisters; those belonging to the preceding generation they may call fathers and mothers (it is not uncommon for an African to speak of my fathers and mothers), and those of the following genera tion sons and daughters, nephews and nieces of the first and second degree their children. And since relationship in the male or female line is distinguished, and there is also a grada tion between elder and younger, the relationship terms are in this respect even more definite and detailed than ours. The fathers elder and younger brother and sister, and likewise the mothers elder and younger brother and sister, and their respective children, have each their own respective designation. The child has to learn and to use correctly all these names and the corresponding behavior to his relatives. This makes him conscious of the fact that he is a member not only of his family but of a larger group which influences his existence on all sides. Even in patrilocal families [i.e., those where the wife lives and bears her children in her husbands group] the childs home is not exclusively that of his parents. He may live for months together with his grandparents, his mothers brother, or some other relatives who wish to have their child with them for some time.
1 Sex and Repression in Savage Society, K. Paul, Trench, Tmbner & Co., London, 1927, p. 219. 2 D. Westermann, The African Today and Tomorrow, Oxford University Press, London, 1949 (third edition), pp. 65-66.

T H E OLD ORDER

Frequently a child is given away as a servant to some elderly person within the group who lives alone and is no longer able to look after himself.3 The fact is that most Africans take a broader view of family relationship and responsibility than most Westerners. Frequently a family will consist of several households in which live the head of the family, his wife or wives, their unmarried sons and daughters and the husbands and children of their married daughters. These extended or enlarged families, as they are called, are likely to be disposed around a compound or group of com pounds. Although such a group is not an economic entity, its younger members have an obligation to help or make presents to the older mem bers, especially to the ranking member, who in turn carries the moral responsibility for their welfare. Nor does the family tie end here. We have always to keep in mind that the primitive, pagan African family includes both the living and the dead. The living are constantly passing into the ranks of the so-called dead; the so-called dead are as constantly returning to the ranks of the living by reincar nation. They return . . . in orderly manner through the legitimized union of two members of the living section of the community. To insure this regular return the living section ordain who shall be, and who shall not be, the parents; they signify their approval and seek the approval of the invisible members; and they take steps to secure the well-being of the child, both before and after its birth.4
Marriage

It follows that marriage is not so much the affair of two individuals as the concern of the groups to which they belong. As everywhere else in the world, physical attraction plays a part, but in many tribes this, and the sexual intercourse that often follows from it, does not ordinarily lead to matrimony. Among the exceptions to this rule are the Chagga (of Mt. Kilimanjaro), who consider it unseemly for a father to choose his daugh ters husband, and the Kikuyu, whose womenfolk boast that they marry only those they want to marry. However, it is probably true to say that even among such liberal-minded people, things are often so arranged that the man a woman wants to marry is one the family wants her to marry. (For that matter, such arrangements are not unknown in Western society!) Among the less liberal-minded groups, questions of happiness, compatibility and mutual attraction are ordinarily subordinated to the wishes of both elders and ancestors, sometimes with satisfactory results but often at the cost of misery and tragedy. In general, marriage is conceived as a civil contract in which both parties commit themselves to certain obligations in regard to each other, but in which they both also maintain a considerable degree of economic autonomy.
8 I b i d p. 66. 4 Edwin W. Smith, Knowing the African, Lutterworth Press, London, 1946, p. 77.

T H E OLD ORDER

Almost everywhere the contract calls for the transfer of goods or money, or both, from the bridegrooms family to the brides family the so-called bride wealth. The exact significance of this custom is still debated by anthropologists. But whatever else it is, it is not to be thought of as the price of a bride, for Africans do not buy their wives. Rather is it to be thought of in such terms to mention only a few of those used as a gift to seal the contract, a recompense to the brides parents for the loss of her services, a pledge that the family line shall be continued, a guarantee that the woman shall be fairly treated, a validation of the legality of the union; or simply as a help in setting up a new household. In pastoral country, the usual medium of the transfer is cattle, sheep or goats. Elsewhere the medium may be money, foodstuffs, copper bracelets, iron hoe blades, or even a mans labor. However much may be said against the custom, it makes for stability of the union, and for respect, since the greater the wealth transferred, the greater is the respect in which the woman will be held by her husband and his family.5 But wealth is by no means the sole criterion of a good marriage. Those who have a say in the matter are also concerned with the abilities and character of the two parties. Courage and skill in hunting (formerly, too, in fighting) are looked for in the man; in the woman, skill in firing clay and in raising and preparing food and industry: she must look well to the ways of her household and not eat the bread of idleness. Looks, too, have their place in the reckoning. But let no one suppose that the eye of the African beholder sees what the Western eye sees; the vision is different. As important is the marital eligibility of the parties. No persons in whose veins the same blood runs may on any account marry. And most Africans have very decided views about what constitutes sameness of blood. In many groups marriage is prohibited between the children of fathers who have entered into a covenant of brotherhood by mingling their blood. In parts of Africa the same applies to the children of families who have had direct arm-to-arm inoculation against smallpox. Marriages are customarily prohibited between persons having the same totem, that is, the same protective and therefore sacred animal, plant or other object, because a consanguineous relation is believed to exist between the totem animal and all the members of the group which bears the totem name. Among such persons the eating of flesh and sexual commerce are equally a mingling of substance. Consequently, neither is permitted when an animal is the totem and the womans totem is also the mans.6
5 Significantly, very many Christianized and Moslemized Africans feel that a mar riage concluded without bride-wealth means a humiliation and even dishonour to the wife. Westermann, op. cit., p. 53. 6 See Smith, op. cit., p. 81. Not all groups think like this. Some actually encourage marriages between people having the same totem, on the ground that it simplifies the business of running a household; where the man and wife come from different totem groups, the preparation of meals is apt to involve a great deal of extra labor.

T H E OLD ORDER

To protect themselves against the destructive consequences of inbreed ing, most groups practice exogamy, that is, marriage between parties not belonging to the same kin or clan. Such groups allow a man to marry his mothers brothers or fathers sisters child, but not his mothers sisters or fathers brothers child. In other words, cross-cousins are eligible for mar riage but not parallel cousins. Such marriages cannot be harmful to the group, because blood is considered to be inherited only through the mother. And where endogamy is practiced, care is taken to see that the parties are not of the same blood. The breaking of the tables of kinship and affinity, wherein whosoever are related are forbidden . . . to marry together, is everywhere treated as a grave offense. Among many groups incest ranks with witchcraft, both being punishable by death. Such is the worth put upon the unity and sanctity of the family tie! In the eyes of the primitive African, the unity and sanctity of the family tie are not forfeit by resort to polygamy. Whatever the evils of polygyny (the form generally practiced), a divided, dissolute home is rarely one of them. There are jealousies, of course, especially in households where one or more of the wives is barren; but these are seldom fierce enough to blind a woman to the advantages of living in a polygynous household. For the first wife, it means an improvement in her status, as in this way she be comes the chief wife and mistress of the house. For the others, and for her, it means a relief from work, since this is now divided, and more time is available for each wifes own affairs, including, in many cases, petty trading. She is free to come and go among her kin, to perform the family rites prescribed by tribal custom, such as the death vigil, and to bear and wean her children among her own people (thus ensuring that the very general taboo against intercourse at such times be not broken). Polygyny also means that the sick are seldom left uncared for or the young orphaned and undisciplined, and that African society is saved from shouldering the incubus of numbers of frustrated single women claiming for them selves a recognition of [the] right to bear children. 7 In most preEuropean, or untouched, societies there were next to no surplus women. Prostitution was accordingly rare. And on the whole there was very little divorce notwithstanding the fact that in most groups divorce could, and still can, be had for a large variety of reasons, including drunkenness, sexual and temperamental incompatibility, unharmonious relationship with a mother-in-law, the discovery that the marriage has broken the tables of kinship and affinity, as well as adultery, barrenness and im potence.8 For the man of the house, polygyny means wealth, prestige and,
7 lhid.y p. 91. 8 Like all African generalizations, this one is hedged about with exceptions. Thus, in the Yako country of southeastern Nigeria, about one woman in three is divorced at least once in her life. In the upper Congo valley, it is still not uncommon, accord

T H E OLD ORDER

unless venereal disease is present, an assured succession. With several wives and many children he can till much land, and keep a table that will allow him to live well and provide the hospitality expected of him. The Status of Women The chief end of African marriage is the begetting of children. Because of this, the standing of a woman with her husband and his people, and often with her own people, is governed by her childbearing ability. If she is barren, she is not only of all women most miserable, but also most undesirable. To be the mother of many children is to win lifes highest prize and most durable security, for in a polygynous world, it is to the children rather than to the husband that a woman looks for support in her declining years. From the day of her birth she has lived in intimate association with the facts of sex, seeing and hearing things which in our Western world are studiously kept from a childs attention. And from the time she could understand her mothers words she has known that the first and great com mandment is "Be fruitful and multiply. In spite of this or perhaps because of it she has to undergo a rigorous apprenticeship, part of it commonly taking place at an initiation school run by the older women. Aside from their direct, practical value, which few students of the subject would underrate, these schools serve as a reminder to the initiate that, although she is graduating from adolescence into womanhood, she is still subordinate in status to her elders a subordination which she must at no time in her life fail to show in her conduct. Within a couple of years of leaving the school she will normally have become both wife and mother, inured to hard labor, weariness and pain. Not even the death of her husband is likely to bring the woman respite from her strenuous round, since, in many tribes, she ranks as property and passes to his brother or other heirs, to whom she is expected to give such services as she is capable of until the day of her death. If the chief end of African marriage is to raise a family, the chief con cern of the contracting parties is to raise it in conformity with the custom of the group, there being no greater crime in African society than non conformity. From infancy the male, like the female, lives in a traditionencrusted environment to the preserving of which his energies are sys tematically directed by his elders. This does not mean that the mans role in family life is characteristically as hard as that of the woman, for it most certainly is not; but it does mean that nobody has to remind him of his duties, or the penalty of forgetting them. For the man, as for the woman, who does forget, African society has penalties in plenty. ing to Dr. Stanley G. Browne, to find men and women who by the age of 30 have had three unions, each sealed with bride money.

T H E OLD ORDER

TH E COMMUNITY The English language is none too rich in words signifying hierarchies of social order and organization. Most of those it does have have been debased by loose usage or taken over by the specialists and given an esoteric meaning. Community is such a word. Yet probably no other better expresses the web of associations, intimate and casual, constant and infrequent, vertical and horizontal, political, social and economic, in which the family is caught. In primitive Africa, the major strands in this web are spun by the clan, the village, the age set and the tribe (or ethnic group). The Clan If the family may be called the heart of primitive African society, the clan is its circulation system. Away from his clan or kinship group, the individual has little if any status and not much security. At best he is a tolerated outsider; at worst he is a nameless stranger, for whom no pity is felt and toward whom no mercy need be shown. Among his own kin he moves with assurance; with them he is at home, knowing what is expected of him under all circumstances, knowing also what he can ex pect, and proud of the associations and prestige which his relationship confers. The exact connotation of clan varies. Basically, however, a clan consists of a group of people claiming common descent, the descent being reckoned by the social relationship of parents and children, which is to say that the relationship may be established by adoption as well as by birth. The commonness may be regarded as deriving from either the male or the female side of the group, or from both sides. Where it is regarded as deriving from the male side, the major responsibility for the upbringing of children is vested in the father and his family, to whom the children belong. Here descent is reckoned patrilineally and the woman is likely to spend much of her time in the husbands village. To begin with, she will probably live with her father-in-law; indeed, she may leave her own home even before she is married if her future husband is working at a distance. Where the common tie is regarded as deriving from the female side, the major responsibility is vested in the mother and her family (most notably in her brother), to whom the children belong. Here descent is reckoned matrilineally and the woman is likely to reside in her own village. Where clans recognize both mother-rights and father-rights, questions of family responsibility, residence, property ownership and descent tend to be more complicated. For example, among the Ewe of Ghana and Togo the children are considered as belonging to the fathers clan, and so are entitled to inherit their fathers real estate. His movable property, on the other hand, is inherited by his sisters children, as in a

lO

TH E OLD ORDER

matrilineal society; and even his own children cannot be married without the assent of their mothers brother.9 This feeling of commonness is fortified in different ways, as, for instance, by the possession of a common totem and common land, both of which tend to be thought of as evidence of relatedness. Totemism is widely held in west Africa. As mentioned earlier, those who hold it sup pose that a blood relationship exists between the totem animal or other object and all members of the clan which bears its name. All who have the same totem are to be treated as brothers. As the totem is inherited, usually from father to son (even in communities which in other respects may be considered matrilineal), and as intermarriage of families having the same totem is comparatively uncommon, in the course of several gen erations representatives of a given totem group are likely to spread over a wide area, often well beyond their tribal borders. But wherever and how ever far they go, the free masonry of the totem goes with them.
For instance, a Mossi of the Pima clan, animist and savage, who had never left his native country before, finds himself suddenly at St. Louis [Senegal] and meets there a Wolof of the Noliaye clan, who is a Moslem or a Christian and is relatively civilised, who on his part has never been in the Mossi country; the Pima does not understand one word of Wolof, nor the Noliaye one word of Mossi; after some moments, by signs which only they note, this Mossi and this Wolof recognise each other as members of one clan, and immediately the Wolof takes this Mossi, whose home is 2,000 kilometers away from his, under his protection.10

Of all the symbols of group identity, land is probably the most evoca tive. For it is the dwelling place of the dead, as well as the living and the yet unborn members of the clan. As such its use and abuse eco nomic, social and religious are matters of the widest concern. To live in the enjoyment of the dead's good favor and to earn the praise of the unborn are ends which only the corporate wisdom of the clan can be expected to secure. The Village Whereas the clan is an expression of common origins, the village is more an expression of common needs. It forms, in Westermanns words, the natural grouping in the daily life of its inhabitants in their work and their recreative activities. It is also the base and center of the many other associations which claim the individual as their member, such as play groups of children, work-groups of the young people, age classes, drum and dancing clubs, religious cults, guilds of trades. 11 At its simplest, the village consists of the compounds of the families, or extended families, of
9 Westermann, op. cit., p. 67. 10 M. Delafosse, Haut-SenSgal-Niger, Volume III, p. 105 (quoted by Westermann, op. cit., p. 95). 11 Op. cit., p. 69.

T H E OLD ORDER

11

a single clan or section of a clan. But in most areas it consists of the compounds of several clans, brought together through intermarriage. The larger the village, the greater the amount of inter-clan marrying, and so the smaller the significance of clan in its corporate life. In the large village, it is the age sets and associations rather than the clans that give polarity to social life. Age sets and associations tend to arise in any society where there is a call for the cooperation of equals. The symbol of cooperation may be a baseball bat or a football, a jet plane or a battleship, a hunting spear or a garden hoe, an axe or a drum. And while equality of age does not signify equality of skill or stamina, nobody is likely to deny that, over the long haul, it makes for greater compatibility of outlook, better teamwork and more fun. Not every tropical African group has developed age sets or associations, but it is fair to say that most groups have and that in organization many of them are almost as institutionalized as most Western clubs, lodges and other fraternal orders. Indeed, no Western association requires its prospective members to undergo anything quite as institu tionalized or as rigorous as the puberty rites to which most African boys and girls have traditionally been subject. Numerous functions are served by age sets and associations. Some age sets are primarily con cerned with economic affairs. Others are more concerned with religious and military matters, or with recreation. Some have managed to keep their real purpose secret. A good many serve more than one purpose. Thus, among the Nupe of Nigeria age sets have both a recreational and an economic function, the latter being concerned with the execution of cooperative tasks such as tilling and weeding, building or roofing a chiefs house, and repairing a bush bridge. Almost all age sets have to do, in some way or other, with the regulation of behavior and status. How this used to work among the Kpe group of the Cameroons, who are by no means exceptional in this respect, is shown in the following age set table:
Age Set
Young men (up to 35-40 years of age) Middle-aged persons (from about 40-50 years of age) Elderly persons (from 50 to about 65 years of age) Very old persons (more than about 65 years of age)

Status
Not considered able to speak in im portant matters. Opinions carry weight. Form the active government of the village and play the important roles in ritual. Greatly respected and even reverenced, but too old to take an active role in society.

From this it would appear that village age sets and associations have their drawbacks even in Africa. Indeed, it is commonly reported that the Kpe continue to call themselves middle-aged persons long after they are toothless and infirm, just as many aging Junior Leaguers are slow to admit that they have passed through the portals of youth for the last time.

12

TH E OLD ORDER

The Tribe Like "community, "tribe means different things to different people so many things that there is a school (tribe?) of thought that favors excision of the term from the body anthropological. And there is much to be said for the avoidance of a word to which even small dictionaries attribute half a dozen technical meanings. However, it may be a long time before any body thinks of a word which is less liable to misinterpretation by the general reader. For our present purpose, we take "tribe to mean, in Westermanns phrase, "an agglomeration of groups and individuals, not necessarily related, [forming] a cultural and political unity through living in a common territory, having a common leader, one language, and similar customs and usages. 12 This definition is not above criticism, but it will serve to identify for us a further strand in the web of associations we have called the community. Of all the strands that go to the making of the web, the tribe is certainly the hardest to analyze, because most variable in strength and character. Here it is strong, there weak; in some places it dominates the pattern, in others it is, in a manner of speaking, invisible to the naked eye. Its main function, however, is almost everywhere the same: the maintenance of law and order. In its most rudimentary form, the tribe consists of no more than a few families or family groups "who live independently by themselves and recognize either the father of the family, the priest, the rain maker, or the magician as their chief, or regulate their communal affairs by means of a council of elders. 13 Small-scale organization of this kind was charac teristic of the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert and adjacent areas, the pygmies of the Congo basin forests, and many tribes in the back country of west Africa and the upper Nile valley. At the other extreme are tribes with populations running into hundreds of thousands, owing allegiance to a single chief or king whose domain covers an area the size of Massachusetts. But such large units were the exception rather than the rule and should be thought of as supra-tribal, for more often than not they came into existence through the conquest of one tribe by another. If the members of the winning tribe liked the look of the country, they settled in it, becoming its dominating caste, and running it, feudal-fashion, with the help of regents, governors, soldiers and labor levies. Given enough time and good treatment, the conquered people would get accustomed to their position as "colonists; and both conquered and conquerors would tend to absorb the others culture. Even so, the entente was seldom notable for its cordiality. Such tribal organizations were, accordingly, inclined to be unstable. It took a ruler with a strong personality to keep them from disintegrating. Not even the strongest of personalities could prevent his subject peoples from keeping alive their
12 I b i d p. 72. 13 Ibid.

TH E OLD ORDER

13

language, beliefs and practices, and maintaining a shadow cabinet of priests, magicians, and clan and family heads. It was only very rarely that a large unit came into being because men who felt themselves one desired to be one. Nationalism and the nation-state are exotic growths. Each tribal unit, large, medium or small, in its pristine form, is ruled by a chief or paramount chief, elected or hereditary, and each component group by a subchief owing allegiance to the chief. Notwithstanding his paramountcy, the chief is himself a man under authority: at all times he must act in conformity with the custom of his people, living and dead. For failure to do so he can be censured, fined and, in cases of serious deviation, deposed. His power is still further restricted, paradoxically, by the fact that his person is considered to be in some degree sacred. To preserve the implied sense of distance between the chief and his subjects, various taboos may be imposed upon him. These may necessitate his not being seen eating in public even not being seen at all, in which case the person chosen to represent him may wield the greater influence. The chiefs power is often still further curbed by the secret societies, from whose inquisitorial eyes no mans life is hidden. In the absence or near-absence of material sources of power, such power as the chief has is largely derived from ability to carry his people with him and from the regard they have for his custodianship of their traditions. While moral qualities are not unesteemed in a chief, they are generally not held to be as important as physical, intellectual and religious ones. What matters most is that he should know how to handle the magic powers inherited from his predecessors. It is these powers that make the tribe truly strong, united and proud.14 But the chief is much more than a symbol and a receptacle of power. He is also its embodiment. One of his most important functions, in con junction with his councilors and deputies, is to administer the law: to see that injuries to person and property are compensated for, that the young of the tribe are properly instructed in its custom, and that the tribe is kept free from the taint of those who do not hallow that custom if need be, by the passing of new decrees. Since the scope of African tribal custom is equaled only by the litigiousness of those who offend against it, chief tainship is no sinecure. To the great cultural value of chieftainship almost all missionaries, anthropologists, sociologists and government administrators who have had the opportunity of observing it in its pristine form bear witness. True, its excesses, such as trial by ordeal, the smelling out of witches, and the arbitrary killing of persons at burials, were barbarous, though probably
14 This conception may explain a certain custom which prevailed in parts of Africa: when the king's [i.e., paramount chiefs] or rain-makers physical powers decayed, or when his reign had lasted a number of years, he was put to death. He was no longer a fitting vessel for magic power, and this must be handed on in another vessel, that is to say, in his successor. Ibid., p. 74.

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THE OLD ORDER

not more so than many of those committed in more enlightened parts of the world. It was, however, a powerful instrument for the forging of political unity, an apt tool for the shaping of public opinion, a ready-made channel for directing community enterprise, and an unfailing reservoir for the nurture of religious sentiment. And in most parts of Africa it has provided the bridgehead from which men of alien ways are striving to establish a wider social and political order.

EDUCATION Because the African attaches great importance to the continuity of the family and the community, he attaches great importance to the instilling into his children of the things for which family and community stand. These things are basically the same whether the man is a Bushman, a Bulu, an Akan or a Kikuyu. All must learn to live, as best they may, with the world, the flesh and the devil. The child born into the old Africa must be taught something of the world of things; of the environment in which his people live the plains, the rivers, the mountains, the pasturage, the arable lands, the hunting and fishing grounds; the trees of the forest; the grasses and shrubs; the fauna, large and small; the heavens and the weather. These things set the stage for African life, and concerning them there has been built up an approved body of knowledge and a rich vocabulary, to be mastered at all costs, for out of them proceeds the river of life. No gatherer of food can afford not to know the nature of a given species of fruit or snake. The child must also be taught to respect the emotional attitudes that have come to be adopted toward the phenomena of the physical world, and to share the sentiments and beliefs associated with them. He must be taught pro ficiency in the making and use of weapons, tools, huts and household effects. The child is also born into a world of people. He does not live alone, nor yet unto himself. Because of this, he must be disciplined into control of his instinctive impulses. The manners, customs, laws, inhibitions which the experience of the past has proved neces sary to the integration of the social structure must be made bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh. Decency of speech and behavior, respect for his superiors in age and rank, a diligent sharing of the common tasks, must be inculcated.15 Besides, social life involves regulation of the commerce of the sexes; the observance of times, seasons and taboos; the maintenance of order and proficiency in the arts of music and the dance. All this must be learned. In addition, the African child is born into a world of spirits. Because his community consists of the dead and the living, the invisible and the
15 Smith, op. cit.y p. 128.

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15

visible, he must be taught about his ancestors; that they and he are mutually interdependent; and that if he fails in his obligations to them, they will call him back to the path of loyalty by visiting him with sickness or worse misfortune. He must learn to recognize their earthly agents, and the methods of divination by which their will can be ascertained. And as they are the guardians of tribal custom and institutions, any change in these must receive their sanction. The child must also learn to discrimi nate between spirits that are amiable and those that are malign to woo the former and appease the latter. He may be expected to learn how to cast a spell, make a charm, and dispense a healing or a death-dealing potion.
Means

How is all this knowledge imparted? By observation, involvement and formal education. Learning by observation begins in infancy, as with all of us, and is a lifelong process. African children are seldom isolated from their elders. At an early age they become familiar with the basic facts of existence, and with the patterns of behavior that govern the relations between father and mother, parents and children, and between children of different ages. They learn, just as quickly, to understand adult speech, since baby talk is frowned on; and they tend to learn fast, since de partures from the accepted norms are seldom well received by their seniors. By the age of three or four they can tell their kinsfolk from others a difficult task when the kinsfolk run to a hundred or more. By the age of six they are likely to know the precise terms in which they should address each one of them and behave toward them. They will also know their food taboos, and the penalties of infringement. By then, too, they will have mastered several dance rhythms and games. Frequently the six-year-old has advanced far enough to mimic the dance and drum routines of youths twice or three times his age. The introduction to social and economic responsibilities is likewise made at an early age. Small boys and girls build toy villages in which they perform, by an appropriate division of labor, the chores of pounding manioc, the hewing of wood and the drawing of water, the thatching of roofs, and the fashioning of pots, baskets and dugout canoes. They may even pursue the illusion of adulthood to the point of going man and wife to bed in the huts. By the time they are five or six, children of both sexes are set to work minding goats and calves in the vicinity of the village. At about the age of ten the boys may be allowed to accompany the herds on their more distant wanderings in search of pasture; they will also, by then, be able to recognize symptoms of cattle disease, and to doctor wounds. In cattleless country, they will be put to work repairing tools, blowing a blacksmiths forge, lopping the branches of tall trees, making nets and going fishing, and generally acting as handymen to their leisure-

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T H E OLD ORDER

loving fathers. They will have acquired a considerable knowledge of the local flora and fauna, their uses and habitats, and will almost certainly be skilled in the chase of small game and in the preparation of the skins and meat. Girls are set to work just as soon, if not sooner. Almost as soon as they can walk, they are apprenticed to the art of carrying jars and other re ceptacles on their heads or backs. The loads toted may hardly be worth the toting, but the exercise induces strong muscles and upright carriage two capital assets in any African woman. Soon they accompany their mothers to the fields for food, to the woods and watercourses for wild vegetables, herbs and spices that will garnish the evening dish. By eleven or twelve they can probably cook all the common dishes. Initiation But for many young Africans of that age, the sternest training is still to come. This is reserved for the years of puberty. Some observers see in the initiation rites that take place at that time the only education that African children receive, but this is not how the Africans view them. Rather do they tend to look upon them as the graduation ceremony whereby boys and girls demonstrate their fitness for the roles they are about to assume. Some African peoples, indeed, have several levels of graduation; the Lotuko, who live to the south of Torit in the Republic of Sudan, require all their men to undergo three different initiations spread over a period of several years. What is taught in the initiation schools is, in most cases, less important than the manner of teaching. By the age of puberty there is probably not much that any cult-school teacher can tell the initiates, boys or girls, about the customs of their tribe or its history. What is deemed important is that the initiates should come to look back upon their days and nights of test ing in the cult school as the climactic experience of their adolescence. To this end, everything that wit and cunning contrivance can do to heighten the drama of the occasion is done. While the practice varies, it is common for male initiates to be taken away into a camp by themselves and isolated from the villagers. No woman may enter that camp. An atmosphere of mystery is thrown about it. Special costumes may be worn. Men representing terrifying monsters strike dread into the boys by their antics. There may be a symbolic putting to death and a resurrection. The initiates are subject to the severest of disciplines. The rough treatment, the floggings, the exposure to cold, the fatiguing dances, the abnormal sexual practices, the obscene songs all these things induce a state of super-excitation. Nor must we forget the way in which the revered ancestors are brought in to share these rites the prayers . . . that are offered for blessing upon the new members of the tribe. Where definite instruction is given and I believe it is given in most schools of this kind it is given in this con text, not poured out in a flood, but imparted as an accompaniment to all the ac

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17

tivities of the camp. . . . The boys emerge as new beings. They are given new names which are a witness and a pledge that old things have passed away they are now men.16 Where they are held, the initiation schools for adolescent girls call for similar, or greater, courage and endurance. Louise A. Stinetorf has given, in her book Beyond the Hungry Country, a vivid picture of a day in the life of a central African initiate. Today [the instructress would pretend] a famine is upon us. There are no beans or ground nuts in the storage pots. There is no com in the granaries. Tembo [the elephant] has uprooted the plantain trees, and field mice have de voured the seed in the ground before it could sprout into gardens. Into the jungle now, every one of you, and bring back all the food you can find. It may be that you will have two or four or even six children in your hut when the hungry days fall upon you. Bring all the food you can find, but do not return without stuffing for at least two bellies. It is you and your husband who must remain alive until rains fall and seeds sprout again he to father children and you to bear them . . . And if the friendly spirits are with you and you find more than your two hands can carry, eat all your belly will hold where you stand a hungrier one can never take that away from you! [Laura] saw the girls straggle in one by one. One girl carried a nest of cater pillars and a handful of wild spinach a good supper anytime! Another had the tender shoots and heart leaves of wild celery. Still another carried a young python about her neck . . . One girl's head was covered with swollen lumps from bee stings, but she carried triumphantly in her hands a lump of bee-bread and a white soggy mass of still wingless young bees . . .17 Many cult schools for girls require their initiates to be tested in a fiercer furnace than this. In the Loma country of Liberia, the headwoman of the Sande, the girls cult school, performs a clitoridectomy on every initiate with a crude iron razor and with only cold water for an anesthetic. The operation is so painful that some girls have been known to die of fear of it .18 The same operation is performed, just as barbarically, and often fatally, in a hundred other areas. Whatever the evils of these rites, and they are undeniable, they most certainly achieve their aim. They discipline the sexual impulses, instill respect for custom and authority. They extol the virtues of obedience, patience, humility and resourcefulness. Whether the achievements are worth their high cost in suffering and degradation is another matter, one which some would find easier to settle than others. Louise Stinetorf puts these words in the mouth of her African-bred Laura: We are members of an advanced civilization; but it is my belief that our black sisters of primitive Africa crude, blunt, even brutal though they often are have outstripped us where preparation of their daughters for wifehood and motherhood is concerned.19
16 Ibid., pp. 130-31. 17 Op. cit., J. B. Lippincott Co., Philadelphia, 1954, pp. 282-83. 18 Esther Warner, Seven Days to Lomaland, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1954, p. 198. 19 Op. cit., p. 281.

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T H E OLD ORDER

In the bush school Laura attended (which lasted only two weeks) there was no theorizing, no vague philosophizing, no time squandered by the instructresses. Each girl knew what her primary duties in life were before she arrived at the school. She knew that "many pregnancies and un remitting toil lay ahead of her. She knew that she was valuable to her husband in proportion to her submission to his desires and her adapt ability to "the restraints of a polygamous household. She was never ignorant of these facts, but in bush school she was trained to do these duties quickly, in much the same way a colt is broken to harness and the plow on a farm. . . . I know that many women . . . would have found the [training] process brutal and disgusting . . . Nevertheless, there is sincere admiration in my memory for the old women who knew from experience the hard life that lay ahead of these girls and trained them for it. Complete obedience even to the most un reasonable demands was beaten literally if necessary into the girls . . . I remember, too, the pleasurable hours when we all sat about a central fire listening to the old women, one after another, recite the legendary history of their tribe . . . I would not give up the experience of that bush school for a very great deal . . .2 0 We may not agree with this judgment, but at least we must respect it, for it is supported by an impressive body of missionary and anthropo logical belief. Much more could, of course, be said both for and against the traditional training techniques of the African. Perhaps, though, enough has been said to establish the point, not always fully appreciated by those reared in Western schools of thought, that the African does educate his children. He sets out to prepare the new generation to take its place in the com munity and carry on the group tradition which is, after all, the essence of genuine education and he succeeds. At least he did succeed. That he no longer does so is largely due to forces outside his control. To fight these forces he is no better equipped than he is to stem an invasion of driver ants with his bare feet. By the time the ants are spotted, they have taken over. In the Africa of today, the taking-over process in the field of education is, as will be seen (in Chapter 16), already well along.

RELIG IO N It is perhaps difficult for us who live in a world made with hands to appreciate the extent to which pre-literate peoples are affected by the world not made with hands. Even if we have not lost our forefathers fear of this world, we have largely lost their awe of it; we have become so accustomed to standing on holy ground that we no longer bother to take
20 Ibid., pp. 281-85.

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19

off our shoes. Not so the primitive African. As he walks with his herd and is alone he is likely to ask himself questions that are as old as Jobs and as profound. Why drought? Why rain? Why death? Why life? Where little is knowable by rational search, little is natural. Where little is natural, much must of necessity be supernatural. And the more that a man believes to be supernatural, the less inclined is he to distinguish between the possible and the impossible, the wish and the reality, knowl edge and faith, thought and substance, the realms of the secular and the religious. Such distinctions mean little to the primitive African. For him the animate and inanimate, the here and now and the hereafter, are all but indivisible. It follows that a man may believe that the dead are as real as the living and need to be as well cared for; that a dead stone is as deserving of respect as a live tree, bird or animal, and that a dead mans spirit is as likely to reside in the one as in the other; that to dream of going on a journey to another country is to have been corporeally present in that country; and that since everything in his world is part of a whole, everything is invested with the significance and power belonging to the whole and should accordingly be the object of awe, and, when there is any doubt regarding its benevolence, of appeasement. Viewed in this context, the three most widely found elements in African religion spiritism (in which ancestor worship may be included), belief in a supreme being, and belief in magic or the potency of things are seen to have their foundations deep in the hard rock of logic.
Spiritism

If there is one universal article of the Africans creed, it is the conviction that death is not the end of all things. What we call death is a stage of the human spirits existence . . . The funeral rites are just what the rites of infancy and puberty and marriage are: rites that mark the transition from one grade to another and that give the necessary accession of internal power and outward status.2 1 And because both power and status increase with age, is it not fitting that the dead be given greater honor than the living? For does not everybody know that if we fail in our duties towards the dead they have the power and the disposition to call us back to loyal obedience by sending sickness and misfortune upon us. Knowing this, we are careful to do our duty. 2 2 So the argument commonly runs. What is ones duty to the dead? It is compounded of many things, among which perhaps the most important are reverence, remembrance (as some would call it, communion) and a sense of dependence. Ancestors are powerful; power is the most respected of all qualities. What, then, bet ter becomes those who are less powerful than that they should walk deli
21 Smith, op. cit., pp. 102-3. 22 Ibid., p. 105.

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THE OLD ORDER

cately, and with circumspection? And that they should at all times refrain from giving the impression that they are as good as their ancestors? Such fear as they know is not so much the captives fear of arbitrary punish ment as the servants fear of incurring his masters displeasure. Certainly the ordinary ancestor worshiper does not go in unmitigated dread of his ancestors. After all, he frequently thinks of himself as his own ancestor,2 3 and no healthy man yet went in dread of himself. For that matter, the African is not really a worshiper. He talks, rather than prays, to his dead grandfather as he would to a living elder; and his offerings of food and drink are not sacrifices but gifts such as one may bring at any time to ones Chief or father. 2 4 As always, reverence implies remembrance, and the stronger the feeling of reverence the more habitual is the remembrance likely to be. Thus, when the head of an ancestor-worshiping household goes on a journey he never fails to take leave of his ancestors, whose symbol stands in the hut; and should he be saved from a misfortune or meet with luck, he will not delay in making a thank-offering to his protector. 2 5 Perhaps the word that comes closest to expressing the feeling of a man for his ancestors is dependence. From them, as Radcliffe-Brown has put it, he has received his life and the cattle that are his by inheritance. To them he looks to send him children and to multiply his cattle and in other ways to care for his well-being. This is one side of the matter: on his ancestors he can de pend. The other side is the belief that the ancestors watch over his conduct, and that if he fails in his duties they will not only cease to send him blessings, but will visit him with sickness or some other misfortune. He cannot stand alone and depend only on his own efforts; on his ancestors he must de pend . . .2 6 What Radcliffe-Brown says of pastoralists is also true of many agricultural, hunting and gathering societies. There are, however, limits to the degree of dependence that can be put upon ones ancestors. An ancestor is seldom powerful enough to protect the man who wanders beyond the borders of the ancestral domain. By the same token, an ancestor is unlikely to come to the aid of a man who wants vengeance done on an enemy belonging to another group. An ancestor is unlikely, either, to do for a man anything that he could do for himself. It is a mans own skill and strength that make him a good hunter; where the ancestor can help is in choosing a propitious day on which to go hunting.
23 Many Africans believe in re-incarnation: the Ba-ila [of Northern Rhodesial certainly do. My old friend Mungalo used to say to me: I am Mungalo: and my grandfather was Mungalo; Mungalo came to be reborn and I am he/ So a man may be his own grandfather! I b i d p. 103. 24 Ibid., p. 108. 25 Westermann, op. c i t p. 91. 26 A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, in the H e n r y Myers Lecture (entitled Religion and Society) for 1945, quoted by Smith, op. cit., pp. 105-6.

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21

But it is not only ancestors that are revered. The phenomena of the phys ical world are capable of generating much the same feeling and attitude in an African. And not unreasonably, for is not the lightning that strikes a tree or a mans house self-evidently the possessor of power? Or the wind that whips up the waters of a lake and cuts a swathe through the forest? Or the rain that drowns a mans land and rots his crops? If lightning, wind and rain have power, who is to say that the earth, with its rocks, hills, lakes, rivers, trees and animals, does not also have power? Wherever it resides, such power must be conciliated, so that the evil it might do be averted. But how can such power, conceived as spirit or divinity, be conciliated? By the giving of gifts, the making of prayers and the observ ing of rules of conduct. Where the power, or spirit, has a local habitation, as in the case of a specific tree or rock, the conciliation gains in effective ness when done on the spot. If the tree or rock should be too distant for this, a symbol of it, set up in a hut or village, will serve as a substitute. Where the power, or spirit, is the power of lightning, thunder, rain, wind and the like, the need for a symbol an idol or a shrine is almost imperative; and its conciliation can, in many instances, be secured only through the person of a priest, who receives the suppliant, lays his offer ings before the idol or shrine, and says prayers on his behalf. Not all natural spirits are equally powerful. In west Africa, where the cult of spiritism, or animism, appears to have originated, or at any rate to have taken strongest hold of the peoples imagination, some spirits have never commanded more than family or clan support. However, some have attained the status of divinities claiming the allegiance of whole tribes indeed, of people belonging to more than one tribe. Around some of them there has grown up the paraphernalia of religious sects, each with its own priestcraft, dogma, initiation school or settlement, rites (many of them secret), and sometimes its own secret language and alleged secret knowl edge. Because of the sense of solidarity which membership in them in duces, and the status conferred by such membership, to say nothing of the attendant pleasures, sects of this kind "exercise a great power of attraction, and not infrequently have succeeded in getting the political power of a community into their hands. 27 This is especially true of those in the hinterland of the Guinea coast. Some of the spirits that are abroad in the Africans world cannot be conciliated. There are certain persons who go disgruntled out of this life, threatening to haunt the survivors; others who are not properly

buried.,, 28 Belief in a Supreme Being

For people reared in a spirit-filled environment it would not seem to be too big a step from belief in hierarchies of power to belief in a high power
27 Westermann, op. cit., p. 89. 28 Smith, op. cit., p. 106.

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T H E OLD ORDER

or a high god that is above all others. Such a notion, variously expressed, is widely encountered among primitive Africans.
The high-god is sometimes identified with, or personified in, the sky or the sun, and thus has similarities with a nature god, whereas in certain regions, no tably in E ast and South Africa, where ancestor worship is predominant, he stands in relation to the first forbear of the group. But his nature is elusive. In W est Africa he is sometimes hardly distinguishable from the personal genius of man, so that each person has his own God; on the other hand the boundary-line between the Supreme Being and the impersonal Power pervading the universe is fluctuating.29

In some groups it rather than he would better identify the gender of the power. Indeed, one should probably speak only of supreme power, never of supreme being or supreme person. What does this high power or high god do, and what does he like and dislike? There seems to be pretty general agreement that he is thought of as a producer, originator, molder or constructor. In the center of almost every African folk tale having to do with origins stands a creative principle and the belief that the first man was a product of it. Less gen eral, but still widely held, is the belief that this high power rules the world, orders times and seasons, and plays an active role in the day-to-day affairs of its peoples. His [Its?] predominant qualities are might, goodness, and justice. He is benevolent because his nature is good and not merely when prayers are offered to him. Unlike nature gods, ancestors, and evil spirits, he is not influenced by mans gifts. 30 The Herero (Southwest Africa) say of him: He has no father, he is not a man, he lives in heaven, he does only good, therefore we do not make offerings to him. The Ewe (Ghana and Togo) say: He is good, for he has never withdrawn from us the good things which he gave us. The Kpelle (Liberia) say: He is the one who causes us to walk about and do our work, he causes rain to pour down on our fields and the sun to shine. And the Yoruba (Nigeria) say: Leave the fight to God and rest your head on your hand. 31 At the same time, many African groups prefer to believe that the Supreme Being re moved himself from among men to remote skies because of mans wrong doing. 32 Whatever the nature of the belief, it is more academic than dynamic. The qualities of the high god are more readily conceded than copied. His bidding is seldom done with alacrity; often it is disregarded. We are not surprised to find, therefore, that he makes few demands, or that he should seem not to be greatly troubled about the ethics of those who recognize his existence. This, of course, is not to say that the African is untroubled about ethical standards and attitudes. Nothing could in fact
29 Westermann, op. cit., pp. 91-92. 30 Ibid., p. 92. 31 Ibid. 32 Smith, op. cit., p. 120.

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^3

be further from the truth. For him ethics is largely a matter of conformity to the prevailing social pattern, as it is no doubt for many of us. Con formity to this pattern, he believes, is more likely to be achieved with the help of the magical qualities inherent in things than with the help of a nonmaterial transcendent being or force. He finds magic useful in other ways, too. Magic Let it be said at the outset that there is nothing very African about the belief in the practice of magic, or potency, or dynamism. 33 It is found the world over and, to judge from the contemporary American interest in talismans, amulets, charms, panaceas, divination and the like, many of its staunchest adherents are found in our midst. Scarcely an aspect of traditional African magic is peculiar to Africa. African beliefs about witches, says Meyer Fortes, are startlingly like those of Shake speares day. 34 Nor is this the only likeness that may be discerned be tween the occult beliefs of the African and Western worlds. We should therefore ponder the place of magic in the Africans supernatural world with more than ordinary sympathy. The essence of the belief in magic, or dynamism, is that the spiritual forces good and evil abroad in the world can be tapped not merely by the venerating of ancestors, the giving of gifts to nature gods, and the worship of a supreme being, that is, through human instrumentality, but also through the instrumentality of supernatural, occult agencies. There are many keys to this kingdom.
The occult power is believed to dwell in the countless charms which people wear on their bodies, in the medicines made by a doctor, and in the ritual ac tions of a hunter or warrior. The symbols that men use, masks, colours, numbers, names, metaphors, all link up with the energy in the desired object; they are not dead symbols.35

There are also many kinds of magic. There is the kind Sir James Frazer called homeopathic magic because it is based on the principle that like produces like. Is rain needed? Then water must be spewed into the air to simulate a fall of rain, or a smoke cloud formed to help the rain clouds gather round it. Does a woman want to bear a child to take the place of one she has lost? Then let her wear a doll. Let a living twin wear an image of a dead twin. Does a hunter want a good days hunting? Then let him wear images of the game he seeks.
33 The word used by R. R. Marett and others, including Edwin W. Smith, to cover belief in, and the practices associated with belief in, the transferability and transmis sion of energy, power, potency or force. 34 T he Institutions of Primitive Society, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1954, p. 88. 35 E. G. Parrinder, African Traditional Religion, Hutchinson's University Library, London, 1954, p. 26.

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T H E OLD ORDER

There is also the kind Frazer called contagious magic. This is based on the notion that things once joined must remain so and can affect one another. Lucky charms can be made out of a mans waste hair, nails, clothing even his bath water.36 Then again, there is personal magic and public magic.
A great many charms are individual, meant for specific needs of one per son. . . . Men wear teeth of animals, magic miniature scissors and knives, caps to make them invisible or safe against attacks of animals . . . bracelets of tinkling metal, girdles laden with leather pouches . . .37

Public magic, as its name suggests, is of wider potency. The bundle of feathers and leaves or the parcel hanging from the ceiling of a hut pro tects all its occupants. The wisps of straw and the packages containing teeth, blood and feathers which a man places in his fields are there to safe guard his crops against pilferers and all natural calamities. The arch found at the entrance to many west African villages removes all evil from those who pass under it. Those who make potions, diagnose diseases, and purvey secret remedies the medicine men no less than those who work with protective spells, amulets and charms, and track down witches the witch doctors are held in the highest regard. These men are experts, the inheritors of an esteemed and closely guarded body of tribal lore, men of substance and great influence for good. They work openly and they are consulted by nearly everyone. Not all magic is protective; as much, if not more, is offensive, or black, magic. And this is so greatly feared that in most parts of primi tive Africa more thought and effort are given to warding off the evil than to courting the good. Babies are loaded with bracelets and charms to protect them from witchcraft. Lovers arm themselves with charms against rivals; farmers, blacksmiths and hunters, against their occupational haz ards. Chiefs frequently walk about with a servant carrying a spittoon, lest the chiefs spittle be left on the ground and used by an evil magician. 38 Women, on giving birth, are careful to bury the placenta and umbilical cord, so that these may not be likewise used. Of the two kinds of black magician, sorcerer and witch, the former is the more hated. For the sorcerer, sometimes called the day witch, is a conscious evildoer, whereas the witch, or night witch, is often thought of as the victim of heredity, possessed of inherently bad qualities, and so as more sinned against than sinning.
The sorcerer deliberately tries to harm his enemies, or those of clients who have paid him, by evil magical means, fie may use suggestive magic only, or true poison. . . . Sorcerers . . . may have animal familiars to work for them. 86 Many a white bwanas bath water has been sold by his servant, at a nice profit, to friends desirous of acquiring some of the white mans power. 87 Parrinder, op. cit., p. 114. 88 Ibid.

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25

Or they themselves may have the pov/er of metamorphosis, and change them selves into animal form at will. . . . [They] are believed, especially in East and South Africa, to be able to use men as their evil agents, and particularly the dead that they raise for their wicked purpose . . .39

Witches, on the other hand, have no palpable apparatus of their trade, and their activities may properly be described as spiritual. They are secret agents [male and female], and arc not consulted by men anxious to harm their enemies as sorcerers are consulted. 4 0 The principle behind belief in witchcraft is that the soul of the witch is free to meet in con clave with the souls of other witches, and to prey on the similarly wan dering souls of ordinary mortals. The witchs body remains in situ, a fact that complicates the work of the witch hunter. The chief purpose of these nocturnal conclaves is spiritual cannibalism, each witch being charged to provide a victim in turn. The assembled ghouls tear the victim limb from limb, eat it raw or cook it. Or the blood may be sucked, vampire-fashion. 41 All this is done spiritually, and not corporeally; but because a mans soul is closely linked to his body, his body weakens as his soul is devoured. Pains, paralysis or impotence appear in different members. When the center of blood, the heart or liver, is reached, then the victim dies. 4 2 To track down a witch, a witch doctor may draw upon a score of means. He may, for instance, go into a trance, or consult the dead. He may use straightforward detective methods or more roundabout devices such as trial by ordeal, water gazing and poison oracles. The most terri fying of all evils, because the most incalculable, witchcraft carries the heaviest of all penalties. It is also the most antisocial of evils, for it is supposed to act most often and most effectively upon those who are in close contact with the witch. In other words, a man considers himself more likely to be bewitched by a relative in his household than by a dis tant acquaintance. That this holds also for a woman is not surprising considering the potentialities of the polygynous household for gossip, sus picion and even hatred potentialities that the traditionally high rate of infant mortality serves only to increase. If a woman is accused and put on trial, she need not expect to be defended by anyone except a son. Frequently no defense is called for, as the accused will confess freely to being a witch. Nor does the fact that a witch cannot do what he or she is supposed to do and has no real existence make belief in witchcraft any less evil and antisocial. This belief in a latent, non-moral potency resident in men, gods and nature is the strongest, most general and most influential postulate which the old Africa applies to the business of daily living. It is also one of the last, if not the very last, to be discarded.
39 Ibid., pp. 117-18.

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TH E ARTS Of all the adornments of human society, the arts are the one about which it is easiest to talk nonsense with safety. The talker has always the defense that artistic appreciation is a subjective matter, that beauty lies in the eye of the beholder, and so that what others take to be a piece of crudely whittled wood or a formless daub of color is for him a master piece. Of all the geographical categories of art, African art (by which we mean the art forms of the indigenous peoples living south of the Sahara) is undoubtedly the art that has provoked the greatest output of nonsense. Nor is it difficult to see why. Until quite recently, no people were as poorly known historically, anthropologically, sociologically and psychologically. Where so little is known of the language of the soul, need we be surprised if its handwriting is hard to decipher? Two things we may be sure of, at any rate: no soul is without a language, and every language has beauty in it. General Characteristics While the deciphering of traditional African art forms is far from finished, enough is known of them to warrant the making of at least three generalizations. The first of these is that the primitive African artist, like any other primi tive African producer, is greatly tied by his environment. The sculptor needs workable wood, stone, metal or clay; the painter, pigments, brushes and a surface on which to use them; the musician, wood or membranes for his drums, reeds for his pipes, metal or gut for his stringed instru ments. All these materials may be had somewhere in tropical Africa, but few of them may be had in handy combinations, and some of them may be had in only a few places. In theory, wood, metal, reeds and other materials could be shipped from a surplus area to a deficit one; but until recently few African societies were organized to do this kind of thing, if indeed they felt any urge to do it. It follows that there is really no such thing as African art or even tropical African art, but only regional and local art. Some of the regions, it is true, are very large. The region in which wood sculpture once flourished covers practically the whole of the basins of the Niger and the Congo, or, in round figures, 2 million square miles. On the other hand, the regions in which some of the most famous art forms developed were no larger than the towns and tribes for which they have been named. It also follows that some art forms did better in one area while some did better in another. Painting, the most perishable of all art forms, flourished among the desert dwellers of the Sahara and the Kalahari, largely, we may suppose, because it was in the desert that water and mildew were least likely to interfere with the painters work and that dry stone walls

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could most readily be had for canvasses. Or take dancing. Dancing to the accompaniment of slit drums or wooden gongs was practically con fined to the forest zones. Dancing to flute and pipe was common only where reeds and bamboos grew along the margins of such marshy rivers as the upper Nile and its tributaries, and in the lightly wooded reaches of the east African mountains. As for instrumentally unaccompanied dancing, this enjoyed its greatest vogue among the peoples of the grassy plains (such as those of Sukumaland in Tanganyika) where both wood and reed are scarce. It can also be shown that the environment using the word to include the language of its inhabitants is responsible for wide regional dif ferences in singing forms. Hugh Tracey, who has been recording African tribal music for many years, has declared in a paper on indigenous music written for this study that
. . . anyone with as wide an experience of recording in this [southern] half of Africa as we have enjoyed would have little difficulty in placing the approx imate geographical position of most items composed by musicians from any of the larger [language] groups with which his travels had made him familiar.

But he is a poor artist whose genius is imprisoned by the bars of his environment. And though all but a few African artists may have been poor in worldly goods, nobody can say that they were poor in invention or improvisation. They had opportunity to be inventive, because the African environment is, with some notable exceptions, a ready destroyer of both the artists tools and work. The damp heat of its forests plays havoc with all perishable materials; while its termites and boring insects make the preservation of even hardwood objects well-nigh impossible. As William Fagg, of the British Museums Department of Ethnography, has pointed out,
The art of tropical Africa is at the opposite pole from Egyptian art. The indestructible stone colossi of Egypt served by their very existence to petrify the Egyptian style and to preserve its essentials through several millennia. In the tropics, the turnover is very rapid: wooden figures may have to be re placed after anything from five to fifty years, very few ever reaching a full century of life. Since variations may be introduced at each replacement, the tempo of evolution may be very quick; a style might become quite unrecog nisable in two to three centuries. The pace is stepped up still more with dance masks, which are usually of soft wood and subject to very hard wear . . . Tribal art did not have the benefit as Europe did of the concentration of the whole artistic talent of a continent within the narrow mould of naturalism, but it did retain the great compensating advantage of freedom to develop in an infinity of different directions. So we find a far greater range of stylistic varia tion in African art than has obtained in Europe at any period; artistic discipline is exerted at the level of the tribe, the sub-tribe, or the village rather than at the continental level.43
43 The Listener, September 13, 1951, p. 414.

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Stylistic variation, then, is the second general characteristic of African art. In the realm of sculpture these variations go all the way from un recognizable abstraction (as among the Dogon, who live along the upper reaches of the Niger River) to faithful portraiture (as among the Baule of the Ivory Coast and the Yoruba of Ife, whose medieval school of natural istic bronze and terra cotta sculpture has never been surpassed). In the realm of music the variations, though less immediately apparent, are no less real. Thus, Hugh Tracey has found that in their instruments of fixed pitch, where each note of the scale is tuned separately, certain tribes regu larly employ pentatonic [five-note] scales, others hexatonic [six-note], and quite a few heptatonic [seven-note] scales. He has also found that tribes normally employing a certain kind of scale not infrequently sing songs and tune instruments to other kinds. All told, there are scores of dif ferent scales, all of which are equally valid emotionally in their appropri ate settings. And he has catalogued no fewer than forty classes of instru ment played in various circumstances and places by African musicians (though a few of these, it is true, are of nonindigenous origin). The fertility of musical invention is further seen in the wealth of com munally produced and communally remembered songs which has been unearthed in various parts of the African tropics. Some tribes have dozens of such songs. In the case of the Lokele, a fishing people living along the banks of the Congo River below Stanleyville, the number of such songs mostly sung while canoeing runs into several hundreds. The third generalization has to do with the apparent dearth of art for arts sake in tribal Africa. This is not to say that the African artist con cerns himself solely with functional, never with aesthetic values. Nobody who has seen him carried away by the rhythm of his own drum beating or singing can doubt that when all its symbolic and mystical qualities have been allowed for, we are still left with a sizable unfunctional divi dend. It is simply yet not so simply that he lives in a world which invests every action with potentialities for good and ill. To realize the good and escape the ill is the burden of every mans life; and he carries it whether he is sowing seed, seeking a wife, singing a song or fashioning a mask. The whole of life is a school for conformity. Its wholeness can as easily be destroyed by an unhallowed innovation of the hand and an im proper gesture of the body as by a breach of tribal law all of which invite the displeasure of ones elders, and betters. Lest it be thought that the inability of the tribal artist to do as he likes means that he is incapable of producing great art, it should be noted that no less a sculptor than Henry Moore has expressed the doubt whether any real or deeply moving art could ever be purely for arts sake. Thus tribal art may be equated with all the other great art traditions in which the artist responds to an inextricable complex of motives, which it is profitless and naive to label functional in one case or purely aesthetic*

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*9

in another. 4 4 Yet, whatever his motivation (and this will be taken up shortly), the African tribal artist is seldom free to pursue it with abandon, let alone to the goal of perfection. The constraints upon him are many and, to our way of thinking, curious. He frequently seems to have an almost pathological aversion to straight lines, for example. [In] the mak ing of a path or the building of a house, straightness is not considered de 5 sirable in itself, but is sought only so far as is absolutely necessary. 4 When making an intricate and decorative pattern he will often introduce 6 a deliberate imperfection, as though to avert the evil eye. 4 The constraints notwithstanding, there is more than craftsmanship to the end product. The artist may be a conformist, but he never loses his individuality. He is a distinguishable and original personality, just as much as Cellini or Turner or Matisse. 4 7 Even today, when conformity including conformity to what Europeans think African art should be like has palsied the hands of many of tribal Africas best artists, it is still possible to come upon striking manifestations of creative originality. Tradition, it is true, usually prescribes the form and many of the con ventions of artistic endeavor of whatever kind; it provides "the frame work within which the artist must work and create, as Fagg points out. Yet, as Fagg goes on to say, it is probably not more restrictive of genius than were the conventions of religious art in Renaissance Italy. Motivation If not for its own sake, then for the sake of what is tribal art produced? The question of meaning and motivation never fails either to excite or to divide the students of tribal art. Although it is still fashionable in some quarters to resolve it in simple, one-word terms, there is a growing dis position to believe that the tribal artist is inspired by motives as mysterious and manifold as those of the Western artist, and that he is probably no better at articulating them than his Western counterpart. Possibly, as William Fagg has suggested elsewhere, many of the tribal artists works, plastic and dramatic, fine and applied, are incapable of adequate expres sion, 4 8 either by him in his own language or by us in ours. Whether we believe this or not, we shall do well to heed Faggs injunction, when entering a field so far beyond the boundaries of objective science as this region of the spirit . . . [to] be especially on our guard against our subjective impulses in interpretation. 45 Ibid. In some instances the absence of straightness can be explained more simply,
as the result of following the line of least resistance, that is, of avoiding a stout tree trunk or a large anthill. 46 Ibid. This is particularly true of those artists who have accepted Islam, with its insistence that only Allah is perfect and that any attempt to be like him is impious. 44 Fagg, loc. cit.

47 Ibid.

48 African Art: The Contrast with Western Tradition, The Times Review of the British Colonies, June 1951, p. 7.

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Of this, however, we can be certain: since religion is woven into the whole fabric of individual and community life, no artist is insensitive to its claims, and to the opportunities which it provides for self-fulfillment let alone for making a living. There is plenty of evidence that art in tribal Africa was the handmaiden of religion with its clamant demand for security symbols. As we saw earlier, it was by making the invisible visible that a man could hope to contain it, or at least to manipulate it to his advantage. By making an image of an animal, a hunter might put a spell on the soul or the power of the animal he sought. By making a symbol of the spiritual powers that hedged him about, he was able to decrease their thralldom, if not always increase his own defenses against them.
It is this task, not just an objective ritualistic one but above all a psychological one, that art fulfils in the great security-system, as one might call the complex of religious ideas. This is true of all its [sculptural] genres: the ancestor figures (more rarely figures of gods); the masks, which transform their wearer into a superior being; and the magic figures, which are themselves active bearers of spirits and superhuman powers.49

There are those who feel certain of another thing, namely, that the aim of the sculptor was not so much to create a speaking likeness of a man or other being (though this was attempted upon occasion with the apparent intention of deceiving evil spirits), as to generalize his dominant quality, or the quality which the artist or his client considered most appropriate to him.
Thus a representation of a deceased ancestor may be designed less to per petuate his physical appearance than to evoke the respect and awe which is due to him in his new state, or to suggest the wisdom in counsel which he may still be expected to lend to the deliberations of his survivors. In furtherance of this generalizing tendency, the carving may, for example, be given a beard, though the ancestor himself had none.50

To use the jargon of the times, the artist was more concerned with con ceptual reality than visual reality, with transcendental qualities than ma teriality. Fagg contends that it is transcendentalism that gives meaning to African tribal art and music, and provides the quality that most endears it to modern artists. But transcendentalism is a big word encompassing a world of ideas that few African artists have so far done much talking about, at least to Westerners. We cannot therefore be sure that it expresses any of the things their art is trying to tell us. Perhaps, after all, it is only trying to tell us what other silent seekers have known: that the way to com munion is through labor, and a man may find that communion only by laboring in the thing he does best not in the thing that is, by secular
49 Werner Schmalenbach, African Art, Macmillan Company, New York, 1954, p. 107. 50 Fagg, African Art: The Contrast with Western Tradition, p. 7.

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standards, most useful. And anyway, who is to say that a statue is not as useful as a bobbin, or a hoe? True, a hoe is for digging and without dig ging a man might die of hunger, as a bobbin is for weaving, and without cloth a man might die of exposure. But a statue is for protection, and with protection no man will die of either hunger or exposure. Perhaps even to read this much into African art is to read too much. Be that as it may, it would seem that there are areas of an Africans life where his artistic endeavors are prompted neither by fear of the unseen world nor by the necessities and conventions of the seen world, but solely by the love of living. To the tribal African countryman, Hugh Tracey says,
Music comes as naturally as talking and the two are largely the extension of each other. Music is the natural fulfillment of festivities such as dancing, cere monies and drinking parties: it is the proper language of sorrow also and makes it possible for everyone in the community to share the whole range of human emotions . . . Life without music would be meaningless to the countryman.

If this is true of music, could it not also be true, in part at least, of danc ing, story telling and carving? Certainly it is difficult to believe that the toddlers who respond to the rhythm of a drum as soon as they hear it, who cleverly mime their elders eccentricities, and contrive to whittle recognizable shapes are doing anything more complicated than being themselves. There is as much uncontrived and uninspired art, we may take it, in Africa as elsewhere.
Output

All of this, added together, would easily account for the high output of tribal art and the high incidence of tribal artists. Symbols, musical, sculp tural, dramatic and literary, were useful at every turn of a mans life. Ladislas Segy has estimated that during the life of the average west African at least twenty sculptures were used.51 Bearing in mind that most of these were individually owned symbols, and that their life was short and frequent replacements were necessary, it is not difficult to accept Segys contention that over the last thousand years or so a stag gering number, running into many millions, of sculptures were produced. The number of sculptors could have been scarcely less staggering, since with the tools and materials at their command output rates were low and spoilage high. There is no evidence that the incidence of artistic genius was very different from anywhere else in the world; but sculpture, though hardly a cottage craft, was characteristically carried on wherever sculp tural symbols were used. Few west African villages or clans were without a sculptor of sorts. The same was probably true of the story-telling art, which in a pre51 The Significance of African Art, Phylon, Fourth Quarter 1951, p. 375.

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literate world assumed an importance of which we in the West can barely conceive. Tribal Africans gather around a story teller as we gather around a TV set. Naturally, not all African story tellers, any more than all TV performers, are artists, but many of them are, especially since, when tales are old, what holds an audience is the manner of their telling. At their superlative best, African story tellers are as good artists as the Charles Laughtons and Boris Karloffs of our world. Such a story teller was Mungalo, Edwin Smiths friend.
With him there was no lip-mumbling; every muscle of face and body spoke, a swift gesture often supplying the place of a whole sentence. He was expert in the use of pauses in heightening the effect. The tones of his voice varied in an inimitable manner. When he told a beast-tale each animal spoke in his own voice . . ,52

Often there was as much art in the tales themselves as in the telling of them the allegorical art of Aesop, Andersen and Uncle Remus by which both children and adults are made vividly and fittingly aware of the norms of their society, the penalties of rejection and the rewards of acceptance. If any reader feels the need of such salutary instruction, we recommend to his attention R. S. Rattrays Akan-Ashanti Folk-Tales (Oxford University Press, London, 1930), and the west African Folk Tales and Fables collected by Phebean Itayemi and P. Gurrey (Penguin Books, London, 1953). As has been pointed out, there were areas and ethnic groups which, so far as can be seen, produced next to nothing of an artistic kind. Music (other than yodelling) and sculpture are scarcely to be found among the pygmies. According to Werner Schmalenbach, they have no artistic heritage at all. 5 3 Among many of the pastoral groups, especially those of east and central Africa which were of nomadic habit, objects of art seem to have been looked upon as so much ballast to be carried about. Art for such peoples was mostly a matter of adorning the body, ornament ing clothes, tools and weapons, and dancing, mostly of a rather warlike kind.5 4 Even where the arts flourished, localities differed widely in the kind and quality of artistic work done, partly for the environmental reasons mentioned earlier. Some of the musical differences encountered in east and central Africa are amazing. On the one hand, whole groups appear to be tone deaf to the finer points of music making of any kind. On the other hand, there are groups that have the Italians ear for a tune, the hillbillys gift of improvisation and, not surprising, the American negros
52 Smith, op. c i t p. 148. 53 Op. cit., p. 13. 54 There is no doubt another reason why pastoralists did not go in greatly for lares and penates. Ancestor worship obviously loses much of its compulsion because ancestors lose much of their 4power when a family leaves the ancestral domain. Such worship as there is tends to be perfunctory, and the symbols of it fewer and less important.

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F IG U R E 3 5 (After Patrick A. Buxton, The Natural History of Tsetse Flies, H. K. Lewis and Co., Ltd., London, 1955)

parts of northern Nigeria as recently as 1940. Mortality rates were prob ably not much less, for spontaneous cure is thought to have been so rare as to have been almost unknown. Most of those who survived the disease lived warped and wretched lives. One recent investigator (G. Tooth) contends that it is probably the commonest cause of mental derangement throughout large areas of West Africa 59 and that it is a not uncommon cause of child delinquency, adult crime and beggary there. Of the sleep ing sickness patients examined by him at treatment centers in the then Gold Coast, gross lunacy occurred in approximately 8 per cent of the cases. 3. Bilharziasis, or, to give it its other name, schistosomiasis, is one of the most unpleasant and debilitating diseases found anywhere in tropical Africa. There is reason to believe that, like sleeping sickness and many other traveling diseases, bilharziasis has enlarged its domain since the African became a long-distance traveler in search of work and ease. It occurs in two forms, intestinal (Schistosoma mansoni and S. intercalatum) and urinary (S. haematobium). Though the ecological require ments of the two types of schistosomes are somewhat different, they have the same general epidemiology; both require an intermediate host a
59 Quoted by J. C. Carothers, The African Mind in Health and Disease: A Study in Ethnopsychiatry (Monograph Series, No. 17), World Health Organization, Geneva, 1953, p. 27.

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fresh-water mollusc and by boring their way through the skin both get into the human blood stream and eventually into the veins of the intestines or the bladder. Where the epidemiological and ecological requirements are met, the incidence of the disease varies from 5 per cent to 100 per cent. In Africa as a whole including Egypt, one of the most heavily infected areas in the world it has been estimated that no fewer than 62 million people suffer from one form or the other, or both forms simultaneously. Most of the victims have some degree of anemia resulting from the con stant drain of blood. Most also suffer constitutionally, through the involve ment of the kidneys, lungs, liver and other organs. In its more extreme forms, the disease has been known to be a predisposing cause of epilepsy and other brain disorders. Once in the system, bilharziasis stays, for the tribal African knows no way of ridding himself of it. And it can get into the system any time he goes fishing or bathing or washes his clothes in an infected body of water. It seems that by now there is at least as much infected as uninfected water in tropical Africa. Indeed, almost the only regions where bilharziasis has not been reported, at least locally, are the eastern uplands of Angola, the highlands of Ethiopia and Kenya, and the land lying back from the coasts of Nigeria, the Cameroons and the territories formerly known as French Equatorial Africa. Since everybody must wash his clothes and his body, and since in tribal Africa there is little safe water, the wonder is that only about one in three Africans is estimated to have the disease. 4. Leprosy is at once one of the most widespread and one of the most mysterious diseases of tropical Africa. Although the mycobacterium, or germ, which causes it has been known for a long time, the epidemiology of the disease (often called Hansens disease, after the discoverer of the germ) has remained obscure. It is accordingly difficult indeed, im possible to say why it occurs where it does, or where, on prima facie grounds, it may be expected to occur. What is known is that (1) the high est rates of infection occur where there is warmth and high humidity and where people habitually work and sleep in crowded quarters; (2) these physical and cultural conditions sometimes exist in the absence of leprosy; (3) it is much less contagious than is commonly believed; (4) prolonged and intimate contact is usually necessary for infection; (5) the incuba tion period is long, extending from several months to several years; and (6) of the two main forms of the disease, lepromatous and tuberculoid, the lepromatous the form that is characterized by widespread, illdefined patches of skin discoloration and small raised lumps on the ears, face and body is by far the more contagious and serious. It is probable that, of all the age groups, children and adolescents are the most sus ceptible to infection. The incidence of leprosy is still not accurately known in all tropical African countries. In those where medical censuses have been taken it

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ranges from well below 1 per cent (in Kenya) to a little more than 2 per cent (in the Belgian Congo as a whole).6 0 The accompanying map (Figure 36) shows the geographical distribution of the disease as estimated in 1952. For the region as a whole, the present leprous population is almost certainly nearer 2 million than 1 million. While the number ap pears to have grown in the past fifty years, it could hardly have been less than 1 million in pre-European times. 5. Tuberculosis is one of the most frequent causes of death in tropical Africa. How long this has been the case is not known, but Dr. May argues that the high susceptibility of the people in the region points to its being a very recent introduction. Unlike most of the other major African diseases, tuberculosis is transmitted by inhalation and ingestion. The most important factors in its epidemiology are the presence of open cases in towns or villages; coughing and spitting; and absorption of contami nated food, including milk and meat from tuberculoid cattle. Conse quently, it can and does occur almost everywhere. In territories as scat tered as the Republic of Sudan, the Belgian Congo, Nigeria and Nyasaland, tuberculin tests show that between 50 and 90 per cent of the popula tion have a positive reaction, that is, have been at some time infected with tuberculosis. These figures, though certainly representing a higher inci60 In some Belgian Congo villages the incidence is over 30 per cent.

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dence of tuberculosis than prevailed at the turn of the century, can be matched in most other territories. The commonest form of the disease is pulmonary tuberculosis; it is acute, shows little tendency to healing by fibrosis, and in the old days was likely to kill its victim inside of a year. 6. Hookworm disease or ancylostomiasis, is extremely common in Africa. The number of infected people in the continent as a whole has been put at approximately 50 million; of these it seems likely that at least 30 million live within the tropics. As infection can be contracted by anybody walking unshod on earth that has been contaminated by the feces of a person already suffering from the disease, and as the hookworm larva can flourish in a wide range of tropical climates and the hygienic conditions provide susceptible hosts, 30 million may well be a gross underestimate. Once in the intestines, the worm lives parasitically on the gut wall. The victim therefore suffers a continuous loss of blood which manifests itself in lack of energy, low resistance to infection generally, and, in the later stages, severe anemia. Many believe that hookworm disease and malaria account for most of the mental and bodily lethargy widely ob served in Africans. Three major hookworm zones may be identified. The first is in east Africa; it covers most of Uganda, Kenya and the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika and extends southward into Northern Rhodesia and Mozam bique. The disease is not commonly found in the Sudan or on the high lands of Tanganyika. The second zone covers most of the Belgian Congo and the region formerly known as French Equatorial Africa. The third zone, in west Africa, is defined approximately by the fifteenth parallel and the twentieth meridian east. South and west of these lines the disease is believed by Dr. May to affect practically 30 per cent of all the indige nous population 7. Filariasis. The term filariasis applies to the group of diseases caused by nematode worms that attack vertebrates. Each genus and family of this superfamily needs an arthropod to serve as a vector to man. The most greatly feared varieties of filariasis are onchocerciasis, which gives rise to subcutaneous tumors, chronic inflammation of the skin and blindness, and Bancroftian filariasis, which gives rise to hydrocele, elephantiasis and enlarged groin glands. The number of people in tropical Africa suffering from filariasis is probably not less than 50 million, and may very well be more. The incidence and infection rates of the principal varieties differ con siderably. The variety associated with elephantiasis is reported from all territories except the Rhodesias, Nyasaland and Mozambique. It seems to occur more commonly on the western side of the continent (where infection rates of 10 to 20 per cent are reported) than on the eastern side (where the rates commonly fall below 10 per cent). The variety associ

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ated with blindness is present in most of the Sudan and neighboring terri tories to the east, in Kenya, Tanganyika, the Belgian Congo (in parts of which the infection rates soar up to 100 per cent) and in the territories formerly composing French Equatorial Africa. It is found also in several parts of west Africa, notably in the valley of the upper Volta and neigh boring river systems. A third variety, known as Guinea worm infection, appears to be confined to the Nile valley, Uganda and west Africa. The elimination of these infections involves breaking the life cycle of the worm at its most vulnerable point, by destroying the larvae or pupae of the vectors by spraying streams with disinfectant, or by other means. The dimensions of the task may be gauged by Figure 37, which shows graphically the prevalence of diseases caused by worms, or helminths. 8. Deficiency diseases. It has long been argued that much of the Afri cans sickness is a direct consequence of malnutrition. The collection of nation-wide statistics on food consumption has barely begun in the great majority of countries, and most of the detailed studies of food habits and the physiological and medical implications of those habits have had to do with small, highly selected groups. Enough is known, however, to war rant a few broad generalizations: 1. Over much of tropical Africa food supplies are irregular in amount and critically low during the hungry season, the months immediately preceding harvest.

F IG U R E 3 7 (After Atlas of Diseases, Plate 4, Copyright 1952, American Geographical Society, New York)

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2. The total annual caloric intake of food over most of the same area does not meet minimum health standards as set down by such bodies as the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. 3. Important nutritional elements are lacking, for some or all of the time, from the diet of most Africans. 4. The prevalence of these dietary deficiencies is a major cause of pre natal and infant mortality and frequently is a contributory cause of deaths from infectious and degenerative diseases in children and adults of all ages. 5. Where these deficiencies are chronic, they result in the stunting of growth processes and consequently in the lifelong impairment of physical and mental powers. 6. Even where diets may appear adequate by FAO standards, they may not in fact be so, on account of liver disease, worm infestations or other intestinal diseases which interfere with absorption or storage. With few exceptions, a diet incorporating adequate amounts of the protective substances amino acids, vitamins and minerals was be yond the reach, seasonally or perennially, of the African in the old days. Those Africans who came nearest to it, it would seem, were the pastoralists of east Africa (such as the Somali and the Masai) and of the savanna zones of west Africa (such as the Fulani), and some of the food-gathering, fishing and hunting (including head-hunting!) peoples of central and west Africa, all of whom were relatively heavy consumers of animal protein. In so far as these peoples continue to follow their traditional diet, their general level of health appears to be superior to that of their vegetarian neighbors. Protein and vitamin deficiencies are the rule, however, as Figures 38 and 39 show. By contrast, the supply of mineral salts is ade quate on the whole. Today, with the exception of pellagra, the classical de ficiency diseases are not frequently seen in fully developed form. Anemia is probably more often due to various protein deficiencies than to a simple iron deficiency. Endemic goiter is found in only a few places (e.g., Nigeria, Sierra Leone, the Belgian Congo and the Republic of Sudan). Rickets is rare in the bush, but is seen quite often in the children of town dwellers. Classical beriberi is also rare. Scurvy occurs sporadically and in occasional outbreaks. 61 However, signs of Vitamin A and ribo flavin deficiency are quite common. There is reason to believe that the burning feet trouble of which many people complain in west Africa is the result of a deficiency of pantothenic acid and that the common tropical ulcer of the leg may be associated with dietetic deficiency. Subclinical states of Vitamin B deficiency are very common. The most serious and prevalent deficiency diseases appear to be pellagra and kwashiorkor.
61 Carothers, op. cit., p. 59.

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F IG U R E 3 8 (After Atlas of Diseases, Map 1, Plate 9, Copy right 1953, American Geographical Society, New York)

F IG U R E 3 9 (After Atlas of Diseases, Map 2, Plate 9, Copy right 1953, American Geographical Society, New York)

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areas.

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Pellagra, according to Carothers, is seen from time to time in most

The classical triad of symptoms dermatitis, diarrhoea, and dementia occur in varying degrees . . . Many Africans must live on the brink of pel lagrous developments; and, in times of stress, such as famine, the onset of feverish illness, or the occurrence of mania, the full-fledged disease is apt to declare itself.0,2

Kwashiorkor is a disease of young children which is found in the carbo hydrate belts of west, central and east Africa, areas where it is very dif ficult to keep animals and where the staples consist of such things as manioc, banana and maize. It is characterized by failure of growth and development after weaning, waterlogging of the tissues, fatty degenera tion of the liver, skin rash, loss of kinkiness of the hair and change of hair color.6 3 The prevalence of the disease can be judged from the following opinion of Dr. John F. Brock, who headed a World Health Organization survey of the disease in tropical Africa:
In the small and primitive hospitals scattered between Zanzibar and Dakar there must at any given time be thousands of cases. F o r every case in hospital there are probably hundreds of equally severe cases scattered in the hinterland of inaccessible bush country. And for every case in hospital there are prob ably hundreds, if not thousands, of additional children whose health and vitality have been undermined . . . In Uganda, where the basic staple is cooked banana, it is possible that every child passes through a phase of kwashiorkor.64

In some areas the mortality from kwashiorkor for children in their second and third years has been put at between 60 and 70 per cent of the cases observed. Much of the widespread malnutrition could be avoided without diffi culty were it not for food taboos. These taboos were, and still are in many groups, strictly enforced. Unhappily, it is usually the women who are most hurt by them, often during pregnancy and childbirth when they can least afford to be deprived of nourishment. In some groups, a pregnant woman may not eat an animal that is timid by nature, lest the timidity be transmitted to her child. Following the same line of reasoning, some groups have ruled that she may not eat a plant, animal or fish of repulsive appearance. Certain caterpillars, grubs and termites are forbidden be cause of their association with webs, which by transference might make childbirth difficult. Eggs are widely forbidden because they are thought to interfere with childbearing and to cause sterility. In some groups, the milk given to a pregnant woman is diluted and the diet otherwise cur tailed, so that the baby shall be small and childbirth easier. In some other groups the drinking of milk is considered to cause barrenness or abortion,
62 Ibid., p. 60. 63 The hair frequently takes on a reddish hue. In Ghana, where the name was used first in medical literature, kwashiorkor means redheaded boy. 64 The Red-Headed Africans, Atlantic Monthly, December 1953, p. 69.

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or lack of milk in nursing mothers, and forbidden on these grounds. It is likely, of course, that women occasionally help themselves to forbidden food while unobserved, or pass it to their children. But no nutritionist doubts that the effect of food taboos has been evil, or that the same is true of totemism where this involves the foregoing of foodstuffs. GROUP TWO 1. Worm infections. The chief of the worm infections in this category is ascariasis, which, in Africa as a whole, is believed to infect no fewer than 60 million people. In tropical Africa, the infection can be found everywhere. Rates among children range between 80 and 100 per cent; those among adults are somewhat lower. Few areas are free from it, for, unlike many other worms, the ascarid (.Ascaris lumbricoides) is not averse to spells of cold and dryness in between the preferred spells of warmth and moisture. The worm is acquired by ingestion, travels via the intestine and the veins to the pulmonary circulation, whence it finds its way back to the stomach. It needs no intermediate host for its development. An indiscriminate and wholesale wrecker, it is capable of virtually obliterating the lumen of the bowel and the bile duct, of withdrawing critically large amounts of blood and other juices from the system, and of producing its own toxic secretions leading to allergy and intolerance phenomena. It can also cause intestinal obstruction, appendicitis and peritonitis. Other important worm infections acquired chiefly by ingestion, but re quiring an intermediate host, are: Taeniasis, which is very common in the Republic of Sudan and Nigeria and among the cattle-keeping populations of east Africa, Ruanda-Urundi, and the eastern and northern margins of the Congo basin. It is present, to a lesser degree, in almost all other sections where meat forms a part, if only small and infrequent, of the diet. Hydatidosis, a cystic disease of the dog and other domestic animals that may be contracted by man. There is a heavy focus of it in eastern Tanganyika. Paragonimiasis, a fluke (Paragonimus westermanii) infection found in parts of the Belgian Congo, the former French Equatorial Africa, Nigeria and Togo. It is caused by ingestion of the flukes intermediate host, usu ally a crab or crayfish, and leads to disorders of the respiratory organs. 2. Yaws occurs chiefly in populations living in the humid tropics. Children are particularly easy prey to it. Its principal foci appear to be located in the Republic of Sudan, British East Africa (Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika), the Rhodesias, in the coastal districts of Angola and Mozambique, in the Congo basin and on and near the coasts of the Bight of Benin westward to Sierra Leone. (See Figure 40.) It is caused by a spirochete closely resembling the spirochete of syphilis, but is not transmitted venereally. It is characterized by large, raspberry-like, dis-

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F IG U R E 4 0 (After Atlas of Diseases, Map 1, Plate 15, Copy right 1955, American Geographical Society, New York)

charging ulcers scattered over the whole body surface. The acute stage may be followed by an indolent infection of bones and skin. Among the resulting deformities is one known as goundou that gives the appearance of horns growing on the face. Yaws is almost always transmitted by direct contact from child to child or by indirect contact, as by handling material which has been in the possession of an infected person. Once it has estab lished a foothold in a community it can quickly assume epidemic proportions. 3. Intestinal disorders. Intestinal disorders in this category derive mainly from amoebic and bacillary dysentery, and typhoid and para typhoid fever. There is good reason to believe that the distribution of both types of dysentery, in both their epidemic and endemic forms, was virtually pantropical in the old Africa. Amoebic dysentery, which is characterized by a chronic ulcerative colitis with or without symptoms of acute diarrhoea, is spread by the ingestion of food or water containing the cysts of the amoeba. Wherever vegetable gardens are fertilized by night soil, wher ever water is polluted by defecation, or wherever there are flies, or cystinfected hands are allowed to prepare foods, amoebic dysentery is a potential and usually a present troublemaker. Bacillary dysentery is caused by various strains of bacilli, which are capable of inducing a more

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or less acute condition characterized by raised temperature, griping pains and bloodstained diarrhoea. The common house fly is its biggest abettor and a warm moist climate its best field of operations. Typhoid and paratyphoid fevers likewise are water-borne and occur very widely over tropical Africa. Their chief endemic foci appear to be in the Omdurman region of the Republic of Sudan, in Uganda, Tangan yika, Nyasaland, Northern Rhodesia, the Belgian Congo, and in the former French Equatorial and French West African territories. The death rate is variable, but was usually high before the days of modern medicines. 4. Pneumonia is exceedingly common and severe in the African. Ac cording to Gelfand,65 The two main types of pneumonia lobar and bronchopneumonia together form perhaps the most common cause of sickness and death in tropical Africa. As recently as 1928, 31 per cent of the reported infant deaths in Lagos, the Nigerian capital, were due to bronchopneumonia and allied pulmonary conditions. There is reason to suppose that the mortality from pneumonia in many areas was higher than this. 5. Ulcers. One does not need to be a physician to accept Dr. Mays statement that it is practically impossible to find in tropical Africa "a single individual who does not show either a trace of, or an active chronic, ulceration on one part or other of his body. Many of the diseases already considered, and some still to be considered, cause breakages of the skin that, in the absence of treatment, quickly become centers of infection. Though precise clinical records are available only for a few local centers, Dr. May believes that ulcers of one kind or another "constitute more than 50 per cent of the case-load of outpatient clinics, and between 20 and 30 per cent of the chronic cases which have to be taken care of in hospitals and dispensaries. The kind known as tropical ulcer one of the most widespread is an acute, rapidly progressing local gangrene of skin and muscle (even bone) caused by a spirochete. Those affected by it become anemic and emaci ated. In the young and debilitated, tropical ulcer is sometimes a con tributory cause of death. 6. Venereal diseases. It is customary to lay the blame for the presence of venereal diseases in primitive lands at the door of the intruder. And it is more than likely that the penetration of these diseases into almost every corner of tropical Africa owes much to the early explorers, soldiers, traders and slavers. However they were brought, venereal diseases have been a very long time in the land. The most important of them are syphilis and gonorrhea, but, according to Dr. May, there is no way of establishing their incidence because of the nonchalance with which most Africans accept venereal disease. Most of the victims, he believes, either seek help from their own pharmacopoeias or ignore the symptoms. On the
65 See Carothers, op. cit., p. 29.

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whole, the incidence of both diseases would seem to be highest in the towns and along the main labor migration routes, and lowest in the bush, where tribal restraints are strongest. GROUP THREE 1. Plague occurs in three major forms pneumonic, bubonic and septicemic and also in a minor form. In its major forms the mortality is very high, frequently reaching 100 per cent in the case of pneumonic plague. The disease occurs in the following areas: near the western shore of Lake Albert in the Belgian Congo, in the vicinity of the equator in Uganda, in the Kikuyu country of Kenya, in the Central, Southern Highlands, Lake and Northern provinces of Tanganyika, in the regions lying to the north and northeast of Luangwa and straddling the Zambezi in Barotseland, Northern Rhodesia, and in parts of Angola, Nyasaland and Mozambique. In all of these areas, plague, which is transmitted by rat fleas, is endemic, numbers of cases being reported almost every year. The disease has also been reported from time to time in Nigeria (around Lagos), in the southern section of Ghana, and in the former French West Africa (to the north and south of the mouth of the Senegal River). 2. Rickettsial diseases are caused by the presence in the blood or cells of the reticulo-endothelial system of one or other varieties of a micro organism belonging to the Rickettsia group. Many of these diseases are grouped together as typhus. (See Figure 41.) Each clinical variety of typhus is caused by a particular Rickettsia, transmitted by its own vector. Louse-borne typhus is more prevalent in the cooler parts of Africa, and in the cooler seasons. Its chief foci are in the uplands of Ruanda-Urundi, Uganda, Ethiopia and the adjacent parts of the Sudan as far west as the Nile. It has also occurred in Nigeria and, paradoxically, in Sierra Leone, which is one of the hotter parts of Africa and has no cool season to speak of. F lea-borne typhus, on the other hand, is more prevalent in the hot parts. The only territories from which it has not been reported are Nyasaland, Mozambique and Angola, and there is no reason to suppose that absence of reports in these territories means absence of typhus. Tick-borne typhus occurs in two forms spotted fever and Q fever both of which are found in Africa. The home of the tick is the savanna. The chief foci are in the Republic of Sudan (Gezira and Juba districts most notably) and in east Africa from Ruanda-Urundi and Uganda southward to Mozam bique and Northern Rhodesia. It has also been reported from the more open parts of the Congo basin, from Nigeria (the Jos Plateau) and else where in west Africa. Mite-borne typhus, the fourth major form, has only rarely been reported in tropical Africa. The severer cases of typhus fever are usually louse-borne and of the epidemic type. Such cases are frequently characterized by delirium. But,

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F IG U R E 4 1 (After Atlas of Diseases, Plate 11, Copyright 1954, American Geographical Society, New York)

taking the disease as a whole, it is not strikingly common, according to Carothers,66 and most of its victims recover without serious aftereffects. 3. Yellow fever is an infection caused by the introduction into the human host of a virus carried by various types of mosquito, the commonest being Aedes egyptii. Before 1930 it was reported to exist only in a narrow coastal belt extending from the mouth of the Senegal River to the southern border of Angola and in the Belgian Congo. After it became possible to discover evidence of previous, perhaps forgotten, infection by the presence of antibodies in the blood of men and animals, it was realized that the disease extended as far as the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. Endemic areas as outlined by the World Health Organization are shown in Fig ure 42. Recently cut-over forest areas are believed to provide some of the most favorable conditions for human infection. The disease is usually mild, but high-mortality outbreaks do occur from time to time. In the Sudanese outbreak of 1940 about 11 per cent of all those infected died. 4. Relapsing fevers are caused by the introduction into the human host of several species of spirochete, the commonest African species being S. duttoni. These spirochetes can be carried to man either by lice or by ticks. Louse-borne relapsing fever , like louse-borne typhus, is a disease of the tropical uplands and of the clothed, lice-infected and water-shy in60

Op. cit.y p. 32.

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F IG U R E 4 2 (After Atlas of Diseases, Plate 5, Copyright 1952, American Geographical Society, New York)

habitants of crowded compounds. Tick-borne relapsing fever, like tickborne typhus, is a disease of the savannas. Neither disease is believed to be as widespread nowadays as it was formerly, but tick-borne relapsing fever is still contracted by the unwary visitor, with dire consequences, in a dozen regions stretching from Kenya to Senegal and from Ruanda-Urundi to Katanga. In Africans either form of the disease is usually, though by no means always, mild. It is clinically much like malaria, and the diagnosis is commonly made only by accident on finding the spirochaete in the blood. 6 7 5. Smallpox, a virus disease, is likely to occur anywhere in the world, and still does, where public health control is insufficient or impossible. Of its two major forms, the severe (Asiatic) form carries a mortality of between 60 and 80 per cent. Both the mild and the severe forms are found in tropical Africa. What the incidence of the disease was before vaccina tion we have no means of knowing, but even today the reported incidence is distressingly high in some territories. Thus, from 1,500 to 6,500 cases a year are still being reported in the Belgian Congo, and from 3,000 to 7,000 cases a year in each of the Rhodesias, Nyasaland and Tanganyika. 6. Cerebrospinal meningitis is the result of human infection by a coccus and, until the discovery of the sulfonamides and antibiotics, it
67 Ibid.

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carried a 70 to 90 per cent fatality risk. It still is a major cause of death in tropical Africa, especially in the woody and grassy savanna zones. In the first six months of 1951 nearly 11,000 cases were reported in French Equatorial Africa, 27 per cent of them proving fatal. In the Ivory Coast more than 12,500 cases were reported in 1945, 26 per cent of them proving fatal. There have also been serious outbreaks in recent years in the Re public of Sudan, British East Africa, the Rhodcsias, Mozambique, Angola and the Belgian Congo. We could go on with the narration of traditional African diseases for skin cancers, polio and cardiovascular disorders must, it appears, be numbered among them but the account is already long enough and depressing enough, in all conscience. If any man has lived in the valley of the shadow of death, it is the African. We might go further and say, in the robust language of a nineteenth-century bishop, that the African was not born into the world; he was damned into it This heritage may not explain everything about the African that many people find tiresome, but it should surely give us a lot of sympathy for him.

CHAPTER

15

Social Change
CAUSES MAJ OR C H A R A C T E R I S T I C S THREE C AS E S T U D I E S

THE TREND

To

t h o s e of us whose acquaintance with primitive man is largely derived from Sunday afternoon strolls through the local museum, the concept of a changeable, and ever-changing, primitive society may seem a little fanciful. We tend to think of primitive man as we think of the recon structed dinosaur, namely, as an example of natures failure to keep up with the times. Like the dinosaur, he must have lacked the power of adaptation and so became obsolete a fossil. In most cases, we could hardly be further from the truth. Man, primitive or otherwise, lives not in a museum but in a laboratory. He does not accept his environment as animals do; he experiments with it, in the hope of making it more livable, more comfortable and more secure. This is as true of the Bushman who by wide consent is one of natures most backward children as it is of the Bantu or the Bostonian.

CAUSES Measured by the inflated standards of our age, the changes wrought in the fabric of a primitive society as the result of experiment are generally small. Over a period of a hundred years they would be unlikely to involve anything more than, say, the refinement of a tree-felling technique, the development of a better firing clay, the discovery of a speedier pain killer, the acceptance of a new code of sexual conduct for unmarried youths none of which would make much of a showing in a museum. But the will to change is almost always there, and so, almost always, is the capacity to change with changes in the pressures that bear upon the society.
53

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These pressures are both external and internal. They can be generated as readily by somebody elses greed as by ones own hunger. They can be built up as effectively by periodic visitations of locusts as by outbreaks of sleeping sickness. Conquest by a powerful neighbor has often been as good a way to infiltrate a new cultural trait as competition among ones own kin for the possession of a prized piece of land. What George R. Horner, a contributor to this study, has written about the Bulu (see pp. 65-72) is of wide applicability. Change was the norm, the expected. There was a constant intrusion of elements from other African cultures and a competitive pattern of life that led to frequent shifts of fortune and material wealth. This perhaps was just as well; at least it helped to cushion the shock of that greatest of all intrusions, the white mans conquest and colonization of the region. But no African-made cushion was proof against the shock of a thousand shellbursts. It required more than a tradition of gradual change to pre pare the Stone Age rain forest dweller for the arrival overnight of the Iron Age, the Air Age and the Electronic Age, and the social furnishings that went with them. The qualities needed to cope with a decline in tribal fortunes, with the recovery of a stolen herd of cattle, with the loss by fire of ones belongings, are of a very different order from those needed to cope with an invasion from an outside world as foreign in its resources, skills and ideas as the world of Flash Gordon from that of mankind. It is one thing for equals or near-equals living in the same world to exchange ideas and habits on the basis of a leisurely observation of their social efficacy in given situations. It is a very different thing for societies as unequal in power, speed of evolution, and sophistication as those of the Stone Age and the Electronic Age to do so. There were no engines, no assembly lines, no housing developments, no central government, no hospitals, no Christianity, no police forces in the Africans world. Then again, whereas social change among equals or near-equals is more a matter of option than compulsion (most African reformers have tended to run out of zeal rather quickly), between people as unevenly matched as African tribesman and European townsman, the acceptance of change by the weaker party becomes virtually essential to his survival. The man who does not work in a European-run community does not find it easy to marry; for where will he secure the bride wealth if not in the Europeans house, mine or factory? The group that does not raise cash crops cannot raise the taxes that are needed to run the local government that is needed to maintain a safe water supply, serviceable roads, schools and clinics. And the tribe that does not renounce its grosser malprac tices cannibalism, sorcery, the raiding of its neighbors, and the like can scarcely hope to convince its rulers of its readiness to graduate into the world of free men. As the association between the two worlds lengthens, the causes of

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social change become more numerous, complex and subtle. No longer is it simply, or even mainly, a matter of change by necessity the necessity of earning more money to buy more goods to employ more people to raise more revenue to finance more schemes. At least four other important factors are at work. There is the initiative of government and private agencies in providing better homes and services frequently out of non-African money. Much of the Colonial Development and Welfare money, raised by the British government from its taxpayers, has been used for such purposes, to the evident social gain of rural groups in British West and East Africa, Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland. The Fonds du Bien-Etre Indigene and the Fonds du Roi in the Belgian Congo and FERDES (Fonds dEquipement Rural et de Developpement Economique et Social) in French Africa have served similar ends. So have the individually smaller but cumulatively large social undertakings of the mining companies of Northern Rhodesia, the Belgian Congo and elsewhere. Closely related is the idealism of those who see in Christianity the answer to all that is base and debasing in indigenous African cultures. It is an idealism that has come to be shared as much by Africans as by nonAfricans and is almost certainly the greatest single force for social change in tropical Africa. Christianity has no monopoly of social idealism, it is true, but it takes a strong breed of idealism to flourish in the African climate, and not even its harshest critics are disposed to doubt that Christianity is such a breed. Following hard on the heels of these comes incentive, much of it the progeny of initiative and idealism. The government builds a house one with plumbing and electricity, privacy and security a better house than the African has ever known. The missionary evangelist, educator, counselor and living witness shows how a man and his family may lead a fuller life in that house. An incentive is thereby born one that has already spurred miners and factory workers in a hundred plants to exchange the tribe-centered, custom-hallowed society of the bush for the still fluid multitribal and often multiracial associations of the town. An industrial corporation the Rhodesian Selection Trust, to name only one of many which have taken the initiative in such matters builds a social center for its African workers. A European, Africa-born welfare worker of high ideals and uncommon sense is appointed to run it. But soon it is the Africans who are doing most of the running of its soccer and gym nastic teams, its dance band, glee club and stage group. Properly handled, the African finds it difficult not to respond to the incentives of competitive enterprise and good companionship. Some incentives are of poorer parentage, alas. More than a little of the social change to be observed in tropical Africa today appears to stem from a desire to keep up with the Joneses, African and non-African, in their failings as well as their virtues. Conspicuous consumption of alcoholic

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beverages is no longer confined to the well-to-do Europeans. Nominal Christianity, long good enough for many Europeans, is now good enough for many African converts. European indifference to the feelings and rights of others has contributed to many an Africans failure to keep the second half of the Decalogue. On the side of virtue, let it be said that the incentive to keep up appears to be in no small way responsible for the desire of many Africans to give their children, girls and boys alike, the best education that money can buy in Europe or North America if need be and their womenfolk the kind of consideration commonly given by Europeans to theirs. A no less important factor making for social change is the emergence of money as the symbol of wealth and its by-products, power and prestige. Until recently, there stood on the walls of the Protestant Chapel of Makerere College in Kampala, Uganda, a painting of the Resurrection in which Christ was portrayed as a fat and prosperous Baganda chief. It was a competent piece of work, to be sure, but in the eyes of many who saw it one more becoming to a Chamber of Commerce than to a chapel. As a por tent it did not stand alone, for in the same province of Buganda easily the most prosperous province in Uganda the Laubach each one teach one method of teaching illiterates has proved almost a total failure . . . because the people who had had their first lesson wanted to know how much they would be paid if they passed their knowledge on. 1 The times have certainly changed.
In the old days personal wealth was in a form that set a very severe limit to selfishness. A chief might own a hundred times as many cows as a peasant, and his lands might be a hundred times more extensive. . . . But all [the] outward signs of his wealth and power were communal. In one sense all [his] wives and retainers were his chattels, but it was also true that they were his dependants. Inevitably wealth meant responsibility and its benefits had to be shared. Very little of it could be used for private indulgence. You cant put your cattle in your pocket, but you can put your cash there and when your pockets are full of it you can put all the rest in the bank. Money made possible for the first time an irresponsible wealth . . .2

In a land lacking the tradition of chivalry (African folk tales are more often tales of cunning than of rescue and sacrifice), and producing no St. Francis of Assisi, no Florence Nightingale and no Albert Schweitzer, it may prove difficult to stop the root of all evil from undermining the social structure. Already, there are evidences that it is weakening it. To name only a few: the dash, or commission, demanded for almost any service rendered, from the awarding of a multi-million-dollar road con tract to the giving of a bedpan in a hospital ward; the propping up of ailing enterprises, personal and corporate, with improperly acquired funds; the unethical use of hospital supplies and other species of white
1 The Reverend John V. Taylor of the Church Missionary Society in Uganda, in a lecture ( September 1955) given at the Ecumenical Institute, Bossey, Switzerland. 2 Ibid .

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mans magic (which may be one reason why even le grand docteur of Lambarene always carries his keys with him); and the reluctance of many African college graduates to take jobs that do not pay well, or promise to pay well very soon. Maybe none of these things greatly matters, as some of the new intelligentsia contend; maybe the foundations of African society are too strong to be undermined by a little selfishness and a little corrup tion. But if they are, they must surely be very strong stronger than any that have gone before, whether in ancient Greece or medieval Ghana. Fortunately, there is a brighter side to the picture. Though tropical Africa has yet produced no Schweitzer, Nightingale or Saint, it has pro duced an Aggrey (one of the founding fathers of Achimota College in Ghana), a Waruhiu (the Kikuyu chief of Kiambu, Kenya, martyred by the Mau Mau for his Christian faith) and a Prester John. It has also pro duced many young men and women as almost any government and mission schoolteacher can testify who are putting service to their people above personal advantage, and righteousness before the applause of the crowd. Perhaps African folk tales a thousand years hence will even in clude a cycle on the Twentieth Century Knights of the Round Table.

MAJOR CH ARACTERISTICS

Magnitude
The most advertised characteristic of African social change is its magni tude. Students of the social sciences are constantly telling us that there is scarcely a tribe or a family in the whole of tropical Africa that lives today as it did a generation ago, or a field of investigation that does not repay a periodical going over for the evidences of change it discloses. Some of these evidences have been referred to in Volume I: the break down of old food taboos; the rise of new trades, towns and means of transport, and the new physical and economic mobility that results from it; the modification of indigenous cropping practices, and of the land tenure systems that went with them; the less general but significant modi fication of such indigenous practices as the keeping of cattle for currency, and pastoral nomadism; the increasing importance of women in com mercial life; and the development of new forms of association, such as the cooperative society. But the scope of the change is much wider than this. Consider the Africans home, for instance. While most homes continue to be fashioned of traditional materials in the traditional way and pattern, increasing numbers, even in remote villages, are being built in the style of the simple European home. Single-story dwellings with two or three rooms, they are made of brick or cement slab, galvanized iron, plaster, planed or pressed wood, equipped with some plumbing and perhaps electric light, and furnished with beds, chairs, a kitchen table and dresser, curtains and

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linoleum. In the better-class African homes, in such towns as Leopoldville, Accra and Dakar, it is not unusual to find a kitchen range, an icebox, a shelf of books, and a radio or a portable phonograph with powers of endurance equaled only by the nerves of those who listen to it. Even in the bush it is exceptional to come upon a home that does not have some untraditional feature, such as an iron bedstead, pages from an American news magazine used as wallpaper, or castoff gasoline cans used to brew native beer. Consider, too, the personal and family life of the African. True, the impress of the past upon it is still plainly seen in most groups in such diverse culture traits as lineage systems, age groups or sets, fertility rituals and rituals relating to puberty, marriage and the other great epochs of life, prayer to ones ancestors, hair styles, and the decoration of clay pots and dugout canoes. But its outlines are becoming blurred, at some points to the extent of being hardly recognizable. The clothes an African wears are, with rare exceptions, no longer those of his own making or design. At least part of the food he eats is likely to have been raised by hands other than his or his familys; and some of his most highly prized panaceas are likely to be pills and potions no witch doctor ever thought of. Instead of having two or more wives, he may have but one. The work he does for at least part of the time is of a kind for which there is no tribal precedent; it is of a kind, moreover, that frequently needs to be done away from home and in company with men of other tribes. It follows that for part of his time a man is depaysS if not detribalized, footloose if not fancy-free, and able to forget his status role often with results as damaging to his health and integrity as to the cohesion of his family. As for his wife, the chances are that she works harder than if she were in a polygynous household because there are fewer hands to help her; that she has little in common with her husband since his concerns are no longer solely those of the local clan; and still less in common with her children, who, most likely, spend part of their early years pursuing the white mans learning, of which she has no more than an inkling. Of course, not all wives stay at home these days. Numbers of them go along with their husbands, living at or near their place of work. In Leopoldville alone there are quarters for more than 40,000 married couples, and many of them have been occupied by the same tenants for years on end. For the women, as for the men, the move to a town or a mining compound means more than a change of place. It means new ties and relationships, and difficulty in making them because of linguistic and sociological differences; new ways of doing things, such as drawing water from taps, washing the baby with soap, and disposing of human waste in a flush toilet. Often it means no way of doing things that have always been done by women, such as growing the familys food and running initiation schools and other kinds of secret organizations. In ability to do these things can result in a considerable loss of prestige.

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The changes in home and family have been accompanied by changes of similar magnitude in the community. The kind of society desired by most modern African governments calls for cooperation on a bigger scale and in more ways than were needed in the days of tribal autonomy. The administering of public programs, such as the building of roads, bridges and dams, the securing of watersheds against erosion, and the control of mosquitoes, locusts and other pests, calls for cooperation by large inter tribal groups rather than small clans. So does the raising of money to finance such programs. So also does the organization of peasant cash crop economies capable of competing, as they must, with the highly capitalized and well-run economies of older lands. What is true of these largely nonpolitical concerns is true of political ones. Democracy may begin at home in the grassroots of the family, clan and tribe but it needs the winds and rains of a wider domain to make it strong. In these days especially, democratic governments need all the good men they can find to come to the aid of the party, and no one tribe has enough of them. All of this helps to explain the coming into existence in recent years of the local district council and treasury, the voluntary self-help associa tion, the mass literacy and adult education movement, the cooperative society, the political party, and both regional and federal forms of government.

Speed
A no less striking characteristic of African social change, in the opinion of many, is the speed with which it has come about. Certainly it is not difficult to find supporting evidence. Thus, it is still less than a hundred years since David Livingstone witnessed (1871) the massacre by slavers of 300 to 400 market people mostly women on the banks of the Lualaba River. It is less than seventy years since the British came upon the last evidence of wholesale human sacrifice in Nigeria (1897 in Benin City). It is less than sixty years since the last slave caravan was inter cepted (1903) in what is now the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. And there are Africans still living in that territory who clearly remember seeing the man who fathered the Federation, Cecil John Rhodes. There is scarcely a theme of African life on which some rapid changes have not been rung. An instance may be cited from education. A few miles outside Nairobi there is a boarding school the Alliance High School for 200 African boys, drawn from all parts of Kenya. In eleven years down to 1955, only one boy had failed to graduate, and the next year he passed the graduating examination which was the same as that sat for by thousands of the brighter products of British schools. Nearly half the graduates, averaging fifty a year, received the equivalent of a straight A. In such matters as athletic, musical and theatrical ability, industry, courtesy and courage, nearly all of them, in the opinion of the

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headmaster, would have stood comparison with their European counter parts. But what is perhaps most significant from our standpoint is the fact that nearly all of them were only one generation removed from total illiteracy. Until they went to this school they knew practically nothing of the meaning of money. Few of them came from homes where either books or newspapers were regularly read, or where there was any intelligent conversation beyond that necessary for the conduct of domestic affairs. And this school, though a leader in its field, is by no means untypical of what has been happening elsewhere, in almost every territory. To cite another instance: down to the early 1940s there was only one institution in the whole of tropical Africa where students could do work of university caliber, namely, Fourah Bay College, at Freetown, Sierra Leone. Today more than a dozen such institutions exist in almost as many territories. Similarly impressive statistics can be gleaned in the field of health and health services. Whereas at the turn of the century less than half of all west African children are believed to have lived to their first birthday, today the ratio is nearer seven out of ten, and in some areas (e.g., Lagos, Nigeria) more than nine out of ten. And whereas in the first five years of the present century the number of people killed by sleeping sickness in Uganda was of the order of 100,000, in the first five years after mid-century the number killed by it in the same territory was almost certainly less than 100.3 Several other territories can point to equally dramatic declines in a wide range of diseases. In the field of government administration there have likewise been changes as conspicuous for their speed as for their size. It goes without saying that at the beginning of the present century there were no ballot boxes, no political parties, and, beyond Liberia and Ethiopia, no autono mous governments. No Africans held posts in any colonial administration, and very few in any civil service above the rank of clerk. And there was as yet no serious talk of partnership, let alone self-government. Today, regular elections are held in a score of the major territories; there are 10 million qualified electors in Nigeria alone, and in the region as a whole not less than 40 million. Of the major territories, five (Liberia, Guinea, Ghana, the Republic of Sudan and Ethiopia) are (1959) sovereign. Five (Nigeria, the French Cameroons, Togo, the Belgian Congo and Somalia) are to become sovereign in 1960. Several other territories are self-govern ing entities of the French Community; Southern Rhodesia is a selfgoverning British colony. Most of the rest have at least a measure of con trol over their internal affairs. In almost all of them the Africanizing process in the civil service, business, industry and the professions is pro ceeding about as fast as the supply of Europeanized Africans will allow.
3 Notified deaths from sleeping sickness during this quinquennium averaged less than two a year, according to the Annual Report of the Medical Department [of the Uganda Protectorate] for the year ended 31st December 1955 , Government Printer, Entebbe, 1957, p. 14.

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Many of the leaders thrown up by these rising political tides would scarcely be recognized by their own fathers. Some of them would have difficulty in recognizing themselves as they were ten or twenty years ago, so great is the change wrought in them by the changes around them. What is frequently as striking as the speed of social change is its ac celeration. In the 1920s and 1930s the speed of change in education, social welfare and government was barely more than a trot, even on the fastest African courses. It was fast only by comparison with the customary tempo of African life. Since World War II, on the same courses, it has become a gallop that gives the spectators almost as much to think about as the riders, and keeps the backers in a state of nerves. And more horses are getting into the field all the time. Statistics of change, like those of horse racing, are apt to obey the law of diminishing returns. But, since it is impossible to measure acceleration without them, one or two more must be cited. For our first example we take the growth of what the Belgians call the 'population extra-coutumiere, the population living outside the tribal area. At the beginning of the century not a single Congolese African, it may be safely said, resided outside his tribal area. Not only would he have been scared to, but he would have had no way of making an honest living outside. As late as the outbreak of World War II fewer than a million Congolese were living extra-tribally. By 1951, however, 2 million, and by 1959 more than 3 mil lion approximately 25 per cent of the total African population in the Belgian Congo were living away from their tribes. For a second illustration we go to Uganda, and to an expression of change that is perhaps as much economic as social, namely, the growth of the cooperative movement. The figures speak for themselves: the number of cooperative societies (exclusive of producers marketing unions) in creased from 118 in 1947 to 1,423 in 1957; membership surged from 7,447 to 136,172 between the same years; and working capital grew more than fivefold, from less than 20,000 to more than T00,000.4 But one must not get the impression that everyone African, Asian and European alike is happy about the changes taking place, or that everyone has been greatly changed by them. On the contrary; if there are two things as certain as the magnitude and speed of the changes taking place in the social life of tropical Africa, they are the patchiness of the change and the superficial look of much of it.

Uneven Incidence
Some areas show far fewer evidences of social change than others. Put a traveler down among the tribal peoples of the great escarpment country of Ethiopia and he might think that he was back in the sixteenth century
4 Cooperative Information Bulletin for the British Commonwealth, various issues (published by the Cooperative Union Ltd., Manchester, England).

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with Pedro de Covilham and his Portuguese colleagues who wrote of them. If he should see these people coming toward him with garlands of flowers round their necks and playing pan pipes, he might feel even more at home reading a book of Greek mythology. A traveler wr ould also have no difficulty in finding stubborn unlaid ghosts in such out-of-theway places as the southern shore of Lake Rudolf in northern Kenya, where the El Molo tribe, one of the smallest in Africa, seemingly prefers ex tinction to change; in the Kalahari Desert, where the Bushman still uses the cupids bow in his love-making ritual and often manages still to live without any of the white mans aids; and in the Lobi country deep in the interior of the Ivory Coast, where the custom that sons murder either their fathers or mothers to prove their manhood is still honored when the authorities arent looking. Nor would a traveler need to go as far as this from civilization to find the past. He could find it on the airfield at Malakal in the Sudan, if by chance a Dinka had chosen to graze his herd around its margins; for a Dinka continues to make few concessions to the Western view of propriety and none where clothing is concerned. He could find it in the Aberdare Mountains of Kenya, within sight of Nairobi on a good day; for it is here that the Mau Mau had their hide-outs and conjured up the witches of a pagan past. He could see whole panoramas of the past from the windows of a train running through the Middle Belt of Nigeria or the back country of Angola. On the other hand, put a traveler down in Leopoldvilles western suburb of Kalina and no amount of familiarity with Stanleys travels would enable him to identify it as the place where the explorer persuaded some 400 Congolese chiefs to sign treaties of friendship. For almost everything about Kalina except the climate is a cultural import. Its houses and apart ments are built in the style favored in Palm Beach and Miami. Its streets are well paved and lined with shade trees as few indigenous village roads are. Its shops are stocked with high-quality products of European and North American factories. Its restaurants feature the finest in im ported foods. Its places of worship and its schools are of Belgian design and Palestinian inspiration. Or put the traveler down in Kampala, Uganda, near the Kabakas En closure, with a copy of John Hanning Spekes Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile, and about the only things to strike him as familiar would be the fence of tall yellow reeds of the common Uganda tiger grass around the palace, the regal hauteur of the womenfolk about its gates, and the very general liking for a potent native beer known as pombe. As to the rest the four-storied Bulange (the parliament building of the Kabakas government) equipped with electricity and a public address system; the hilltop cathedrals, Protestant and Catholic; Makerere College with its many-styled halls of learning and leisure rampant on a

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field of green, its English-speaking student body drawn from eighty tribal backgrounds and living in the manner hallowed by centuries of British academic convention; and, not less important, the business quarter, where Europeans, Asians and Africans match wares and wits, stir the poor mans imagination with pictures of plumbing and flatter the rich mans pride with talk of the latest in fashions for himself and his wife all this and much more is out of Spekes world. The same could be said of any of a hundred other cities. And not of cities only; there are countrysides in which the traveler of earlier days would be hard put to it to find his social bearings. In much of the Kikuyu country of Kenya, for instance, dispersed settle ment has given place to nucleated settlement. This villagization pro gram, originally intended as a security device against Mau Mau terrorists, has proved so widely acceptable that a whole new way of African life is being built around it. To reduce the walking time to and from the charac teristically scattered bits of farm land (which was increased for most farmers as a result of the program), the Kenya government has been push ing through a parallel program of land consolidation by exchange. Many hundreds of square miles of Kikuyuland have already been divided into compact small holdings to which owners have a clear title and on which they can more readily apply the principles of good husbandry and so make more money to support, among other things, the greatly improved services now being made available to the villagers. Each of the larger villages has a health clinic, a clean and reliable water supply, a school, a recreation center and a church. The shops are much better than those found in the bush, where the turnover is slow and consequently the range of offerings small. In most villages babies formerly back-loaded almost every where can be left at day nurseries in charge of trained sitters while their mothers are at work in the fields. Many villages have facilities to train women in hygiene, housekeeping and greatest innovation of all! ball playing. For the men the villagization program means change, too: more scope for the leaders among them to show their quality, and more reason for the led to see that the quality is good; closer touch with the outside world by means of radio, newssheets, pep talks, and the comings and goings of neighbors; firmer discipline, but more distractions; more problems, but higher hopes. Many other rural communities provide equally notable evidences of change. Some, like those of the Gezira in the Republic of Sudan and the upper Niger valley in the Sudanese Republic (formerly French Sudan), vir tually owe their existence to the white mans initiative. Frequently the only things the people attracted to such developments have in common are their tiredness, poverty, wretchedness and yearning to be free. The welding of such people into cohesive groups inevitably calls for social improvisation. Other communities have undergone an economic meta morphosis in the case of the Kipsigis of Kenya, from nomadic pas-

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toralists to sedentary farmers. No community can make such a break, involving its internal and external relationships, without rewriting parts of its social testament. Then there are many communities, mostly small, that have embraced Christianity as a living faith. In them, the New Testament has become the guide to both belief and conduct. And any community that takes the New Testament for its guide quickly finds itself in the midst of social change of the most radical kind.

Superficiality
When we have said all this, however, the fact remains that we have been talking only about minorities, and that among these much of the evident change has a superficial, or topped-up, look about it. As for the majorities, in most cases they continue to think of themselves as belong ing to the old social order. To most of the cattle-keeping Masai, for instance, the world of classroom, clinic, lathe, legislative assembly and Christian church is still as foreign as the world of their crop-raising neighbors, the Kikuyu and Chagga. They want to have as little to do with either as possible, and as a rule they have their wish. So, too, the pygmies of the Congo basin forest. From time to time they may do some light work for the local commandant, but they show little desire to live like him, or to trade the seclusion of their hutments for the exposure of his housing projects. Nor is this point of view held only by herders and hunters. Tens of thousands of cultivators find that the newcomers homes, offices, workshops, mines and plantations where they sometimes work as laborers are new jungles sources of food and excitement, but also of fear and trouble, frequently coming to them in the guise of sickness. As soon as they can conveniently do so, they go back home, taking with them such symbols of their prowess as they have managed to come by. They have been in the new world, but they are not of it; to all appearances, they are not much interested in becoming part of it. But what of those who have come to think of themselves, or to be thought of, as changed men, and as being the product of the white mans world as much as of their own? Of these, it is arguable that many per haps a majority are still commuters, citified Westerners one week, bush Africans the next, their permanent address and roots being still deep in the country. They may live as Europeans do, work as they do and worship as they do, but after a while the European mantle slips from their shoulders and they are children of the African earth again until they weary of the role or are forced to abandon it temporarily. Many miners, machine shop workers, clerks and artisans "commute in this fashion; many doctors, lawyers, teachers and other professional men find it easy and pleasant to do the same, though not, it would seem, without impair ment of their skills.

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And what of those who have done with the bush, who never leave the world of the European? They may be lost to the tribe, but rarely are they lost to the world of the tribe and rarely do they seek to be. Peter Abra hams, himself an Africa-born negro, makes this point very clearly in his A Wreath for Udomo. Set in a west African territory called Pluralia, and reading in places like an eye-witness account of social change in the Gold Coast of the early 1950s, the story is largely framed around the dual personality of a promising young politician, Mhendi, who could never forget that there were two Pluralias. He was torn between two worlds, that of the cities and the white men and that of the countryside and the old tribal ways. And though I had been to school in the cities and had gone to Europe, I was still a son of the tribe. They couldnt think of me as anything but a son of the tribe. I couldnt outrage my old fathers great dreams. 5 Meanwhile it seems that plenty of Africans are less fastidious, taking what they fancy from the foreigner and also keeping what they fancy of their own, much as children do when faced with a supply of new toys which they have not space to stow. And as with children, the things they fancy frequently provide the student with a wonderful field for sociologi cal and psychological inquiry. More important, they frequently provide the advocate of early political autonomy with a shock. For no man is greatly changed by acts of parliament, by grant of license to teach or to practice law, by adoption of another mans dress, or even by the rite of baptism into another mans religion. How he is changed in depth in his thinking and feeling, his values and judgments is beyond our com petence to tell; but of one thing we can be sure: time is a factor in the process. In most of tropical Africa, there apparently hasnt yet been enough time. TH R EE CASE STU D IES To catch the real meaning of social change, one must see it at work in whole communities. Of the many communities that might be studied with advantage, three have been chosen, partly because they have been investigated at great length and partly because they typify three of the most general situations in tropical Africa today. A RAIN FOREST GROUP The indigenous inhabitants of the section of the equatorial rain forest which lies in and adjacent to the French Cameroons belong to a number of negroid groups distinguishable more by the languages and dialects they speak more than a hundred in number than by the way they live. The following account of these people is derived from a paper writ5 Op. cit., Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1956, p. 22.

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ten for our study by George R. Horner. Horner believes that, with the exception of the coastal fishing groups, they all belong to the same culture group, since they have all had the same kind of economic and social or ganization, and much the same general views about the nature of the world in which they live and their place in it. They also traditionally fol lowed the same livelihoods hunting (for small game as a rule) and the cultivating by the usual bush-fallowing methods of such subsistence crops as yam, manioc and banana. They formerly did little trading, as their surpluses were few and unreliable; and they seldom went far from home, partly because of fear6 and partly because of linguistic difficulties. Among the more important of these groups are the Fang and the Bulu.7 During the past fifty to seventy-five years these forest dwellers, like all other colonized peoples, have come to accept the fact of interference. They have become accustomed to the exactions (mostly small) of the com mandant, the ministrations (mostly welcome) of the mission teacher, pas tor and doctor, and the pushing and shoving of the entrepreneur (mostly unavoidable). Many of them, too, have become accustomed to living in towns, without which the white man or so it seems to them can do nothing well. Chief among such towns are Douala, Yaounde and Kribi in the French Cameroons; Bata in Spanish Guinea; Bangui in the Central African Republic (the onetime province of Ubangi-Shari); and Libreville and Port Gentil in the Gabon Republic. Those still by far the great majority who continue to live in the forests have become accustomed to the idea of growing cash crops. Cocoa, coffee, tobacco, peanuts, bananas and palm kernels enable them to pay their taxes and to be in the market for a limited range of goods. To what extent has the social order of these rain forest peoples been changed by these changes in their economy? In externals, at least, it has been greatly changed. To start with some of the most obvious and agree able changes: Slavery has disappeared and along with it the practice of burying slaves alive (sometimes wives, too) in the graves of their masters. Cannibalism has also disappeared, assuming one can discount the stories that still, from time to time, come out of the deep forests of killings made for the sheer pleasure of eating human flesh. Most of the secret societies that used to terrorize everyone have been snuffed out. There has also been a satisfactory decline in the status and activity of the sorcerer. Coming to more prosaic matters, there have been changes in the strati fication of society, in its family institutions and relationships, and the day-by-day doings of its members.
6 Even today there are men in some of the deeper forests who refuse to go anywhere unless accompanied by at least two blood brothers, each armed with lance and cutlass. 7 It would apparently be wrong to speak of these people as "tribes. Each of them can say my family or my clan, but none of them has a word for my tribe. When a Bulu wants to refer to all the Bulu people he is forced to use the word race, wrong though it is ethnically.

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Leadership In pre-European times there were no chiefs, either hereditary or elected. Each village was run by a group of older men belonging to the clan family. Though no one man had greater power than any other, because of the prestige attaching to wealth the word of the richest man usually commanded greater attention than that of the not so rich; the rich man was, in fact, an uncrowned king the headman of the group. Today this old one-level society (the head man of it was never more than the first among equals) is slowly being replaced by a three-level so ciety, founded on Western criteria of schooling and civilization, instead of on the African criteria of wealth and prestige. Horner characterizes the three levels as follows: 1. The elite class, composed of government officials, rich and educated planters and store owners, directors of schools, pastors, priests, etc. 2. The evolue class, consisting of lesser school and government fonctionnaires, clerks in commercial employ, small planters, carpenters, masons, truck drivers, domestic workers (boys), specialists in ivory and ebony handicrafts, tailors, and educated women. 3. The great mass of uneducated, illiterate or pre-literate villagers all those living where there are no schools, or where schools have been started too recently to have produced a literate class. This is not a classification that means anything to more than a few Africans. As Horner says, Only a small percentage of the elite class, those who have given up their culture for Western culture, would recognize these social divisions. The rest have not yet begun to think of themselves as belonging to a society in which there are superiors and inferiors, privi leged and unprivileged, in which favor is to the evolue and riches to the elite. Most people, nevertheless, have begun to see that they belong to a society that does not stop where the village stops. The ties that bind them to their ethnic kin in other clans and villages may be loose, and articulated poorly if at all, but the awareness of the ties is there. Nowadays language is no longer the barrier to understanding it was, since almost every man, if not yet every woman, has a smattering of French. Insecurity is no longer the barrier to travel it was, for a man may go the length of the land without fear of being attacked or maltreated. Many, indeed, have gone beyond the length of the land and to North Africa and Europe as part of the Free French army that played so large a role in the liberation of Occupied France and in doing so have discovered how little of the world they know who only know the rain forest. The postwar awards of citizenship, voting rights, representation in the French National Assembly, and scholarships for bright students served to enlarge the intellectual borders still further. Some of the rain foresters are today more conscious of country than of tribe or group; and a few are world-conscious to the extent of seeking, and winning, U. N. recognition of their political hopes

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Effects of Schooling

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A number of changes have come about as a result of sending children to the white mans school. If they go to a day school, they are away from home from early morning to late afternoon. If they go to a central, or boarding, school, they may be away from home for months on end. In either case they are no longer free to work in their parents fields or go hunting or fishing except during vacations; and they are no longer able to spend large amounts of time, if any, in the bush schools the initia tion societies of their age groups. Whether they go to day or boarding school, the disciplinary role of the parent is diminished. Most teachers assume the role of father. In doing so they oblige children to work for them, in both house and garden, and to submit to their jurisdiction in all social matters. Frequently this spells punishment far more harsh than any the child will have known at home. The schools, particularly the central schools, are responsible for other, more disturbing changes. Away from their home communities, boys and girls find it easy to break the traditional rules governing sexual conduct. They find it equally hard to obey the white mans rules, with the result that neither the old nor a new code of behavior has real meaning for them. This has not been without effect on the system of marriage and divorce.

Marriage and Divorce

As in most other parts of tropical Africa, marriage was traditionally thought of in the rain forest as a community matter. Its primary func tion was to ensure the survival of the two families concerned, and so of the community of which they formed part. Accordingly, a marriage had to be arranged, and the terms of the contract agreed upon, not only by the two contracting parties but by all the elders of the village, or villages, from which the parties came. Bride wealth formed an important part of the contract. Characteristically the securities transferred took the form of two or more bundles of iron bars (each bundle containing twenty pieces), ivory, sheep cloth and a dog. Today marriage means different things to different people. To many young men and women it means little more than elopement and a clan destine home in the bush. To many others it means a quick civil cere mony performed, with or without the families and elders consent, by the nearest available government official. To baptized Christians it means vows performed in a church or chapel, often followed at a discreet interval by a traditional pagan ceremony in the womans village. In the first case, no payments or securities are required; and it is prob able that none are available, since the commonest reason given for the bush marriage is the inability of the man to find the cash or goods de

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manded of him by the womans people. In the second case, it is unusual for payments or securities to be required, for it is an un-African form of marriage to begin with, and one that is not generally approved of by the families of the contracting parties. In the third case, the practice re garding payments or securities varies widely. Some parents, Christian and pagan, require that certain specified gifts be made by the man; but others do not. On the whole the churches, Protestant and Catholic, dis courage the practice, both because it is un-Christian and because the amount of cash or goods demanded in these days makes "legitimate marriage increasingly difficult for most young men. And the demands are high. Writing in the mid-1950s, Horner reported that even in the bush they would commonly include a phonograph, a suit for the brides father, a sheep (worth the equivalent of about $12), a saw (worth about $50) and $300 in cash more (up to $500) for a well-educated girl. To come by such wealth takes most young men more years of hard work than they are willing to wait. Along with the consequent increase of unrecognized marriages has gone an increase in divorce. In the old days divorce was rare. A man could divorce a woman for one of three reasons only: sterility, adultery and re fusal to cook. A woman could not divorce her husband legally for any reason, though she could leave him if he were too cruel or would not eat the food she prepared for him. Nowadays a man can demand a divorce on any of four grounds: adultery, crime, prolonged absence from the home, and plain bad conduct. A woman now can also demand a di vorce, on any of four grounds: beatings, venereal disease, continual infamous condemnation, and, in the case of a polygynous household, failure to treat her on an equality with the other wives. For this easing of divorce, both church and state must, it seems, be held responsible; the church by insisting that a polygynist could not become a member in good standing until all but one of his wives were divorced, and the state by increasing the number of grounds on which divorce could be obtained and by insisting that marriage needed neither the blessing of the church nor the approval of village families that it was a matter which could be ended as it was begun, by consent solely of the parties concerned.

Dress Food and Housing

There have also been changes in the way the rain forest dwellers dress, feed and house themselves. Today it would be hard to find a young Bulu man or woman who does not aspire to be able to dress though not necessarily to be dressed all the time in the style of the European. So strong is this aspiration in many minds that the question of the suitability of a given fashion for local use scarcely arises. If close-fitting slacks for women are the mode in Paris, then they became the mode in Douala, notwithstanding the notable difference in the figure of the average Parisian

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and the average Doualan. If white buckskin shoes are in style on the paved promenades of the Riviera, they are likely to be fashionable in the unpaved, muddy tracks of the bush on the heads, if not the feet, of their owners. It is difficult, of course, for the man or woman who wants to be able to look like a European not to want to be able to live like one. More and more are seeking to do it to the extent, at any rate, of having chairs to sit on, beds to lie on, bicycles to ride, and metal on the roof, linoleum on the floor, windows in the walls, canned goods in the cupboards and "canned noise everywhere. Some Bulu town houses are far better ap pointed than some town houses in metropolitan France.

The Pull of the Forest

There is, then, no minimizing the changes that have taken place, and still are taking place, in the culture of the rain forest peoples. At the same time, the cultural climate and the "soil of the rain forest the sources of strength and inspiration of the forest dwellers appear to have changed very little; the lopping, pruning, trimming, clearing, and planting up with exotic growths that have been going on have altered little more than its looks. At heart, Horner contends, the man of the rain forest is still unrepentantly African. As supporting evidence he cites, among other things, the increasing incidence in recent years of polygyny. In a society as poor in things as the old rain forest society, wealth must be measured by other criteria. One of the most widely accepted of such criteria, both in and out of the rain forest, has long been the number of wives and children a man has. A man with one wife was considered poor, for two reasons. First, women, as wives, were the only ones he could normally get to work for him in his gardens; men and boys shun manual work, while girls marry and leave home almost as soon as they are capable of doing a day s work. Second, death rates being what they were, a man could not expect one woman to raise enough children to assure him of a succession. Conse quently almost every rain forest man desired to have more than one wife. Frequently he would be abetted in his desire by his wife, who looked forward to having less work and more prestige in a polygynous household. For a while it looked as though the strictures of the Christian church would strangle sentiment for the old pagan creed, but this has not proved to be the case. As the incomes of the rain forest peoples have increased, thanks to the demand for their cash crops and their services in commerce, industry and government, so has the number of those willing to give up membership in the Christian church for the privilege of living in the manner of their forefathers. Other lines of evidence pointing in the same direction are the fact that most rain forest people, Christian and pagan, still strongly approve of the

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traditional way of arranging a marriage and of stabilizing it with the help of payments or securities, and the fact that most of them show no desire whatever to cut themselves loose from their homes. As Horner puts it, "Though many young men and women leave home these days, hardly any of them leave home psychologically . Away from home they may dress and talk and eat like Europeans, but at home they are not like any body; they are themselves. There they will frequently discard not only the speech, dress and living style of the European, but also his way of thinking and his skills.8 As a further line of evidence in Horners view, the most important line of all we may cite the fact that the highest good and chief end of the ordinary rain forest man remains what it has ever been: wealth and status. Only the methods used to reach this end have changed, and these not always greatly. Thus, whereas a man interested in winning status or keeping it was expected to divide up the bag of a hunting expedition according to a long-established division of wealth procedure among a group that included his wife, his close friend, his village brothers, his parents and parents-in-law, nowadays he is expected to follow much the same procedure with the earnings of his crops. Upon receipt of cash for his crop, he is expected to give his wife any sum she asks; to give his close friend usually the equivalent of twenty kilograms of cocoa; to give something to any village brother who asks for it; to help a village son raise his marriage money; to send gifts to his parents and parents-in-law; and to give aid to any stranger who asks it. Again, whereas in the old days a man sent gifts to a village brother in the hope of receiving richer gifts and of raising his prestige with his neighbors and relatives in the process, now he is quite likely to send gifts to the nearest white man since, by the senders standards, he is almost always rich in goods, influence and power. Or, again, whereas in the past a boy would spend time in the bush school being initiated into the secrets of his peoples greatness and learning how to become as great as they, today he is likely to spend much more time in the white mans school be ing initiated into the secrets of the white mans greatness; for, increasingly, "white and "wealth are thought of as two sides of the same coin.9 The
8 Horner tells of a trained medical assistant who, on returning to the bush after working in a modern hospital, gave up using Western medicines in favor of native ones. When asked why, he replied that the white man's medicine did not always work for Africans. He would never have said this while working at the hospital, that is, while he was a European'; but now, at home, he was once more an African and solved his conflict of identification by becoming a member of the group and once more at least for six months following the established customs and mores of his culture. 9 Homer tells how a man insisted on bringing him, over a period of months, regular supplies of chickens, eggs, bananas and other foodstuffs for which he would take no money. Then one day he asked Homer to adopt his elder son and send him to America for an education; thus equipped, the boy could not fail, on returning to his people, to make both himself and them rich.

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fact that much of the white mans education is unrelated to the needs of bush life does not seem to matter greatly. Indeed, where an Africanized curriculum, complete with instruction in local geography and folklore and the care of the locally grown cash crops, is offered as an alternative to the standard curriculum, the student is commonly encouraged by his people to choose the latter, on the grounds either that it is a stronger kind of magic or that to study like a white man is, in time, to have his wealth and status. It is perhaps not too much of an exaggeration to say that almost the only things the ordinary rain forest man wants as yet of the white man are his power tools and symbols: the ability to read, write and calculate (many men argue that this is the basic tool, and that now they have it, they are as good as the white man), the ability to make and maintain machinery, travel fast, grow fine crops, print money (you are rich because you print all the money, is a complaint that is often heard) and, when it serves his social purpose, to eat, live and dress like a white man. In so far as the white man is willing to put him in the way of these tools and symbols, the ordinary rain forest man is happy enough to court his com pany; but once the willingness ceases to be apparent, the courtship flags. As for the other things the white man has been offering him politics, citizenship, nationhood, the Code Napoleon, sectarianism, class distinc tions the rain forester remains for the most part unconvinced of their relevance to his social good, let alone of their intrinsic goodness. When asked by Horner if he thought the white man had brought good to the African, a Bulu replied: We Bulu will not know if you have brought good until fifty years after you have gone. Not that every Bulu, any more than every Briton or Brahmin, is above finding uses for things that his descendants half a century from now will decide were really very bad for him! A H ILL PEOPLE The country of the Teita of the Coast Province of Kenya, whose life is the subject of a case history prepared for this study by Alfred and Grace G. Harris, differs from that of the Bulu and Fang in several respects. For one thing, it is much smaller, consisting merely of a group of three hills. These hills, lying about a hundred miles northwest of Mombasa, are a far cry from the typical Cameroonian rain forests. They are higher (up to 7,000 feet in elevation), rougher, cooler and, for the better part of the year, drier. They also have a more lived-in look, most of their native vegetation having long since been destroyed. Not being able to expand outward because of the aridity of the surrounding plains, the cultivators dwelling at the base of the hills had to expand inward and upward, toward the head of every little valley with a supply of water and a cover of soil. At the present time, the hills carry a population of over 60,000, repre

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senting a density of roughly 175 to the square mile, or about ten times the density of the Cameroonian rain forest and this notwithstanding the greater difficulties they present to the inhabitants. For, by any cri terion, it is difficult country, by turns wooing and whipping, drowning and desiccating, scorching and chilling. Nature may have spread her tables in the wilderness of the rain forest, but not in the Teita Hills. However, the difficulties appear to have kept the Teita on their toes and given them a sizable capacity for improvisation and resilience for rolling with the punches, and returning them. These hillsmen early learned that the price of harvest was watchfulness, hard work and willing ness to raise almost anything. Maize (the staple for about half the year), yams, sugar cane (mainly for beer), bananas, sweet potatoes, beans, peas, cucurbits and other vegetables, all found a place in their diet. So, too, did chickens. And every man tried to keep a few cows and goats though more for their money than their food value. The Teita also learned that there were times when all the watchfulness, hard work and willingness in the world could not win an adequate harvest and when they had to look elsewhere than to the hills for help. They may live on an island, but they have long known that it is not entire of itself. Indeed, the Harrises contend that the Teita, unlike the Cameroonian rain foresters, have always been part of a wider economy. This included their Bantu neighbors and even the half-Hamitic Masai.
Bantu groups raided one another for stock, while the Masai were their com mon scourge, hated but grudgingly admired. Some interchanges of population seem to have taken place between the Bantu groups, in part as a result of famine-stimulated movements. Relations were not always unfriendly, or insti tuted as a result of disaster. Trade, ties of blood brotherhood and stock guard ianship, and occasional intermarriages, bound individuals and groups in differ ent tribes, although long and arduous distances needed to be covered, and the relationships perforce could be mobilized only infrequently. The Teita world included much that was beyond their immediate view and [the Kamba, Kikuyu, Nyika, Taveta, Pare, Shambala, Chagga and Masai] were in one way or another a part of it. Contact with non-Africans has been of long standing, too. Living memory and the traditions which go beyond it do not tell of a time when Teita did not trade in ivory, hides, food, and possibly wild-animal skins, with Arabs or Swahili from the coast, in return for beads, cloth, iron and wire. Early caravan routes to the interior passed close to the hills, and Teita were occasionally taken as slaves to serve in households on the coast.

Europeans travelers, explorers, missionaries, road builders, traders and administrators have been coming and going among the Teita for well over a hundred years. Today the Teita are caught in a widening net of economic, social and political relationships.

Economic Life
To find the money for the taxes and school fees he must pay and the commodities he feels the need of but cannot make with his own hands, the

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Mteita must have something to sell. To have a surplus of goods, such as cattle or crops, he must have either more land or better yields, or both, than he has been in the habit of having. To get the land he must either reacquire tribal land that has been alienated for the building of missions and schools, the running of demonstration plots and similar purposes or get hold of some new, non-tribal land in the surrounding plains and valleys. In both cases, he finds himself dealing with agencies whose offices are a long way off in Mombasa and Nairobi, perhaps in London. To get the yields means learning new techniques (frequently developed in other parts of the colony or in other territories), following practices that are, in many instances, as foreign as their exponents, and, perhaps, spend ing time away from his hills seeing how other people tackle the problem. And when he has the surplus the chances are that he will not be able to sell it unless it is of a kind and quality to attract outside buyers; in a small area like the Teita Hills most farmers are producing surpluses of the same things and therefore are not in the market for their neighbors5 produce. The customers for his surplus chillies and other vegetables are more likely to be at the coast than in Voi and Mwatate, the chief local trading cen ters; his ability to market his coffee is more likely to be governed by demand in the United Kingdom than in the neighboring provinces of Kenya. If he has little or no good land and in these days many lack adequate amounts of such land he must seek to sell his services. The chances are that this will also mean going outside, for while the hills can gen erally provide him with work, the outside can generally provide him with better-paid work. The nearest large labor market is Mombasa. Nowadays the Teita go there in increasing numbers to search for work or on business. At the last census almost 50 per cent (1,776) of the total (3,654) number of employed adult Teita males were located in Mombasa and another 25 per cent (898) were working outside the Teita district in other parts of Kenya.10 The economic net has widened in another sense. The range of employ ment open to the Teita is nowadays much greater than it was in pre colonial times. Not that it was ever as small as in the Cameroonian rain forests, with their traditionally small scope for animal husbandry, trading and porterage. Today Teita men work in railway shops, sisal estates, government departments, business offices and cooperatives; and as tinkers, tailors and teachers. Increasing numbers of them are doing jobs that rank as semiskilled and skilled.
10 It should not, however, be inferred that approximately 75 per cent of the adult males were away from the Teita Hills at the time of the census. At least 75 per cent were actually living in the Teita district, presumably self-employed, unemployed or just between jobs.

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Social Life
As in the Cameroons, the enlarging process has been at work, yeast like, in almost every compartment of life, with marked effect on its looks and consistency. Take, for instance, the look of the Teita house and its inhabitants as the Harrises describe them:
Material objects of European provenance, and a few European practices, are to be found or observed in any household, pagan or Christian, schooled or un schooled. Virtually everyone wears some form of European clothing, and most households possess such things as enamel plates, cups, bowls, wooden chairs, and perhaps a table or two. Tea drinking is universal.

The higher the education or the higher the income, the more evident is the Europeanization. The home of the well-educated man is almost always rectangular or I,-shaped, in contrast to the traditional circular house, and occasionally has more than three rooms.
The roof is often made of galvanized iron or, failing that, of petrol tins which have been flattened out. The walls, if they are of mud, are ordinarily smoothed and white, or color-washed both inside and out. China tea sets, knives and forks, replace or are added to enamel plates and mugs and spoons. Often, in such a household, the wife has also gone to school for some time; and the furnishings bear witness to this in crocheted or embroidered cotton tablecloths and bedspreads. The household head will have forsaken khaki shorts and shirts for a suit, sometimes accompanied by a stiff-collared shirt, or for slacks and a jacket or blazer; he seldom goes barefoot any more. Among the most recent and least frequently seen material changes are the provision of extra clothing for the children, and of really modish clothes for the wife . . .

For many a wife modishness does not stop with the clothes she wears. In the past the Teita wife ran her home with little or no help other than what she might get from her small children, or from the other wives if there were any. Today it is not unusual for her to have a hired boy or girl to help with the heavy work. Whereas formerly she was expected to be and often had to be a universal provider, now she is as likely to be complimented on the quality of the corned beef bought in the village store as on the excellence of her home-grown chillies or chickens. While making more use of the resources of the village store each year, she is not neglecting those of her garden. If she has had some schooling, the chances are she will be making better use of them, and serving better meals. Also if she has been to school, she is likely to have new ideas about the care and feeding of her children. In some Teita homes infants are now fed protective foods based on scientific formulas, and given the additional protection of rubber sheets and mosquito nets. Older children and adults are likely to be protected by patent medicines. Formerly the paths of the wife and the husband seldom crossed during the daytime, but now it is not uncommon to see the two eating together at table, and by no means unknown for them to display companionability

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publicly. It is in this realm of personal and family relationships that some of the most striking changes have taken place. As in the Cameroonian rain forest, most of them have come in the wake of the Christian missions. Thanks largely to the close control of the school system by the missions during the past half century, the wake is a strong one. Generally, the teachers are themselves missionaries or converts of missionaries, and re gard their mission as something more than an educational one. Being con cerned with the whole of life, and having judged Teita life to be almost wholly unserviceable for Christian ends, they feel that the Teita must be separated from it, freed from conformance with tribal ways and loosened from the bonds of old superstitions.
Freedom from the old pressures, both external and psychological, is supposed to go hand in hand with greater conformance to the principles of Christian morality and true acceptance of the Christian faith. Not only pagan ritual prac tices, but many domestic customs and leisure-time activities have been viewed as wrong, or at least as obstructing the path to enlightenment and faith. Very little of the old culture, apart from folk tales or riddles and handicrafts, has escaped either criticism by the missions, or efforts in the schools to substitute Europeanized forms.

Many Teita have already been separated from their old ways. They have abandoned polygyny. They no longer practice clitoridectomy or other rites de passage. They no longer consort with witch doctors, rain makers and other diviners, or keep charms and shrines, or make ritual sacrifice. They no longer condone drunkenness and similar excesses. On the positive side, many of them have accepted the Christian view of equality before the Lord of man and woman, of the brotherhood of man, and of the need for higher standards of righteousness, compassion and even cleanliness in daily living.11 Such changes are nothing short of revolutionary, whether they are recorded in the Teita Hills or in Beverly Hills. For most people they are too revolutionary, with the result that where there was once agreement, there is now division. Fathers are divided against their sons, mothers against their daughters, daughters-in-law against their mothers-in-law. Increasingly, families are being split along generational lines as the chil dren of non-Christian and unschooled parents reject the tribal beliefs and customs. Many of the children who attend school are eventually baptized and confirmed in one of the Christian churches.
Sometimes this differentiation causes little friction while the children still live at home; and . . . when they marry they simply set up households which differ in greater or lesser degree from their parents, depending on how Euro peanized they have become, and how firmly devoted to a church. Occasionally there is acute disruption of family relations when young men and women adopt 11 For various reasons, cleanliness takes on much importance, and carries a high emotional charge, the Harrises observe. The women of [Christian] households undertake all the extra sweepings, washings and so on that their meager resources of implements, soap and water will bear.

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a contemptuous attitude toward their parents on the grounds that they lack education, or adhere to the old religion, or both.

Even where the commitment to the Christian faith is little more than nominal, the degree of external change has often been quite large. In the mission schools a student is exposed daily to Christian teaching and ex ample. Such prolonged exposure could hardly fail to cover the sensitized film of his mind with unpagan if not orthodox Christian images. It is probably no exaggeration to say that nine out of every ten Teita who have been through a mission school are rebels against some aspect or other of their society and converts to some aspect or other of Christian society. And among the unrebellious tenth there are those who seem to feel that a little external change does no great harm so long as it simplifies the business of getting on. For in the Teita Hills, as elsewhere, getting on, whether as an employee of the government, a mission or a business, is often as much a matter of being a conformist as a man of character.

Political Life
Before the coming of the British the Teita governed themselves in the manner of the Cameroonian rain forest people. Upon occasion, men from all parts of the hills demonstrated their tribal solidarity by joining to gether under one leader to raid other tribes. But there were no chiefs and no large administrative units. Members of a village were expected to keep the peace under the direction of the most senior and most dominating man or men. Such elders ruled largely by dint of their moral authority and status, and the supernatural sanctions at their disposal. Save under exceptional circumstances, they had no means of backing up their de cisions with force, and needed none. Differences of opinion between elders were resolved either by referring them to the public at large or by administering an ordeal-oath. Peace between villages was maintained by blood-brotherhood pacts to which elders drawn from all parts of the tribal area were party. Besides simplifying cattle transactions and the trading of medicines and other goods, these pacts provided a kind of political unity in the absence of a formal government. Today the Teita are part of a colony-wide administrative system which they neither devised nor direct. The system has its central offices in Nai robi, its provincial office in Mombasa, its district office in Voi and sub district offices in the Teita Hills. In most of these, executive power is in the hands of Europeans, few of whom have had an opportunity of getting to know much about the Teita at first hand. Three agencies of this sys tem bring members of the tribe directly into the business of governing it. These are the African (formerly Native) Authorities, the African District Council and the African Courts (formerly Native Tribunals). However, by the Harrises account these three organs of government neither repre sent indigenous institutions nor make use of them to any great extent.

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The African Authorities are the British counterpart of the Teita system of government by village elder. The tribal area is divided into adminis trative districts called locations, which are in turn divided into subloca tions. Each location is put in charge of a headman (by courtesy, chief), who has under him a number of subheadmen (by courtesy, headmen), each of whom is in charge of a sublocation and has one or more village elders to assist him. Both chiefs and headmen are appointed by the central government and paid a salary. Their major responsibilities are to maintain order; to organize the collection of the poll tax and local rates; to arrest offenders; to settle by arbitration (provided no fees are charged) petty disputes arising within their area; to see that the rules governing the cutting of timber, the burning of bush and the making, selling and drinking of beer are observed; to keep the local roads in repair; to enforce anti-erosion measures wherever the administration considers them neces sary; and to carry out the resolutions and the by-laws of the African Dis trict Council. The African District Council is a local government body, partly elected and partly nominated, composed of representatives from each of the locations, and normally presided over by the District Commissioner. As a rule it meets only a few times a year. It is authorized to pass resolutions on many matters. These resolutions, once they have been approved by the Governor of the colony, become by-laws which it is the duty of the African Authorities to administer. Among the matters covered are the imposition of local taxes and licenses, land rights and responsibilities, the annual budget for maternity and ambulance services, dispensaries, pri mary and adult education, agricultural services, and the salaries of those employed by the council and by the African Authorities and African Courts. The African Courts come nearest, of the three bodies, to being an in digenous institution. The Harrises report that they have jurisdiction over Africans only, are staffed entirely by Teita, and in general are sub ject to much less supervision than many other activities in which Euro peans and Teita are associated. Most of their work has to do with the trying of offenses, both criminal and civil, against native law and cus tom. Each court has a President, a Vice President, and a panel of six judges, appointed by the District Commissioner. It may impose sen tences involving short-term imprisonment or fines in cash or kind. In the absence of an African Appeals Court, appeals go to the District Commis sioner and from him to the Provincial Commissioner. Some idea of the importance of the system may be gleaned from the fact that in a recent year more than 1,000 cases were heard in the two Teita district courts. In addition to these courts, there are large numbers of smaller courts, one to every sublocation. These are the Beni Mwana Councils.12 Their
12 Beni mwana is an idiomatic phrase meaning indigenous (or local) inhabitants/*

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field is likewise native law and custom, but their work consists mainly in arbitration, admonition and the setting of compensation. They handle several times as many cases in a year as do the African Courts, and they are very popular even, it seems, with many of the offenders. After all, they were sired by the Teita; they may have been groomed by the British to increase their efficiency, but they belong to the tribe. In an age when country-bred stock is seldom regarded by its trainers as worth the price of its keep, the Teita have every reason for satisfaction with their Beni Mwana Councils. Not that this is the only foal from their stable to survive.
Below the level of the Beni Mwana Councils, the old form of arbitration still goes on in the villages under the guidance of elders. A great number of disputes and offenses against custom are dealt with much as they have always been, and a whole host of matters never reach the sublocation or location coun cils, or the tribunals [i.e., African Courts]. F o r example, the Teita, unlike some other African peoples, do not like to have ordinary bride wealth discussions come before anyone besides those concerned, and only a very small fraction of such cases ever go beyond village discussions.

The fact is that behind the changing visage of Teita government lies an almost unchanging disposition. What was right and wrong, good and bad, safe and dangerous for the Teita of fifty years and more ago is just about as right and as wrong, as good and as bad, as safe and as dangerous today. This is illustrated by the selection of men to occupy the posts of chief and headmen. District commissioners have naturally placed em phasis on the personal qualities and attainments which they consider de sirable efficiency, vigor, initiative, a progressive outlook and a betterthan-averagc education. As a result the posts generally go to professing Christians, young men at that. But the Teita are inclined to use a rather different yardstick of competence. They may concede that it is a useful thing for a chief or headman to be literate, to have a working knowledge of English, and some experience of government service. But they will be most unlikely to concede that it is a useful thing for him to have spent much time away from home, as in this event he will almost certainly have lost touch with his people and their ways. Further, as they see it, the utility of knowing European ways is less in being able to copy them than in knowing what Europeans are likely to do in given circumstances. The Teita also have different ideas from the Europeans about the importance of age.
By the standards of the old way of life as it continues today, a man in his twenties, thirties, or even his forties, is just a child. . . . The education which young men often have is unquestionably valued by the Teita for its usefulness in dealing with the modern situation. But schools are far from being regarded as conferring the wisdom which, in the Teita view, is one of the requi sites for the legitimate exercise of authority . . . Attempts on the part of a young man to exercise the leadership and forcefulness valued by Europeans become, in this light, the effrontery of a youngster who must be put in his place.

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The pagan Teita, who still constitute about three fourths of the popu lation, do not share the British governments customary esteem of the Christian, either. Christian chiefs, in their view, are no better than young chiefs. Because they are Christians they cannot acquire their own shrines and so pass into the ranks of ritually validated elders; and their wealth cannot bring them much prestige since it has not been ritually validated, nor can it be used by them for the blood-brother pacts so important among elders. Without ritual knowledge and perquisites, a chief remains a man without wisdom, a little child, even though he be old and well schooled.

The Voice of the Past

Thus, on more than one flank of the Teita Hills, the articulate, audible voice of the past continues to be heard. In point of fact there is scarcely a spot where the voice is not heard, and respected. And, as the Harrises show, Christians pay almost as much heed to it as pagans. Christian church elders tend to share the traditional pagan attitudes toward youth, and to feel that they themselves occupy among Christians the same posi tion as elders do among pagans, with the same rights to the exercise of authority in daily life as they have in church matters. This feeling is in clined to make them, like the pagan elders, uncooperative toward a young chief, whether Christian or pagan. Some Christian chiefs feel their lack of prestige keenly enough to take a second wife, trying thereby to enhance their status in pagan eyes by acquiring one of the frequent accompani ments of traditional elderhood. Most Teita Christians still seem to feel that it is both decent and right for their daughters to undergo some sort of initiation ceremony on reaching the age of puberty. Many of them also remain convinced of the uses of the old medicines, of divination and, in extreme cases, of sorcery. Almost all of them continue to support the institution of bride wealth. So far as the style of daily life is concerned, many Christian households differ hardly at all from non-Christian house holds. If the voice of the past can beguile the Christian, we need not be surprised if it continues to bewitch the pagan. The Harrises leave us in no doubt that it does. Among other things, they point out that there has been very little detribalization of the Teita. A man may spend years of his working life in Mombasa, but he seldom spends more than a few months there at a stretch, and by the time he has a son old enough to go out to work the chances are that he will settle back in the hills for good. Again, while there is unquestionably a growing tendency to balk at the obligation to contribute to the support of parents, sisters and younger brothers, the young man who refuses to help his family remains subject to

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stringent sanctions and strong disapproval. Much the same can be said of the young man who aspires to be wealthy.
Accumulation of important goods originally almost exclusively cattle, but today a variety of other things as well is a prerogative of old men. It is considered unseemly for younger men to have large numbers of cattle, and few do. Nor do many young men dare to acquire houses roofed with corrugated iron, or maize grinders, even when they can afford them. These also have be come symbols of a mans place in the community . . . [This] means that young men tend to buy consumable goods of a narrowly restricted type, such as color ful clothing, and even in this instance older men resent the display as un becoming . . .

The path of the economic or social climber is rough, for the Teita are nothing if not egalitarian. Even their old men who had a right to be rich could be only so rich. To be more than so rich was to incur the serious displeasure of the village. Today this displeasure can be incurred by a man who makes money in a shop or plies a skilled craft. In general, the Harrises remark, using special knowledge to gain a better living is viewed as the exercise of an unfair advantage over others. It is this same ingrained egalitarianism that keeps chiefs and headmen from ap pearing better than other people, and spending a good deal of time and money entertaining guests from whom they stand to gain nothing directly. Largely because there has been little detribalization, there has been little change in the dimensions of a mans thought or his loyalties. A man may be appointed chief over a location, but the farther away [he] goes from his own village, the more likely people are to contend that there is no reason for obeying him since he is a man of such-and-such a place, and why should we have anything to do with him, as he is not our man? More or less the same applies to the African who tries to interest the Teita in any colony-wide movement, whether it is a political association, a trade union or a welfare society. If he comes from outside he will be regarded as an upstart who, without the wisdom of the elders, is taking too much upon himself. Accordingly he will be either ignored or dis believed by the large majority of his hearers. If he comes from within the tribe, he will be respected only so long as he does not assume the posture of leadership. This, in the nature of the case, he is almost bound to do, sooner or later. It is clear that here, as in the Cameroonian rain forest, we have a society in which forces making for change are opposed by forces making for stability, both forces being, up to now, sufficiently well balanced not to endanger the societys foundations. As the Harrises put it, Christian and non-Christian, schooled and unschooled, Europeanized and traditional, are members of a single community. Needless to say, such forces give rise to friction, and where there is friction there is heat. The progressives often lose patience with the conservatives, who, they seem to feel, lower

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the prestige of the tribe in the eyes of outsiders and reflect unfavorably on themselves. The conservatives sometimes accuse the progressives of being custom breakers and seekers after strange gods. At the same time few of the progressives are custom breakers and idolaters enough to accept the notion of complete Europeanization, and few of the conserva tives are sufficiently singleminded not to see merit in some of the material changes for which the Europeans have been responsible. Most of the Teita people, progressives and conservatives alike, would probably settle for the best of both worlds. All the time their ideas of what is best are so divergent, they might do worse than bear in mind the words of George Horners Bulu friend quoted earlier in this chapter. The only trouble is that fifty years is a very long time to wait, especially if you are a progressive. A CITY POPULATION To savor fully the taste of social change, from its sickening worst to its astringent best, one must go to the town. For the town is the biggest distillery of social change. With the exception of the native towns of west Africa, such as Tim buktu, Kano and Benin, a few Arab towns along the eastern coast, such as Zanzibar and Bagamoyo, and one or two Portuguese ports like Luanda and Mozambique, there were no towns in tropical Africa before the pres ent century. Now there are hundreds. The town therefore represents a new milieu for almost all of those who live in it, one to which the tradi tional sociological criteria of normalcy do not apply. It is neither clan nor country, neither hallowed ground nor fruitful earth. It neither feeds a mans children nor lodges his ancestors. It is an uncharted wilder ness, for which tribal man lacks both guiding star and measuring rod. European man made the town, and made it for European ends which, as has been shown, were not African ends. While every one of these towns could provide grist for a case study of social change, not many of them have as yet been through the sociologists riddle. Of those that have, few if any have been sieved and sifted as carefully as Stanleyville, capital of the Orientale Province of the Belgian Congo. From 1952 to 1954 Stanleyville was under almost continuous scrutiny by a three-member team of the International African Institute, working in collaboration and under contract with UNESCO. The team consisted of an anthropologist, Pierre Clement; a statistical sociologist, V. P. Pons; and a psychologist, Nelly Xydias. The account that follows is based very largely on the teams findings as published by UNESCO in its Social Implications of Industrialization and Urbanization in Africa South of the Sahara,13 A report made for this study by Jacques J. Maquet on the drift to the towns has also been drawn upon.
13 By Nelly Xydias (prepared under the auspices of UNESCO by the International African Institute, London), UNESCO, Tensions and Technology Series, Paris, 1956.

SOCIAL CHANGE

83

Stanleyville is situated at the upper limit of navigation of the middle Congo, roughly a thousand miles above Leopoldville, at the foot of the rapids known as Stanley Falls. When H. M. Stanley saw the locality in 1877 it was nothing but a fishing village backed by seemingly endless, uninhabited and untamable bush. Today Stanleyville is a center of trade, transport (rail, road and river), administration and industry. Of its ap proximately 75,000 inhabitants, more than 70,000 are Africans. More than 80 per cent of the Africans live in the three separate quarters, known as Beige I, Beige II and Brussels, which very roughly form the apexes of a triangle in the middle of which lies the European town. Almost all of the rest live in a large arabise, or Moslemized, village a half mile or so from the European town, and in the railway workers camp beside the station. What sort of people are these Africans? What did they do for a living before they went to Stanleyville? And where did they come from? Ap proximately two thirds of them were born in the bush. At the time of the UNESCO study nearly half of them had been in Stanleyville less than five years; only slightly more than one sixth had been there more than twenty years. Although there is bush and bush, for all practical purposes this means that most of the inhabitants of Stanleyville were raised in the world of village, clan and tribe, a world strong in local loyalties, weak in central authority. It also means that they were raised in a world of selfsufficiency (or semi-self-sufficiency since the coming of the Belgian ad ministration), of simple living, and of scant opportunity for acquiring wealth and power. Of the 66 different tribal groups making up the population, not one was represented by more than 6,000 people at the time of the survey, and only five by more than 2,000. Fifty were represented by groups of less than 500. While the great majority of these tribes had their homes within 200 to 300 miles of Stanleyville, not less than 15 per cent of the persons surveyed by the team came from outside the Orientale Province, some from as far as Katanga, Kasai and Ruanda-Urundi, upward of 750 miles away. What sort of people are they becoming? What are they doing, and how are they living in Stanleyville?

Education
Most of them are getting some education. At the time of the survey more than half of the adult males had had at least one year of general schooling, and nearly four fifths of the boys between the ages of 6 and 15 were attending school. Even one third of the girls between those ages were attending school. But not many of them were as yet getting much education. Only a minute proportion leave school equipped for the new life awaiting them. The majority have not been trained for any particular

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SOCIAL CHANGE

trade and have no idea how to fit into a changing economy. 14 Only 15 to 20 boys were being graduated each year from the Stanleyville tech nical school, out of a total working population of approximately 20,000. Not many Stanleyville Africans as yet see the need for much education. After putting a boy through five or six years of primary schooling the parents like to think that he has a claim to a white-collar job, if only that of a junior clerk. A girl after two or three years of primary schooling if she gets as much as that is generally thought to be wasting her time and she probably is, in the context of the life her parents led when they were young.

Occupational Status
Largely because of this limited schooling, most of those who are gain fully employed do work for which very little previous education or ex perience is required. They are laborers, night watchmen, messengers, and helpers to truck drivers, mechanics, masons and the like. Exact figures are unavailable, but the ratio of unskilled to total workers is perhaps four to five. The remaining 20 per cent of the labor force is made up of skilled and semiskilled wage earners (chauffeurs, mechanics, cobblers, masons, carpenters, painters, cooks, houseboys), white-collar employees (clerks, schoolteachers, medical orderlies, managers of European-owned shops serving Africans), and self-employed persons (shopkeepers, dealers in palm wine and beer, cultivators and so on). What education can do and does for the worker is clearly shown in Table 50. As more schooling becomes available or as some school14 Op. cit., p. 325. Table 50 PERCENTAGE DISTRIBUTION OF ADULT AFRICAN MALES (16 PLUS) BY OCCUPATIONAL CATEGORY AND LEV EL OF EDUCATION, STANLEYVILLE, BELGIAN CONGO, MID-1950S
YEARS OF GENERAL SCHOOLING CATEGORY

0
49.5 64.7 43.4 7.9 73.3 48.2

1-3 20.9

4-6
23.0 12.3 28.8 42.6 10.7 25.9

6+
6.5

NUMBE 1,894 694 812 176

Total Unskilled wage earners Skilled and semiskilled wage earners White-collar employees Self-employed Not gainfully employed

21.2
25.2 7.8 12.4 17.0

1.8 2.6
41.7 3.6 8.9

88
124

Source: Jacques J. Maquet, quoting the preliminary report of the UNESCO-In ternational African Institute research team.

SOCIAL CHANGE

85

ing becomes available to more people the occupational status of the African may be expected to improve. Indeed, it is already doing so. Thus, whereas 46.1 per cent of the first-generation workers those who began life in the bush were engaged in unskilled work at the time of the survey, only 27.7 per cent of the second-generation workers were so engaged. The corresponding figures for those engaged in skilled and semiskilled work were 46.3 and 53.5 per cent; and for those in white-collar work, 7.6 and 18.8 per cent. Where there has been an improvement in occupational status, it is reflected in the workers way of life: in the growing amount of luxury spending being done (on such things as radios, phonographs, tobacco and beer); in the unwillingness of increasing numbers of whitecollar workers to let their wives live like bush women; and in the forma tion of workers councils and occupational unions though it must be added that it is European more often than African interest that so far has kept most of these alive.

Earnings
Most of the Africans living in Stanleyville are still poorly off; their earnings are insufficient to enable [them] to feed well and live decently in an urban center. 15 At the time of the survey most of the unskilled work ers were getting less than 850 francs (approximately $17) a month, and most of the white-collar workers less than 1,750 francs ($35).16 Many workers supplement their wages by income from family side lines, cover ing everything from hawking fish caught in the Congo to hairdressing and laundering. On the other hand, it is only fair to say that many salaried workers were making more than 7,000 francs (approximately $140); that every worker was entitled to free dispensary and hospital treatment, and to receive from his employer the amount of the food ration and one quarter of his wage whenever he was certified sick. Further, every worker was in sured by his employer against industrial accidents and occupational disease.

The City as Home

With the increasing attractiveness of urban employment, many Africans are coming to think of the city as a place where a man may make a per manent home, raise a family, form new associations, and fashion a new kind of community. Evidences of this line of thinking abound. The occu pational ambitions of African school children show it clearly. Whereas 21 per cent of the primary school boys questioned on the subject expressed a desire to become mechanics of various sorts, 24 per cent a desire to be
15 Ibid., p. 295. 16 By way of comparison, the average monthly pay and allowances of the European civil servant (never overpaid!) was 37,500 francs, or approximately $750.

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SOCIAL CHANGE

come clerks and 30 per cent carpenters, only 6 per cent wanted to become farmers. Whereas 9 per cent of the secondary school boys questioned expressed a desire to become either doctors or medical assistants, 24 per cent teachers and 59 per cent clerks, only 2 per cent wanted to do manual work. Only 15 per cent of the primary school boys stated that they wanted to follow the work of their fathers (or brothers); as for the secondary school boys, not even one per cent of them wanted to do as their fathers did. The preferences expressed by girls attending primary school were even more uncustomary. Thirty-three per cent of those questioned wanted to become seamstresses, 21 per cent embroiderers, 21 per cent teachers, 10 per cent either nurses or midwives, 2 per cent nuns, while 13 per cent wanted nothing more than to go on with their studies. Equally far removed from tribal life were the preferences expressed by educated grownups when questioned about their choice of friends and about the kind of community they would like to live in if they could choose freely. Already it is clear that common interest is for many edu cated people at least as strong a tie as brotherhood or kinship. Thus, 69 per cent of the clerks questioned had a teacher, mechanic or clerk for one or more of their three best friends. Only 35 per cent of the drivers questioned had friends, one or more, in these occupational categories, and only 27 per cent of the unskilled laborers questioned had such friends. Though the answers given to the kind of community question were harder to analyze statistically, they were on the whole untribal answers. People can be of the same tribe, but have very different situations in life. Tribe is not enough. You feel freer when the tribes are mixed. One must take into account education, occupation, the home, the private life, decency, wealth. Sentiments like these were expressed by evolue Africans often enough to constitute something of a trend. The phenomenon of the voluntary association is also indicative. The African, ever a lover of tribal group activities, ritualistic and recreational, secret or otherwise, is busying himself increasingly in the work of groups designed to fill the empty hours and the emptiness of his new town life. He has organized voluntary associations for almost everything from helping the dead and getting more pay for the living to promoting true religion and comradeship. In some of these causes the women are as ac tive as the men. A few associations are open to both men and women tribal apostasy if there ever was! Some are single autonomous groups; others, like the Brotherhood of Congolese Veterans, form an integral part of large organizations. Almost all make a feature of mutual aid, and in creasing numbers of them are interested in broadening the basis of membership and in fostering the moral and intellectual progress of the members along the still rough paths of their new social domain. And as the basis of membership of a given association broadens, the range of its interests ceases to be parochial, bound by tribal and regional attitudes of

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87

mind. Instead it becomes concerned with the gradual integration of the various sub-groups (ethnic, religious, professional . . . ) of the urban centers advanced community into a society as a whole. 17

The Tribal Bond

At the same time, most of the Africans of Stanleyville still have more than half a foot in the bush. They may be urbanized, civilized and Chris tianized (or Moslemized, as many are), but very few of them are com pletely detribalized. There may have been some weakening of hereditary bonds and authority, but most of the traditional institutions of bush society, such as the kinship system, rites de passage, bride wealth, age sets and brotherhoods, retain their vigor. Few if any town families have renounced the customary bush practice of accommodating those of their kin, brotherhood and acquaintance to whom they are beholden. As in the bush, when brothers settle down on a mans compound, while waiting to find work or on the occasion of a visit, they are put up free. And as in the bush, the visit may last for the remainder of a lifetime. Even in evolue households, tribal values die hard. Thus, while many educated men try to get their wives to play the part of an equal by sharing in the conversation of the table or by developing some outside in terests few have succeeded, and many say they have given up trying. Most town dwellers, first and second generation alike, periodically go back to the bush, either for the pleasure of it or to honor tribal obliga tions. A large proportion of them belong to associations open only to persons of their own tribal or ethnic group. In such associations what counts is not so much a mans education, economic status or ability to speak French, as his knowledge of tribal custom and language, and the qualities of leadership prized by the tribe. The durability of the old tribal bond is nowhere seen to better advantage than in marriage forms and procedures. A random sample study covering 77 case histories of marriage disclosed the following facts: 1. More than two thirds had married within the tribe. 2. Nearly nine tenths of the marriages were of the customary sort, bind ing not only the individuals but also the families or groups of relations; only about 11 per cent of them involved a religious (Christian or Moslem) ceremony. 3. Payments in cash or kind were made in all but one case, and in the case of more than one third (35.1 per cent), payment was made either partly or wholly in kind. 4. More than one fourth of the marriages had been arranged by mem bers of the family. 5. More than half of the married persons questioned admitted to having been divorced one or more times a ratio not substantially smaller, it
17 Op. c i t p. 491.

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SOCIAL CHANGE

would seem, than that prevailing in the bush. The grounds for divorce were, for the most part, the customary ones: loss of desire, desertion, refusal to live as man and wife, barrenness, neglect of household duties, quarreling, in-law troubles, habitual adultery and so on. Even in regard to marriage, nevertheless, the old order has been coming in for its share of battery and assault. Increasing numbers of marriages break up because the parties concerned are drawn from different tribal backgrounds and fail to make the necessary adjustments. Increasing numbers of men resort to concubinage because of the exorbitant marriage money demanded of them. Increasingly, also, urban marriage is com ing to be a matter for decision by the principals only, not by parents and clans. But this is not to say that the old order, whether in marriage, home, village or community, whether in Stanleyville, the Teita Hills or the Cameroonian rain forest, is done for. If its days are numbered, nobody is telling not even the sociologists.

TH E TREN D Those who have spent any time studying them know that weather maps are always changing, and that the changes do not always agree with the predictions. Indeed, the weather seems to have an infinite capacity for confounding the experts. To study the phenomena of social change is not infrequently to come to the same opinion about man. He, too, is an inveterate innovator, and confounder. Even while we are measuring his mores, he is altering them, and the direction in which he alters them is not always the direction in which the sociologist is led to believe he will alter them. What follows should therefore be viewed more as an inter polation than an extrapolation as an index of what has been happen ing rather than a prospectus of what is to come.

Increasing Differentiation
There has been a notable differentiation between African and African. The primeval African was made in the image of the group, and the group was constantly on the lookout for imperfect images; it had no time for deviations. But the group mold is no longer what it was. Indeed, there is no longer a single mold. Instead there are many molds, each the work of different hands, incorporating different designs of what a man should be and how he should live. The look-alike African may not yet have gone, but he is no longer in production. His place is being taken by the distin guishable African: the miner and merchant; shop clerk and houseboy; politician and preacher; the Christian and the pagan; the schooled and the unschooled; the evolue and the elder; the progressive and the conservative.

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89

Some groups, it is true, are working with more molds than others, and with molds of more radical design. But in every group new molds are being fashioned and new differentiations being achieved. Here and there the differentiating process has reached the point where a man now feels a closer kinship to men of other groups than to those of his own group. Many evolues in the French Community think of themselves as French men rather than as Bulu or Bangi; outwardly at least, they live like Frenchmen. Some of the Stanleyville evolues would much prefer to live alongside Europeans than their own non-evolue kinsmen. Even among the Teita the Harrises came upon one man who contended, with vehe mence, that he was nothing if not British. Each of the "new countries now has people who are so far removed from the tribal mold as to think of themselves as men of Ghana and Nigeria rather than as men of Ashanti and Yoruba. Every territory has converts to Christianity who assume that because Europeans (or Americans) brought them their salvation, Europe anization is part of the price of it. Every territory, also, has many more who while not repudiating their cultural heritage are sufficiently far re moved from it as to think of themselves in the words of another Mteita as men of half-and-half. These differentiations do not stop at the group level. They cut deep into villages and households, often separating generations more widely than tribal groups were separated in the precolonial era. Such differen tiations spell divisions, and all too often divisions spell estrangement. Already there are places where the estrangement between African and African is as conspicuous as the estrangement between African and nonAfrican. Wherever such estrangement is found it represents a gangrenous infection of an already deep social wound. Some of its manifestations are as tragic as they are shortsighted. There are Christians for whom all pagans are dirty and barbarous; pagans for whom all Christians are government yes men and traitors. There are students who treat their boys with disdain and thoughtlessness, the like of which is seldom seen in non-African households; illiterates who see in the wealth and status of their well-educated kinsmen only an opportunity to live an easier life than they have ever known. There are husbands who abandon their wives and families because they cannot talk their language or share their interests; wives and families who make no attempt to learn the mans language or share his interests. There are farmers who, by following the white mans advice, become wealthier than their neighbors only to have their cattle stolen and their storehuts and houses burned down. And there are some who are willing to kill in order to keep a man from dishonoring his ancestors. Not all differentiations lead to estrangement. Some lead to emulation. Ask a group of school children to draw a man or a woman and the chances are that, even if they are bush children, they will draw a Euro pean figure, complete with hat, umbrella and cigarette and, in the case

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SOCIAL CHANGE

of a woman, high-heeled shoes. Give a man who has just learned to read the run of a bookshop and the books he will first ask for are those that tell him How To how to do everything from becoming a mechanic, an accountant or a medical assistant to winning friends and influencing people the way his political leaders do. But the course of the emulator is not easy. Frequently the man who aspires to run it has no idea how long it is or how difficult, let alone how much is expected of him over and above the piece of parchment, the pass port, the suit of clothes or the bank balance that symbolizes for him his successful completion of it. Frequently, too, he has little idea how small are his chances of being able to exploit the status he has emulated and acquired, either because of his unwillingness to put expediency before principle and pride before honor or because of somebody elses prejudice, conceit or fear.

Increasing Selectivity
There is a growing disinclination by the educated African to believe that Europe, or the West, has the final answer to his social problems. It is not that he is unaware of his indebtedness to Western missions, medicine, engineering, welfare and administration. He knows none better that without these he would still be groping his way through a roadless, hos pital-less, unproductive, ungoverned and ungovernable jungle. Nor is it that he wants to go it alone from now on, fortified with the white mans technology but unwilling to take his advice. On the contrary, he knows again none better that there simply are not enough of his kind to do all the complicated things that must be done if his now useful lands are not to be given back to the jungle. However, he is no longer entirely content to conduct his affairs according to the white mans prescription. The following are straws of evidence. First, the appeal of what the sociologist calls syncretistic movements. In the realm of religion alone there are said to be over a thousand sects in the southern part of Africa, from the Rhodesias to the Cape, most of them nominally Christian but almost all of them incorporating, in varying amounts, pagan ritual and belief. Second, and related, the appearance of such overtly anti-white movements as Watu wa Mungu (People of God) and Mau Mau in Kenya and Kimbanguism and Kitawala in the Belgian Congo. Third, the reluc tance of many well-educated Africans to abandon belief in witchcraft, sorcery, divination, and the importance of keeping in with ones ancestors, and in magic generally when sitting for an examination. (Camara Laye, the author of The Dark Child, apparently set as much store by the magic liquid given to him by his teacher as by the quality of the instruction he had received.) Fourth, the difficulty of getting Africans to believe that Western ways of dealing with civil and criminal offenses are either as expeditious or as acceptable to the offender as tribal ways. Fifth, the

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91

rather poor showing to date of the higher Western virtues in the conduct of business. When asked by Elspeth Huxley what he thought would hap pen after the Europeans withdrew, a prominent African replied that the climate of his continent was not too favorable to the spirit of puritanism. It needs a cold winter . . . You never find it in the sunny countries Spain, Italy, South America . . . It may be that we shall revert to more human standards. 18 Sixth, and perhaps most significant of all, the con tinuing strength of indigenous forms of self-expression, notably music, dancing, singing and the plastic arts, notwithstanding the appeal of Western forms of art and entertainment. No doubt it takes more than a handful of straws to thatch a theory, but two or three are usually enough to tell which way a wind is blowing at least which way it is blowing from. And since even meteorologists name the wind for the quarter from which it comes never the one to which it appears to be going perhaps we who study the winds that sweep across the face of society should exercise similar caution. The strongest pre vailing winds fail from time to time; and todays trends have a habit of being tomorrows retractions.
18 Elspeth Huxley, Two Revolutions That Are Changing Africa, New York Times Magazine, May 19, 1957.

C H A P T E R 16

The Assault on Ignorance

EDUCATIONAL SOME THE THE THE OF T H E AGENCIES PROBLEMS SCHOOL-AGED ADULT MEDIA

E D U C A T I O N OF T H E EDUCATION MAS S OF T H E

COMMUNICATIONS

IN [o b o d y

can travel in tropical Africa without soon being made aware of the importance attached by the African to learning. Ask a hundred literate men what they consider to be the greatest need of their people, and ninety will unhesitatingly reply "education. Ask a hundred school boys what they want to be and at least one fourth of them are likely to reply, Either an education officer or a schoolteacher. In educa tion the African politician sees the key to better government; the African businessman, the key to greater output and higher consumption; the African welfare worker, the key to happier, healthier living. Nor is this zeal to educate and be educated confined to the lettered. The enthusiasm of the unlettered is frequently just as great. On a wet morning it is not unusual in some places to see a crowd of children waiting hopefully outside a village school on the off-chance that the teacher will allow them to occupy the seats of those who have been kept away by the rain. On any evening in almost any African town, grown men and women may be seen studying reading primers by the light of a candle or a street lamp. Even in the deepest bush, where none can read or write, it is not uncommon to find communities that have either gone so far as to build their own school with the help of donated labor and materials some
93

94

T H E AS SAUL T ON IGNORANCE

times before they knew where the teacher was coming from or managed to underwrite the cost of sending some of their brightest youngsters to a distant mission school. This is not to say that all Africa is hungering for the white mans learn ing. Many people have had as yet no chance to savor it; they are still subject to all the sanctions, constraints and limitations of their indigenous culture. For some it has lost the savor it once had, if for them it ever held more than a passing appeal. Africans educated in Europe very able men at that frequently go native on returning home, for Western culture is at best a thin veneer. The words were spoken by a high govern ment official in Mozambique, but the phenomenon is by no means con fined to that territory. Many are sincerely afraid of the white mans learn ing. These see it only as a destroyer of their social solidarity, as an agent provocateur sent to spread confusion of tongues, disaffection and self-con tempt. They admire its magic its medicines, machines, illustrated magazines and so on; but they deplore its meanness its barely concealed scorn for their customs and laws, its impatience with their beliefs, values and patterns of behavior, and its insensitivity to their standards of beauty in natural forms, art and language. They suspect, if indeed they do not know, that because they are unlettered, they are in the Europeans eyes unlearned and therefore the target of his educational enthusiasm; and that the longer they are exoosed to that enthusiasm, the greater the risk of losing their cultural identity a prospect that no man can view with equanimity. But whether there is hunger for the white mans learning or not, there is everywhere a realization of the importance of the learning process in fitting a people for the responsibilities of life. There may have been few schools in Africa, as we know schools, until the missionaries arrived; there may have been fewer books and alphabets until more recently still; but if education be defined as the whole process by which one generation transmits its culture to the next, then there has been no lack of education in Africa. On the contrary, as was pointed out earlier (Chapter 14), Africans have shown themselves second to none in the punctilious pursuit of this end. They neglected no phase of life economic, ethical, sexual, artistic, familial and they deemed no discipline too harsh or sacrifice too great to ensure the safekeeping of their cultural heritage. In content and method African schooling may have had little or nothing in common with its European counterpart, but it provided a matrix in which the latter could develop and a mental atmosphere in which it could thrive. Part of the success which has attended the endeavors of the Western educator in Africa during the past one hundred years or so arises from the tradition of tribal instruction which he found and the esteem in which men versed in the lore of their peoples were characteristically held. A part of the com monly observed resistance to modern ideas and methods is an expression of that same esteem.

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95

E D U C A T IO N A L A G E N C IE S To look for the beginnings of formal education in Africa we must, how ever, go back much further than a hundred years. As early as the eleventh century the Mohammedans had established schools, where children were taught to read and write Arabic and to repeat verses from the Koran, at many important sub-Saharan caravan centers. There were similar schools, at about the same epoch, at the Arab ports of call along the east coast from Mogadishu to Sofala. In some of the larger mosques and shrines Mohammedan science, law, grammar and astronomy were also being taught from about the twelfth century onward. The Timbuktu of that epoch was such a noted center of Mohammedan learning that Moroccan scholars thought it worth their while to make the perilous journey across the Sahara in order to hear the teachings of the erudite Sudanese negroes who lived there. The schools of the Christian church in Ethiopia are of even greater antiquity. However, unlike the Mohammedan, the Christian schools were little interested in profane studies. Their curriculum seldom ran beyond the reading and transcribing of sacred books, and a little simple arith metic. Many of the clergy knew hardly more than their pupils. But the schools did at least serve to keep alive the tradition of literacy, and main tain the priestly succession. The interest of the West in the educational needs and potential of the African likewise goes back a long way, certainly to the thirteenth century. In his Blanquerna (1283), Raymond Lull, the Catalan mystic, tells of a mission which the Pope of his day sent to the lands of the Sahara, and which "by the grace of God led to the conversion of "the Saracen King, and a great number of people/ 1 Later, in the fifteenth century, Prince Henry the Navigator gave as one of his reasons for sending expeditions from Portugal down the west coast of Africa the desire to enlighten the minds of those who were sitting "in darkness and in the shadow of death, and though most of his captains proved to be more interested in the mercantile than the missionary side of their enterprise, the priests who accompanied them did make a number of converts, some of whom were later trained to be teachers of their own people. It was, however, many decades before the West did anything more than skirt the edges of the Africans mind. When, in the nineteenth century, it did at length come to grips with the challenge of "heathen darkness, it was the churches which took the initiative. Frequently their men doctors, teachers, translators and priests bored into the interior before any other men; frequently they worked without the assurance of civil sup port or protection. It is they, and the women who went with them, who, ever since that time, have held the initiative; who have reduced hundreds
1 Blanquerna, A. Peers edition, p. 356.

T H E AS S AUL T ON IGNORANCE

of African languages to writing (over 400 already); who have provided most of the vernacular literature, and not only Bibles and Testaments either; who have developed most of the mass-education techniques and been behind most of the literacy campaigns. It was they who built most of the early hospitals and trained most of the African laboratory tech nicians and nurses. It is they who still man most of the schools.

Governments and Missions

Until recent years the role of metropolitan and territorial governments in the field of education was, understandably, no more than modest. Prior to World War II the budgets of almost all of the territories were small. By the time law and order had been enforced, roads built and repaired, endemic diseases kept in check, and postal and telegraph services estab lished, not much money was left for education. Notwithstanding, some of the colonial governments had begun to accept partial responsibility for the planning, direction and coordination of education in their territories well before 1939. In doing so they were guided by two things. First, by the realization that the results of the well-intentioned but often amateurish and sometimes bigoted work of the missionary were uneven, and, as one government memorandum of the time worded it, not . . . altogether sat isfactory. 2 Second, by a growing conviction that the success or failure of their civilizing mission turned upon the quality of the education the indigenous peoples received upon their grasp of the goals, their will ingness to cooperate in winning them, and their ability to do the things required of them and that they were more likely to get the desired education if the control of it was not left entirely in the hands of people who were answerable only to their consciences, or their sponsoring societies. With the general principle of government support of primary and, to a lesser extent, secondary education, most mission societies have long agreed. They had little to lose by agreeing, except the sense of independ ence (and this was often more imagined than real in view of the chronic difficulty many of them have had in raising their budgets), since almost all governments view the educational work of the missions as indispen sable. On the other hand, they had much to gain by agreeing, for agree ment meant better buildings and equipment, greater administrative effi ciency, higher scholastic standing and, not least, better-qualified teachers. All the same, some missions have hesitated to accept financial help, feeling that by so doing they would become identified with the state. And some of those that showed no such hesitation are beginning to find that as the role of the government increases so does the volume of paper work and
2 Memorandum on Educational Policy in British Tropical Africa, Colonial Office, H.M.S.O., London, 1925.

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the amount of attention given to secular studies, with consequent curtail ment of their evangelistic and pastoral activities. Whatever happens in the future, one thing is certain: government schools have come to stay, in Africa as elsewhere in the world. The missions do not command the funds that are necessary to provide the African with the trade schools, demonstration shops, experimental farms, colleges and universities he expects, and needs if he is to assume the leadership of his own people. If they did, they would not be able to fill the posts from within their own ranks. As it is, many mission schools are indifferently staffed, and the flow of new recruits is quite inadequate. Yet the need for teachers who have something more to share with the African than a knowledge of things, theories and techniques was never more widely affirmed, by administrator, student and missionary alike. There would certainly be deep regret in many council chambers were the missions compelled or persuaded to relax their educational effort. Kenneth Bradley, himself an African veteran with more than twenty years admin istrative service, expresses, in a paper prepared for this study, a common conviction when he says that the greatest contribution which the West has made and will continue to make to Africa is Christianity . . . [for] all education for citizenship must, if democracy is to be true and lasting, be firmly based on sound religion. Our fathers who . . . left education to the missions because in those days their embryo governments were very poor, builded better than they knew. Bradley does not speak for all, needless to say. There are many, mostly Westerners, who have no use for the mission school, or what it stands for. In their view it is the nursery of discontents that cannot be appeased; it teaches ideas of equality and brotherhood that have no place in the Africans world and no justification in theirs; it tends to confuse dogma with truth, and to teach Christianity with the same authority as physics and arithmetic. There are many, mostly Africans, who see in the mission school the destroyer of traditional sanctions which previously ensured good behavior; the instrument of imperialism (all the more so since most of the schools have come to be subsidized by the imperial govern ments), and in its expatriate teachers the paid agents of a religion that sets a man at variance against his father, . . . the daughter against her mother and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. Both groups would like to see the schools taken away from the missions. Some, it seems, would like to see them taken away from the government.

Private Secular Schools

So far private schools have not had much of an inning in Africa. Most of those that exist serve the privileged few who can afford to pay the high fees and who do not care to, or cannot, send their children to either the mission- or government-run schools. A few, however, serve a very different

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purpose, one that most missions and governments find difficulty in viewing with pleasure. These are the nativistic, and syncretistic, schools that have as their aim the preservation of as much of the old customs, laws and beliefs as is necessary to satisfy the Africans self-esteem and to ensure his survival, as an African, in an increasingly un-African world. Until the Mau Mau emergency of 1952 several dozen such schools were operating in Kenya alone. The most notable and numerous of these schools, the Kikuyu Independent Schools, came into existence as a result of the unwillingness of many Kikuyu Christians to disavow, as required by their mission church, belief in, and the practice of, clitoridectomy. Since this was regarded as a vital part of Kikuyu religion and social practice to quote Kimani Waiyaki, a Kikuyu and the author of a paper prepared especially for this study the elderly Kikuyu converts interpreted the churchs attack on the custom as a condemnation of the whole Kikuyu social order. They therefore revolted against the foreign church and established one of their own which legalized polygamy and the drink ing of alcoholic beverages (both of which were proscribed by the mis sions in question) along with clitoridectomy. And they decided, Waiyaki says, that the best way in which the gap between Christianity and Kikuyu tribal life could be bridged was by taking only those things from Christianity that could enhance Kikuyu culture and teaching them in schools of their own. The schools they were able to build and operate with their meager funds were poor, even by the poorest of mission school standards, but they were the Kikuvus own. The teachers were Kikuyu; the curriculum was Kikuyu-designed; its objective was to foster Kikuyu solidarity. The popularity of these schools, it is claimed by Waiyaki, was due to the fact that they aimed at developing Africans who are proud of their culture and . . . who want to be free. Such movements have occurred elsewhere. Wherever Africans suspect that the European is, as Waiyaki puts it, out to produce Africans who are ashamed of being Africans, they do not lack for followers. As more and more Africans in the dependent countries become able to articulate their hopes for their people and their fears of continuing subjection to the white mans educational philosophies, interest in the independent type of school is sure to increase. It is unlikely to have the same appeal to those Africans who can foresee the day of self-government. Among these and among those who are already self-governing, private schools of the European type have more chance of finding favor. Already many well-to-do Africans send their older children to such schools in Europe and elsewhere. Also falling in the private category in the sense that admission to them is restricted are the schools maintained by some of the larger corporations. Corporations like the Union Miniere du Haut-Katanga and the Societe des Mines dOr de Kilo-Moto (both of the Belgian Congo) have consistently held that education was part of their business; that they could not hope to build up an efficient work force unless they had the means of

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training it; and that they would be most unlikely to recruit the children of their workers unless they could provide school facilities at least equal to the best available in the larger towns. This they have done, with profit to themselves in higher output and smaller turnover, and to their employees in a better, longer and fuller life than most of their fellow countrymen enjoy. SO M E O F T H E P R O B L E M S Educational advance is beset, always and everywhere, with difficulties. If anything, tropical Africa has rather more than its share of difficulties and a greater capacity for slowing down the rate of educational advance than most places. Indeed, there can be few parts of the world where small difficulties develop into large problems with such ease and resist solution so obstinately. The problems are of many kinds and show no particular preference for people or place. Most of them, however, fall into four cate gories: environmental, social, financial and philosophical.

Environmental
Tropical Africa does not suffer the intruder gladly, whether he comes armed with axe, bulldozer, blueprint or Bible. If he is not careful, and knowledgeable, he may find that he has misjudged the pleasure of the land and its inhabitants. The educator may find that the site of a bush school has to be selected with due regard not only for soil drainage, ease of access and availability of building material, but also for the wishes of the local headman and his favorite fetisher, and the habits of mosquitoes and larger fauna.3 He may find that one of the most stubborn entries in his school accounts is one he had never thought of before going to Africa: delapidation of fabric, building and supplies due to torrential rainstorm, mildew, moth and termite. If his planning of the school calendar does not accord with the calendar of the farmers around him, he will find that his pupils vanish when the first rains fall and the planting season begins. A washout on the road has prevented many a tutor from reaching his weekly adult education class. More serious is the debilitating effect, aggravated by the intestinal diseases from which most Africans suffer, of the high humidities and monotonously high temperatures of the rainy season. Habituated though many of Africa's indigenous peoples are to heat and moisture, they are palpably discomfited by them, as, of course, is the European. Statistical evidence of the loss of intellectual drive resulting from exposure to such conditions is harder to come by than evidence of the slowing down of
3 A recent issue of the Northern Light , the magazine of the Government Secondary School, Tamale, Ghana, contained the following lament: In the past one of the greatest problems of the school has been the constant visits . . . of snakes, with attacks amounting to invasions at the beginning and end of the rains.

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manual processes, but clerks, ministers, teachers and students are wont to speak with a common voice on the subject, whether they live in Nigeria, the Belgian Congo or the Republic of Sudan. The following extract from a letter written in the Belgian Congo to the author is only too typical:
I am finding that I need all the rest I can get now. [The writer was a strap ping twenty-seven at the time.] Three years in the wet and warm climate of the equatorial forest seem to sap ones energy thoroughly, and I shall be quite ready for my turn for furlough next April. Not that I am not fit, for, apart from a couple of attacks of bacillary dysentery and a malarial fever, I have kept very well; but the chronic fatigue which assails particularly the medical staff who fail to practise what they preach in the m atter of regular rest at night is be coming a reality to me just now.

Other manifestations of impaired mental efficiency are the so-called west coast memory that Africans and Europeans of that section frequently cite in extenuation of their verbal lapses, and the common confession of expa triate teachers in west African colleges that their best research work is done while on furlough in Europe. It is not only the equatorial lowlands that make life difficult for the edu cator. The highlands are an unaccommodating environment, too. Al though they are not afflicted with prolonged periods of oppressive heat or perpetually high humidities, the wide diurnal range of temperature, coupled with the rarefaction of the atmosphere and the associated in tensity of actinic rays, puts a strain on the system.

Social
Educational problems having their origin in the Africans way of life in his attitudes toward land and kin, his valuation of leisure, comfort and commodities, and his regard for the world of spirits are at once the most numerous and the most serious. The administrator finds them wherever he goes, and among all sorts of men. Rather than disappear when people have learned to read and write, they may become more acute. The problem of educating an African girl is one that Rebecca Reyher discusses at length in her working paper. In the first place, there is the problem of getting the girl inside a school. Outside the towns, most parents contend that all a girl needs to know of such matters as cleanliness, good manners, industry in the house and field, sex, morality and family living, they or the initiation schools are capable of teaching her. They are also likely to say that the things she might learn in a white mans school could bring them and her future husband no profit, if indeed they might not make her less docile and effective in the performance of her wifely duties. If the parents are willing to enroll the girl as more and more are, especially in the towns they will still need to be persuaded of the advan tages of keeping her in school after she has reached the age of puberty. Since a marriageable daughter is quite likely to be one of their chief

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capital assets, it is asking much of them to deny themselves such advan tage as an early marriage contract may confer. If the parents are willing to allow their daughter to complete both primary and secondary school courses and go on to college, other prob lems arise. What shall she be taught, and for what shall she be trained? For a profession? Unquestionably the need for women trained in teaching, nursing, medicine and so on is great; the facilities exist, and the compen sations are considerable. But in many parts of tropical Africa the one respectable profession is still marriage; and the earlier the marriage, the more respectable. Where this holds, a girl who enters a profession and remains unmarried soon gains a reputation for easy virtue. In some tribes, such as the Sukuma of Tanganyika, where girls are allowed much sexual liberty before marriage and where even having an illegitimate child is not considered unseemly, this may not cause anxiety or prejudice the chances of a good marriage later. But in other tribes, such as the Sumbwa, where virginity at marriage is highly prized, the entry of a girl into a profession tells badly against her, as does any kind of advanced training, academic or otherwise. As a result girls are still scarce on most college campuses. Makerere College, at Kampala, Uganda, graduated its first Kenya woman student (an Mteita) only in June 1958. A solution to this problem is not easy to find. It is nonetheless necessary if the security of the African home is not to be imperiled. At the present time, for every thousand well-educated men in tropical Africa there are less than ten well-educated women. Most of the educated men must therefore marry women with whom they have nothing in common, save perhaps the desire for children. The embarrassment of the educated West ernized man married to an illiterate woman who still follows her African folkways is matched only by the womans inability to sense his pride and share his thoughts. There are those who believe that the illiteracy of the Kikuyu women is partly responsible for the evils of Mau Mau. If the women, with the innate conservatism common to their sex, had been able to share in the discussion of the troubles that lay upon the land, they would have been able, it is contended, to curb the more violent and unrea sonable political aspirations of their menfolk. Certainly they would not have been the first wives to counsel moderation, or the first to keep their husbands from going to war. No less an educational problem is posed by the African's regard for taboo, juju and the like, and the Westerners determination to eradicate it along with all other evidences of ignorance and superstition. One can teach children, or adults, the food value of an egg, but it is hard to per suade people to eat eggs when they have been brought up to believe that they make a man impotent and a woman barren. One can show that two well-favored cows yield more milk than any ten scrawny and diseased ani mals, but it is hard to persuade the owner of the ten to switch from herding

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to dairy farming. Any teacher can explain, and most students can be made to understand, the principles of combustion, but few students seem to know how to apply the teacher s reasoning when it comes to finding out why a particular combustion engine doesnt work. The common approach to machines, as was pointed out in Volume I, is still essentially magical. In their desire to root out ignorance and superstition, many educators have overlooked the good that flourishes along with the bad, to the African s deep resentment and their own bedevilment. Kimani Waiyaki speaks for many of his generation, and not only in Kenya, when he says that the disparagement of African culture has been one of the funda mental weaknesses of educational practice there and that the resulting mental havoc is all the more serious because the Kenya African is coming to regard education as the panacea of all his ills. Europeans generally have taken a poor view of indigenous African education. They have made very little attempt to discriminate between the forms which that education takes and the aims behind it, which are often not so very different from their own. They have seen the outer framework, which they did not like, rather than the urge to self-development which is there also. 4 They have been quick to point out the defects of the social organization which the African has established for himself, but slow to give him the credit for trying to organise something for himself and others which fits the situa tion as he sees it 5 often at considerable sacrifice of his time and re sources. The Kikuyu Independent Schools are a case in point. Not the least of their intended functions was the preservation of the good in Kikuyu culture and the bridging of the gap between the Kikuyu and Western worlds. Unfortunately, most Europeans were unable to see any good in the movement. They condemned it as pedagogically unsound, as nativistic, exploitative, and, when the Mau Mau trouble arose, as subversive. There was substance in all these accusations, certainly; but there might have been less had the Europeans, at the outset, helped to combine the advantages of Western education with Kikuyu tradition. Similar situations arise wherever people with a mission go to people with a need; and the more palpable the need, the greater the temptation to write prescriptions. In tropical Africa the educational need is so obvious and compelling that it calls for extraordinary humility and perception in the missionary not to assume that the things worth preserving in the indigenous system are so small a part of the whole that no great harm can be done, and much time can be saved, by not attempting to preserve any of it. It is much the same as when an African prefers to destroy a ratinfested house rather than spend time hunting for the rats, the main differ ence being that the African succeeds in harming nobody, not even the rats.
4 Elizabeth Hoyt, The Spender's Choice, Corona, September 1954, p. 335. B Ibid.

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However, we can be of good courage. There is mounting evidence that the educator, along with his professional colleagues in sociology, anthro pology and the missions, is learning to discern "the difference between the constructive and generous action of a people seeking self-expression and the mistakes which in their ignorance they may easily make, and the per version of their action by the unscrupulous. He, with his colleagues, is beginning to understand that the willingness of a people "to sacrifice so much for such causes is proof of their idealism, and [that] it is the obliga tion of policy-makers to see that the creative core of such idealism is pre served and fostered. 6 Financial Almost all countries have trouble raising money for education; those of tropical Africa certainly have. The needs of the place are so many and per capita incomes so low that governments have tended rather naturally to give priority to enterprises promising early returns. Casting bread upon the waters of ignorance is not usually numbered among such enterprises; the returns come only after many days indeed, years. The cost of ignorance, however, is such that no territory concerned with the longrange good of its peoples can afford to bear it. For just as knowledge is power, ignorance is weakness; and weakness is poverty poverty of ideas, skills and ambition, if not of resources. In these days there is little that a poor country can do, unaided, to redeem its life from ignorance. The kind of knowledge poor countries need most applied knowledge must be imported. This costs money, and in tropical Africa money goes very little further than it does elsewhere in the world. Judged by the criterion of hourly rates African labor is cheap, but most employers prefer to measure it by other criteria. They are more interested in such things as hourly output, turnover, care and maintenance of equipment. By these criteria the labor showing is not so good. Although many of the materials used in the construction and equip ment of schools can often be obtained locally at small cost, almost all laboratory supplies, books, writing materials and instruments have to be brought in from great distances. So, too, have most of the senior grades of secondary school and college teachers. Because of this, almost every secondary school and college must make provision in its budget for peri odic furloughs with all expenses paid, and for early pensioning of some members of its faculty. Those teachers who do not have to be "imported have, in many instances, to be trained abroad, which likewise costs money. There must also be provision, in many parts of Africa, for the rapid depre ciation of buildings and supplies. How to snap the crippling chain of ignorance-weakness-poverty-ignorance has long been one of the most disconcerting questions to confront
6 Ibid.

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African administrators. It is still not resolved; but at least all governments are agreed upon the necessity of resolving it. Almost without exception, they are now spending far more money on education than they were doing at the end of the war. In some countries expenditures on education have come to constitute the largest single item in the territorial budget. In Nigeria the three regions (Eastern, Western and Northern) each spent about one third of their ordinary budgets on education in 1956-1957; and they have spent approximately one fifth of their capital budgets for the 1955-1960 period on educational projects. In Liberia, long the most illit erate of African countries, between one tenth and one fifth of the budget is currently earmarked for public instruction. This is not to say that any one government is spending enough to break the chain, let alone exorcise the evil spirits that dance upon it. The revenue of Tanganyika in 1957-1958 amounted to some $65 million, or less than $8 per capita; of the eight dollars less than two were available for educational purposes. To increase the national income of such countries to the point where universal primary schooling, to say nothing of secondary schooling, be comes a feasible goal is obviously going to be difficult, if not impossible, unless it is bolstered from outside sources. Thanks to the development funds made available by the metropolitan countries and the growing con viction that the best, and perhaps the only, way to win the uncommitted African over to the democratic camp is to educate him fully and fast, this is, in fact, happening. The postwar grants made by the Belgians, British and French for primary and higher education have been generous by any standard. In the view of people on the spot, some of them were too gen erous and made too soon. As evidence they point to the needless elegance, as they see it, of the new university colleges and the difficulties they are having in filling them with students of good caliber. The ability of coun tries like Ethiopia and Liberia to find money has been less conspicuous. They have no rich relatives; however, since World War II they have been receiving considerable sums for educational purposes from United States government agencies. And some of the colonial territories (notably the British and Belgian) have had windfalls from such American agencies as the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. Sooner or later, of course, adventitious aid of this sort is bound to come to an end. Neither the metropolitan countries nor American agencies can be expected to subsidize African education indefinitely, and it is clear that they have no intention of doing so. Their function is essentially that of pump primers. They hope, by injecting enough education of the right kind, to stimulate a flow of trained men and women sufficient to transform the countries of their concern from their present poor and underdeveloped state into countries that are not only viable economically but autonomous culturally and socially, if not in every case politically.

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Realizing that the day of ready money would, sooner or later, end, both the benefactors and beneficiaries have been giving thought to the question of cutting education costs. Thus, the basic education campaigns which UNESCO and other agencies have been conducting rely as far as pos sible (which, alas, does not always amount to very much) on the enthusiasm of the newly literate and his readiness to pass on freely what he has learned. The Laubach technique of teaching illiterates like wise requires few paid instructors, little equipment and less organization.7 Even many of the regular grade schools are contriving to keep costs very low by employing teachers with no more than six or seven years educa tion, and curtailing the curriculum to reading (from a couple of books or so), writing (on slates and in sand) and a little blackboard arithmetic. At the secondary, technical and college levels cost cutting is much more diffi cult. To be worthy of its name, higher education must be in the hands of highly qualified teachers teachers, that is, who have had a long and expensive education. It must provide the student with facilities for con ference and debate, for laboratory, library and field work, and for extra curricular activity. But it is hard to confer without privacy or to act without props, and quite impossible to browse without books or to experiment without equipment. Moreover, the certificates and diplomas which are among the most highly prized dividends of such an education must be of international currency. No African would long be content with a medical diploma that gave him professional standing only among his own people and why should he be? For all these reasons higher educa tion is costly and its rate of expansion slow. While the European administrators are generally resigned to this, many of the Africans are not. They demand universal primary education; tech nical and professional training facilities for all who can profit by them; and vocational and non-vocational courses for every willing adult. And they want all of it in a hurry. Consequently, they are inclined to belittle the difficulties and dangers of accelerating the rate of educational progress; to believe that a third-rate teacher is better than no teacher; and to argue that it is preferable to crowd a thousand children into a school intended for five hundred and give them half a schooling than to give half of them no schooling at all. In a still largely illiterate world, it is hard not to sympathize with them. Yet it is impossible to agree with them, for in our immensely complex world there are few more dangerous persons than the undereducated those who have acquired the jargon of education but little skill in the exercise of it, who are bloated with knowledge but barren of wisdom. Where dilution of educational standards is being countenanced, as it is in some territories, it is already causing concern to members of the African
7 Basically, the each one teach one technique developed by Dr. Frank C. Laubach consists in finding a symbol for each sound in a language, and learning to visualize, by means of readily identifiable pictures, key syllables and words formed by such sounds.

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elite as well as to Europeans. Because money is short, salaries are low. Frequently they are too low to attract and hold the more intelligent and better-educated person, who finds no difficulty in getting bigger money, often for less work, in industry, commerce or civil service.8 For the same reason, the supply of textbooks and materials is often quite inadequate. It is by no means unknown for students to prepare for an examination by first copying out whole sections of the set textbook, simply because there are too few books to go around. In Nigeria the Reverend James H. Robin son of New York came upon a student who had prepared himself for his examination in the New Testament by first writing out in longhand all four Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles.9 It is entirely possible that, as his standards of living advance, the Africans ability to contribute more largely to the education of his children will increase. To judge from his past performance in finding school fees, his willingness to go on doing so can hardly be in doubt. Whether he will be allowed to do so is another matter. Throughout most of the developed world free primary and secondary, if not as yet college, education is regarded as a childs birthright. The peoples of the underdeveloped African world can hardly be expected to settle for less without a struggle. On the social and economic level there is likewise much to be said for free education. At present the local boy who makes good at school or college with the help of his familys savings, including perhaps those of his aunts and uncles, cousins and grandparents, is likely to find himself paying off his indebtedness for years thereafter. No sooner does he start to earn his living than the erstwhile beneficiary becomes the benefactor. Some of his relatives may even move in on him indefinitely. Small wonder that many school and college graduates ask their employers to post them as far away as possible from their families. On the other hand, it must be conceded that many Africans have difficulty in believing that something worth hav ing can be got for nothing. One of the commonest complaints voiced by administrators is that the African is slow to learn the value of a free service; once education is free, they contend, he will cease to esteem it as highly as he now does. This, says Kenneth Bradley in the paper already referred to, is one of those psychological factors which are so important in Africa and which give rise to so much ignorant criticism elsewhere. Very likely, many years will pass before the economy of tropical Africa as a whole is robust enough to support the heavy cost of universal free education. If by then there are still any dependent territories, the chances are that they will get it first, because independence has a nasty habit of taking the wind out of a nations financial sails.
8 To keep a good man in a rural school sometimes necessitates resort to stratagems of doubtful morality. One Ghanaian village council gave a teacher it was most anxious to keep a bonus of 150 and even built an elaborate house for him; then, when his director moved him to another school, the council sued him for the money! 9 New York Times, June 30, 1954.

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Philosophical

By now it will be apparent that there is hardly an educational problem in tropical Africa that does not force one to consider the question of ends. The environments and cultures of Africa are different from those of Europe and North America; they make radically different demands upon the people and elicit very different responses from them. No educator can possibly ignore these demands and responses. But what shall he do about them? Shall he adapt his curriculum to fit them? Or shall he endeavor to change them, Westernizing the Africans land, life and livelihood alike? What shall he do about religion? Shall he try to winnow the good from the bad in African belief and practice, or shall he assume that nothing of either is worth the winnowing? What shall he do about the Africans political aspirations? Shall he educate for self-government, for association or for servitude? If there is insufficient money to do all that he would like for the African, what kind of schools shall he run with the money he has? And so on, ad infinitum. Philosophical questions of this kind are more easily asked than an swered. Some of them have not yet been answered; others have been answered differently by different administrations; and there may be some that will simply have to be lived with.10 But at least we can begin to discern the directions in which answers to some of the questions are being sought.

TH E EDUCATION O F TH E SCHOOL-AGED While there is wide agreement among the rulers and the ruled that education is the Africans greatest need, there is no such agreement on the extent of the need, the manner of meeting it or the means for doing so. The differences of viewpoint arise from several causes. Some of them are geographical in origin. Thus, it is the climate more than any other single factor that accounts for the absence of a *white-settler population in most of west Africa, and its presence in east and central Africa. In the former the question of multiracial schooling has never arisen and probably never will; in the latter it has become more important with the passage of time until today it is, in the opinion of some, the dominant policy issue. Then again, it is much easier to establish a good school system in a rela tively well endowed, accessible and populous little country like Ghana than it is in a relatively poor, mountainous, unevenly peopled and large country like Ethiopia. Other differences are political in origin. The Portu
10 The late Grenfell Williams, head of the Colonial Service of the British Broadcast ing Service and a profound student of African affairs, once assured the author that the majority of African problems were like that. The most we can hope to do is to learn to live with them and apply to their day-by-day handling the virtues of integrity and justice.

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guese, having no intention of handing over their provinces to the African, are less concerned to provide him with higher education on the metro politan level (though, truth to tell, they already have a number of very fine high schools in Mozambique and Angola) than they are to provide him with first-class primary and trade schools, by means of which they can turn him into a highly skilled artisan. The French, on the other hand, have felt obliged, within the limits of their resources, to provide the African with schools not unlike those in France. There are religious dif ferences, too. Thus, the presence of Mohammedan emirates in northern Nigeria led Lord Lugard in his original treaty with them to agree not to disturb the established religion by introducing Christian missions and mission schools. In central and southern Nigeria, which in Lugards day was more pagan than Christian and more Christian than Mohammedan, the British did not feel themselves to be under any such obligation; as a result, there are today in the south many mission schools in which Mo hammedans sit alongside Christians and pagans, even during the periods of religious instruction. French Territories

Educational Policy
The aim of French educational policy down to 1958 was very simple namely, to make worthy French citizens of all the inhabitants of the French possessions south of the Sahara. To achieve this aim, the govern ment argued that it must provide schooling in French, along the general lines of the metropolitan curriculum, and for everybody. To implement such an ambitious policy posed an enormous problem. The area admin istered consisting of French West Africa, French Equatorial Africa, French Somaliland, Madagascar and the Trusteeship Territories of Togoland and French Cameroons was more than fifteen times as large as metropolitan France. Its total population was approximately 33 million, or about 70 per cent as large as that of the mother country. Now that almost all the component parts of these territories are either autonomous mem bers of the French Community or independent, some changes in their educational systems may be expected, but what those changes will be it is too early to say. The people within this vast domain are widely scattered, much given to wandering and, for the most part, have not been greatly interested in French citizenship. With few exceptions they are too poor to support a heavy tax load. The languages and dialects are many. In what was French West Africa there are approximately a hundred, none of which is spoken or understood by a sufficient number of people to justify an attempt to make it the lingua franca. All of them are poor in the kinds of words and concepts with which the modern educator is concerned. Large sectors, moreover, are unattractive climatically, unpromising economically

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and all but inaccessible. It takes an uncommonly dedicated teacher to stand the cultural and physical isolation of the more primitive areas. While there are such teachers, the supply has never been equal to the demand, for few educated Africans, it seems, are willing to submit for long to such discipline. Consequently, the French have found it impossible to provide in tropical Africa education on the scale on which it is available in France. Even today, there are still many disconcerting blanks on the primary school map, and with few exceptions only the bigger towns offer post primary educational facilities. (See Table 51.) In 1957, in the whole of French Afrique noire, some 1.2 million children, out of approximately 5 million children of school age, were enrolled in European public or private schools. Of these, only about 5 per cent were enrolled in postprimary schools. In French Equatorial Africa out of a total enrollment of approximately 176,000 in 1957, only some 8,000 students were attending secondary or technical schools. In French West Africa the corresponding figures were approximately 380,000 and 20,000; in Madagascar, 332,000 and 19,000. Down to 1958 the only institution in the whole area offering academic and technical training at the university level was the University of Dakar. But even these figures represent a remarkable advance on those of the early postwar period, as Table 52 clearly shows. It is probable indeed, certain that the French could have had more schools and more children enrolled in them if they had cared less about quality. But they have consistently striven to maintain metropolitan standards, particularly at the post-primary levels. And not without success, for it is claimed that neither the African nor the European students at tending high schools in the overseas territories find it difficult as a rule to make the grade when they switch to similar schools, or go on to college work, in France. Certainly, few concessions are made to the color of a mans skin or to his cultural background. To become a university student, a teacher or a doctor, an African must have all the paper qualifications a Parisian would have. He is also expected to have much the same grasp of the French language as the Parisian; and it is noteworthy that most edu cated Africans from, say, the Ivory Coast have a greater mastery of French than most educated Africans from, say, Ghana have of English. Almost the only kind of concession the French have been willing to make is to the African s physical setting. As far back as 1920, Albert Sarraut, Minister for Colonies, advised his governors and governors-general that while it is unquestionably necessary to have an elite, selected strictly on the basis of their proven capacities [and given every] access to the higher spheres of learning and [opportunity for] the complete develop ment of personality, it is also important to bear in mind from the very first the economic utility of education for the masses, and efforts should be directed toward insuring above all a full development of primary, technical

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Table 51 FRENCH TROPICAL AFRICA: NUMBER OF PUBLIC AND PRIVATE EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS, JANUARY 1, 1957
TERRITORY TOTAL PRIM ARY TECHNICAL SECONDARY HIGHER

Total French West Africa French Equatorial Africa French Cameroons (French) Togo Malagasy Republic (Madagascar)

9,263 2,546 1,254 2,504 478 2,481

8,454 2,339 1,126 2,370 465 2,154

460 128 93 68
6

342 75 35 66 7 159

7 4 0 0 0 3

165

Table 52

FRENCH TROPICAL AFRICA: NUMBER OF STUDENTS IN PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SCHOOLS, 1946 AND 1957 a
TERRITORY TOTAL NUM BER PE R CENT GIRLS

French West Africa 107,470 1946 379,186 1957 French Equatorial Africa 1946 34,150 1957 175,956 French Cameroons 1946 114,722 1957 278,889 (French) Togo 17,230 1946 67,950 1957 Malagasy Republic (Madagascar) 187,820 1946 1957 332,003 a Figures are as of January 1.

19 24 9 22 14 27 18 23 40 41

Source of Tables 51 and 52: African Affairs (French Embassy, Service de Presse et

dInformation, New York), May 1958, pp. 8-9.

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and vocational education. 11 The desirability of teaching the African how to live better has been stressed from time to time in later declarations of policy. It finds its expression today in the increasing attention that is being paid in primary and technical school curricula to husbandry, health and hygiene, and to indigenous arts and crafts. By proceeding in this way the French held it would be possible to avoid a disequilibrium which would be fatal to society and to the indige nous family, and to ensure the formation of an indigenous elite which will be called upon to fill an increasing number of jobs in commerce, industry and administration. 12 School System To serve this conception of its educational responsibility, the French government developed various types of schools. At the primary level, the standard model has been the six-grade school, the leading functions of which are to make the student literate and to equip him, according to its location, for life in the bush or in the town. A good many substandard schools still offer only a two-to-three-year curriculum. At the post-primary level, there are technical and vocational schools, secondary schools, higher technical schools, teacher-training schools, and the University of Dakar. The technical and vocational schools offer courses varying in length from three to six years. These courses are designed to give young Africans greater familiarity with modern developments and techniques in agricul ture, industry and commerce. 13 Satisfactory completion of the three-year course wins a certificate of professional aptitude; the longer courses, a teaching diploma (Brevet dEnseigncment Indnstriel, or Brevet dEEnseignement Commercial). The secondary schools offer a three-year course (roughly equivalent to the first three years of high school in the American system) leading to a certificate (Brevet dEtudes du Premier Cycle), and a further three-year course leading to the Baccalaureate which is generally reckoned to put the student on a par academically with a junior at the average American university. The principal aim of these courses has been to provide a cadre of men and women capable of assuming responsibility for the effi cient running of the public services of the communities in which they live. The higher technical schools offer work at approximately the freshman and sophomore levels, in a wide variety of subjects including surveying, electronics, the repair and maintenance of machinery, roads and other
11 Circular by Minister for Colonies, Albert Sarraut, to the Governors-General and Governors of the Colonies, October 10, 1920. 12 United Nations, Non-Self-Governing Territories: Summaries and Analyses of In formation Transmitted to the Secretary-General during 1949, New York, 1950, p. 172. 13 African Affairs (French Embassy, Service de Presse et dInformation, New York), May 1958, p. 8.

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public works, and agriculture. Graduating students are awarded the BaccalaurSat Technique. To handle the rapid postwar expansion of pri mary education and the consequent demand for more teachers, the govern ment established, often with very considerable assistance from the mis sions, normal schools in various parts of its African dependencies, and introduced continuation programs in many of its secondary schools. The University of Dakar also had its origins in the postwar surge of edu cational interest. Starting, in 1950, as the Institute of Higher Studies with modest facilities and a very small enrollment, it now has more than a thousand students enrolled in three faculties (science, liberal arts, and law and economics) and the National School of Medicine and Pharmacy. Its campus, on the western shore of the peninsula on which Dakar stands, is destined to rank as one of the most spectacular, for site and plant, and one of the most salubrious in the whole of Africa. Its academic standards al ready bear comparison with those prevailing in metropolitan France. The doors of the university are open to all qualified students. However, its curricula are designed primarily to serve the aspirations and needs of the African peoples, and to give the modern African an opportunity to re examine the values of his own cultural heritage and to acquire a deeper knowledge of other technical and moral values from the West. 14 While government schools have been the norm, mission and other pri vate schools have enjoyed equal rights, so long as they maintained the approved academic standards, conducted their work in French, and were staffed by teachers holding metropolitan certificates. Until quite recently many missions preferred to use the local vernacular, or vernaculars, and so were disqualified from doing formal educational work. However, the majority of mission societies are coming to see that a well-run school enjoying official recognition is a good thing to have on any mission station, especially in these days when the African's main reason for consorting with white men is frequently to learn their magic in order to qualify himself for European jobs. It is fair to say that the French government has gen erally been of much the same mind. Portuguese Territories Educational Policy The educational policy of the Portuguese is more modest than that of the French and rather differently conceived. Unlike the French, the Portuguese are in no hurry to make citizens, though they leave the way open to those who wish to become citizens and can measure up to the set requirements. Consequently, they do not feel under the same obliga tion to duplicate in Africa all the educational facilities provided in the homeland; nor have they attempted to do so. They also differ from the
14 Ibid., p. 4.

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French in regarding instruction in religion as forming an integral part of their teaching responsibility. Marcelo Caetano, in his book Colonizing Traditions, Principles and Methods of the Portuguese, speaks for the Portuguese government when he says: On the principal that political unity is founded on a moral unity . . . Portuguese colonization has at tached great importance to the religious factor in civilizing natives. 15 And because Catholicism is the official religion of the country, the government has, from the beginning, insisted that the responsibility for civilizing natives be vested in the Catholic missions operating in its African terri tories. The diffusion of Catholicism is regarded as being of such im portance as to warrant government protection of all Catholic missions, no matter what their national affiliation. Since 1935 the position of Catholic-controlled schools has been fortified by a decree restricting edu cational subsidies to such schools. In the matter of language medium, however, the Portuguese share the French governments preference for the mother tongue. Indeed, they go further than the French. Because of the great diversity of ethnic groups and languages, they contend that their goal of cultural assimilation can be reached only when there is a common tongue, and that tongue Portu guese. It would seem that to the Portuguese administrator the native lan guages are part of the barbarism he is seeking to overcome. In line with their narrower conception of African needs, the Portuguese have limited the scope of their elementary school offerings to Christian morals, reading, writing, arithmetic and vocational training in such fields as farming, carpentry and needlework. By so doing, they affirm that they will effect a preliminary penetration of Portuguese culture without turn ing the Africans from their tribal life or from their traditional way of living. 16 It might be supposed from this that the Portuguese government had no use for non-Catholic schools, but this is not the case. It broadly [wel comes] missions of all Christian confessions, according to Caetano, and though the warmth of the welcome has frequently been questioned by Protestant missionaries, the fact is that, until recently, in some parts of Angola more children were attending Protestant mission schools than Catholic, and the educational standard of those schools was higher than that of the Catholic schools. To this many government officials in Angola have readily testified. In Mozambique Protestant schools have had to work under greater difficulties, and since 1935 the majority of them have been closed. In addition to their financial handicap, the Protestant schools also labor under the necessity of having to permit all those of their students who wish to enter the teaching profession or to go into govern ment service, or even to continue their studies at a higher level elsewhere,
15 Agenda Geral do Ultramar, Lisbon, 1951, p. 44. 16 Ibid., p. 45.

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to take an examination in Catholic doctrine as well as in secular subjects. However, the syllabus for teachers is sufficiently broad to permit Chris tian and ethical teaching in the classroom to be fairly general in character; and the complaints from Protestants are less sharp than one might expect. 17 School System Primary education is free to all Africans residing within three kilometers (roughly two miles) of a school, but it is still not available to more than a minority. In 1957, in the whole of Angola, out of an estimated school-age population of more than a million, only 80,000 children were enrolled in primary schools. In all of Mozambique, out of an estimated schoolage population of 1.5 million, approximately 360,000 children were attend ing primary schools. In Portuguese Guinea, with a school-age population of not less than 150,000, the number of enrolled students was about 11,000. To get to these schools, many children were walking more than three kilometers. But more schools are being built, at a faster rate now than ever before, and it is hoped that in the course of the next decade the theoretical compulsion upon Africans to send children between the ages of 7 and 12 to school can be transformed into a practical possibility. Wherever feasible, the Portuguese provide separate elementary schools for European children and the children of Europeanized or assimilated Africans. The basis of segregation is cultural rather than racial. The curriculum calls for four years of instruction in the case of European children or children of Europeanized Africans. African children who have not learned Portuguese at home may begin the curriculum only after two years of preparatory work. Post-primary education is even less developed, and is generally avail able only in the big towns. In the whole of Angola in 1957 fewer than 13,000 students were enrolled in secondary, technical and normal schools. In Mozambique about 10,000 were enrolled; in Portuguese Guinea and Sao Tome and Principe, about 600. Significantly, in the light of Portuguese policy, most of these students were attending technical schools. In Portuguese Africa as a whole some 15,000 students, or over 60 per cent of the total number of post-primary students, were attending technical schools; not more than 8,500, or 35 per cent, were attending secondary schools; only 820, or less than 4 per cent, normal schools. Significantly, too, most of the technical schools were simple affairs, offering instruction in such artisan subjects as carpentry and shoemaking. The normal schools were concerned mainly with training Africans to run small bush schools. But those attending the secondary schools were clearly regarded as a
17 M. Searle Bates and others, Survey of the Training of the Ministry in Africa, Part II, International Missionary Council, London and New York, 1954, p. 27.

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class apart, for they enjoyed facilities comparable to those found in any progressive American community. Indeed, the liceus at Luanda in Angola and Lourenco Marques in Mozambique would be an adornment to most such communities, and their students would have little difficulty in standing their ground against any comparable American group. Although the criterion of entrance into the liceus is solely merit, the ratio of African to European students is still low, much lower than it has been in the French areas. In line with its policy of cultural assimilation, the government requires that the curriculum in all high schools, and the standards of achievement, be identical with those demanded of similar schools in Portugal. Those African students who have qualified for entry into the liceus sit side by side with, and take the same examinations as, the children of high-ranking Portuguese officials. The full seven-year secondary school curriculum is divided into three parts, lasting two, three and two years respectively; but not all secondary school pupils complete all three parts. Such post-secondary education as students, European and African, may wish to pursue, or may be permitted to pursue, can be had only by going to Portugal or the Union of South Africa. Down to 1959 there were no plans for establishing, in any of Portugals African terri tories, institutions comparable to the colleges of university rank in Ghana, Nigeria, the Republic of Sudan and elsewhere. Belgian Territories Educational Policy The Belgians predicated their African educational policy on two as sumptions. First, that it is better to have 90 per cent of the population capable of understanding what the government is trying to do for them and competent to help the government in doing it than to have 10 per cent of the population so full of learning that it spends its time telling the government what to do. Second, that all education is the better for being in the hands of men of faith. From the beginning, the policy of the gov ernment was to favor mission schools. By the Concordat of 1906 which Leopold II concluded with the Vatican, the Catholic missions were given virtual control of the Africans education and were provided with govern ment subsidies. Protestant missions were also allowed to run schools, but it was not until the mid-1920s that they became eligible for government grants. At the present time (1959) subsidies, adjusted to work done in various phases of general education, are given to such schools and teach ers, Protestant and Catholic alike, as meet government standards. Only about half the schools have met these standards. In addition to subsidizing mission and other private schools, the govern ment has operated, since 1954, a number of schools of its own. Not the least of the functions of these schools is to keep the non-government

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schools wide awake and so bring about an improvement in the general quality of education for the [Africans]. 18 Several schools are also operated by the big commercial and industrial companies and mining corporations. Thanks to the joint efforts of government, churches and corporations, the educational provision for the African is impressive. In 1957 there were approximately 30,000 schools (28,500 of them primary) and 46,000 teachers (40,000 of them African) in the Belgian Congo and Ruanda-Urundi. In the same year more than 1.64 million students were enrolled in primary and pre-primary schools, and more than 50,000 in post-primary schools of one kind or another. All together, between one third and two fifths of the school-age children of the Congo were receiving some formal European education. At the rate at which schools were then being provided and teachers being trained, almost the entire school-age population, girl and boy alike, was expected either to be in primary school or to have had some such schooling by the early 1960s. Post-primary facilities were expected to be available then for those living in the more accessible areas and capable of profiting by them. By 1970 the government hoped to be able to offer the best elements in the population academic and technical training that would allow them to get to the top of the educational pyra mid without ever having been separated from their native environment. Some students have already got to the top, for since 1954 there has been a private university Lovanium at Kimwenza near Leopoldville, and since 1956 a state university with headquarters at Elisabethville and branches in other Congo and Ruanda-Urundi cities. At the beginning of the 1958-1959 session Lovanium had 236 students (most of them Africans) and the state university 171 (most of them Europeans). While the properly qualified African student is not prevented from going abroad to further his academic interests, as a general rule the Belgians have preferred that he did not. The African student educated abroad has tended to become, in their view, a stranger and a pilgrim a stranger to his own people and a pilgrim to unpatriotic places.

School System
The school system employed in Belgian Africa has been kept flexible, and its organizers have not hesitated to alter it whenever their resources allowed or circumstances dictated. At the present time the system calls for a two-year pre-primary (nursery) course followed by a primary course which can be completed in four years but may be spread over five or six years. Wherever possible, the better students are encouraged at the end of their second primary year to embark on a further four-year course
18 A. Buisseret, the then Minister of Colonies in the Belgian government, in the New
York Times, lanuary 4, 1955.

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designed to prepare them for work at the secondary school level. Students who are unable or unwilling to consider doing six years of secondary schooling may, on completing the standard four-year primary course, enroll either for teacher-training courses ranging in duration from two to four years, or for courses of comparable length that will qualify them for clerical positions in business or government. The secondary schools are of two types, modern and classical. As their name suggests, the classical schools stress languages, literature, history and philosophy. In making this type of school available to African as well as Belgian students, the government sought to demonstrate that it was 'not reserving for [Belgian] children alone the monopoly of a high intel lectual training 19 and, as a consequence, the professions to which it gives entree . The so-called modern schools provide three years of wellrounded education, and three years of specialization in administration and commerce, surveying, general science or teacher-training. To those not interested in getting white-collar jobs (there are some), the Belgians have offered the attractions of artisanship. In recent years they have opened many well-equipped and well-staffed technical schools and workshops, with courses ranging in length from two to four years, in which students can learn to become furniture makers, masons, motor mechanics, lathe workers, workshop supervisors, plant foremen and, at a higher level, medical assistants (infirmiers) and dispensers. In 1957 more than 22,000 students were enrolled in some 650 such schools and workshops. In order to be able to proceed to one of the two universities, students must either have completed successfully the full six-year secondary school program or have made good any deficiencies in their school record by attending classes in the pre-university section of the university. At the university level itself work is offered in all the traditional fields and in some that are still almost virgin. By 1958 Lovanium was already offering courses in African philology and sociology, tribal law, African history, art and literature, and the economy of underdeveloped countries, as well as in tropical medicine, hygiene and agriculture and more conventional subjects. As in the French territories, government-subsidized education is free at every level. In those pre-primary and primary schools which serve African communities the medium of instruction is normally the dominant language of the district, French being merely one of the subjects taught. At most post-primary schools, instruction is given in French. Flemish, which has been the other official language of the Belgian Congo, has the rank of second modern European language in most high schools.
19 Pierre Wigny, A Ten Year Plan for the Economic and Social Development of the Belgian Congo, Belgian Government Information Center, New York, 1951, p. 29.

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Unlike the French and Portuguese governments, the Belgian govern ment has not prescribed what language shall be used in schools which it has not supported or officially recognized. All the same, it has made in creasing effort to secure the adoption of French as the lingua franca of its school system. Neither Swahili, which was introduced by the Arab slave traders, nor any of the vernaculars, it is argued, meets the requirements of the elite who seek to be initiated into the things of the mind . . . [and to have opened] to them a wider gateway to civilization. 20 In any such linguistic endeavor the cooperation of the African woman is essential. So long as the mother tongue is a vernacular, the prospects of making French the language of communication between one African group and another, and between African and European, must remain poor, to the embarrassment of administrator, enterpriser and educator alike. When the government has the ear of the women it will have the ear of the children, and when it has the ear of the children it has opened the gateway for once and all. At least, that is the hope. Progress toward parity of educational facilities for boys and girls has been slow for several reasons, not the least important of them being the inertia of the unschooled, both male and female. However, the tempo is quickening as funds become available for girls education, and the prac tical advantages of efficiently run homes, rational child care and emanci pation become more widely appreciated. Since the war the Belgians have introduced several "woman-oriented programs into their school system. At the primary level there are now home economics courses (etudes menageres). At the post-primary level vocational courses are offered in such subjects as teaching, midwifery and dressmaking, and more general courses covering the theory and practice of homecraft. A measure of the progress made by the Belgians in this postwar period is provided by the following figures: in 1948 less than 5 per cent of the African children attending school were girls; in 1958 the percentage was more than 20. Commonioealth Territories

Educational Policy
The British are habitually shy of statements of policy, particularly those relating to the imponderables of mind and spirit. Inconvenient as this trait may be to their critics, it has the advantage of giving them greater freedom of action to do things they believe need doing in a given situation, and of making it less difficult for them to switch to other things when the situation alters. This is not to say that they are a people without an edu cational policy, but rather that they have no special fancy for educational policies which leave nothing to the imagination. The raison detre of their
20 Ibid., pp. 29-30.

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educational endeavor is clear, at least. In the words of W. E. F. Ward, the main business of education, as they see it, is
to take boys and girls and develop them as human beings to the highest pos sibility that they have: to train them to make the best use of their gifts . . . It is not the job of education to teach people to know their proper stations and to stay in them. We have rejected that idea of education in [Britain], and it has no place in Africa . . . Our job as educators, whether Europeans 01* Africans, is to get the schools and colleges and universities into good order: to provide more trained teachers, to develop institutes of education and professional associations of teachers, to develop African local education authorities, and, of course, to provide more education as well as better education. If self-government and partnership are to work in Africa, the educational problems have to be solved. Once you begin education, you cannot stop it; you must go all the way.21

For long, questions of policy were left in the hands of local authorities. In some instances this meant that they were left pretty much in the hands of the local mission society or societies, whose men and women constituted the local authority in the absence of a resident district officer. Later, each dependency assumed the oversight of the educational work being conducted within its borders, and developed its own educational postu lates. From 1925 onward the British government periodically issued memoranda dealing with the education of the African, but it was never the governments intention that the principles set down therein should be interpreted uniformly; nor, indeed, could they be. The territorial dif ferences in racial composition (e.g., between the largely monoracial west African territories and the multiracial east and central African territories), religious affiliations (e.g., between the Mohammedan Northern Region and the Christianized Eastern and Western Regions of Nigeria), economic development (e.g., between comparatively advanced Uganda and com paratively backward Tanganyika), and inclination (e.g., between the Kikuyu, who eagerly embraced the chance of schooling, and the Masai, who didnt) ruled out any such possibility. Nevertheless, these memoranda leave no doubt about the kind of edu cation the British government believes the African should have, or the problem of giving it to him. What it has been trying to do is to provide primary school facilities for all children; secondary or technical training for the cream of the primary scholars; and university training for the cream of the secondary and technical school graduates. Its purpose in so doing has been to give enough Africans enough instruction in the art of civilized living to enable them sooner or later to run their own show and to do it successfully. Or, as a Colonial Office Memorandum of February 1954 put it rather more formally: [African education] must develop qualities of citizenship and the capacity for self-government; it must pro vide training in all the various skills and techniques which a self-governing nation needs; and it must give its peoples an understanding not only of
21 The Listener, July 9, 1953, p. 54.

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the potentialities of their own country, but of the essentials of Western culture.

Primary Education
All of this is more easily said than done, of course. The building of pyramids in Africa has always been a slow and costly process. But progress has been substantial, at all three levels of the pyramid, in all the Commonwealth territories, especially since the war. Literacy may still be as low as 10 per cent in many out-of-the-way places, but in most of the larger towns at least 50 per cent of the African children now attend pri mary school, and in some (notably Lagos, Nairobi, Salisbury, Dar-esSalaam) the percentage is as high as 75. Within the next ten years or so several governments expect to be able to provide free primary education for their entire school-age populations. Among these are the governments of Nigeria and Ghana. The educational ten-year plan embarked on in Nigeria in 1946 had as its main objective the provision of junior primary education within a generation for all Nigerian children of school age. This plan was later superseded by the even more ambitious 1955-1960 development plans of the federal and regional governments, which have devoted a large proportion of their development moneys to "crash pro grams of educational expansion. As a result of these, school enrollments went up in the Western Region by two thirds of a million between 1954 and 1956, and in the Eastern Region by three quarters of a million to 1,330,000. In Ghana, the Minister of Education was able to report in 1957 that
throughout the length and breadth of southern Ghana and Ashanti, primary school facilities are available for the great majority of children of school age. In 1951 there were just over 1,000 primary schools; in 1957 the number has risen to over 3,000, and the period of tremendous expansion in primary edu cation is over.22

This in a country where the rate of expansion of educational facilities down to the mid-1930s was so slow that it would have taken six hundred years to achieve universal primary education!

Secondary Education
The development of secondary schools has been much slower. Such schools, to serve their function which, in the eyes of the student, is to enable him to obtain on graduating a certificate from one of the senior British universities that will be his password to "white-collar service must be well equipped, well staffed, commodious (most schools have to reckon on having boarders as well as day scholars and many are for boarders exclusively), and must maintain educational standards com
22 Ghana Today, July 10, 1957.

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parable to those found in British schools of the same kind. Then again, until the recent expansion of primary education, the number of primary school graduates who were either able or willing to attend secondary schools and complete the arduous five-to-six-year curriculum was small. Many of those who were willing did not pass the highly competitive en trance examinations, and many of those who did, found it difficult to pay the tuition and, where they applied, the boarding fees. Consequently, it is not surprising that up to the early 1950s, the per centage of primary school graduates who went on to do secondary school work was nowhere higher than about two, and in some territories less than one. Such figures, it has long been recognized, are too low for the good of any territory moving toward self-government, to say nothing of terri tories already self-governing. Accordingly, large sums of money have been spent in the past decade on the building of new schools and the training of new African teachers. Between 1951 and 1958 the number of secondary schools in Ghana increased from 13 to approximately 60, and the number of secondary school students from less than 3,000 to more than 12,000. Over the same period the number of teacher-training colleges increased from 20 to 34, and the number of trainees from less than 2,000 to more than 4,000. In Commonwealth tropical Africa as a whole the number of secondary schools more than doubled (to over 600) in the first postwar decade, and the number of students more than trebled (to over 75,000). By the end of 1960 the number of such schools is expected to exceed 1,000 and the num ber of students to be well over 150,000. By the mid-1960s, therefore, the number of secondary school graduates coming onto the labor mar ket in such territories as Ghana, the Western Region of Nigeria and Uganda will bear comparison with the number in some comparably sized American states. There will still be many primary school graduates who are unable to get a secondary education, but there should be enough to ensure that the foreseeable needs of government, commerce and industry for white-collar African employees can be met in most territories.

Higher Education
The reasons that may be advanced for the slow progress of secondary education apply even more strongly to college and university education. It is at once the costliest and most demanding of all scholastic enterprises. It is also, from the standpoint of priorities, the least urgent. For many years the number of Africans capable of taking advantage of such educa tion was so small that governments and mission boards found it much cheaper to send those who did measure up to the required standards to foreign universities than to attempt to provide local facilities. Those col leges that did offer post-secondary courses of instruction, for example Achimota College in Ghana, were habitually hard-pressed for funds and

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faculty. But no government that announces its intention of preparing its wards for self-government can deny them the right to a university educa tion, costly and demanding as it may prove to be, and no elite that has begun to ponder the implications of autonomy can be expected long to forego the prestige, the authority and the convenience that comes from having its own university. Among the "new nations the university is apt to be as much a symbol of national spirit as it is of intellectual maturity. Shortly after the conclusion of World War II, the British government, acting on the recommendations of two wartime commissions, voted funds for the setting up of four African university colleges. Two of these were located in west Africa (at Achimota, Ghana, and at Ibadan, Nigeria),23 one in east Africa (at Kampala, Uganda) and one in what is now the Republic of Sudan (at Khartoum). What Dr. Kenneth Mellanby, the first principal of the University College, Ibadan, said in his opening address on April 22, 1948 about the purpose of the Nigerian college may fairly be said to represent the governments intention for all four:
The University College is being established with the primary object of pro ducing a university which will be a center of learning and culture and which will make the maximum contribution to all aspects of the development of the country. The standards of the University College must be equal to those of the best universities of any country, but the college must also have an African bias, and while not neglecting any branch of learning must concentrate on subjects of special interest and importance to Africa.

Each of the four colleges has already done much to justify these high hopes. There has been no trimming of academic standards. The Uni versity of London, with which each college has enjoyed a "special relation ship, and for whose degrees the students of three of the four still (1959) work, has never been known to temper the wind to the shorn lamb, white or black. There has been very little frittering of effort or op portunity; such expansion as there has been of the initial programs has occurred usually after the needed funds have been assured, and has been related closely to the realities of African land and life. There has been no trimming of material standards, either. "Only the best is good enough for Africa is written large across the blueprints of chemistry laboratories, cafeterias, chapels and candelabras. When the British leave Africa they will at least be able to say: "If you seek a monument, look around. Whether the African student will be as much impressed by what he sees as his British tutors, it is too early to say. Meanwhile, the idea of bringing higher education within the reach of all qualified students, of whatever race or creed, is spreading throughout Commonwealth Africa. In 1957 at Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia, a fifth university college, the University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland,
23 At Freetown, Sierra Leone, Fourah Bay College was already offering courses of college caliber and capable of earning bachelor degrees in the University of Durham, England. In 1960 it was granted the status of university college.

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opened its doors to 68 full-time students European, African and Asian.2 4 Plans have been made for a second university college in Nigeria (in the Eastern Region) and for two more in British East Africa (at Nairobi in Kenya and Morogoro in Tanganyika). Since the war, too, several technical colleges and other centers of higher education have been established. Outstanding among these are the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology (which has campuses at Zaria, Ibadan and Enugu and con fines itself largely to professional education), the Kumasi College of Technology in Ghana, and the Royal Technical College at Nairobi, Kenya.

Mission Schools
Until a few years ago, the keystone of the whole educational system was the missionary. As in the Belgian, Portuguese and French territories, the missionary provided the bush African with almost his only opportunity of observing the white man at close quarters. It was he who, in the ab sence of the overworked administrator, was called upon to settle petty disputes; who dispensed medical magic; who was ready to hunt meat in time of hunger, and to dig wells in time of drought; who was able to build a bridge, or pole a ferry across a stream, make bricks and repair tools; and who built the schools and ran them. Though the missionary factotum is disappearing, the influence of the missionary teacher continues to be strong. Most of the primary and secondary schools are still staffed and administered by the missions, and, fortunately for the recruiters, a high percentage of the faculty members of government colleges are "missionminded. 25 If, in recent years, the British government has assumed greater and greater responsibility for African education, the reason is not dissatisfac tion with the work of the mission societies, but rather the desire to strengthen it and extend it, especially in the predominantly Moslem areas, to which Christian missions have been denied access. Yet it is hard not to believe that the heyday of the mission school is past, especially in those territories which are nearing the end of their colonial tutelage and about to become masters in their own house. It is harder still to see how the educational goal of all the Commonwealth African administrations can be reached unless responsibility for the financing, directing and supervising of all types of education is vested in government bodies created for the purpose. Alone, the missions cannot be sure of either the necessary funds or the personnel, and because of their confessional differences they cannot be expected to speak with one voice on matters of curriculum, teachertraining or pedagogic method. Nor are they likely to submit readily to
24 In March 1959 the number of full-time students had increased to 169. 25 In conversation one principal confessed that he could see no professional reason why a physicist or chemist should take a post in his college, which could never begin to compete with British universities or industrial corporations, either in intellectual stimulus or opportunities for research.

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dictation from secular authorities in such matters. Even so, it is likely to be many years before the mission school disappears from the scene, if it ever does. Already some Commonwealth governments are beginning to find that what makes a good school is not the amount of the equipment or the size of the budget, but the quality, ethical as much as intellectual, of its staff members and their sense of vocation qualities that tend to find their strongest roots in religious faith. Spanish Territories The fact that the Spanish government does not make a habit of publiciz ing its colonial administration has led many people to infer that there is little to tell that any government would wish to tell. But in the field of education such an inference would seem to be unwarranted. Thus, in Spanish Guinea 20 in 1957, out of an estimated school-age population of approximately 65,000, not less than 21,000 were in primary school, over 200 in technical school and nearly 200 in secondary school. Such figures compare well with those of several much larger non-self-governing territories, including Bechuanaland, British Somaliland and Somalia, and, on a proportional reckoning, they outrank those of most other tropical African territories, non-self-governing or otherwise. The educational systems for the children of European stock and for those of African stock are, in the phrase once so familiar to Americans, sep arate and unequal. The objectives of African education are stated to be the improvement of the Africans living conditions and the inculcation of Spanish virtues, patriotism and culture to the degree that this is possible without making him a rootless person. In line with these objectives, the African is offered training of three types. The first, or pre-primary, type is concerned, in the main, with prac tical, manual matters, and is conducted largely by African "auxiliaries. The second, or primary, type offers the student the alternatives of training for "the activities of the country in general or preparation for the "higher school (escuela superior indtgena), where he will receive the third type of training, namely, for auxiliary service in such fields as public health, public works, business and teaching. In addition, there are schools which offer instruction in clerical, agricultural and domestic work. So far little thought appears to have been given to the subject of higher education, possibly because it would almost certainly lead to Europeaniza tion, and so to rootlessness. The education of the sizable European population of Spanish Guinea follows in all essentials the metropolitan pattern. The responsibility of providing education for Africans and Europeans is shared by the govern
26 Comprising Rio Muni, or continental Guinea, the nearby islands of Corisco, Great and Little Elobey, and the islands of Fernando Po and Annobon in the Bight of Benin.

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ment and the missions; but only Catholic missions are eligible for grants and subsidies. Liberia For the first eighty years or so of its history, the Liberian Republic had the unenviable distinction of being the most illiterate sovereign state in the world. Even some of the presidents had difficulty with their reading and writing. The only education to be had w ras provided by the few undernourished Christian missions, the Koranic schools, which did little more than teach the children of the northern Moslemized tribes to recite the Koran in Arabic, and the initiation schools. With the setting up in the present century of a Department of Public Instruction, the government took formal cognizance of the subject. In 1912 a law providing for compulsory elementary schooling was enacted. A general education code was promulgated in 1937, and amended in 1942 and 1944. But as there was little or no money in the national exchequer for the building of schools and the training and payment of teachers, the children of Liberia had very little more schooling than before. In 1920, Ruth Sloan notes in a paper prepared for this study, the government ap propriation for education was $2,000, not all of which was actually spent. As recently as 1946 the government spent only $154,000, or nearly $50,000 less than the missions. Until the end of World War II, only 3 per cent or so of the school-age population was actually attending school, and 80 per cent of the educational work was being done by Christian missions. Throughout this period most of those attending school were children of Americo-Liberian stock. The Afro-Liberians of the hinterland were regarded by the Americo-Liberians for the most part as being intellec tually inferior. All instruction was given in English, the official language of the country. The curriculum was similar to that in general use in the United States, where most of the missions had their headquarters. Very little of it was free. With rare exceptions the elementary schools were poorly staffed and supervised, inadequately financed and shockingly short of equipment, textbooks and other supplies. There were no secondary schools worthy of the name, and such colleges as there were (for instance, Liberia College, the College of West Africa, and Cuttington College and Divinity School) found it necessary to give most of their attention to what was euphemistically called preparatory work in other words, basic education. Since about 1946 the educational picture has brightened considerably. Each year has seen more and more effort directed to preparing the peoples of the country, Afro- as well as Americo-Liberian, for life in a Christian democratic society. Fortunately, the large American corporations operat ing in Liberia, such as the Firestone Plantations Company and the Liberia

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Mining Company, have been able to provide President Tubmans govern ment with a larger operating budget just when it was needed to give teeth to this intention. By the late 1950s the budget of the Department of Public Instruction was roughly $2 million, several hundred times what it was in 1920. It was still an inadequate budget, amounting, at the most, to about $5 per school-age child, but it was being put to good use. In the first postwar decade the number of children attending elementary school more than quadrupled, increasing from about 10,000 to over 40,000. The teacher-training program was strengthened by the opening of the William V. S. Tubman School of Teacher Training and several demonstra tion schools where apprentice teachers could gain valuable practical ex perience, and also by the setting up in different parts of the country of training institutes conducted under the auspices of the International Co operation Administration of the United States. During the same period the College of West Africa, Liberia College and the Booker Washington Institute, along with some smaller centers of learning, were reconsti tuted by Act of the Legislature (February 15, 1951) into the Uni versity of Liberia. Following a visit in 1948 by Dr. Frank C. Laubach, literacy programs conducted in both the vernacular and English were begun among the neglected Afro-Liberians and those of the AmericoLiberians who were still unlettered. Plans were also made to place at least one elementary school in every town or tribal community. Even so, at the present rate of expansion, it will be many years before Liberia can match the educational performance of, say, Ghana or Nigeria. In 1957 the number of children enrolled in primary schools was still less than 15 per cent of the estimated school-age population, and not more than 10,000 of those enrolled were expected to go beyond the third grade. In the same year the number of primary school teachers was still less than 8 per cent of the number (approximately 25,000) needed to make it pos sible to enforce Liberias compulsory education law; and of these teachers, only about one in six had more than a sixth-grade education. The position regarding post-primary education was still more depress ing. In 1958 the total enrollment in the 24 secondary and technical schools was about 2,600; and in the three institutions of higher education (in cluding the University of Liberia at Monrovia 27), less than 500. The levels of performance required in most of these institutions are low, both by the better American standards and by those of neighboring west African countries. Ethiopia (including Eritrea)

Educational Policy In education, as in many other respects, Ethiopia does not fit into the stock African mold. It is, in fact, unique among the territories of tropical
27 Now (1960) in process of being moved to Paynesville. By 1962 the country is expected to have two more universities, one a Catholic university and the other the gift of a group of American businessmen.

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Africa. When the Portuguese reached the country at the end of the fifteenth century, they found themselves among people who could read and write; who knew the rudiments of astronomy, music and mathematics; who ran seminaries and schools, and filled libraries with their parchments. True, the number of people who did any of these things was small, but so, for that matter, was the number who did in Europe; elsewhere in tropical Africa there were none who did these things. Three hundred years later, Protestant and Catholic missionaries entering the country found children reading the Psalter and other sacred books in Geez (the liturgical lan guage of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church), writing in Amharic and doing exercises in arithmetic. They also saw what their fifteenth-century predecessors had not seen, for the Moslem conquest did not take place until the sixteenth century imams teaching the children of the faithful to recite verses from the Koran, and to read and write in Arabic. At the same time, it did not take the missionaries long to realize that the majority of the people were completely illiterate and that many of the "literate were no better off than the Ethiopian eunuch of the New Testament story who did not understand what he was reading. It was not until 1908 that the government of Ethiopia, under the Em peror Menelik II, seems to have sensed the inadequacy of the education provided by the Orthodox and Moslem schools (and, to a lesser extent, by the Western missions) for the responsibilities which the children of the ruling class were being called upon increasingly to assume. Though several government schools were established in the years that followed, fewer than a thousand boys and girls including the hundred or so who were studying abroad were receiving anything in the nature of a modern education when the Italians invaded the country in 1935. The Italians, who made little effort to conceal their contempt for the ruling classes, closed the government schools and, along with them, most of the non-Catholic mission schools. In their place they established a number of primary schools designed to make good working-class Fascists out of the pupils. Only among the Moslems, whose protector Mussolini declared himself to be, were higher studies allowed. Throughout the Italian occu pation, the great mass of the population remained illiterate. With the defeat of the Italian army in 1941 and the return of Emperor Haile Selassie I, a new education era began. Schools long disused were reopened. Those damaged were repaired. New ones were built as quickly as labor and materials could be found. By 1945 eight new primary schools had been built in the provinces. In addition, several post-primary schools, designed for technical, teacher-training and secondary work (including the fine Haile Selassie Secondary School in Addis Ababa), were already in operation. The educational policy of the Ethiopian government was set down at some length about the same time (August 1944). Its major provisions are as follows: 1. Universal elementary education, for both boys and girls (hitherto

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neglected if not ignored), with a curriculum that prepares the child for life in a land where there are few shortcuts to ease and affluence, and whose great need is for better artisans, cultivators and cattlemen. The govern ment insists that, along with academic studies, opportunity for education through handicraft and other practical activities should be made available to every child. 2. The expansion of secondary, technical and university facilities, sub ject to the countrys financial limitations, which, of course, are very con siderable and likely to remain so for many years to come. 3. Mass education of unschooled adults to spread literacy, promote better hygiene and encourage community activities, including recreation. 4. The use of Amharic, the official language of the country, as the principal medium of instruction in the lower grades of the state schools, and of English and Amharic in the upper grades and in the secondary schools. (Amharic remains the sole medium of instruction in the schools administered by the Orthodox Church, and Arabic in the Koranic schools.) 5. The employment of well-qualified foreigners at all teaching levels, but especially in secondary schools and colleges, until such time as enough Ethiopians are qualified to take over this work. 6. Closer and more effective association of the Orthodox Church and Christian missions in the countrys educational program. This is an ambitious policy, though not more ambitious than it needs to be if Ethiopia is to overtake the twentieth century before it is gone. For the fact is that until the Italian invasion Ethiopia was more medieval than modern; indeed, it was medieval. If Haile Selassies exile in England served no other purpose, it afforded him ample opportunity of learning the uses of universal education, technical no less than academic, for girls as well as boys, for both the laboring and the governing classes. It also enabled him to see something of the resilience and stamina, in time of stress, of people who are well aware of what they are fighting for, who are kept informed of the ebb and flow of their fortunes through press, radio and personal encounter with their leaders, and who are united by common traditions, faith and language. Almost none of these conditions existed in Ethiopia. Those who were educated lived for the most part withdrawn from their fellows, in church, monastery and mosque. The languages of the country numbered more than fifty, of which only three were written and not one was understood by more than half the popula tion. There was practically no intercourse between the people of one language and another, and consequently no sense of community, let alone common loyalty. Many tribal chieftains kept their own armies in the man ner of feudal lords and went to war with almost the regularity of the mon soon. Most of those who did the fighting had no idea what they were fighting about or for, and very little share in the spoils. However, the Emperor is not a man to be easily dismayed. Having set the educational goal, he proceeded to busy himself in its pursuit, guiding

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every program, visiting every school and college in the land (in the manner of an inspector oftentimes), and being in almost everything but name the countrys Minister of Education. It was at his insistence that in the early postwar years the annual appropriation for education became the largest in the government budget, and has since been running between 15 and 20 per cent of the total. Notwithstanding, the appropriation still does not come to $10 million U. S. This is not much in a country that is thought by many to have around 4 million children, that stands in the direst need of schools, books and supplies of all kinds, and that has, for the time being, to lean heavily in the running of its schools on expatriate help. Of necessity, therefore, the tempo of educational progress remains slow. School System In 1958 there were in the whole of Ethiopias 395,000 square miles fewer than 450 government primary schools, a bare score of post-primary schools, and one university. The enrollment in the primary schools was roughly 150,000; in the post-primary schools, less than 5,000; in teachertraining colleges, less than 1,000; in the university, less than 400 full-time students. There were fewer than 4,000 government-employed teachers and administrators, of whom about one tenth were foreigners. The 10,000odd schools administered by the Ethiopian Church, Islam and various private agencies (such as the European and American missions) claimed almost 300,000 students; but it is questionable whether the work done in most of the Ethiopian and Koranic schools spells progress. But progress there is, and wherever the visitor journeys he sees evi dences of it. Here it takes the form of new professional training schools, such as the Air Force Cadet Training Center, the Public Health College and Training Center, the School of Building Technology, the Ethiopian College of Engineering, the Harar Teacher Training School, the Agricul tural Technical School, and the Imperial Ethiopian College of Agricul tural and Mechanical Arts (sponsored and partly financed by the Inter national Cooperation Administration of the United States). There it comes in humbler guise: a crowd of barely literate youngsters looking at a window display of English reading matter, a group of young farmers watching a demonstration of cattle-dipping, an adult evening class dis cussing West-East diplomacy, village gossips listening to a radio program in the local coffee shop. Elsewhere it is more in evidence as an attitude than an accomplishment, as among the students of the Haile Selassie Secondary School, who are receiving as fine an education from as com petent a faculty as could be found in any state in the Union and who seem to sense it; or in the offices of ICA consultants, who are tackling gallon-sized problems with pint-sized resources and extemporizing solu tions which more timid spirits might regard as risky, and teaching the Ethiopians to do the same.

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In the long run, of course, it is the attitude of a people toward its prob lems that matters most. The present attitude of the government and people of Ethiopia offers strong grounds for believing that the countrys educational problems will be solved, and in the twentieth century. Somalia It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that until the late 1940s there was no such thing as an educational policy in Somalia, and next to no educa tion of a modern kind. Before and during the fascist Italian occupation, little or 110 thought was given to the educational needs of the indige nous population. Almost the only educational agencies were the Koranic schools for the children of die faithful, and the Catholic missions, whose work was done mainly among the immigrant Italians. The British ad ministration, which lasted from 1941 to 1950, was, to all intents, an inter regnum during which the authorities were reluctant to go much beyond the "care and maintenance requirements of international law. By the time the British handed back the territory to the now democratized Italian government (acting as administering authority for the United Nations Trusteeship Council), fewer than 7,500 Somali children, out of an esti mated school-age population of 350,000, were getting some kind of formal education. Early in the 1950s the Italians, working closely with the indigenous leaders of the country, set themselves the threefold task of creating a Somali teaching corps adequate in numbers and training; increasing the number of children going to school and ensuring regular attendance; and developing vocational and higher education. A measure of the prog ress they have made with these tasks may be gathered from enrollment figures for the 1957-1958 session. The number of Somalis enrolled in government primary and pre-primary schools in that session was ap proximately 31,500 (around 14,000 children, the rest adults). The number enrolled in government secondary schools of which there were only two for Somalis in the country, both of them in Mogadishu was 248. Of these, only 57 were enrolled at the "senior high level, and only about four out of every five of those enrolled were in regular attendance. An other dozen or so Somalis were enrolled in secondary schools designed primarily for Italians and other Europeans. Vocational schools of various kinds (technical, teacher-training, commercial, agricultural, veterinary, domestic science and fisheries) had about 80 students on their registers. Of these, only 33 were in the teacher-training school, though 98 had been so enrolled in the previous session. Higher education in 1958 was available only at the School of Islamic Discipline and the Higher Institute of Law and Economics, both in Mogadishu. At the former, which has a broad curriculum covering many "non-Islamic studies, there were 270 students; at the latter, which is

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principally interested in producing a cadre of administrators, executives and teachers, there were about the same number of students. The official languages of instruction are Italian and Arabic. Italian is generally employed in the teaching of civil subjects, Arabic in the teach ing of religious subjects. Besides the government schools, mention should be made of those run by various private agencies. Chief among them are those run by the Somali Youth League (with Somali directors), the National Model Schools (started by groups of civic-minded Somalis in various parts of the country and staffed, for the most part, by teachers provided by the government of the United Arab Republic), the Italian schools (for the children of Italian administrators and business people and, for that reason, patterned closely on the metropolitan model) and the Koranic schools (of which there are several "in each of the large towns of every region and district and . . . at least one . . . in every village 28). As in most other parts of the Mohammedan world, it is the boys who get most of what education is going. In the 1957-1958 session the number of Somali girls enrolled in primary schools, government and non-govern ment, was approximately 3,000 and the number of women 1,800. The number of girls and women doing post-primary school work is, in the words of the above-quoted report, "negligible. Some 40 were enrolled in the territorys one domestic science school, 15 in its secondary schools, and one in the Higher Institute of Law and Economics. No women were in training as teachers. Besides all the problems that customarily confront the non-self-govern ing territory, Somalia has two which are peculiarly her own. The first of these is the fact that "the Somali language has not yet been reduced to a written form which is either widely accepted or acceptable . . . The problem posed has thus far proved to be almost insoluble. 29 Technically the problem is no worse than that tackled successfully by linguistic ex perts in almost every other African territory; indeed, a written form of the language, called Osmania after its originator, already exists. What has made it "almost insoluble is the unwillingness of the Somali people to agree among themselves on what they want. Some want Somali with the Osmania alphabet, some want Somali with a Latin alphabet, but most people favor, for religious reasons, the use of the Arabic alphabet. Until the problem is solved, Somali students must continue to be educated in tongues that are not their own and in lore that does nothing to feed their self-esteem. This, to rate it no worse, is an unpromising basis for national cohesion.
28 Report of the United Nations Advisory Council for the Trust Territory of Somaliland under Italian Administration, covering the period from 1 April 1957 to 31 March 1958, mimeographed, T/1372, March 31, 1958, p. 100. 29 Lawrence S. Finkelstein, Somaliland under Italian Administration: A Case Study in United Nations Trusteeship, Woodrow Wilson Foundation, New York, 1955, pp. 17-18.

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Almost as intractable is the problem posed by the nomadic habit of life followed by most of the population. Somalia is goat and camel country. To keep their estimated 10 million goats and 5 million camels alive in a land of fugitive rains and largely seasonal streams, the Somali herders must be mobile. They must be willing to strike camp at any time and to do it, if need be, fifty times a year in as many different districts. In re cent years the Italians, aided by the U. S. government, have drilled many sweet-water wells which have made some of the journeys unnecessary; but so far the herders have shown no sign of wanting to settle down. Until they do, they have no more chance of getting a formal education than the wandering gypsy. A few fleet-footed teams, jointly sponsored by the gov ernment and UNESCO, have been put into the field, but even these, it seems, have had difficulty in keeping up with the nomads. The Republic of Sudan When, in 1898, General Kitchener entered Khartoum at the head of his Anglo-Egyptian force and so completed the reconquest of the Sudan, there were only two schools in the country other than those teaching the Koran. These two were for boys and had an enrollment of about 300. As in all other tropical African territories, the development of educa tional facilities was for long hindered by shortages of funds and qualified teachers. It was also hindered somewhat by lack of agreement, at the policy level, on what was educationally good for the Sudanese people. Where there was agreement, it tended in the early days to follow the thinking of Lord Cromer, who, in 1902, announced his governments aim as being to impart such a knowledge of reading, writing and arithmetic to a certain number of young men as will enable them to occupy with advantage the subordinate places in the administration of the country. In the circumstances it is not surprising that in 1910 only 39 elementary (or primary) schools and 6 intermediate (or middle) schools most of them in the towns had been opened, or that the total enrollment was little more than 3,000. However, Gordon Memorial College in Khartoum, founded in 1902 on an endowment raised largely by Kitchener, was al ready taking some young Sudanese beyond the three Rs into the realms of engineering, accounting, law, business and pedagogy. While the second and third decades of the century saw an increase in the number of both schools and scholars, it was not until the 1930s that anything much was done either to satisfy the needs of the rural areas or to provide an adequate supply of teachers and other professionals. As the result of a special inquiry, the government then put into operation in northern Sudan an ambitious scheme which included the establishment of a university college, expansion of secondary and technical education, and teacher-training facilities. Thanks largely to this scheme, the country found itself much better prepared to meet the responsibilities of inde

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pendence than any of its nationalist leaders had supposed possible ten years before. On January 1,1956, when the Sudan became an independent state, there were over 1,100 government schools, with a total enrollment of nearly 100,000. Of these schools, roughly 1,000 were primary and pre primary schools (200 of them for girls); 40 were intermediate, or middle, schools (6 of them for girls); 8 were secondary schools (one for girls); 11 were teacher-training colleges (4 for girls); and one was the coeduca tional University College (formerly the Gordon Memorial College). Ap proximately 650 non-government schools were in existence, with an enrollment of well over 50,000. Most of these schools were in the southern (so-called pagan) part of the country and were mission-run. Since 1956 there has been further expansion of the countrys educational system. There are now (1959) approximately 2,000 schools and 300,000 students. Secondary education of high quality is available at some 20 government and non-government schools. Technical education is pro vided by a number of intermediate industrial schools and the Khartoum Technical Institute. There are also several night schools, at which both academic and vocational subjects are taught. The University College, formerly affiliated to the University of London, is now an autonomous, degree-granting institution, called the University of Khartoum, with facul ties of arts, science, agriculture, engineering, veterinary science, medicine and law, and with an enrollment of approximately 1,000. Not the least important area of expansion has been female education. In the same year well over 40,000 girls were in regular attendance at elementary, sec ondary and vocational schools (notably teaching and nursing), or more than twice the number in 1950. Much remains to be done, especially for the southerners, whom the Anglo-Egyptian administration left largely to the missions and whom the Arabic-speaking, Islamic northerners have tended to despise for their uncouth, unclothed and unaccommodating ways. However, in April 1957 the central government took over responsibility for all primary educa tion in the country. It is now in process of bringing the schools owned by the missions under its supervision, and of adding considerably to the number of primary schools in the southern provinces of Bahr-el-Ghazal, Equatoria and Upper Nile. It has also required all post-primary schools in the non-Arabic areas to teach Arabic. TH E EDUCATION OF TH E ADULT There can be no spectators of the African assault on ignorance. For ignorance is not a localized infection to be dealt with by a small educa tional first-aid team; nor is it a passing affliction to be speeded on its way by the ministrations of a few certified teachers. Rather is it a malignant disease a cancer that can be extirpated only when every thinking person in the land is aware of its presence and consequences.

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Important as is the role of the school-aged in this assault, it is prob ably not more important than if as important as that of the adult. It is the adult who suffers most from the consequences of ignorance. It is he who sees his wife die in childbirth because he knows nothing of asepsis; who gets cheated in a business transaction because he cannot count or calculate; who misses the point of a technicians advice because he cannot follow him in his tongue; who "loses his children because, being schooled, they live in a different world from his. It is the adult man or woman who is the arbiter of the childs education; who decides how long the child shall remain at school and, in many cases, whether the child shall have any schooling at all. It is the adult who, in the absence of enough qualified younger persons, must take up many of the responsi bilities of government which are being off-loaded by the administering authorities. In short, it is the adult who is most aware of the consequences of ignorance, and so of the need to enlist in the forces marshalled against it. All over tropical Africa there are adults who, during the past ten to twenty years, have enlisted in these forces. Their numbers vary from territory to territory; there are many more in, say, Ghana than in the Belgian Congo, and more in the Belgian Congo than in Ethiopia or Angola. There are wide differences, too, in the motives behind their enlistment. For many the motive is primarily economic to increase the market value of ones labor or crops. For some the motive is primarily social to learn how to appreciate Western art, literature and music, or merely how to be at home in Western society. For some the motive is political to find out how the machinery of modern government works; how laws are made, amended and administered; how the United Nations Trustee ship Council functions and how to get invited to its hearings. And for many, perhaps most, the motive is a compound of all three, being, above everything else, the desire to "understand the forces of change, and to see that these changes are taking them in the direction they want to go. 80 The quality and scope of the education offered at the adult level vary widely. Some of it is outstanding, and highly spoken of even by those who feared at the outset that too much was being offered too soon by edu cators too advanced in their views. Much of it would scarcely be thought of as education by those for whom education is now more a technology than an art. Some of it, indeed, is as devoid of technical apparatus as it is of art; but it is probably no worse on that account, since it draws its strength from the opened eyes, the quickened ears and the guided hands of those who, until yesterday, were themselves ignorant and unaware. Taking the adult field as a whole, it is possible to distinguish three main educational needs: (1) the need of those adults who want to supplement
80 David and Helen Kimble, Adult Education in a Changing Africa: A Report on the Inter-African Seminar held in the Gold Coast from December 10 to 23, 1954, International Federation of Workers* Educational Associations, London, 1955, p. 7.

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their formal schooling by taking courses in non-vocational subjects that interest them; (2) the need of those, likewise literate, who want to im prove themselves by undertaking vocational training; (3) the need of those the large majority in all but a very few territories who are still illiterate or nearly so. Some territories are making stronger, and more suc cessful, efforts to serve these needs than others; but not all territories see the need, or have the resources, to pay equal attention to all three. Some have so far paid little attention to any. General Education Without question, the need of the first group is being served best in those territories which have colleges doing extension work, or, as it is widely spoken of in English-speaking Africa, extramural work. These institutions carry high prestige with the educated African, and are able to offer him a wide choice of subjects having relevance to his life and times. In a country such as Ghana, these subjects are as likely to include cabinet government as English composition, international affairs as eco nomic geography, and comparative constitutions as raw materials and their uses. But they are subjects which, for their adequate presentation, call not only for highly qualified teachers but also for the use of a good library and, in some cases, for audio-visual aids and equipment. They are also subjects which lend themselves to extended debate, conference and written work; subjects, too, which can best be studied in an environment free of intellectual constraint and philosophical prejudice. For these reasons, they are best handled by high-caliber colleges and, within such colleges, by departments or institutes set up for the purpose. Such departments or institutes now exist in all the university colleges of Commonwealth tropical Africa and in more than one corresponding institution in French and Belgian Africa. A few excerpts from a recent annual report of the Institute (formerly Department) of Extra-Mural Studies of the University College of Ghana will serve to indicate some thing of the scope of the work being undertaken by them:
In the bigger towns, it has been possible to break down classes into intro ductory and advanced groups, and to offer a wider range of specialist subjects, as numbers increased. In Accra, twenty-seven different classes were offered throughout the session, with Economics and English each being taught at four different levels, and French at three. . . . [EachJ course is conducted by a graduate tutor, who meets students weekly for a period of 1/2 to 2 hours; lectures are followed by guided group discussion, and supplemented by students own reading and written work. A detailed syllabus, with a list of recommended books, is distributed to each member as a guide to study, and a box of about thirty books is provided on long loan from the Institutes own library . . . The extra-mural library now possesses a total of approximately 10,000 books.

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[During the 1954-1955 session nearly 150 book boxes, containing over 4,200 books, were issued on long loan] . . . One hundred and twenty part-time tutors [including 21 of the Colleges own graduates and sixteen internal members of the University College] were employed during the year . . . Others were recruited by the Institute from a variety of occupations, and all were appointed on the basis of their qualifica tions and competence to conduct classes, irrespective of their political views.31

The institute conducted 159 extramural classes or short courses of lec tures in the 1954-1955 session. It also organized 5 residential courses, 13 weekend conferences and a great number of one-day schools and public lectures. In addition, the extramural students, through their voluntary independent national organization, the Peoples Educational Association, ran five conferences of their own. These courses and conferences lead to no degrees, not even certificates of attendance. The only doors they open are those of the mind. For all that perhaps because of it they are always well attended. During 1954-1955 the number of "effective students enrolled in the institutes long courses (twenty lectures or so) was nearly 2,300; another 300 were en rolled in the short courses. The people who attended these courses were recruited from almost every rank and calling. Those attending the fifteenweek course on the British Constitution in the small, fairly typical, North ern Region town of Bawku consisted of 11 teachers, 2 headmasters, 2 cooperative officers, and one of each of the following: treasury officer, postmaster, health inspector, member of the Legislative Assembly of the then Gold Coast, clerk of local council, clerk, local council officer and works foreman. In almost every course students with university degrees and students with little or no formal education at all worked side by side.

Vocalional Training
The needs of literate adults who are interested in vocational training are being served where they are being served, which is by no means everywhere through the medium of continuation schools provided by either government or private agencies. Among the schools falling into this category, none surpass and few equal Jeanes School at Kiambu, near Nairobi, Kenya. Named for Anna T. Jeanes, the Philadelphia philanthropist who did so much to raise the standard of teaching of negroes in the American South, this school was at first (1926) concerned primarily with rural de velopment. Since 1949, when it was taken over by the Kenya government, it has become "an institution to support community development in Kenya by means of adult education, as a school circular states. At the present
31 Report of the Institute of Extra-Mural Studies for the Academic Year October 1954-July 1955, University College of the Gold Coast, 1955, pp. 2-4 passim.

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time, the work of the school, as described in the same circular, is divided into three distinct sections:
first, the preparation of young adult Africans for work in various government departments or with African District Councils; secondly, help given to older members of the community who are already established as farmers, shop keepers, civil servants, etc., and who come to Jeanes School in order to obtain not only a better knowledge of their own particular job, but also a wider knowledge of the affairs of the country; and thirdly, women's work.

One of the most important courses offered to students in the first cate gory is that designed to turn out community development assistants. Students for the course, which lasts anywhere up to a year, are recruited from the lower echelons of local and central government and from busi ness organizations. While in residence, they receive instruction in such diverse fields as labor relations, village management, and the running of adult literacy classes and recreational clubs. Other courses are designed to train health inspectors and health assist ants, probation assistants, cooperative assistants and inspectors, rehabili tation officers, farmers, traders and shopkeepers, bakers, librarians and choral singers (the last in an effort to revive the better forms of traditional African music). Courses in Swahili are given for European civil servants, and courses are offered in such non-vocational, but highly practical, subjects as citizenship. Most of the training in what is called the women s work section is done in a homecrafts department, which has its own headmistress. Here some 80 to 100 women a year are instructed in child care, health and hygiene, needlework, cooking, laundry, agriculture, and in the running of literacy campaigns. On leaving the course, these women undertake to set up womens clubs in their home areas; there, under guidance, they can pass on the knowledge they have acquired during their training. These Prog ress of Womens Clubs, as they are called, already have well over 50,000 members in Kenya. The fact that people in many other progressive parts of tropical Africa are pressing their governments to build schools of the Jeanes type, and are succeeding in getting such schools built, is as much proof of the widely felt need for vocational training of adults as it is of the conviction that such schools can go a long way toward satisfying it. To satisfy the need completely would, of course, be quite beyond the reach of governments having difficulty as all are in meeting the demand for primary education of the school-aged. Fortunately, the governments of several territories have been able to lean heavily on the training arm of commercial and industrial companies. As was pointed out earlier, such companies were among the first organizations to see the need for schooling, both for the children of their employees and the em ployees themselves; and some of them have had outstanding training programs for many years. Among these are the Union Miniere du Haut^

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Katanga (Belgian Congo), the United Africa Company (Commonwealth West Africa), and the East African Railways and Harbours (British East Africa). To the adolescent brought up in its schools and wishing to work in its installations, the Union Miniere offers the alternatives of attending ap prentice school (which will train him to do either technical or administra tive work) and on-the-job training. To the regular African employee who wants to qualify for a better position, it offers night-school courses in such academic subjects as mathematics and French, and in such skilled trades as cabinetry, metal working, draftsmanship and electronics. The com pany also operates on-the-job training for its European employees. Ac cording to a company statement, this is designed to give them basic principles for the education of the African and to establish good working relations between Europeans and Africans. In line with its long-followed policy of Africanization, the United Africa Company offers its employees a wide range of educational opportunities. In each of the larger towns where it does business, it makes provision for the in-service training of clerks, typists, machine operators and so on. A company booklet reports:
In Kano and Freetown young employees attend small clerical schools for short periods daily under the experienced eye of a full-time teacher. In Kingsway Stores, Lagos, staff attend courses on salesmanship. The Manager in charge of the Nigerian Kingsway Shops organization gives lectures to salesmen when he visits their branches, and these lectures are linked with follow-up postal courses leading to promotion examinations.

The company also runs four separate schools for indentured apprentices and for those who already rank as skilled artisans. One of these, at Burutu, on the delta of the Niger River, specializes in the training of apprentices (over a hundred at a time) in marine engineering and allied trades. Two others, at Lagos and Accra, specialize in motor repair and maintenance. The fourth, at Sapele (near Burutu), provides training for technicians employed in the companys timber operations. All four offer refresher courses for members of the companys staff. Elsewhere training courses are arranged for laboratory assistants, coopers and typewriter mechanics, while each year the company sends one or two students to the Govern ment School of Pharmacy in Yaba outside Lagos. Recently arrangements have been made for the training of a number of Africans as engineers, deck officers or pursers on Palm Line ships. In addition to this specialist training, the United Africa Company has an agreement with one of the large British correspondence schools which enables employees to take, at much reduced fees, courses of practical value to them in their careers. It also makes a regular practice of sending its ablest African shop managers to the United Kingdom for study, and even exchange-of-duty tours. The Kenya and Uganda Railway and Harbours (now incorporated into

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the East African Railways and Harbours) opened its first training school in 1919. Confined in the early years to telegraphy, the curriculum of the school later came to include such subjects as the running of railway sta tions, the handling of passenger and freight traffic, and the driving of locomotives. Today, in a block of modern buildings, costing over $1.25 million, E.A.R. and H. provides residential training facilities for several hundred young Africans, Asians and Europeans interested in making a career of railroading. The training covers every phase of activity opera tional, commercial and engineering. For boys of average scholastic attain ment (those with the equivalent roughly of a grade school education), the company offers a five-year indentured apprenticeship to various trades. Those who complete their apprenticeship satisfactorily are engaged as artisans in the railway workshops, or as tracers in the drawing office. For boys with more schooling, the company offers apprenticeships leading to higher grades of employment, including charge-hand and foreman. A measure of the popularity prestige, one might say of these appren ticeships is seen in the fact that in 1957 no fewer than 15,000 people applied for the training school's 200 vacancies. Literacy Training The basic need of the third group of adults, the illiterates or near illiterates, is obviously the ability to read and write, preferably in a language which is widely understood and for which there are some printed materials. While reliable statistics of illiteracy are scarce, it is pretty safe to say that in tropical Africa as a whole eight out of every ten adults are still unable to meet the criterion of literacy suggested by UNESCO: "[to] read with understanding and write a short simple statement on . . . everyday life. There are considerable regional differences in the rate. Thus, it is certainly lower down to less than 50 per cent among the people of Buganda in southern Uganda than it is among the people of Karamoja in northeastern Uganda. In Uganda as a whole it is probably much lower than it is in, say, the Central African Republic, Liberia and Somalia. Whatever the figures are, they are not as high in most territories as they were twenty, even ten, years ago. In Ghana they may well be less than half what they were ten years ago. As in the other fields of adult education, credit for the advances being made belongs to many agencies. In some territories, Ghana and Uganda among them, most of it belongs to the government, working through its community development or social welfare agencies. In two or three, in cluding Somalia and Liberia, much of it belongs to UNESCO; and in almost all territories, some of the credit belongs to the missions. But whether the agencies are public or private, their funds large or small, their methods modern or primitive, the results are the same: the intel lectually blind receive their sight, the economically lame begin to walk,

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and the politically poor have the gospel of nationalism preached unto them. And thanks to the techniques developed in the past generation by Laubach and others, it does not take the willing adults long to start seeing and walking or, for that matter, long for the preachers to arrive. Not all adults are willing to be made literate. Many teachers find the process of educating the illiterate in the values of education slow and hard. After a generation of effort, the Firestone Plantations Company in Liberia reported that the ratio of literate to illiterate employees was still less than one in ten. Many who are willing learners to begin with do not stay willing very long. In a recent annual report, the Department of Community Development in Uganda had to confess that interest in literacy seemed to be on the wane among the Ganda usually regarded as the most progressive people in the country. Regrettable as this is, it is perhaps not surprising. Since literacy is commonly held to be a species of white man s magic, should it not be discarded when it fails to make its possessor either as rich or as powerful as the white man? But if the newly literate man is willing to take disillusionment, he can hardly be expected to take the dearth of reading matter in his stride. In far too many written African languages, the only reading matter available to the new literate consists of portions of the Bible, religious tracts and badly printed newspapers. Important as the ability to read and write is, it is not indispensable to an adults better understanding of his life and times. As extramural tutors have found, many illiterate adults are quite capable of discussing their economic and social problems intelligently, and are willing to do so regu larly week by week. The African countryside shows many evidences that they are quite capable of solving some of them, too. Many of the com munity welfare schemes the well digging, the mosquito spraying, the school building and the mass inoculating are being carried out by illiterate people. Many other illiterates have learned to perform highly skilled jobs in workshop, factory and mine. All the same, so long as men and women remain unable to enlarge their experience through reading and develop their powers of self-expression in writing, they are unlikely to perceive the full penalty of their ignorance, let alone discover the means of removing it. TH E MASS COMMUNICATIONS M EDIA Of all the weapons in the educators armory, none have wider appeal than the mass communications media. In tropical Africa the chief of these weapons are the press, the radio and motion pictures. (As of the end of 1959 there was no television anywhere in tropical Africa. The Federal Government of Nigeria hoped to have a station going by October 1960, in time for its independence celebrations. There were also plans for com

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mercial television in several other territories, including Kenya and the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland.) The reasons for their appeal are obvious. In the first place, as the name implies, they are media for the masses, and it is to the masses that the administrator, the preacher, the politician and, increasingly, the advertiser seek to get across. Second, they are the media that deliver the largest audiences per unit of cost a major consideration in all poor countries. Third, they reach the people where they are in their homes, market places and villages; even motion pictures may be sent to the people in this age of mobility. Fourth, in a part of the world where con versation is still an art and the bush telegraph still a highly efficient form of telecommunication, the reach of these media exceeds their grasp; in deed, the secondhand audiences are frequently the largest. To measure the precise impact of these media is impossible. For one thing, in many areas the poll taker is likely to be told what the person being polled thinks he would like to be told. For another, impact is as much a matter of imponderable depth as of measurable length and breadth, of stored memories as of shared reaction, and of past experience as of present circumstance. But impact there most certainly is. To this every educated African and every government and mission agency can testify. What is more, it is growing in every territory, for as the siren songs of editor, announcer and producer become louder, the audiences addiction to them becomes stronger. THE PRESS The first to enter the mass field, the press has known all the excite ments of pioneering and all of its frustrations. It has also been guilty of most of the excesses of pioneers. At the same time, when given the right environment, it has shown a capacity for growth in intellectual stature and for gumption in the handling of controversy. Although newspapers have been published in tropical Africa for many years, it is only in the past generation that they have become an important educational force. Even now, though, there are many areas which, because of illiteracy, poverty, or lack of distribution facilities, or all three, have no newspapers. According to the 1957 and 1959 Statistical Yearbooks of the United Na tions, nine territories had only one newspaper each in the latest year for which information was available, and the combined circulation of these nine was only a little over 46,000, more than one third of which was ac counted for by a single paper. (See Table 53.) For convenience, the newspapers can be divided into two groups: those serving African needs, and those serving either European or Asian needs. Where the press serves a bi-racial or multiracial constituency it is gen erally because only one paper is available, or because one paper is superior to another in news coverage and so forth.

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Table 53

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DAILY NEWSPAPERS: NUMBERS, ESTIMATED CIRCULATION, AND COPIES PER 1,000 POPULATION
CIRCULATION TOTAL ( Thousands ) p e r 1,000 24 40

TERRITORY

YEAR 1956 1957 1956 1957 1954 1954 1957 1955 1957 1955 1957 1957 1956 1957 1956 1956 1953 1957 1956 1956 1956 1957 1955

NUMBER 3

Angola Belgian Congo Ethiopia (inc. Eritrea) French Cameroons French Equatorial Africa (French) Togo French West Africa Gambia Ghana Kenya Liberia Malagasy Republic (Madagascar) Mozambique Nigeria Northern Rhodesia Southern Rhodesia Sierra Leone Somalia (Italian Somaliland) Spanish Guinea Republic of Sudan Tanganyika Uganda Zanzibar (inc. Pemba) 1959. a Less than 500.

6
3 b 3 b

8
5

1
4

1
7

10 10 1 1
32

1
5 4

1 101
31

2 5 5

21 1
4 3 7

1
17

4
13

1 20 21
224 18 51 7

1
3

21
3

1
1

1 2
30 18

11 2 1 1

1 10
3

2 1 1

Source: United Nations, Statistical Yearbook, 1957, 1959 editions, New York, 1957,

b Less than 1.

The African Press The region with the most influential African press is Commonwealth West Africa (Gambia, Sierra Leone, Ghana and Nigeria). It was here in Sierra Leone in the early nineteenth century that the first tropical African newspaper was printed, and it is here that most tropical African newspapers run today for the benefit of Africans are published. Nor is Commonwealth West Africas dominance in this respect accidental. It was here that the European cultural tradition first got a footing. It was here that the African intellectual, and his progeny the nationalist, first emerged; and for such, journalism provided one of very few professional opportunities. Then, too, it was here, in the land of the cocoa bean and the palm kernel, that Africans first came to have spare cash for the pur chase of such things as newspapers.

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More than 50 newspapers of differing frequency of appearance are now published in Commonwealth West Africa. In Nigeria alone there are about 30, and in Ghana a dozen or more. Of the total, not more than about six use vernacular languages; the rest use English. By Western standards their aggregate circulation is small, amounting to perhaps 400,000. The readership, however, is large. Probably nowhere else in the world do newspapers get read so often, so completely, and over so long a period. But this and their Africanness are about all they have in common. The circulation of individual papers varies enormously, as does their technical and journalistic competence; there is no average. At their best, they can stand comparison with those of almost any medium-sized American town, for they are competently printed, well illustrated and thoughtfully edited. They are no less interested in promot ing the health and welfare of their readers (women included) than they are in presenting the news of the community, country and wider world; they are as keen to applaud economic gain as they are to condemn political trickery and malfeasance. But there are few such papers. Until 1947, when a London newspaper (the Daily Mirror) became interested in the region and formed the West African Press, there were almost none at all. Today, this group alone runs three highly successful daily papers the Daily Graphic (Ghana), the Daily Times (Nigeria) and the Daily Mail (Sierra Leone) with a combined weekday circulation of approximately 150,000 and a Sunday circulation of some 100,000. The great majority of the newspapers, however, are inadequately staffed, indifferently written and edited, and poorly printed on presses of antique design. Further, their circulation is small. Many have such a small circulation (numbered in hundreds rather than thousands) that the editor frequently finds himself doubling as reporter when he is not reading proof or pushing sales. His lot has been feelingly described by Abiodun Aloba, a Nigerian editor.
The Lagos editor who is master of all trades, interviews everybody who cares to call because they all insist on seeing him, rushes through every pro vincial news item, runs after the half-illiterate compositors below and sweats through four editorials to go to print on time . . . [If] this Lagos editor were editing a provincial [newspaper] his fate would still be worse. There will probably be no telephone to check the story of an accident occurring only a couple of miles from his office. As his reporters (where they are more than one) are divided between the courts and the social functions and important inter views and political meetings, all he has to do is to attempt to publish what is safe, and spare no time for worrying about accuracy. Of course there will be no question of taking a photograph. If he did, for reasons that only he could justify, he would have to wait for at least two weeks to get it printed. As for the reporters who do the field work, their fate is to get a fair idea of what has happened, rush to the office on their flat and sometimes shoeless feet, and write anything to help them escape the fury of their tired editor; for the editor is not in good temper, the sun is already on the decline and the third leader [editorial] has not gone down . . .

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Now, what about the manuscripts that have just come in at 2 p.m. because the train came in late yesterday? The first is a Press Release from the Public Relations Department. It contains no scoop, it has been passed to a couple of dozen other newspapers in the country, and those in the capital have already published it . . . The second manuscript in the pile is plain libel. The third is an obvious fabrication, the fourth a mixture of unintelligible Latin mixed up with worse French but meant, for all that, to read as English; the fifth has been sent in by a village vicar begging the editor to announce a harvest thanksgiving which unfortunately took place last Sunday. So we go on.82

The wonder is that they do go on, for it is unremitting toil and poorly paid at that. Few small-town editors earn more than a bus driver; most of the reporters earn considerably less. But such is the hunger for news and such is the prestige enjoyed by both reader and editor in a world where the majority of people are still unlettered, that most of the papers do manage to carry on. And there is no doubt that newspapers have been influential in molding public opinion, especially political opinion. Many of these papers began as the mouthpiece of politicians in search of a party. To those who formed the party, what mattered was not the quality of the newspaper or the writing, but the justice (as they saw it) of the cause it stood for and the eloquence of those who proclaimed it. More than anything else, perhaps, it was the constant plugging by the little African-run papers of the case for self-government that hastened the end of colonialism in Commonwealth West Africa. (Judging by the speed with which it ended in Ghana, it is probable that some of the British readers of these newspapers had their opinions molded by them, too.) The political influence of the larger, European-owned papers addressed to Africans has also been considerable. However, for the most part, this influence has been exerted in favor of the constituted authority of the country, and so has been in the nature of a counterweight to the prevail ing political forces. This means that these newspapers have been spec tators of political evolution rather than active participants in it. At times this has annoyed the African politician as much as it has disturbed the government. But they have generally tried to give their readers both sides of the problem of political change; and in a world of astigmatic readers, there is always room for editors with 20:20 vision. For all its shortcomings, the African press of Commonwealth West Africa is still a long way ahead of the African press in other sections. Large sections, indeed, do not yet have an African press, whether run by Africans or for Africans. Among these are Mozambique, Angola and Portuguese Guinea, and the Spanish colonies of Fernando Po and Rio Muni. Elsewhere it is at best a rather weak press.
32 Quoted in The Press in Africa, edited by Helen Kitchen, Ruth Sloan Associates, Inc., Washington, D. C., 1956, pp. ii-iii.

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In some areas the press is weak because there is not a large enough concentration of literate people to support the costs of even a small paper; and so long as distribution is a problem, the incidence of potential read ers per square mile is likely to be a more critical factor than their incidence per 1,000 population. At the present time, few territories, or parts of territories, can begin to compete with Ghana and the Eastern and West ern Regions of Nigeria in this respect. One of the few that comes close to doing so is Uganda. In 1954 it was estimated that About 70,000 of [Ugandas] five million inhabitants buy a paper at least once a week, and [that] the number of readers must be five times that number. In addi tion, some 75,000 government newssheets are distributed gratis weekly. 33 Today the readership may be half as high again. However, the difficulties of distribution are such that not less than nine out of every ten readers live within fifty miles of Kampala where most of the papers are published which is to say that not less than nine out of every ten readers live in Buganda, the most progressive province in the protectorate. The political power of this press is already considerable. A large part of the opposition to the British government (and to its chief representative, Sir Andrew Cohen, the then Governor) during the 1953-1954 Kabaka crisis34 almost certainly emanated from the local vernacular press. It is also arguable that the Uganda National Congress has grown up around its press, rather than around a solid membership. 35 Unlike the African press of Ghana and Nigeria, which does most of its publishing in English, the Uganda press works mainly with Swahili, the lingua franca of east Africa, and Luganda, the language of the Ganda. Other regions which have been able to reckon on a comparatively high incidence of African readers are southern Kenya (especially in and near the large towns and in Kikuyu country), northern Tanganyika (especially the Meru-Kilimanjaro-Dar-es-Salaam area), the Copperbelt of Northern Rhodesia, the urbanized districts of Southern Rhodesia, and the Katanga and metropolitan areas of the Belgian Congo. In each of these regions there is a growing African press. But in each region it is beset by weakness of one kind or another. In some regions the weakness is primarily eco nomic lack of cash for anything but essentials, or things considered to be essentials. Even in districts where the average pay is high by African standards, newspaper circulation is noticeably cyclical, most of the news paper buying being done within a week or so of payday. (This applies also in Commonwealth West Africa.) In some regions the weakness, until recently, has been more political than economic. This was especially true
33 An African Press Survey: 3 East and Central Africa, New Commonwealth, August 19, 1954, p. 171. 34 This crisis arose over the refusal in 1953 of Mutesa II, the Kabaka (King) of Buganda, to abide by decisions taken by the British government, a refusal that led to his temporary deportation to England. 35 hoc. cit.

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of Belgian and French territories, the governments of which were in the habit of keeping close watch on the content of papers intended for African consumption, and of censoring anything that would put their administra tion in a poor light or make for unrest. The same has been true of the Kenya government, which, at the time of the Mau Mau troubles of 1952, found it necessary to suppress some 40 vernacular newspapers (most of them Kikuyu), and for a while thereafter forbade the circulation of all mimeographed vernacular newssheets. Frequently the control, whether by way of censorship or suppression, is exercised behind the readers back rather than overtly. Lacking the funds to subscribe to any of the large news agencies, most African newspapers have to rely heavily on what the government information services choose to give them. While most governments give generously, they give selec tively; and the principles governing their selection of news are usually different from those that would be applied by African editors. What is bread to the one is often a stone if not a serpent to the other. Then again, it is not only governments that exercise censorship, overt or other wise. Many European-run African papers are equally inclined to put all incoming items of news through the fine screen of public interest. This brings us to another weakness, as it is widely judged to be, namely, the extent to which the African press is controlled by non-Africans. Many African papers are government-run as well as government-controlled. Many others are owned either by missions or by mining and other indus trial corporations. Many more are in the hands of publishing firms owned and directed by Europeans. European control may be of small conse quence in countries like Ghana and Nigeria, where there are competing African-owned and -operated presses and where, anyway, the government would make short work of any directorate that was found guilty of indulg ing in un-African activity. But it is different in a country like Southern Rhodesia, where the African press is dominated by a single European company, African Newspapers Co., Ltd. Granted that the Europeans who own this company the Paver brothers offer the literate African of Southern Rhodesia good-quality English and vernacular newspapers (weekly, bi-weekly and monthly); that they use African editors, reporters and photographers, and run their presses with African help; and that the ordinary reader to judge by the correspondence columns is well satisfied with the product. The fact remains, however, that the policy of these papers is set by Europeans who, while not afraid to criticize the government (as they did on the Federation issue), share its conviction that the African is still unready for true, interracial partnership and selfgovernment. In these immoderate times, the holders of middle-of-theroad policies are almost everywhere finding the going hard. Like middleof-the-road drivers, they incur the displeasure not only of those seeking to overtake them but also of those headed in the other direction. In

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Southern Rhodesia there are plenty of each, since hardly anybody wants to stay where he is. It is easy, of course, to diagnose the ills of the African press; they are there for every African and European to see. It is the cure for them that poses the problem. In the case of the African-run press, it will no doubt require large and frequent injections of capital capital to buy the materials needed, to engage the qualified staff, to arrange for correspond ents, to build up photo-engraving plants . . . 36 Such capital will not be easy to come by. Few outside investors would be impressed by the look of the average African press, its management or its product; and most local investors have other ideas about what to do with their capital. Some governments might be willing to supply it, but it is unlikely that many editors African or European would care to be tied to the attendant strings. Most of the capital will have to be self-generated. Already advertising plays an important role in some newspapers. In Commonwealth West Africa, for instance, it accounts for 25 to 50 per cent of the space in the larger papers and an even higher proportion in some of the smaller ones. Some two-page broadsheets have been known to carry six columns of advertising to four of news, a proportion probably unrivalled in the world. 37 And the outlay on advertising is growing as manufacturers of consumer goods discover that advertising creates sales for branded products and the big trading and industrial companies begin to see the value of public relations advertising. Perhaps it is not too much to hope that, by stimulating the African appetite for manufactured goods, advertising will come to provide the much needed incentive to higher productivity and living standards. As these rise, so will the output, and the profits, of the press. All of this will take time, and its twin, patience. Patience will also be needed in other matters not least, as Abiodun Aloba observes, patience to wait until telephone exchanges do not keep you waiting for hours to get in touch with your sources of news, and telegrams do not have to go by 30 m.p.h. trains. Quite as important as capital and patience is the question of training. Prior to 1959, the only way an aspiring journalist could get training was by apprenticing himself to a local newspaper, and most papers had neither the facilities nor the skills to take him very far. For formal train ing he had to go to either Europe or America, where, not infrequently it seems, he became more interested in the propagandist than the educa tional value of news. At times, it almost looked as if those who went abroad were being trained to make trouble, without, however, being taught to distinguish news from comment, or even truth from falsehood. 38
36 Abiodun Aloba, loc. cit. 37 New Commonwealth, July 22, 1954, p. 65. 38 Ibid., August 15, 1954, p, 172.

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There have been some notable exceptions, such as Lawrence Vambe of Southern Rhodesia, E. M. K. Mulira of Uganda, and Abiodun Aloba him self, but their number is small. However, the need for formal training in journalism is slowly coming to be recognized. The first tropical African school of journalism opened its doors in Accra, Ghana, in 1959. Others are in the planning stage. With training, it is not too much to hope that there will emerge a stronger sense of public stewardship, compounded of awareness of the power inherent in the printed word, restraint in the uses made of it, and tolerance for the uses made of it by others. Certainly such a sense will not come by wealth or waiting; if it is to come at all, it must come through the insights born of intellectual discipline and honesty. As for the African newspapers controlled by Europeans, their weakness as also their strength derives from the colonial matrix in which they were reared. Invaluable as they have been in providing the African with good-class reading material of all kinds, and desirable as their continued existence in many areas would seem to be, they must be counted a poor risk almost everywhere, since almost everywhere the colonial matrix is disintegrating. The fact that these newspapers are, for the most part, run, edited and supported by Africans is of small consequence to most African patriots beside the fact that they are not controlled by Africans. To the patriot, foreign control is not something to be cured; it is something to be eradicated. The European Press Wherever Europeans go, the press is sure to follow. In tropical Africa, it has generally followed close behind. Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia, has had a newspaper (the Rhodesia Herald) since 1891; Bulawayo in the same colony has had one (now called the Chronicle) since 1894. Kampala, Uganda, and Mombasa, Kenya, had newspapers before World War I; Nairobi has had a daily newspaper (the East African Standard) since 1914. Elisabethville, Belgian Congo, has had one (VEssor du Congo) since 1928; and Dakar, Senegal, one (Paris-Dakar) since 1935. Today there are few towns that do not have a paper or journal addressed primarily to a Euro pean readership. Nor is this surprising. In almost every town the Euro pean element consists largely of well-educated people with money to spend, time on their hands, and a self-imposed obligation to have opinions on what is going on around them. Today, too, many Europeans, ex patriates and settlers alike, also feel an obligation to know the opinions others have of them. Like the African press, the European is far from uniform in quality. This, too, need not surprise us. The constituency served by some of the papers is very small, partly because of their isolation from other European centers and partly because there is only a limited local demand for this

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kind of paper. Many papers have a circulation of less than 5,000. One or two in the Belgian Congo have a circulation of not more than 1,000. With out subsidies, such papers barely manage to keep going. They do so largely by dint of using local news, government handouts, and as much advertising matter and as little paid help as possible. Moreover, some of the European as some of the African papers are less concerned with news than with propaganda. This is especially true of some of the settler papers published in the Belgian Congo, Kenya and the Federa tion of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. In more than one instance, the propa ganda has been sufficiently seditious, or racist, to bring government action against the publishers. Thanks as much to their advertising as to their circulation revenues, the larger papers such as Le Courrier dAfrique of Leopoldville, ParisDakcir, the Bulawayo Chronicle, the Salisbury Rhodesia Herald , the Nai robi East African Standard and the Salisbury Sunday Mail have con siderably bigger budgets to work with. They can afford to subscribe to news agencies, to keep a switchboard going, and to pay their employees a decent wage. But even the 50,000 circulation of the Sunday Mail the largest in the region is small by European standards, and too small to give its readers more than an inkling of what is going on beyond the range of the territorial telephone and telegraph system. Nor does it buy much in the way of journalistic skill, overseas field staff, or photoen graving work. As a result, most of the news and comment contained in the European papers is focused on the local scene, its alarms and excursions, its passions and pains. It is uncommon to find a paper in which the works of the world command more linage than those of the flesh and the devil. It is likewise uncommon to find a paper that is free to plot its own editorial course and change it at will. In some cases this lack of freedom is a result of outside control. Thus, six of the largest papers in the Federation the Rhodesia Herald , the Sunday Mail, the Chronicle, the Sunday News (Bulawayo) and the Northern News (Ndola) are published by a company (the Rhodesian Printing and Publishing Co.) that is a subsidiary of a newspaper group having its headquarters in the Union of South Africa and anxious, on that account, not to give offense to either the Union or the Federation governments, with both of which it feels it has to curry favor. In other cases it stems from the conviction, which many publishers have, that since they are Europeans in lands predominantly non-European, they ought to support the constituted European authority in their midst. In the case of many smaller papers, it is an automatic consequence of the fact that, like many African papers, they exist to pro mote the political ideas of their founders. But there are free papers, and their following is growing. Among them the Central African Examiner of Salisbury has been outstanding.

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Calling itself a fortnightly journal for thinking people/ from its inception in 1957 it has maintained an independent attitude toward the questions, political, industrial, social and racial, that have come under its scrutiny. While claiming to have no axes to grind, it has kept plenty in stock and has not been afraid to wield them when occasion demanded and in the Federation of the past few years there have been plenty of occasions. On some of these it was the Europeans rather than the Africans who had to watch out for the wielder. The circulation has been small (less than 5,000), but probably no paper published in tropical Africa has had a more influential or widespread readership. Other journals that have dis played considerable independence of viewpoint and have been addressed to thinking people are the Kenya Weekly News, La Presse du Cameroun, La Cote d'Ivoire and Pourquoi Pas (Leopoldville). Since World War II, the European press in most territories has found an increasing sale for its publications among educated Africans. This, of course, must not be taken to mean that it has been making converts of them. In most cases it merely means that the African's hunger for news, and for reading matter of all kinds, is not adequately met in the papers which are published for his benefit. In a good many cases, however, it also means that he is coming to see the necessity of looking at both sides of the questions that confront him and his rulers. The results of his doing this have sometimes surprised him as much as the European. Perhaps one reason why the French still have as many friends as they do in tropical Africa is that their newspapers have seldom shown any inclination to coddle the reader, let alone corral him. Another significant postwar development has been the growth in cir culation of newspapers and periodicals published in Europe. Primarily this increase is a reflection of the development, and speeding up, of air transport that now makes it possible to buy Figaro in Douala the day of publication, and to have the London Times delivered in Salisbury the day after publication. To some extent, however, it reflects the desire for a better news service than is provided by the local papers. Up to now, most of the subscribers to these journals have been Europeans. However, the number of African subscribers to papers like Figaro and the Times and to periodicals like the international edition of Time is steadily grow ing. The attitude of these publications toward the African is sympathetic, their reports are generally reliable, and, in these days of fast fame, theres always the chance that he who reads may run into his own name. In British East Africa, notably in Kenya and Zanzibar, there is an Asian press of considerable size and influence. Among the more widely circu lated of the papers published in Kenya under Asian auspices are the Kenya Daily Mail, the Observer, the Colonial Times, the Daily Chronicle, and the Goan Voice . The first two appear in two editions, Gujerati and English; the last three in English only. Their total circulation is probably

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of the order of 25,000. Most of the Zanzibar papers are small weeklies, but at least one of them, the Scimachar, claims to have a wide and ex tensive circulation throughout East and South Africa, Rhodesias, Mada gascar, India, Pakistan and West Africa . . . [and to be] recognized by all influential advertisers as the best medium for advertising in East Africa . . . among the rich and middle classes. 39 While these papers are oriented toward Asian (including Arabic) needs and interests, some of them are read approvingly by Africans. This is particularly true of those (the Daily Chronicle for instance) which lean toward the left and so find themselves opposing the government as, of course, do the Africans most of the time. THE RADIO Broadcasting in tropical Africa began in the early 1930s as a service to the European population. Rather naturally, therefore, Kenya, Mozam bique, Angola, Southern Rhodesia and the Belgian Congo were among the first territories to be served by local transmitters. The first programs directed to the African population began a few years later. However, until the outbreak of World War II, most of them relied on rebroadcast and rediffusion of overseas programs rather than on direct transmission. As St. Clair and Elizabeth Drake put it, they were wired rather than wireless programs. Facilities Down to 1939 only 7 tropical African territories possessed transmitting facilities. At the wars end 15 had such facilities. However, in the case of 2 of the 15 French Equatorial Africa and the Belgian Congo these facilities were used primarily for short-wave overseas broadcasts in the interest of the Free French and Belgian war efforts. With the possible exception of the Portuguese territories, where broad casting is in the hands of radio clubs run by and for Europeans, most of the postwar effort in this field has been directed to the task of reaching the indigenous peoples. The spoken word continues to carry a far greater appeal for them than the printed word, even where the latter is under stood. It has, needless to say, been a task of ample proportions. To begin with, the average African household is still far too poor to be interested in buying a radio set. Even in Nigeria, which has one of the highest income levels in tropical Africa, the price of a good battery-run set the only kind that is any use away from the larger towns repre sents approximately two to three months take-home pay of the average worker. Then, there is the difficulty of providing servicing, including battery39 Quoted by St. Clair and Elizabeth Drake in a paper prepared for this study.

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recharging facilities. In most rural areas they simply do not exist; and few towns can boast of a reliable radio repairman. There is also the question of transmission. Most of the territories are large and call for powerful transmitters. But not even the most powerful transmitters can silence the static which fills the tropical air during the rainy season. Programs that come through loud and clear tend to be the exception. A further difficulty arises from the absence in most territories of a single, widely understood language. To reach its radio audience, the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation uses no fewer than 13 languages, a fact that adds greatly to its operating costs. Another circumstance that tends to push up operating costs is the scarcity of qualified Africans to fill the senior technical and administrative positions. European labor, while efficient, is expensive, especially in the non-settler regions. Perhaps the biggest difficulty of all is the raising of revenue. The usual European device of raising it by license fees is subject to serious limita tions. The number of sets is still almost everywhere small, as Table 54 shows. Even in Nigeria, which is credited with having the most, there are probably not more than 250,000 at the outside a considerable increase, to be sure, from the 73,000 reported in 1958. In territories like Togo and Somalia the number is nearer 3,000. Besides, few African owners of radios are in a position to pay more than a nominal license fee. Even if they were, most of the territories are so large and their populations so scattered that the cost of collecting such fees is likely to be almost as great as the revenue obtained from them. Furthermore, evasion is easy. In 1958 the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation obtained about 4,000 from license fees. At 10 shillings a license this represented about 8,000 radios, or approximately the number being sold each month. What of commercial advertising as a source of revenue? So far most of the corporations have shied away from using it. Among their reasons for doing so is the fact that they do not wish to lose control of the programs to people whose aims are likely to be very different from their own. Some corporations also feel, as one director recently put it in con versation, that with business and politics being so closely mated in most of the newly independent countries, they would soon find themselves in the pay of politicians if they once attempted to go in for sponsored pro grams. But the pressures for such programs are almost everywhere grow ing. Already there are commercial stations in Mozambique, Southern Rhodesia and Liberia. Up to now, therefore, almost all of the money for broadcasting has had to come from government sources, either from current income or from capital funds made available for the purpose through such agencies as the British Colonial Development and Welfare grants. A very few stations derive their funds from private sources only. One of the most important

T H E A S S AUL T ON IGNORANCE Table 54 RADIO BROADCASTING: TRANSMITTING STATIONS AND RECEIVING SETS
RECEIVING SETS TRANSMITTING STATIONS TERRITORY YEAR NUM BER YEAR

153

NUM BER

( T housands )

Angola Bechuanaland Belgian Congo (inc. Ruanda-Urundi) British Somaliland Ethiopia (exc. Eritrea) French Cameroons French Equatorial Africa French Somaliland (French) Togo French West Africa Gambia Ghana (Gold Coast) Kenya Liberia Malagasy Republic (Madagascar) Mozambique Nigeria (inc. British Cameroons) Portuguese Guinea Northern Rhodesial Nyasaland I Southern Rhodesia J Sao Tome and Principe Sierra Leone Somalia (Italian Somaliland) Spanish Guinea Republic of Sudan Tanganyika Uganda Zanzibar

1958

16

1957 1957 1956 1957 1957 1957 1953 1955 1957 1953 1957 1958 1958 1957 1957 1958 1958 1958 T1955 J 1955 [l951 1951 1957 1951 1958 1957 1958 n.a. 1958

33 * 1 16 * 2 50 11 10 2 3 50 1 101 25 * 10 55 36 * 73 1* 40 4 24 *
b,

1958

14

1958 1958 1958

1 3 3

1958

1958

7 a ------

1958 1958 1956 1958

5 8 1 8

1956

1958 1958 1958

7 a

7a 3

8* 2 1 7* 19 n.a. 5

Source: United Nations, Statistical Yearbook, 1958 , 1959, New York, 1958, 1959.

a Total for Kenya, Tanganyika and Uganda. bLess than 500.

* Number of licenses issued. n.a.: not available.

of these is the high-powered station (ELWA) owned and operated by the Sudan Interior Mission in Liberia. The difficulties notwithstanding, radio broadcasting is making strides in most parts of tropical Africa. At the end of the 1950s the region had over 80 transmitters, as against fewer than 10 in 1939. It also had a rapidly growing number of relay stations. Some territories (Nigeria, for instance) now have enough relay stations and transmitters to give radio coverage

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on

ign o rance

to every inhabitant able to pay for it. Judging by the growth in the number of receiving sets, a large number of Africans are able to pay for it. The total number of sets has grown since 1939 from 50,000 (at the most) to 550,000 (at the least). Every year sees a lowering of the price and an improvement in the design of the models put onto the African market. The Saucepan Special (so called because of its housing) developed by the British for use in the bush sells in most places for less than $20 and, short of being used as a saucepan, gives good service.
Services

Increased facilities have resulted in greatly increased services. Whereas twenty years ago few stations were on the air for more than an hour or so a day, now many stations keep going 8 to 12 hours a day. Nor has the growth been merely numerical. The intellectual growth of radio broadcasting has been, if anything, more impressive. Entertainment, it is true, continues to be an important ingredient of almost all programs. But most stations now see their job as threefold to inform and instruct no less than to entertain. The actual air time given to the pursuit of the first two objectives seldom, if ever, exceeds that given to the third, but the amount of planning (to say nothing of money) that goes into this pursuit leaves no doubt as to the importance attached to it. What the Federal [Rhodesian] Broadcasting Corporation has said of its Lusaka programs could be said of many other services catering primarily to Africans: As a whole, the Lusaka programmes can be considered . . . as programmes for the education of adults. Where most of the adults are country dwellers, illiterate and otherwise backward, the emphasis tends to be put, as in the Lusaka programs, on instructing how to grow bigger crops, get a clean water supply, conduct an anti-malaria spraying campaign, cook manioc and like it, and so on. Where most of the adults are either town dwellers or school graduates, or both, more emphasis is generally put on informing about everything from the running of the government and the threat of communism in underdeveloped territories to the evils of prostitution, alcoholism and polygamy. Many stations also offer straight educational programs. Depending on the type of constituency served by the stations, their programs range from elementary reading to economics, world geography and musical appreciation. Although often designed for use in schools, these courses seldom fail to draw an audience of adults. If the interested adult has no set of his own, he is likely to seek out the nearest community or coffee shop set. Today in most territories there are literate adults whose only formal schooling was obtained, by proxy, in this fashion. Such is the appeal of the educational type of program, both formal and informal, that some sta tions are now devoting 25 per cent or more of their time to it. In a recent year, the Central African Broadcasting Station at Lusaka devoted about

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10 per cent of its time to news, about 10 per cent to talks, and another 10 per cent or so to quizzes and similar features. A great deal of attention has also been given since the war to the enter tainment side of radio, which, in Africa as elsewhere, is what most people spend most of their listening time looking for. Of necessity, in view of their small operating budgets, most stations continue to rely heavily on recorded music. But the range of musical taste catered for by the average station is now wide, embracing everything from African traditional to European classical and American modern. Some stations, responding to listener demand as they have quickly learned to do in the areas of over lapping coverage now find themselves putting out almost as much nonAfrican as African music. And the quality is generally good, for here, too, the African is showing himself to be a discriminating listener, ready at the drop of a disk to tell the announcer what he thinks of him, and to take his place if need be. In fact, most stations serving a largely African audience now use African announcers, in some cases even for their Europeanlanguage broadcasts. When given half a chance, the African has also shown himself capable of becoming a highly accomplished radio artist, whether singer, instrumentalist or actor. Not only the African man, either. Many stations use almost as much female as male talent. Stations in Ghana, Nigeria and the former French dependencies have been doing so for several years. But the progress, great as it is, has been far from uniform in either direction or degree. Thus, while the Belgians, French and British have all made impressive strides in getting their dependent peoples radio-minded, they have not all stridden down the same path. The Belgians have, for the most part, taken the view that the needs of the people are best served by providing community listening facilities in the rural areas and rediffusion systems in the larger centers, and that the needs of the government are best served by speaking to the people in their own vernaculars and in the official languages of the country. While sharing the Belgian preference for community listening, the French have taken the view that since the one mass language is the language of government, it is cheaper, and in the long run most effective, to use this as the vehicle of communication. The British, on the other hand, have preferred, wherever possible, to speak to the people in their own tongues in their own homes over their own sets. (For this reason, assessments of the comparative reach of the radio pro grams based on the number of receiving sets per 1,000 population in the various territories need to be treated with caution.) Then again, there are very considerable territorial differences in the kinds of programs offered to the African and in the proportion of radio time given to each. Not all of the territories give as much attention as, say, Northern Rhodesia, Ghana, Nigeria and the Belgian Congo to educational matters. Some, like British East Africa and Southern Rhodesia, still seem to feel that the primary function of radio is to entertain. There are stations

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that still devote more than 90 per cent of their time to such features as Music While You Work, Dancing Time, Town and Country Songs, Marching Songs, Folk Songs and War Dances. In some parts there are also considerable intraterritorial differences. This is particularly true of those territories which have large regional concentrations of Moslems. In Nigeria, for example, the amount of time devoted to readings from the Koran and other religious items over the Kano station, which serves the Northern Region, is very much greater than the amount given to religious programs of all kinds over the Lagos station, which serves the predomi nantly non-Moslem south. Then, too, most Moslem areas are still nervous of novelty of anything that might sow the seeds of disaffection among the faithful. These areas, consequently, have so far tended to lag behind the Christianized areas in their use of radios informing and instructing services. There are some territories in which progress of any sort or in any direc tion has been slow. The Portuguese and Spanish territories, for instance, continue to offer the African listener almost nothing except European pro grams. The Somalilands and Rechuanaland offer little of anything to any body. But for ELWA, Liberia would have little to offer its people, either and since ELWA is mission-operated, most of its offerings are of a religious character. However, we must not judge the role being played by radio in tropical Africa solely on the basis of territorial facilities. For radio is footloose and free for the receiving. Unlike the press and motion pictures, its products are not subject to border control; frequently they can be de livered to homes 3,000 miles or more away as easily as to those 300 miles or 30. Once a Copperbelt miner has the price of a receiving set, it is scarcely more difficult for him to tune in to Brazzaville, Cairo, Moscow or Monrovia than to his own local station. Though there are no means of telling how many listeners, in the Copperbelt or elsewhere, such stations have, it is certain they have some. It is also beyond question that the number will increase as the Africans awareness of his position and poten tial increases. But what of it? The following snatch of conversation with a Nigerian radio official, reported by St. Clair Drake, suggests that what some find frightening, others find challenging: If sets are placed in hands of the ordinary people, wont they listen to Brazza ville and Monrovia instead of to Lagos? What would be wrong with that? You might end up with an elaborate broadcasting system and no regular listeners. Well, it's up to us to deliver a program that will hold their attention. What is democracy for, if it doesnt mean the right of people to listen to any station they want to? Unfortunately, there is still too little sign in many territories that the radio people are capable of delivering such programs or, for that matter, that the listeners are interested in democracy.

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MOTION PICTURES In most parts of tropical Africa the educational impact of motion pic tures on the African has so far been weak to the point of being impalpable. True, almost every town has at least one commercial movie house; and the larger towns have several. But it is not every movie house that is allowed to admit Africans, nor is it every African who has the price of admission. Anyway, most of the films shown are the standard, full-length and fully aged productions of Hollywood and Ealing; and those who show them are no more interested in the film as a weapon with which to do battle against ignorance than most movie companies are interested in producing documentaries. If such films have any educational impact at all, it is the unfortunate one of representing most Americans as knaves and most Euro peans as fools. For the American films are strong for fighting between fast-talking, tobacco-spitting, gun-packing cowboys and savage, mono syllabic Indians who have decamped with their overstuffed, underdressed, scheming women. And many of the European films are concerned with messy domestic situations the solution to which every African in the audi ence sees after the first five minutes and thereafter makes little attempt to keep to himself situations, furthermore, that no self-respecting African would have got himself into in the first place. The problem of exploiting the educational value of the film is, of course, formidable. To begin with, there are the usual African difficulties: lack of funds for making good documentaries and the mobile units needed to show them; lack of technicians capable of handling the projection equipment and maintaining it in serviceable shape; and lack of agreement on what is needed most and how to go about supplying it on a shoe string budget. But there are frequently other difficulties. Among these is the difficulty of forecasting audience reaction to a given type of film. In some of the unsophisticated parts of Africa what was straight documen tary to the producer turns out to be straight comedy to the audience. Many films dealing with such indispensable matters as cattle dipping and inoculation, bush clearance, conservation and road building have failed for no other reason than that they had Europeans doing some of the demonstrating and who had ever seen real Europeans using their hands for anything but eating and such like? Again, most African audiences still find it difficult to suppress their interest when watching a film of any kind. Each sequence brings forth a swarm of questions, the answers to which fly like fireflies and do about as much to lighten the questioners darkness. Meanwhile, the film has moved several sequences nearer its end, and the real point of it may have been lost. But if the problems are great, so is the promise. Where government film units have been active, as in Ghana, the caliber of their work has been generally high, and in some instances quite outstanding. Films such as Bamiri Village, which dealt with the building of a community center in

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a small Ashanti village, Amenus Child, which was designed to en courage better nutrition, and The Gold Coast Votes, which recorded the general elections held in that country in 1954, can take their place with the best documentaries of any land. Here again, however, not all the territories have yet seen the promise. Among those that have, in addition to Ghana, are Nigeria, Kenya, the Rhodesias, the Belgian Congo and the onetime French-administered terri tories. Most of the rest have either done little or left the field to other agencies, such as the United Nations, and public-spirited corporations like the Firestone Plantations Company of Liberia. The large commercial film companies continue to concentrate almost all of their interest on the seven-foot Tutsi, the four-foot pygmy, and the even tireder game. The real drama of todays Africa lies elsewhere, in the war on ignorance and its twin progeny, poverty and sickness a war rich in hope, excite ment and prowess, and fought by people who are no strangers to tears, sweat or blood, including their own. It is the kind of war to which Holly wood could do ample justice. To film it might not be to make a fortune; but it would certainly be to make friends, and in these days even Holly wood needs friends.

C H A P T E R 17

The Assault on Sickness

T H E GAI NS THE COUNTERASSAULT THE THE STRATEGY PROSPECT OF P R E V E N T I O N

I n the African social drama sickness has a strong claim to being arch villain. It is bad enough that a man should be ignorant, for this cuts him off from the commerce of other mens minds. It is perhaps worse that a man should be poor, for this condemns him to a life of stint and scheming, in which there is no time for dreams and no respite from weariness. But what surely is worst is that a man should be unwell, for this prevents his doing anything much about either his poverty or his ignorance. In tropical Africa, as was pointed out in Chapter 14, most men, women and children are habitually unwell. Many are unwell from the day of their birth to the day of their death. Many are more than unwell; they are sick of diseases, such as sleeping sickness, that are incapacitating; or of diseases that are debilitating, such as malaria and bilharziasis; or of diseases, such as bronchopneumonia and tuberculosis, that are distress ing. Most of the sick are sick of more than one disease. It is nothing un usual for a person admitted to a leprosarium to be suffering from malaria, sleeping sickness, tertiary yaws, onchocerciasis and worm infections as well as leprosy. Left to their own devices, most of the sick have no prospect of ever being not sick. The pharmacopoeia of the medicine man is an awesome assortment of herbs, entrails, charms and incantations. Its cures say more for the fortitude of the patient than for the skill of the practitioner. Nor is it only a matter of the African suffering from diseases. It is also a matter of his living in a physical, social and psychological environment and on a diet that make it hard for him to keep well even when he is not actually ill. The assault on sickness, therefore, calls not only for tactical
159

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T H E AS S AUL T ON SICKNESS

warfare against specific diseases and localized foci of disease, but also for a strategy aimed at removing the predisposing causes of both disease and ill-health. It calls for prevention no less than cures. TH E GAINS Although there were doctors and nurses in tropical Africa before the end of the nineteenth century, most of them doubled as explorers, sur veyors or evangelists. Almost all they were able to do was to dispense a few simple household remedies and hope that the people who took them would follow the directions. Notwithstanding the many moving pleas made by men like David Liv ingstone, years went by before either public or private agencies did much to bring the consolations of modern medicine within reach of the ordinary African. This is well brought out in the statistics in Table 55 on Nigeria,
Table 55

EXPANSION OF MEDICAL SERVICES IN NIGERIA, 1900-1951

DIS YEAR HOSPITALS PENSARIES IN-PATIENTS OUTPATIENTS HOSPITAL BEDS

(cases) 1,667 5,302 21,400 40,800 80,700 205,471

(cases) 17,700 94,300 138,000 458,000 2,288,000 3,670,101

1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1951

5 11 18 46 85 162

2 6 16 89 350 952

89 275 569 1,440 4,135 9,229

Source: The Nigeria Handbook, Crown Agents for Overseas Governments and Administrations, London and Lagos, 1954, p. 123.

a territory whose experience in this respect has been, if anything, better than the average. The number of hospital beds in Nigeria had not reached 1,500 by 1930. Medical Facilities Today, in the whole of tropical Africa, there are approximately 7,500 doctors and 125,000 hospital beds. By Western standards, these are still very modest figures a doctor to about every 22,000 persons and a bed to about every 1,300.* Large parts of tropical Africa do not have a doctor to 100,000 persons or a bed to 10,000. In 1957 Ethiopia was reported as hav ing one doctor for every 164,800 inhabitants;2 the number of hospital beds
1 The corresponding figures for the United States are about 1 to 750 and 1 to 100. 2 New York Times, December 3, 1957.

T H E AS SAUL T ON SICKNESS

l6 l

was not known, but it was probably less than one for every 20,000. Some territories do much better, of course better in a few instances than many "older countries. In 1956 the doctor-to-population ratio was approxi mately 1:3,660 in Southern Rhodesia and 1:8,800 in Kenya. In the same year the ratio of hospital beds to population in the Belgian Congo was approximately 1:400, or more than sixteen times higher than in India and more than four times higher than in Mexico. In almost every African country, no matter where it stands in com parison with its neighbors, there is an acute awareness of the need for more doctors and more hospitals. In most, this awareness is being matched by action worthy of the need. Name almost any large city from Dakar to Addis Ababa or from Khartoum to Lourengo Marques, and you will find either that its largest, most up-to-date and often most handsome building is a hospital or that it has plans for such a building. Few American towns of comparable size can compete with Dakar, Kumasi, Ibadan, Luanda, Leopoldville or Brazzaville when it comes to hospitals. Or name any uni versity or university college, and it is safe to say that no faculty has a higher priority with its treasury than the medical faculty, where it exists. And where none exists, it is equally safe to say that the establishment of one capable of standing comparison, in the quality of its equipment, in structors, research workers and students, with those of North America and Europe is one of the authorities chief preoccupations. In the past few years, medical faculties have been established at Dakar, Ibadan, Kampala (Makerere College), Khartoum, Elisabethville and Leopoldville (Lovanium University). Others are to be established at Accra, Salisbury and Addis Ababa. When all of them are in operation, they will be able to turn out between 500 and 1,000 fully qualified doctors annually. The 1958 en rollment in the medical schools was less than 400. But there is much more to the tactical assault on sickness than the pro vision of doctors and hospitals. If, to pursue our military analogy, the doctors are the officers and the hospitals the base repair and maintenance centers, the medical auxiliaries are the no less necessary "other ranks, and the clinics, dispensaries and mobile units the indispensable field casualty stations. In all of tropical Africa there are between 10,000 and 12,500 midwives and pharmacists and perhaps as many dispensers and nurses, most of them African. While some of these are attached to base hospitals, more are field workers who carry the fight right into the enemys camp, to places seldom if ever visited by doctors, and to people who have never seen a hospital. It is impossible to weigh in a statistical balance the worth of the medical services rendered by these people, for each statistic is a sufferer, and who can measure the suffering caused by a single disease, or the relief from it that can come from a shot in the arm, a course of antibiotics, or even a bottle of antiseptic? But none who have seen the "other ranks at work can doubt that, without them, the assault on sickness would have

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T H E A S S AUL T ON SICKNESS

faltered badly. With the best will in the world the 594 doctors working in the Belgian Congo in 1953 could not have handled alone more than a small fraction of the 3,054,324 hospital outpatients, the 443,582 in-patients, the 15,112,363 rural dispensary cases, the 6,197,486 Africans examined for endemic disease by mobile teams, the 2,607,543 who were vaccinated against smallpox, or the 413,494 women who received prenatal or post natal treatment. What is true of the Belgian Congo is true, in kind if not in the same degree, of almost all the tropical African territories. This is not to say that the army of auxiliaries is everywhere large enough to contain the enemy, let alone prevail against him. But at least it is grow ing everywhere in places quite impressively, as the following two re ports indicate. The first comes from Kenya.
During 1955 the following number of [African] students qualified: Hospital Assistants (male) 13; Laboratory Assistants 5; Assistant Radiographers 1; Grade II Dressers (male) 1; Grade II Dressers (female) 5; Kenya Registered Nurses 2. The total number of students at the Medical Training School [in Nairobi} at the end of 1955 was 254, composed as follows: Hospital Assistants Attending Promotion Course 6; Hospital Assistant Trainees (male) 144; Hospital Assistant Trainees (female) 11; Compounder Trainees 14; Laboratory Assistant Trainees 12; Kenya Registered Nurse Trainees 14; Grade II Dresser Trainees (male) 27; Grade II Dresser Trainees (female) 26.3

The second comes from the Republic of Sudan, in the days when it was still the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan.
Nurses Training Schools. Ten schools were recognized [during the year 19531954] for the in-service training of nurses covering the full period of three years. A further nine schools were recognized as capable of undertaking the shortened training course of one year.4

The auxiliary army is growing in versatility as well as in numbers. The following report comes from Uganda, but the progress it speaks of can be paralleled in a dozen territories.
Auxiliary medical staff are trained at departmental training schools for work in Government units. These schools, which are being increased in size and number, provide training for medical assistants, nursing orderlies, nurses, mid wives, dispensers, laboratory assistants, assistant radiographers, assistant health inspectors and hygiene orderlies . . . Training is carried out in Kampala, where the Queen Elizabeth Nurses Hostel at Mulago Hospital provides modem accom modation for 350 nurses, midwives and student nurses and midwives. There are other training schools at Masaka, Jinja, Mbale and Lira, and a midwives training school will shortly be opened at Gulu. An assistant medical store keepers hostel is to be started at Entebbe, where a course of instruction will be given at the Central Medical Store.5 8 Medical Department: Annual Report, 1955 , Government Printer, Nairobi, 1956, p. 6. At the end of 1958 the corresponding number of students in training was 349. 4 Report of the Medical Services, Ministry of Health, Sudan Government, for the Year 1953-54. , Khartoum, 1954, p. 35. 5 Colonial Office Report on Uganda for the Year 1954, H.M.S.O., London, 1955, p. 84.

T H E AS SAUL T ON SICKNESS

Although increase in skill often lags behind increase in the number of skills, many medical auxiliaries have acquired outstanding ability. In some instances their skill exceeds that of their tutors, it would seem. At any rate, one European leprosy specialist working in the Belgian Congo has an infirmier (himself a former patient) who, he claims, is "the finest leprosy diagnostician he knows. As the strength, numerical and professional, of the assault force in creases, so does the need for physical facilities. This need, too, is slowly being met in most territories. Since World War II there has been a sharp increase in the number of rural dispensaries and clinics, hospital out-stations, mobile vaccination and inoculation units, maternity centers and so on. Some administrations have, in fact, given a higher priority to the pro vision of such facilities than to the provision of hospital beds, on the ground that the best way socially, financially, medically, epidemiologically to press home the fight against almost any disease is to attack it be fore it has had time to do much damage. To do this effectively may necessitate a "smoking-out campaign, since, in some areas, Africans are still reluctant to undergo hospital treatment except as a last resort. For that matter, in some areas Africans are still unwilling to present themselves even for a medical examination. However, with perseverance, abetted by flattery, material inducements and mild pressure, these inhibitions are almost everywhere being overcome. For example, at the Kabou clinic in Togo, soap and sugar are given to every woman who comes for prenatal consultations; and the local chiefs are requested to round up pregnant women for such consultations. If the child is delivered at the clinic the mother is sometimes given a dress for it. Even the United Nations Visiting Mission of the Trusteeship Council, which is not often heard to champion colonial practices, conceded that this was "a very good system in order to attract sick people to attend hospitals and dispensaries. 6 In some areas it is no longer a matter of finding inducements, but of finding facilities for those seeking treatment. This is particularly true of those areas, such as the Belgian Congo, where the assault on smallpox, sleeping sickness and other greatly feared diseases has been pressed with vigor. The assault may have been mounted only on bicycles and led only by African auxiliaries, but once the success stories began to get around by "bush telegraph few dispensaries and mobile units had much difficulty in attracting custom. And success there certainly has been; for it is thanks largely to the work of these agencies that malaria and plague, as well as smallpox and sleeping sickness, are now under control in the Belgian Congo, and that most of the cases in that territory of leprosy, yaws and onchocerciasis have been diagnosed and treated. Where difficulty some times arises is in restraining patients from living on the dispensary door
6 United Nations, Report on Togoland under French Administration, U. N. Visit ing Mission to Trust Territories in West Africa, 1952, New York, 1954, p. 22.

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T H E A S S AUL T ON SICKNESS

step until they are cured or, too often, in persuading them to stay when they become disenchanted and want to go back to their own dispensers. Besides the agencies that operate domestically, there are a number that work on a broader international front. Of these the World Health Organization of the United Nations is the foremost. The following extracts from the African Region part of the 1958 report of the Director-General of WHO indicate the type of forces being thrown into the assault by this organization, and the strategy it is pursuing.
In dealing with the health problems of the Region [covering all of Africa south of the Sahara, except Ethiopia, Somalia and the Republic of Sudan], the ad vantages of inter-country programmes have been always emphasized, since they make it possible to plan more effective and economical projects. . . . An important procedure in the work of the Regional Office [in Brazzaville] has been the many visits paid by members of the office staff to countries and ter ritories in the Region, particularly to those that have asked WHO for assistance with their health programmes. During those visits information was collected about the health conditions of the area, discussions were held with the health authorities on their proposed programmes, help was given in preparing plans for operations, and the progress of programmes already launched was discussed on the spot with the responsible officers. Probably the most practical means of reinforcing and developing the existing health services is the instruction and training of competent personnel of all grades to staff these services, and a high priority was therefore given to assisting teaching and training programmes. In the regional fellowships programme, the number of fellowships awarded (128) was nearly double the number in the previous year. About sixty per cent, of those fellowships were related to the organization of public health services and about thirty-five per cent, to the con trol of communicable diseases, in particular of malaria and tuberculosis. Medi cal officers, engineers, nurses and auxiliary personnel have benefited from the fellowships programme. Governments are giving increasing attention to the training of health services staff in protection against atomic radiation, and a number of fellowships were awarded for this purpose. Fellowships or grants were provided for attendance at courses or seminars, such as the social paediatrics course at Dakar . . ., the mental health seminar, held in Brazzaville . . . the training course on brucellosis [undulant fevers] at Elisabethville . . . [and] the course on the ophthalmological aspects of onchocerciasis, at Bamako . . . The assistance to countries and territories in the Region has been largely given to the organization, expansion and co-ordination of work on communicable diseases . . . Considerable progress has been made in the study of the technical difficulties and special problems of breaking the transmission of malaria in several parts of Africa. . . . One of the advisory teams, provided to assist countries in assessing the progress of their schemes for malaria control, continued its work . . . and similar teams are being set up to make surveys and prepare sound plans of operation for the areas in which schemes of malaria eradication are already in prospect . . . The great majority of malaria control projects in the Region have been assisted by U N IC EF.7 7 The Work of WHO 1958: Annual Report of the Director-General to the World Health Assembly and to the United Nations, WHO, Geneva, 1959, p. 45.

T H E A S S A U LT ON SICKNESS

The African Regional Office has been giving similar support to projects for the control of bilharziasis, leprosy, tuberculosis, onchocerciasis, small pox and yaws, the improvement of maternal and child health, the raising of nutritional and sanitary standards, and the training of nurses and rural health workers. At the end of 1958 the list of projects being directed (either by WHO alone or in conjunction with other international agencies) from this office was more than one hundred items long. Another twenty or so projects were being directed in Ethiopia, the Republic of Sudan and Somalia from the Eastern Mediterranean Regional Office in Alexandria. To measure the strength of the forces engaged in the assault presents no great difficulty, since all medical agencies keep records of personnel, equipment and supplies. To measure the progress made by them is much more of a problem because of the many unknowns. Nobody knows exactly how much disease there was when the assault began. There was plenty, to be sure, but in no area was the precise incidence or the mor bidity of a given disease known. Nobody knows the size of the population at that time, or anything concerning its mortality. Nobody, indeed, knows the exact size of the population today; as was pointed out in Volume I, census material is still lacking in some areas. Adequate vital statistics are likewise lacking; the majority of the territories still have no comprehensive system of registration, and those that do lack the means of implementing it. Then, too, many pathological phenomena are still unobserved; if ob served, they are not always reported; and if reported, they are not infre quently diagnosed wrongly. Our knowledge is based on the fraction of population with which modern science has had contact, and on some surveys, made by research teams, into the less accessible areas. It is, Dr. Jacques M. May asserts in his working paper, little better than an edu cated guess. Sometimes it is no more than a half-educated guess, as the writers of the following report, coming from Uganda, are frank to admit: There is . . . general agreement that the mortality figures available leave much to be desired, and no data exists on which to decide whether the probable errors of figures quoted in reports are of the order of 2 percent, 5 percent, or even 10 percent. Until there is a greatly improved organization for collecting statistics of real use, with a higher degree of accuracy, and until improvement is maintained over a period of years, it is impossible to assess changes in the simplest variables, such as birth rates, death rates . . .8 Uganda, as it happens, is better off for vital statistics than most African territories, having highly developed central and local governments and a network of dispensaries and district hospitals. But progress there has been, as any elderly African will testify. Indeed, there is probably no better assurance of medical progress than the fact that there are elderly Africans.
8 A Development Plan for Uganda and the 1948 Revision of the Plan, Entebbe, 1949, p. 46.

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T H E A SSA U LT ON SICKNESS

Evidence of Gains How mortality rates have been changing in several territories may be traced in Table 56. Imperfect, approximate and partial as these figures are, there is little doubt that they indicate a downward trend. At the same time, it is impossible, on the basis of such material, to come to any definite conclusions as to the degree of decline, or to compare the figures of one territory with those of another. The accompanying infant mortality table hints at a similar downward trend. While there is reason to believe that this trend is a real one, the given level of the figures is very questionable and comparison from terri tory to territory is impossible. The level is questionable because, where small sample surveys of infant mortality have been made, the rates are generally higher than those found in the official handbooks. And terri torial comparison is impossible because no two sets of figures are derived in the same way. The Gambia figures in Table 57 are simply those for Bathurst, the capital; the Nigeria figures are for Lagos only; and those for Ghana relate solely to the compulsory registration areas, which contain only about one tenth of the total population. The evidence of progress is combating specific diseases is subject to equally important limitations. The chief of these, perhaps, is the fact that figures as a rule refer only to persons to whom the chance of treatment has been offered; therefore, they cannot be taken as representative of condi tions at large. Even if all 30,000-odd doctors and medical auxiliaries were assigned to the job, they could not fumigate every home in the bush, inocu late its inhabitants against all the diseases that jeopardize their health, and teach them the rudiments of modern hygiene. Only a small proportion of the 30,000 are, of course, available for such an assignment. Consequently the figures cited must be thought of merely as gains made by skirmishing parties working on a limited front, not as the assurance of a total victory over the diseases in question. Even so, some of the gains have been impressive. Here is a sampling, culled from recent reports.
1. Belgian Congo. [In] 1930, from among 2,779,448 natives examined by itinerant medical missions, 33,562 new cases [of sleeping sickness] were dis covered, that is 1.2 percent. In 1953, among the 6,197,487 people examined, no more than 3,804 cases were found, that is 0.06 percent . . . In 1917, in certain regions there were many villages in which 40 percent of the population was sick, and it was not unusual to find villages where 60 or 70 percent of the inhabitants had sleeping sickness. 9 Twenty-four years ago [1935] all children attending our hospital were suffer ing from one or more diseases, such as malaria, chronic anemia, yaws, helmin thiasis (e.g., ancylostomiasis, ascariasis and filariasis), general malnutrition,
9 The Belgian Congo: From Wilderness to Civilization, special issue of Les BeauxArts, Brussels, 1955, p. 19.

T H E A S S A U L T ON SICKNESS
Table 56

167

MORTALITY RATES OF SELECTED TERRITORIES, 1947-1957

(Number of Deaths, Excluding Stillbirths, per 1,000 Population)
TERRITORY

1947 5.8 n.a. 28.7 18.1 5.6 n.a. n.a. 36.7 7.7 17.1

1950 6.3 n.a. 19.9c 17.6

1953 7.4 19.4 20.8

1954

1955 6.3 17.0 n.a. 13.1 5.3 12.5 n.a. 22.7 7.2

1956

1957

Angola a Gambia: Bathurst only Ghana (Gold Coast)a* b Malagasy Republic (Madagascar) a Mozambique a Nigeria: Lagos only Nyasaland a d Sao Tome and Principe a Spanish Guinea a d >0 Zanzibar & Pemba a

6.6
17.1 n.a.

6.1
20.4 n.a.

6.8
16.0 n.a. n.a. 4.9 14.2 n.a. n.a.

12.8
5.5 13.6 5.6

12.2
5.5 13.0 n.a. 24.5 7.3 11.4

12.6
5.2 11.9 n.a. n.a. 6.7 9.9

6.1
n.a. 13.6 27.3 8.5 15.6

21.6 8.1 8.1

8.2
8.4

11.2

Source: United Nations, Demographic Yearbooks for 1956, 1957 and 1958.

* Data are affected by irregularities in registration or incomplete coverage. b Data are for compulsory registration areas only, comprising about one tenth of total population. 0 Not computed by the Statistical Office of the United Nations. dData are based on year of registration rather than year of occurrence. e Data exclude deaths of infants dying before registration of birth, n.a.: not available 2'able 57 INFANT MORTALITY RATES OF SELECTED TERRITORIES, 1947-1957
(Number of Deaths of Infants under 1 Year per 1,000 Live Births)
TERRITORY

1947 n.a. 119.8 117.1 130.8 125.7 n.a. n.a. 50.0

1950

1953

1954

1955 107.6 94.8 n.a. n.a. 82.5 n.a. 127.6 41.8

1956 103.1 111.9 n.a. n.a. 76.3 n.a. 144.5 26.4

1957 n.a. 71.8 n.a. n.a. 80.1 n.a. n.a. 35.9

French West Africa: Dakar only Gambia: Bathurst only Ghana (Gold Coast)a >b *c Malagasy Republic (Madagascar) a Nigeria: Lagos only Nyasaland a Sierra Leone: Colony only b Zanzibar & Pemba a

115.4 91.6 n.a. 115.1 100.9 106.1 n.a. 120.9 d 113.0 d 111.5 86.3 n.a. 178.7 83.2 n.a. 85.1 148.3 0 127.9 n.a. 78.0 89.9 n.a. 123.0 n.a.

Source: United Nations, Demographic Yearbooks for 1956, 1957 and 1958.

a Data are affected by irregularities in registration or incomplete coverage. bData are based on year of registration rather than year of occurrence. c Data are for compulsory registration areas only, comprising about one tenth of total population. dNot computed by the Statistical Office of the United Nations, n.a.: not available

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T H E A S SAULT ON SICKNESS

scabies and impetigo. Now it is possible to find children without any of them, though most children still have subclinical malnutrition. "Leprosy is still widespread: there are more than 3,500 cases of it among the 50,000 people served by the hospital, but the sulfone drugs are working wonders. More than 100 of the 1,000 patients in our leprosarium most of them afflicted with the once almost incurable type of the disease were sent home cured in 1958. 10 2. Kenya. During the late 1940s the incidence of river-blindness (oncho cerciasis) in young children living in Nyanza Province was put at 35 to 40 per cent. As a result of a sustained DDT-spraying campaign of the vector-breeding streams and rivers in the region, Dr. A. J. Walker, Director of the Medical Services of the colony, was able to report at the end of 1956 as follows: No early stages of Simulium neavei [the buffalo gnat, which is the local vector of the disease] have been seen on crabs [the host], or adult flies caught . . . since January when a residual focus was found . . . It would thus appear that this ambitious scheme of eradication . . . has been successful. 11 Dr. Walkers re port for 1957 showed that his confidence was justified; the vector had not been seen anywhere in the province. 3. Northern Rhodesia. "Figures of malarial cases in Broken Hill are avail able since 1936. The peak period was reached in 1945 with 43.11 percent of the admissions to the hospital being malarial cases, while this year [1956], the lowest figure yet recorded of 5.18 percent was achieved . . . These figures relate to Europeans and [Asians], but give an indication of the effectiveness of the work in the township as a whole. 12

4. Republic of Sudan. No outbreak of [relapsing fever] was encountered [in 1954-55]: only 3 imported cases were spotted in Khartoum and treated. Delousing by DDT which is applied at all posts of entry to Sudan on imported labour has removed the worry that this disease used to create in the past. 13 How much worry it did create a decade earlier is evident from the figures cited for 1945: 17,392 cases and 444 deaths.
5. Tanganyika. Annual tabulations by the Government Medical Department show a decrease of more than 85 per cent in reported cases of smallpox between 1950 (6,390 cases) and 1957 (856 cases). The case mortality rate declined sharply and steadily during the early 1950s, despite a flare-up of the disease in 1953 and 1954. In 1957 the rate was 4.4 per cent, against 21.0 per cent in 1950. 6. Various territories. The cases of yaws in the [African] Region have been estimated at twenty millions. Over twelve million people have been examined, of whom seven million have been cured by teams working with WHO col laboration. 14
10 Dr. Stanley G. Browne, onetime medical superintendent, Baptist Mission Hospital, Yakusu, Belgian Congo, in a personal communication. 11 Medical Department: Annual Report, 1956 , Government Printer, Nairobi, 1957, p. 28. 12 African Affairs: Annual Report for the Year 1956 , Government Printer, Lusaka, 1957, p. 48. 13 Report of the Medical Services, Ministry of Health , Sudan Government, for the Year 1954-55, Khartoum, 1956, p. 11. The Work of WHO 1958 , p. 46.

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l6g

There is no territory in the whole of tropical Africa that cannot provide some evidence of medical gains, and there are next to no diseases that have not had their ascendancy challenged in the past generation. Few of the gains are general, however, and none is as yet secure. Losses, more over, continue to be considerable. Indeed, it is impossible to read current medical literature without being gravely disconcerted. The enemy, it seems, gives ground in one place, or disease, only to gain ground in an other. Nor would it appear to be just a matter of giving and gaining, but rather of assault and counterassault.

TH E COUNTERASSAULT The evidence of a counterassault is to be found, first, in the comeback being staged by some of the old, characteristically "African diseases. In recent years, reports like the following, from widely scattered areas, have become distressingly frequent.
1. Republic of Sudan. A grave epidemic of cerebrospinal meningitis at tacked the Bahr El Ghazal for the second successive year. This Province was also visited by a severe outbreak of smallpox which had not been brought finally under control by the end of the year. Nor was control of smallpox in Darfur fully successful and the epidemic there continued, though at a lessened pitch. "A raised incidence of sporadic cases of enteric fever and minor epidemics in Wadi Haifa, Dongola, Atbara, Abu Usher and Ed Dueim underlined the ur gency of betterment of environmental sanitation throughout the country. There was an ominous rise in incidence of sleeping sickness in Yambio and Yei districts. 15 2. Nigeria. From time to time . . . more virulent outbreaks [of yellow fever] do occur. Thus in 1946 an outbreak occurred at Ogbomosho; only eleven deaths were recorded, but since the area involved contained an urban population of some 100,000 people, and since proven cases wandered as far afield as Ilorin, Kafanchan and Gusau, the total number affected, if only in a mild form, must have been very much larger. In 1951-52 a much more serious outbreak occurred at Enugu, involving 5,000 cases and resulting in some 600 deaths. Another con siderable, yet probably mild, outbreak was detected in retrospect along the north shore of the Lagos Lagoon. No case of yellow fever had been reported from the Lagos area between 1925 and the time of the investigation (1945), yet 17 per cent of all children in the area had had the disease, die youngest being five. An epidemic of some size must have taken place in the district about the year 1941, and yet passed quite unrecorded. 10
15 Report of the Medical Services, 1953-54 , p. 1. 16 Professor A. Brown, Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, University College, Ibadan, in Land and People in Nigeria, by K. M. Buchanan and J. C. Pugh, University of Lon

don Press, London, 1955, p. 51.

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T H E A S SAULT ON SICKNESS

3. Tanganyika. From 1949 to 1952 there was a progressive decline in the reported incidence of sleeping sickness. In 1953, however, there were indica tions that a general increase might be expected, and all precautions were inten sified. Up to the end of October, 1954, over 1,000 cases had been re ported, compared with a territorial total of 732 for 1953. More than 700 of these cases appeared in the Western Province. In May a new focus was discovered in the Lake Province not far from the Ruanda Urundi border, and a similar out break was reported from the Belgian Congo side of the border . . . 17 4. Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. Smallpox was present in North ern Rhodesia in small outbreaks at the beginning of the year [1955] but later culminated in an epidemic beginning in April. The large mining towns on the Copperbelt were most seriously affected, and other outbreaks in the Federation could be traced to a Copperbelt source. In Northern Rhodesia, 3,538 cases were reported, 2,772 of them from the Copperbelt towns. There were 501 deaths. The overall mortality was 14.46 per cent, and in the Copperbelt district itself, 16.85 per cent. In one week in mid-June in Mufulira, there were 37 deaths in 42 cases. . . . I have seen more cases of kwashiorkor from the African township [Hartley, Southern Rhodesia] than I remember in the past, and a fair number of cases of beri-beri and pellagra in adults. 18 Bilharziasis has increasingly endangered the health of human beings . . . in Southern Rhodesia during the past ten years . . . It is estimated that in the eastern part of the Colony, which includes Salisbury, 80 percent of the African population and 10 percent of European children are infected with bilharziasis. . . . [An] enormous increase in the number of dams and weirs and in the permanency of rivers [as a result of work sponsored by the Federal Department of Conservation and Extension] has led to a corresponding rise in the snail population. There is now a real danger of bilharziasis becoming as fatal [sic] as it is in Egypt, where it has existed for 5,000 years. 19

At the same time, diseases not traditionally associated with most of the African tropics have spread. High on the list are tuberculosis, venereal diseases, pneumonia and poliomyelitis. Once again, it is very difficult to get reliable information for more than small sectors of any given territory. But where it is available, as in the cases that follow, it leaves no doubt about the inroads being made by these foreign diseases.
Tuberculosis
1. Nigeria. 2,591 pulmonary and 1,259 other cases with 406 deaths were seen in hospitals during the period [1949-1950], but this does not give a true picture of die actual incidence. In Lagos, for example, 12.11 per cent of all deaths were attributed to tuberculosis. 20
17 Report htj II. M. Government . . . to the General Assembly of the United Nations on Tanganyika . . . for the Year 1954 , H.M.S.O., London, 1955, p. 72. 18 Annual Report on the Public Health of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland for the Year 1955 , Government Printer, Salisbury, 1956, pp. 7, 18. 19 Central African Examiner, August 17, 1957, p. 8. The liver fluke disease of cattle,

carried by water snails, has also, and for the same reasons, increased greatly in the past ten years or so. 20 Annual Report of the Medical Services, 1949-1950 , Government Printer, Lagos, p. 6.

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2. Uganda. This disease is widespread: about half the adult population react to the tuberculin test which shows that they are, or have been, infected. 21 3. Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. Tuberculosis in the African continues to be one of the biggest health problems facing the Federation . . . the special [curative] accommodation for Africans was filled to capacity, over flowing into hospitals and clinics wherever beds could be found or made avail able, but was still insufficient. 22

Other countries where the disease is widespread and thought to be on the in crease are the Republic of Sudan, Kenya, Tanganyika, Angola and the Belgian Congo. In all these countries, Dr. May reports, tuberculin tests show from 50 to 90 per cent of positive reactions in adults. Venereal Diseases
1. French Cameroons. The mission [of the U. N.] was informed that in some regions of the North, among the Fulani and the few pagans of the plain, some 75 percent of the population suffers from syphilis. 23 2. Tanganyika. Annual reports of the Government Medical Department list the number of patients treated in hospitals for gonorrhea and syphilis during recent years as follows: 1952 1953 1954 19560 1957 * Gonorrhea 22,658 30,745 27,056 30,504 28,043 Syphilis 38,646 40,222 33,109 29,478 21,295 * Outpatients only.

Pneumonia
1. Nyasaland. According to the 1955 report on public health issued by the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, pneumonia still remains the number one killing disease in the district of Ncheu in spite of modem drugs. 2. Ghana. The principal causes of death through disease are pulmonary tuberculosis and the respiratory diseases, according to a Colonial Office report for the year 1954.

Poliomyelitis
In Uganda, according to a Colonial Office report, more cases of poliomyelitis than of sleeping sickness were notified in 1955. The report comments: The change in the pattern of disease is interesting: whereas the so-called tropical diseases are gradually being brought under control, diseases common to more temperate countries are either actually increasing in incidence or are being reported in larger numbers. 24
21 Colonial Office Report on Uganda for the Year 1954 , H.M.S.O., London, 1955,

p. 81.
22 Annual Report on Public Health, 1955 , p. 11. 23 United Nations, Report on the Cameroons under French Administration, U. N.

Visiting Mission in West Africa, 1952, New York, 1954, p. 25. 24 Colonial Office Report on Uganda for the Year 1955 , H.M.S.O., London, 1956, p. 63. This report contained another sign of the changing times: road deaths in Uganda in 1955 were believed to have exceeded the number of deaths recorded in the countrys hospitals from malaria.

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Contributory Factors How did this counterassault manage to get under way? Of the many contributory factors, the following would seem to be especially notable: 1. The opening up of tropical Africa. Since about 1900, Europeans and Asians have become domiciled in almost every part of the region, and wherever they have gone, their diseases have gone with them. But whereas most of them enjoy some degree of resistance to the more disabling forms of these diseases, the Africans living round about them do not. There is little doubt that it was the newcomers who lit the fuse for the explosion of venereal and respiratory diseases reported from many areas in the past generation. 2. The growing mobility of the African. Thanks to roads, railways and airlines, and the increasing demand for migrant labor, the African has become a highly efficient carrier of diseases, both new and old. Syphilis and tuberculosis acquired by men working on the mines are often carried, when their term of service is over, to places five hundred to a thousand miles away, hitherto free of either disease. Much the same is true of leprosy. Bilharziasis acquired in an old Sudanese focus of the disease can be carried overnight to the Belgian Congo or east Africa by the itinerant seller of ivory and metalware, unless his personal hygiene is as up to date as his mode of travel, as it sometimes is not. Sleeping sickness can be carried from one territory to the next by infected tsetse flies hiding in the nooks and crannies of a truck or car. 3. The inadequacy of the Africans defenses. These defenses are inade quate on several counts. In some instances they are inadequate because to all outward appearances at least he does not care enough about good health. It is a frequent complaint of doctors and public health officers that even after a man has been taught the drill of protection against a disease, he quickly falls backs into his old infection-inviting habits. Another com plaint (no longer as common as it used to be in some parts) is that people who have willingly presented themselves for vaccination subsequently do their utmost to prevent it from taking by rubbing the spot with lime juice or a native concoction, or simply exposing it to strong sunlight and thus killing the virus. In many instances the Africans defenses are inade quate because he does not earn enough. He may not earn enough to keep himself and his family in food, or to buy sufficient room space to avoid sleeping at close quarters with his associates, or to buy footwear that will protect him from worm infections and a change of clothes that will enable him to avoid the consequences of getting soaked in the rainy season. He is unlikely to earn enough to undertake anything in the way of preventive measures like pond spraying. In most instances, however, the root of the trouble is neither unconcern nor poverty, but ignorance. Most Africans are so accustomed to being less than well that they frequently do not realize how unwell they are until

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it is too late to do much about it. Doctors almost everywhere lament that patients are generally not brought into hospital until the last stages have been reached and every other remedy has been tried without success. 25 Most Africans still do not know enough to see the point of supplying themselves with pit latrines and a clean water supply, without which it is scarcely possible, in most areas, to avoid contracting bilhar ziasis, the dysenteries (bacillary and amoebic) and the typhoid fevers; or of sleeping in a well-ventilated atmosphere (instead of the cus tomary fug), for want of which many are daily contracting tuberculosis and bronchopneumonia. Increasing numbers of reasonably well-to-do Africans know too little about bought foods and beverages to be able to steer clear of nutritional diseases. Many of the most recently reported cases of kwashiorkor, pellagra and beriberi in Southern Rhodesia have been attributed to "the inordinate consumption of white bread, buns, syrup and mineral waters. 26 Observations such as these, recurring like a refrain in medical reports, suggest that possibly another of the Africans inadequacies, when it comes to defending himself against disease, is his lack of confidence in himself and the folkways of his people. In many areas, certainly, he has virtually discarded his traditional food staples and beverages, along with his tradi tional wardrobe, such as it was. In many areas, too, his womenfolk are now weaning children after the nine-month period favored by most Europeans. Although missionaries advocate teetotalism in the African convert with good reason, having all too often seen what happens to the man who acquires a liking for Western drinks, the fact remains that native beer, brewed from maize, sorghum, palm sap or sugar cane, contains protective elements that are not found in mineral waters and white bread. Traders, missionaries and government officials have equally good reasons for encouraging the African to wear Western-style clothes, but the fact is that over most of the African tropics there are no clothes like no clothes, or at least like the fewest possible clothes. The "Mother Hubbards distributed by the early missionaries may have been replaced in these days by something a little more chic, but the forlorn spectacle of a dressed-up African woman caught in a tropical rainstorm is enough to con vince anyone that she would look much happier, feel more comfortable, and run a smaller risk of catching pneumonia if she were less cumbered with soggy cotton and silk.2 7 Again, cogent as many of the arguments may be for weaning a child at nine months, they do not cancel out the one great 2 5 Colonial Office Report on the Nyasaland Protectorate for the Year
London, 1954, p. 93.
1953 , H.M.S.O.,

26Annual

Report on Public Health, Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, 1955,

p. 18. 27 It is only fair to add that the incidence of such traditional African ills as yaws and ulcerations is generally much lower in clothed than in unclothed communities.

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argument for leaving it at the breast for the more usual two to three years, namely, the fact that in most bush areas there is a scarcity of indigenous foodstuffs capable of nourishing infants adequately. In his paper written for this study, B. S. Platt notes that
the significance of weaning too early by traditional standards is well recognized. In some parts of Nyasaland the infant that deprives its predecessor of its full birthright of breast feeding is given a name which carries a stigma for the mother for conceiving again too soon. The same idea is inherent in the term deposed child.

TH E STRATEGY O F PREVEN TIO N It is clear, therefore, that the battle for the health of the African and, to a lesser extent, the non-African has still to be won, and that it is most unlikely to be won by nibbling tactics, no matter how efficient, or by an army of patched-up casualties, no matter how brave. To change the figure for a moment: though forest fires can always be put out, given enough men and equipment, even in tinder-dry conditions, there is no hope of stopping them from breaking out from time to time when the forest is tinder-dry. What is needed is a good fall of rain a change of environ ment. So with the diseases of tropical Africa. The only hope of a durable victory lies in changing the cultural and physical environment to the point where disease cannot get away with aggression. Requisites Such a victory will take some winning. To start with, it will take a long time. The terrain over which the campaign will range is tough and in many places hard of access. The Africans communication system is still far from satisfactory. The diseases to be fought are capable of putting up tremendous resistance. In most instances, they can be fought only one at a time, so that the strategy for the campaign against malaria must be quite different from that against, say, bilharziasis. It will also take a vast amount of effort, both individual and cooperative: individual, because everybody needs to be able to recognize the vector and symptoms of a disease, and to do something about them; cooperative, because the good one mans efforts do will be annulled unless his neighbor can be persuaded to do the same. This effort must not be merely a matter of cooperation between neighbors. The vectors of malaria and sleeping sickness know nothing of political boundaries; they do as well in Uganda as in Ruanda-Urundi and can cross and recross the border unhindered. Region-wide cooperation of the fullest possible type is necessary if the fight is to be pressed home. So far, such cooperation has been limited for the most part to the exchange of epidemiological information between certain territories.

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Victory will take education, too, for no fight is so hopeless as that fought in the dark, and there is still much gross darkness in tropical Africa on the subject of what makes for health and what for sickness. In many places it is still the medicine mans mumbo-jumbo that makes for health, and the sorcerers for sickness. But it is likely to be the money for the fight that will take the most getting. Not many of the people have it themselves; and if they had, they would be unlikely to subscribe it to some of the community projects that are part of the price of victory but that seem at times to have no bearing on the immediate needs of the subscriber. Nor can we justly blame them for being reluctant to support drainage 01* mass-inoculation campaigns while they have so many more urgent needs. Nor, again, can we justly blame local and central governments for their apparent tardiness in put ting money into ditches and needles while they are short of roads, schools, hospitals and clinics. But if not from the people and their governments, where shall the money come from? The World Health Organization and the United Nations Childrens Fund have barely enough money for pilot and pump-priming operations. The foundations have money only for training and research. The technical assistance programs of the United Nations and the United States are likewise not on a "military scale. Con sequently, short of a world-wide change of heart, funds for the fight for durable health are bound to be scarce. But even in war, money isnt everything. The will to win, or the lack of it, has often made nonsense of logistics. And the will to win is not yet present in many Africans. As Kenneth Bradley observes in his paper,
Disease and malnutrition have always been obvious evils to the African, so obvious and so much with him that, since he did not know how to overcome them, he long ago developed a philosophy to make them acceptable. They are the will of the gods, and the only hope of alleviation lies in propitiation and in a strict observance of the rites which the gods decree and of the customs of the tribe which the gods and ancestors are so anxious to preserve.

At the same time, the Africans ability to acquire the will to win the battle of disease must not be underrated. Many Africans have already acquired it. Over much of tropical Africa today the tide of resentment against habitual sickness is running so strong that it promises soon to fill every creek and backwater. Governments are finding that many people are as interested in their preventive public health work as in their remedial work. Accomplishments The preventionist still finds many serious obstacles in his path, but he is beginning to see how to overcome some of them. How he goes about it is perhaps best seen in his fight against such "fly diseases as malaria and sleeping sickness. To hospitalize all the victims of

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these diseases conservatively, seven out of every ten persons is selfevidently impossible, even if all Africans were willing to enter hospitals. If it were possible, it would still not be the answer, because the moment a patient left the hospital he would run the risk of reinfection. What is possible, and what the preventionist is trying to do, is (1) to so alter the physical environment of the vectors and hosts that they can no longer reproduce their kind in it; (2) to kill the vectors and hosts with insecticides; (3) to give individuals their own "built-in protection or protective screen; and (4) to destroy in the patient the parasitic cause of his disease or diseases.28 In the existing economic and social context, very few of these things can be done on a generous scale. But where they are being done, they are amply proving their worth. Thus, wherever tsetse-harboring bush has been cleared and steps have been taken to keep it from growing again, sleeping sickness infection rates have become almost negligible. To take a single instance: there are today large sections of the Niari valley (in the Republic of the Congo) in which African and European farmers live along side each other oblivious of the tsetse flys existence, whereas up to the late 1940s the valley was such bad sleeping sickness country that it was virtu ally uninhabited. Similar gains have been made in respect of malaria in the vicinity of Abidjan, Lagos, Douala, Leopoldville and a score of other cities as the result of draining or spraying nearby marshes and ponds. In the absence of such measures, most Europeans have escaped these diseases by the faithful observance of a few simple rules: "Never sleep without a mosquito net; "Never skip an inoculation shot; "Always have the pill box handy. To get Africans to keep such rules has, understandably, proved much harder. Many of them cannot afford the price of a piece of net or a box of pills; some of those who can are forgetful or careless; and not all live within reach of a pill supply or a medical syringe. The measures required to combat diseases that follow in the train of human filth, such as the typhoid fevers, diarrhoeas and helminth infections (including bilharziasis), provide another example of the preventionists strategy. Here there is but one road to prevention: cleanliness. Even so, the public health officers job is anything but simple. It is not enough that he should build efficient disposal systems, public and private latrines and safe water supplies, and that he should treat snail-infested bodies of water with copper sulphate and so on. To insure continuing immunity to infec tion, he must also see that the work he does is never undone. This means persuading a lot of people the better part of 167 million to break with habits that are encrusted with tribal sanctions and endowed with
28 Dr. Stanley G. Browne, a consultant to this study, reports that this prevention by cure is especially effective for such diseases as trypanosomiasis, yaws and leprosy. It satisfies both the clinician, out to help the sick individual, and the epidemiologist, who is primarily concerned wth the good of the community. Furthermore, it demon strates the concern of the public health authority and the value of its activities.

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symbolic meaning. It also means raising a lot of money, for in addition to the building costs involved, there is the cost of maintaining enough sani tary inspectors and their aides to see that everything is as it should be. However, for most Europeans and a slowly increasing number of Africans and Asians prevention is just a matter of observing a few more house rules: Never go about barefoot; "Never wade or wash in a stream or pond; "Never eat raw vegetables or fruit of unknown origin; "Never drink unboiled water or, as many would have it, "Never drink water. What is true of diseases having to do with ignorance of public hygiene is true in large measure of those having to do with ignorance of personal hygiene. Thus, a very large part of the characteristically high infant mor tality and maternal mortality rates among primitive African groups can be traced to the failure of the midwife or the mother to observe the most elementary principles of cleanliness. "Until very recently, writes A. M. M. Nhonoli concerning the rural areas of Unyamwezi in Tanganyika, "there prevailed most unhygienic practices at childbirth and neither the mother nor the attendant old women knew even the rudiments of asepsis. The umbilical cord would be tied with any piece of cord or string picked up at the moment and the distal portion be sliced off with any old knife that came handy. . . . I have used the past tense throughout here, but the occasions when a more hygienic procedure is followed are still unfortu nately few compared with what has just been described. No wonder that tetanus is common and that most, if not all, premature babies fail to survive. 29 The people of Unyamwezi are not very different in this respect from other African groups. Needless to say, lack of cleanliness is not the sole reason for the high infant and maternal mortality rates. The endemicity of parasitic and other infections also counts for much. What, in many cases, counts for more is the lack of proper food and feeding. Indeed, it is arguable that malnutrition is responsible for more untimely deaths and more habitual sickness among Africans than any other single factor. Theodore Gillman, Professor of Physiology at Natal Uni versity, Durban, has stated that two thirds of all African deaths on the Witwatersrand are attributable to diseases associated with malnutrition; that up to 70 per cent of the African children attending certain schools are recognizably malnourished, 50 per cent of them needing nursing and medical attention, and nearly 10 per cent needing to be treated in hospital for "diseases directly or indirectly attributable to malnutrition; and that "Chronic malnutrition from infancy, and even from conception, is . . . among the most important direct and indirect factors sapping the vitality of the pigmented peoples of Africa. 30
29 An Enquiry into the Infant Mortality Rate in Rural Areas of Unyamwezi, East
African Medical Journal, Vol. 31 (1954), No. 1, p. 10. 30 Chronic Malnutrition in Africa, The Listener, May 3, 1956, p. 538.

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Though Gillmans figures are derived from South Africa and few similar surveys have been made north of the Limpopo, they apply, according to Platt, "in large measure to the continent as a whole, and particularly to those areas where the "process of sophistication is well along. Certainly there are few areas where, on the evidence (very scanty, it is true, and based on available food supplies rather than on known consumption), the ordinary African enjoys a perennially adequate diet. Dr. May, who has made some of the most comprehensive studies in this field, is of the opinion that, with the possible exception of the pastoralists living in the Somalilands and in the better-watered savannas of west and east Africa, and some isolated sedentary groups "which have not broken the bounda ries of their primitive ecology, no African populations have diets that are adequate in both energy-producing and protective elements. It might be supposed that the strategy to be followed in preventing nutritional diseases would also be very simple, namely, better feeding. Better feeding is, indeed, the crux of the strategy. But it is still not possible always to say with assurance what must be done to turn a poor diet into a better one. According to Gillman, "we still do not know how to improve [inadequate] diets by supplements, especially if, as in Africa, a single natural food is used as a staple comprising more than 75 to 80 percent of the total caloric intake. 31 It would appear to be easier to hurt a man than help him by offering him such supplements, for Gillman goes on to say that, as a result of conducting hundreds of food supplement experi ments on animals, he is "confounded by the ample evidence substantiating the view first put forward ten years ago from South Africa that, in the wrong dietary setting, a good food may indeed promote disease; and that "there is scarcely any other way whereby it is possible, wittingly or unwittingly, to inflict such widespread bodily harm on so many people as tampering, incorrectly, with a nations diet. But it is not just a matter of finding and prescribing better foods. It is also a matter of making such foods available to every malnourished Afri can; and this promises to be more difficult. At the present time the food stuffs favored by most nutrition specialists are not available to the majority of Africans needing them, either because these foodstuffs cannot be raised where they are needed, or because storage facilities are inadequate to safeguard them from insects, rodents and fungi, or because they are quite beyond the means of those needing them. Then again, it is also in part a matter, to which we come back time and again, of persuading the African to do new things, such as eating "alien corn in alien ways. How may such difficulties be overcome? In the opinion of Platt, Gill man and most other experts, it can be done only by developing and using all the resources of the area under attack by nutritional diseases. In this
si Ibid., p. 539.

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strategy the parts played by the food technologist, welfare worker, econo mist, educator, politician and administrator are likely to be quite as impor tant as those of the medical man and nutritionist. Combined operations of this kind have scarcely begun in most terri tories. Still too little is known about the habits and strength of the enemy. But plenty of scouting work is being done, and here and there raiding parties are already in the field. Thus, in Tanganyika
studies [are] now being made concerning the properties of . . . soils and ex tensive crop yield surveys will eventually contribute towards greater precision in the planning of food resources. The influence of the post-war years [of food shortage] on the future is seen in the programme of providing sufficient food re sources for famine years by construction of food storage facilities and in the increase and wealth of the peasant producer which enables him to obtain articles of food of high nutritive value, such as milk and meat, which may not have been obtainable in the past.32

In parts of the Northern and Eastern Regions of Nigeria preliminary surveys have been made, according to Platt, of
the incidence of malnutrition and its dietary background. For the Western Region, the Carnegie Corporation has granted funds that are enabling the Nutrition Unit of University College, Ibadan, to study local foodstuffs and dietary patterns, especially the feeding of women and children. Very little was previously known of this subject, and the investigation will mean that reliable advice on the use of their local foodstuffs can be given to people in this area.

In the Belgian Congo strenuous efforts have been made, as part of the Ten Year Plan (1950-1959), to increase the supply and improve the use of locally raised protein foods. In some areas the emphasis has been put on stock raising, elsewhere on fisheries, and in still other areas on the cultiva tion of new crops. As production increases, it is hoped that local protein foods will gradually replace the skimmed milk which is now being widely used. Similar work is in progress in the French Community. To quote from Platt again:
Successful experiments have been made using fish meal generally supplied by the Food and Agriculture Organization for child feeding in many terri tories in Africa. Children who had no appetite and would not take milk digested the fish very readily, with excellent results. If the fat content is kept low, this food can be given to babies as young as four months. Because of its concentra tion, only small amounts are needed, and the meal may prove a most satisfactory way of providing extra protein in the tropics.

As Platt points out, these are but examples. Reports of what has been done in the postwar years in the nutritional field by the Belgian, British, French and Portuguese governments are sufficient to fill several books and, in fact, do.33 And everywhere it is being realized that good nutrition, far
82 Tanganyika: A Review of Its Resources and Their Development, edited by J. P. Moffett, Government of Tanganyika, Dar-es-Salaam, 1955, pp. 101-2. 33 A summary of the work done during the period is to be found in 'Nutrition Re-

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from being a purely medical matter, is the concern of all, from which none can stand aloof if the benefits of civilization are to be truly enjoyed by the African. TH E PRO SPECT The assault against sickness in tropical Africa has been going on long enough for some things to have emerged quite clearly. The first of these is that the scale of the assault does not match the scale of the sickness. True, there have always been Davids ready to do battle with the Goliaths that stalk the African earth, but mosquitoes, worms and viruses are not felled by slingshot. Reasons why the scale of the assault is inadequate are easy enough to find. There are the usual ones of ignorance, apathy and sloth; and they are important reasons. But perhaps more important than any of these is the difficulty of doing battle with an enemy that is ubiquitous and largely unseen an enemy that can as easily lurk in a pail of water, a garment, a hut and a diet as in a childs feces, a mothers cough and a mans urine. There are no heroics, no coups de grace , and no lasting victories in such a fight; only an unremitting daily foot slogging. "To fight and to fight when hopes out of sight takes not only stamina but also dedication. It also takes money, and theres the rub. The African doesnt have it; his governments do not have nearly enough; the outside world has too much sickness of its own to feel passionately about the needs of people it has never met or about diseases from which it may not itself suffer. The second thing that has emerged is that there is still a great deal to be learned about the enemy before anybody can be certain that a given strategy is the right one. Nor is it merely a matter of knowing whether hospitals take a heavier toll of his strength than health centers, or drugs than doctors, or good nutrition than good nursing. It is no less a matter of knowing whether the physical good that hospital care would do a woman suffering from bilharziasis would more than offset the psycho logical harm of being separated from her unweaned child; of knowing whether it is better to give a man a living wage, part of which he may squander in worthless food and drink and flashy clothes, than to feed and house him and his family adequately, and keep him in pocket money; and of knowing how far the gains accruing from a clearing and drainage cam paign are canceled out by the losses of wildlife on which the inhabitants depend for their protein foods. And these are all matters in which almost any man may pose as expert until he meets another. What is equally clear is that about all we can hope for, in the present context of limited material resources, imperfect intelligence and inertia,
search in Africa South of the Sahara, Publication No. 19, Scientific Council for Africa

South of the Sahara, London, 1957.

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is the continued coexistence of sickness and health. For those indi viduals and governments alike who are willing to pay the price in work, watchfulness and hard cash, there will certainly be more health and less sickness. Over increasingly wide areas it should be possible to speak of the containment of more and more diseases. At the same time there is no promise, either in the medical literature or in the statistical trends, that the gains will be permanent. Many of those already entered in the record are insecure. Not infrequently they are there by the accident of good government good, that is, in providing the funds needed for campaigns against malaria, yellow fever and sleeping sickness, in promoting and administering these campaigns, and in coordinating them with public works, education, agricultural and housing programs. Were the "accident to cease, such gains would soon be forfeit. It takes only a little neglect, a little carelessness, to enable malaria-carrying mosquitoes and trypanosome-carrying tsetse flies to repossess a district from which their kin have been evicted. The advances made in the control of a dozen other diseases, including the helminthiases, the dysenteries and typhoid fevers, would likewise not long survive the passing of good government. The same would almost certainly apply to most nutritional diseases, unless, miraculously, the people found they could live as well under a bad government as they could under a good one. Not even good government can make some gains permanent, it seems. It is now known that sleeping sickness may continue to be present subclinically and in tsetse flies long after its eradication from a district has been officially announced. Plague may continue to exist in wild rodents for years without ever showing up in man. Tertiary lesions may appear long after yaws victims had supposed themselves cured. Even where there is no likelihood of a disease staging a comeback, there is a very real likelihood of the gains made against it being offset by losses in a different quarter. The growing urbanization of tropical Africa, with its almost inevitable accompaniment, overcrowding, is an open incitement to tuberculosis, poliomyelitis and meningitis to make themselves at home in the land. Similarly, as the average African tends to live better and longer, he can scarcely expect to avoid attack by "middle-age diseases. From these, up to now, he has been largely free, if only because he has not lived to middle age. Among such likely attackers are diabetes (mainly in areas of "better nutrition), arteriosclerosis, rheumatism, high blood pressure, kidney disease, obesity (especially in the towns), heart troubles and mental disorders. Most of these diseases are already being reported, though the extent to which the reports reflect better diagnosis rather than increased occurrence is not always clear. Must we conclude from all this that the African is still unable to look forward to the time when he will be free, once and for all, of those diseases that for ages have incommoded, crippled, maimed, weakened, disabled and killed him when it will be possible for him to speak of conquest, rather

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than containment, of disease? It is perhaps significant that the word con quest has, up to now, seldom appeared in the medical literature of tropical Africa, even with respect to those diseases in the treatment of which the most spectacular gains have been made. All that is ever claimed for such diseases is that they are under control; and control, like right of way, is a thing more often yielded than possessed. So far most of the "vic tory speeches have had a hollow sound, for the enemy has usually been within earshot of them. This does not mean that all thought of ultimate conquest should be discarded; it certainly has not been in the case of leprosy, in the treatment of which tremendous advances are being made. But it does mean that it should be divested of wishfulness or, what often amounts to the same thing, the feeling that fighting is something only pro fessionals do. The fight against disease can never be won by professionals alone. There arent enough doctors, public health officers, technologists, medical auxiliaries or administrators; and if there were, the cost of keeping them on a governments payroll would almost certainly be such as to doom that government to an early demise. Besides, theres a limit to what even an "unlimited army of professionals can do. They can command a man to build a pit latrine, but they cannot always be around to see that he uses it. They may have cures for syphilis and malaria, but they cannot stop a man from believing that he has been bewitched and is dying.34 Further, the professionals reasons for engaging the enemy are some times open to question. The professional is the paid servant of the govern ment, and some governments have a reputation not altogether unde served, it must be confessed of using the African for ends he does not always perceive, let alone care for. When a district officer tells a head man to clear bush or drain swamps, there are usually some among those who find themselves doing the clearing and draining who wonder whether they arent just paving the way for the D. O. to settle on the land himself. And when a medical officer insists on vaccinating every inhabitant of a village and taking X-rays of their chests, there are almost sure to be those who wonder whether he is doing it merely in the expectation of getting more work out of them perhaps even sending the fittest of them to a distant mine or training camp. But if not by professionals alone, how? By professionals working in cooperation with laymen the common people, in fact? And, if in this fashion, how are ignorant spectators to be turned into efficient fighting units and these into disciplined teams who will do what they are told, and want to do it? 84 In his working paper, Kenneth Bradley affirms, No doctor . . . would guaran tee that any patient in his wards might not disappear overnight, or just turn his face to the wall and die.

NEW

WORLD

IN

T HE

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Photographs by Omar Marcus, from a collection made by him for the Twentieth Century Fund; arranged by Anita Ventura

EDUCATION
Almost everywhere in tropical Africa people are crying out for schooling and the things that schooling can bring. And, certainly, if there is to be ready communication between man and man and between group and group, an adequate supply of skilled labor and a sound economy to say nothing of durable health and happiness there must be education. But, so the leaders believe, education is more than a hammer with which to shape the weapons of a nation's welfare. It is also the anvil on which to break the chains of servitude economic no less than political, spir itual and intellectual alike to other nations.

The physical facilities of most colleges are first-class, and unsegregated (Dakar, School of Medicine and Pharmacy)

Critical moment m a science laboratory, University of Khartoum

Learning to read

to draw

. . . to nurse

The Portuguese are good mixers (Mozambique)

Parking lot

Play supervisor

School patron

The Liceu (High School) Salazar, open to all who can make the grade (Lourengo Marques)

The lycee at Conakry, offering qualified students an education like that to be had in France

Modern skills for the Guinean (Conakry)

Ancient lore for the Sudanese (University of Khartoum)

Neither modern skills nor ancient lore recognize differences of person or sex

HEALTH

SERVICES

Malaria, tuberculosis, sleeping sickness the list of diseases is almost endless, and it is age-old. The Africans environment and his diet make him ready prey to a host of painful, debilitating and incapacitating diseases. Many Africans never in their lifetime know what it is to be in good health even if they escape acute illness. The
Where maternity clinics open, mortality rates drop (Kumasi Central Hospital, Ghana)

mortal diseases they have not, until recently, had the knowledge or means to com bat; the perpetual ill health they have taken for granted. Of treatment they knew very little; of prevention they knew even less. Facilities for remedial and preventive work are now becoming widely available, and with the strides that have been made in both has gone a change in the African's characteristic attitude toward sickness.

NATAL - CLINIC

[inn

prtienu

I NQUI KI I S

Medication

Isolation

Nursing care

Vaccination (children of mine workers in the Belgian Congo)

4 The patients, Ethiopian; the doctor, European; the treatment, as good as any in the world

' iim M

Examination day, nursing school, Cameroons Development Corporation (Tiko)

1?'

i/

Inspection day at the Princess Tsahai Haile Selassie Hospital (Addis Ababa)

Any day in a medical laboratory (Institut pour la Recherche Scientifique en Afrique Centrale, Lwiro, B. C.)

RECREATION

Women's program (Khartoum)

Radio star (Omdurman)

For the African, it has been said, the greatest freedom is the free dom not to work. And certainly many Africans like many Amer icans contrived to win this free dom in the past. But now there are taxes to be paid, food, clothes and furnishings to be found, and a dozen civic duties to be done. In spite of this, or perhaps be cause of it, leisure is still a pearl of great price. These photographs show some of the uses to which Africans are putting their un scheduled time, and some of the agencies that are catering to their recreational needs.
Radio announcer (Lusaka)

^ With a saucepan radio to help, cookings a pleasure if not a recreation (N. Rhodesia)

YMCA (Addis Ababa)

Movie theater (Nairobi)

Ballroom dance practice at a cultural institute, Ghana

Kindergarten dismissed at the government social center, Bangui

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"

- -w-

C E N T R E W O C IB L N2 3 P

# X swJ

.> '? ]* '* ' * "' - .., 'V * a a * 9 BUIWl9M-fliSti m m m .flKKtf :IH # :li'iift * Jg l^ i;#M:J:ifll 1 1 JIiN#Mit, I!!!# ' w jiii ;jl# ^ SW i t f i i i t f i i # i l l

^mm:Wm -i^ 'iiili:UMlt

:KftAli8ifciiK#iiiliMI )5TES *TELESRAP HES

Time to write letters (Ft. Lamy)

. to learn a new hobby (Accra)

. . . for window shopping (Addis Ababa)

. . . to read a newspaper (Addis Ababa)

. . . to watch the passing show

Posting the schedule (Omdurman)

Playing the game (Omdurman)

Persuasive poster (Yaounde)

Non-professional coach (Freetown)

4 Soccer for the fun of it, at 10,000 feet above sea level (near Addis Ababa)

HOUSING
Sixty years ago about the best that tropical Africa could offer in the way of architecture was Zimbabwe; and it was in ruins. Most Africans have traditionally had little use for buildings; they have traveled light and have lived out of doors as much as possible. Many still do. Even so, where the Europeans idea of a house has been offered to them, they have generally taken to it. Several million Africans now live in dwellings far more durable if not always more comfortable than those they once fashioned from sticks, straw and clay. And thanks to the exertions of the missionary, administrator and enterpriser, many more make use of buildings far bigger if not more durable than those of Zimbabwe.

Functional efficiency in a recently built school. . .

. size and splendor in a new church

Housing development (Brazzaville)

A yard is what all urbanized Africans would like to have (Dakar)

4 A place of ones own and plumbing make up for a good deal (Bukavu)

GOVERNMENT
The newest thing, it is widely supposed, in the Africans new world is the emergence of new countries from the colonial cocoon. The signs of newness are easy to see: each such country has new development plans on its boards, new names on its payrolls, new suitors and new critics. But tropical Africa has been governed quite a time. Some of its imported systems have proved sufficiently hard-wearing to be worth a retread a process now under way in more than one independent country. Some of the 4chiefly and kingly systems, too, have long exercised a whole some influence on the body politic; but, oddly enough, those who today proclaim the virtues of the ancient systems may find themselves without honor in their own countries, and sometimes without a platform.

Ghanas National Assembly is conducted like the British Parliament

Installation of a new chief, northern Ghana

Official car for a cabinet minister (Ghana)

Unofficial view of Ghanaian legislators

Ghanaian legislators between sessions

V -

Sudanese statesman

Angolan administrator

^ He personifies the hopes of black nationalism everywhere on the continent where people are educated enough to have heard of him.,, John Gunther. (Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, first Prime Minister and chief architect of Ghana)
(Overleaf) Residence of His Excellency the Governor, Commander-in-Chief and Vice-

Admiral of Sierra Leone

CHAPTER

18

The Rise of the Voluntary Organization

COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT COOPERATIVES TRADE UNIONISM

JLhe African has always been aware of the importance of the group. It is probably no exaggeration to say that he has always lived his life in the group, for the group and by grace of the group. Certainly he was a joiner long before the American. But, in the traditional milieu of African life, opportunities for "joining were limited. For the most part they could be found only within the bounds of the family, kin and age set, clan and craft; in the daily round of raising children, honoring tribal obligations and maintaining order; in the common tasks of clearing bush, harvesting, hunting, fighting and propitiation. If there were other needs that could be met only by collaboration, they were either unfelt or un willed. Ignorance is a powerful anesthetic, and there are no more effective paralyzers of the will than poverty and sickness. It might even be argued that the main reason why the old Africa was so long in outgrowing its smallness was its inability to get things going on a scale matching the need. While Africa is still having difficulty matching the scale of its actions to the scale of its needs, it has been showing a remarkable capacity in recent years for adopting and improvising new forms of group enterprise. The timeliness of some of these enterprises may be open to question, but the utility of most of them, or the manifest good they are doing, cannot be de nied. The range of their interest is wide; it embraces religion, politics, ad ministration, education, civic and self-improvement, and recreation of all kinds. In scale, these enterprises run all the way from local to international
183

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T H E V O L U N TA R Y ORGANIZATION

from village cooperatives to mine workers unions affiliated to the Inter national Confederation of Free Trade Unions and Boy Scout troops that form part of the world scouting organization. In character, they are volun tary, deriving their support from the freely donated time, effort and, in some cases, funds of those who believe in them. COMMUNITY D EVELO PM EN T It is customary to speak of the expanding horizons of the Africans world, and, up to a point, it is correct. Most Africans can "see farther today than they could a generation ago, and most of them go much farther than they did then. The center of their world has not changed greatly in the last generation, however. There is probably not one African in a hundred no matter how long gone abroad to the mines, cities and factories who does not continue to think of his native village, town or ancestral land as the country to whose bourn every traveler, sooner or later, returns, and to whose demands he must ever be ready to pay heed. It is not surprising, then, if most of the new group enterprises, formal and informal, take their start and make their widest appeal at the local level. There are other good reasons why most of them are based on the lo cality. To begin with, most of the Africans needs are still for local things: a moisture- and vermin-proof storehouse for his grain; an all-weather gravel road for the transport of his surplus fruits and vegetables to the nearest town; an accessible, clean water supply that will cut down the unproductive portion of a womans working day and eliminate the risk of water-borne disease; a dispensary that will help to lower the toll of needless pain and ill-health; a clinic that will reduce infant and maternal mortality; and an adult school that will make it possible to command higher wages, a more knowledgeable wife, and the respect of ones juniors. Unfortunately, though, most African governments are habitually hardpressed for funds. The half-dozen dollars or so which they are able to collect annually from the African householder as his contribution to the territorial budget barely cover the costs of administration and mainte nance. Accordingly, if needs of the kind mentioned above are to be met, much of the labor and native materials must be supplied by the house holder. The world over, it is easier to get householders to support local projects than regional or national projects from which they may derive very little direct benefit. Again, if tropical Africa is ever to be saved from its poverty, sickness and ignorance, it will be only as the ordinary people come to see that salvation is more a matter of works their works than faith, whether in their own culture or in their governments intentions and abilities; that salvation lies in self-help. Now, what people do for themselves, and how well and consistently they do it, is largely a matter of solidarity. And in

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tropical Africa solidarity is still compounded of kinship and common ties of language, land, livelihood, customs, beliefs and traditions. All these ingredients can still be found in the small bush community. In the big towns, mining compounds and plantations, they can be found in cellular form, but often there is very little communication between cell and cell. As for solidarity at the territorial level, it has barely begun to be compounded. And, further, it is only at the local level that men and women, having no more than a glimmer of an idea of what they really need but often rather more than a glimmer of doubt about their rulers' intentions, can be made to see the point of any new government program and so be per suaded to become voluntary participants in it. The need for a greatly enlarged program of local group enterprise is nothing new. It was there long before community development cam paigns got under way. Many governments were, in fact, engaged in community development long before anybody was calling it that. In a sense, community development is another name for the primary goal of all enlightened government. Those who have seen something of the work of the district officer in British-administered territories or that of his Belgian, French and Portuguese counterparts will know that the develop ment of a better community is precisely what he has been striving for for many years.1 What is new is the practice of community development as an economic, social and political creed, and the conviction of African governments that the great mass of Africans [must be made to realize] that with the new knowledge and assistance brought by Western civilisation behind them, they can themselves by their own efforts improve their economic and social conditions . . . [and] that the new knowledge is not an enemy which will disrupt their society but an ally which will help them to over come and make the most of the intractable environment of Africa, and the recognition that development can only be fully understood [by the ordinary African] if it brings direct, visible benefits to him in the shape of improved wealth or improved services. 2 In the years immediately after the second world war, several circum stances served to quicken these convictions and translate them into a language the ordinary African could understand. Among them the fol lowing were, perhaps, the most important. 1. The return to their homes of thousands of African soldiers, many of whom had been abroad and discovered for the first time that not every body drank from the water they washed in; that ill-health was not essential to the business of living; that children need not die before they had begun
1 For those who have not, Kenneth Bradleys The Diary of a District Officer (T. Nel son, London and New York, 1947) will provide some rewarding, and amusing, reading. 2 Sir Andrew Cohen, the then Governor of Uganda, in a despatch (No. 490/52) to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Colonial Office, London, July 22, 1952, p. 5.

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T H E V O L U N TA R Y ORGANIZATION

to live; that even a very little book learning enabled a man to earn more money, raise more food and live longer; and that many of the things the African had been brought up to believe were for his good were simply not tolerated in other countries. From such men, in Ghana, Nigeria, French Africa, Kenya, Uganda and many more territories, has come much of the demand, and the drive, for local development programs. 2. The growing sensitivity of African governments to public opinion colonial, metropolitan and foreign and their own genuine desire to up grade the ordinary African's living standards. To encourage their wards to go to war for them, some governments had named economic, social and political development as the laurels of victory; before the wars end, al most all had announced plans for such development. Since the founding of the United Nations, the governments administering African trust terri tories have vied with the U. N. visiting missions to trust territories in the desire to justify their existence in the Africans eyes. 3. The availability of money for development work. Part of this money was, in the view of the cynic, conscience money that governments ought to have used for this kind of work sooner. Much more of it, however, was either money that the Africans themselves were willing to put up in the form of voluntarily assumed levies on cash crops, head taxes, etc., or money, such as the British Colonial Development and Welfare funds, the Belgian Native Welfare Fund and Ten Year Development Plan, and the French Investment Fund for Economic and Social Development (FIDES), that the administering powers raised by additional taxation of their already heavily taxed metropolitan electors. In addition, sizable sums were put up by the large mining and plantation companies for the de velopment primarily of their employees and families; by philanthropic agencies, such as the Belgian FOREAMI (Queen Elizabeth Funds for Medical Assistance to the Natives); and by the technical agencies of the United Nations and the United States. 4. The determination of ever-increasing numbers of young African men and women to join the twentieth century, to rid themselves of their chronic ills, and to lead fuller lives. Every graduating class, whether it be from a secondary, primary or adult education school, swells the ranks of those so determined. Forms , Methods and Aims It is easy enough to say what community development is. In the words of the Social Commission of the United Nations Economic and Social Council, it is
a process designed to create conditions of economic and social progress for the whole community with its active participation and the fullest possible reliance upon the communitys initiative. [It] implies the integration of two

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sets of forces making for human welfare, neither of which can do the job alone: (i) The opportunity and capacity for co-operation, self-help, ability to assimilate and adapt new ways of living that is at least latent in every human group; and (ii) The fund of techniques and tools in every social and economic field, drawn from world-wide experience and now in use or available to national govern ments and agencies.8

Although there are shorter ways of saying the same thing, no African development agency would be likely to disagree with the thesis. It is easy to say what community development does. It does, or seeks to do, virtually anything that will quicken a communitys pulse. In most parts of tropical Africa this can be done as readily by digging a well or spraying a pond as by teaching a tongue, opening a clinic or organizing a sports club. It is easy to say how community development works. It goes on the theory that development comes by seeing, seeing by believing and believ ing by the word, written or spoken. Its symbol is a pump; its agents, primers; its secret weapon, a dowsers rod. It cannot work in arid, un responsive soil. It needs to feel the pull of desire. But once it has struck water and can demonstrate its worth to even a small community, its task is greatly lightened. It takes but a small success to start a lot of people talking, and in tropical Africa a talker seldom lacks for listeners. It is also easy to say why so far at any rate community develop ment in tropical Africa wins most of its acclaim in the rural areas. It is there, on the anvil of tribal solidarity, that common causes can still be shaped most easily, and dissenters most quickly straightened out. It is the rural areas, with their characteristically small-scale organization of land and livelihood, that lend themselves best to the pint-sized projects most commonly undertaken by community developers. It is these same areas that need them most urgently, of course, since the towns are almost always ahead of the villages in the matter of public utilities, welfare services and so on. Not least, it is the rural areas where most of the people live. What is much less easy to speak of is the importance of community development in tropical Africa, whether as a means of ensuring develop ment or enriching the community which is not necessarily the same thing. Certainly no generalizations are yet in order. There are many places where community development is still unheard of; others where it has come and gone; still others where it has stayed, growing from strength to strength. Many very firm opinions about its importance have neverthe less been formed. One opinion is that community development is nothing but a cut-price cure for backwardness and frustration and a not very efficacious one, since it substitutes good fellowship for good government and passing fancies for long-term policies. Another is that it is just a clever
8 Principles of Community Development, mimeographed report by the SecretaryGeneral, E/CN.5/303, January 31, 1955, pp. 13-14.

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T H E V O L U N TA R Y ORGANIZATION

piece of window dressing done to draw a crowd of outside admirers. A third is that it is no more than a trick to keep colonial peoples colonial a twentieth-century version of the bread and circuses formula. A fourth, and less easily disposed of, opinion is that the idea of development is completely incompatible with the idea of community as the Africans have understood it; that each new development is so much more fuel on a fire already threatening to destroy the old community order, including those valuable human qualities which are the true foundation for any satisfying conception of welfare. 4 Lastly, there is the opinion of the com munity developers themselves, most of whom appear to feel that com munity development is the bootstrap by which lowly men and nations can lift themselves to higher ground, and become members of a larger world community while getting a firmer grip on their own. In the face of such opposing views, perhaps the most prudent course is to describe some of the projects, both rural and urban, that have been or are being conducted. The number of such projects is very large. Those selected merely illustrate the wide field of the community developer, its possibilities and pitfalls, its mixed soil, variable yield and amenability to differing techniques. RURAL AREAS A Project at the District Officer Level The Awgu Division of the Eastern Region of Nigeria provides an ex ample of the small-scale, man-and-a-boy type of project beloved of the British. This project had its origins partly in the disillusionment of returned soldiers who found civilian life tame and stuffy; partly in the lack of economic openings commensurate with those available in the mining and industrial regions to the south, whither there was a steady flow of underemployed men; and partly in the growing estrangement of the schooled and the unschooled, the progressives and the traditionalists. Because of this, there is a certain representative, even symbolic, quality about the context of the project, if not about its size and scope. How community development got started and what it has done and failed to do for the 150,000 people living in the 424 square miles of the Awgu Division has been described by I. C. Jackson,5 one of the few Europeans who had anything important to do with it. Since no community development project can succeed unless the leaders of the community are fully persuaded of its value and feasibility, the first thing to be done was to sweep away the benevolently despotic native authority councils that, along with the District Officer, had been
4 T. R. Batten, The Community and Development, Corona, September 1951, p. 334.
5 Advance in Africa: A Study of Community Development in Eastern Nigeria,

Oxford University Press, London, 1956.

T H E V O L U N T A R Y ORGANIZATION

l8 g

the governments field agents. The members of these councils were gen erally illiterate, inarticulate and incapable of understanding, let alone dealing with, the postwar stresses. In place of these bodies the government established, in 1948, a single native authority, or council, composed almost entirely of younger, educated men. The change-over was not made without words and loss of face, but within a year or so it had come to be accepted, largely because the people saw that their new leaders were capable of getting things done and the new leaders were anxious to get things done. By 1950 almost every village in the division had some community project in hand. With the help of a very small pump-priming fund at the disposal of the District Officer, a steadily rising local taxation rate and the occasional piece of expert advice from visiting members of the Public Works Depart ment, the work went forward until, by the end of 1952,
Forty-one village water points rain-water tanks, spring improvements, or wells had been completed. Five leper segregation villages had been estab lished. Six villages had reconstructed their markets in permanent materials. Five maternity homes had been started. Sixty miles of good motorable road, with the necessary bridges and culverts, had been completed, and a further forty miles awaited the day when the council would undertake its maintenance.6

However, the biggest need that of a hospital was still unmet. To build this would require the use of voluntary labor on an unprecedentedly large scale, and of people drawn not just from the community in which it was to be built, but from all over the division from villages which had been warring together until forty years before, and to this day . . . are still liable to have an affray over boundary disputes. Even so, it was built, along with the necessary utilities, by 1954. While it was the District Officer who did most of the organizing and supervising, it was the local people who did most of the ordering, accounting and building. One group of men gave more than half the working days of 1953 to the job. The students of a nearby teachers training college gave up part of their vaca tion to forward the work. One of the most enthusiastic workers was the local congressman. But hospitals, maternity homes, roads and even water tanks have to be maintained as well as built, and in Africa it is hard to whip up enthusiasm for maintenance of any kind, especially the kind that takes money as well as labor. A hospital or a road, or even a water tank, invariably does take both, and the money has to come from the same people who have already given the labor. The next community project therefore was to raise the taxable incomes of the people of Awgu. This has proved a good deal harder.
The earliest economic development was an attempt to introduce hand-loom weaving, and eight young men . . . were sent for six months training at the ex6 Ibid., pp. 62-63.

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T H E V O L U N TA R Y ORGANIZATION

pense of the native authority. On their return they were given work-shops and houses, and loans to tide them over the initial period. Their response was to ask to be put on a regular wage. They refused a profitable government contract and preferred to weave yam supplied by the Department of Commerce and Indus tries, which sold the finished cloth and gave the weavers a share of the proceeds. When this arrangement was stopped, and they were forced to use their own initiative in buying the yarn and selling the cloth, work came to a standstill at once, and the weavers dispersed.7

An attempt to develop pottery making on modern lines has so far avoided the fate of weaving; in other words, it, too, is having its troubles. The new techniques demand a teamwork unnecessary under the old methods, and as production is done in bigger batches there is a long delay between the times of making the pots and selling them. Somewhat more successful has been the campaign to get farmers to grow rice on low-lying land and to plant cashew trees on sandy land that hitherto produced nothing but firewood. However, there is not much enthusiasm anywhere in the division for development of an agricultural sort, and Jackson has sadly to admit that while in one direction com munity development has achieved something considerable the hospital; in the other direction there is nothing comparable. This, he contends, is not the fault of community development, which can do no more than clear the path for the dynamic individual, but due rather to the absence of enough such individuals with technical training, and of enough credit and marketing facilities. Here, it seems, Jackson comes close to playing into the hands of his enemies, for is he not saying, in effect, that selfgenerating community development depends more on external stimuli than internal cohesion? And if this is so, is it likely that these dynamic individuals, once they have seen how much greener the grass grows in distant fields, will be content to go on cultivating those of the community? All too often the path that has been cleared for a dynamic individual leads away from those who cleared it. It takes dedication amounting to idealism for the dynamic souls of this world to spend themselves in the service of their less dynamic neighbors.

A Program Carried Out by Specialists

In some other British-administered territories, the government has held the reins of community development with a firmer hand, employing, where necessary, the art of the teamster to get things moving. The teamster technique is probably seen to best advantage in Uganda, thanks in large part to the driving power of Sir Andrew Cohen, Governor of the pro tectorate from 1952 through 1956 and in his earlier days community de velopment policy maker-in-chief to the Colonial Office. From the start he and his colleagues held that community development could become an 7I b i d p. 66.

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effective instrument of economic and social policy only if certain condi tions were satisfied. Among these, the most important were: 1. That the work should be done by trained specialists in community development, and not by grossly overworked district officers. 2. That it should be done in concert with the agricultural, cooperative, medical and other specialists already stationed in the district or province. 3. That African leaders, chosen from the new educated classes, should be "trained to help direct the programme in each area and to secure the co-operation of the people. 4. That the program should be applied by and through local govern ment bodies then being broken in and looking for buyers (and what could sell them better than a demonstration that they fostered economic and social improvement in rural areas?). 5. That the program should be carried through quickly and vigorously, since only in this way could the government hope to absorb the energies of those who were at the same time most likely to help and if not prop erly occupied most likely to oppose and disrupt. 8 How quickly and vigorously this policy was implemented in Uganda can be seen from the following miscellaneous items taken from the 1953 and 1954 annual reports of the Department of Community Development. From the 1953 report:
In 1952 the Protectorate Government contributed 1 0 ,0 0 0 as additional provision for plans which African Local Governments might put up. In 1953 .100,000 was provided as the first instalment of 5 0 0 ,0 0 0 which is to be available over a period of five years . . . It is not practicable to include . . . full details of the many different projects which have been approved. The plan for the Toro District . . . may be re garded as a typical programme. Among the more commonly-chosen projects were those in which the people provide free communal labour for the building of schools, dams, roads, etc., while the funds are used to provide skilled labour, tools, cement, timber and other materials for finishing off the job. The provi sion of local workshops for making latrine stances, culvert pipes, doors and windows, etc.; the improvement of water supplies and their protection from fouling; the improvement and equipment of rural sports fields; educational visits and agricultural shows; the supervision of adult literacy campaigns; the pro vision of building materials for new leper settlements; the encouragement of local vernacular literature; encouragement for Boy Scouts, Girl Guides and other associations such as village clubs; the provision of materials for erecting shelters at bus stops all these plans are common to several districts.

From the 1954 report:

The Local Government and Community Development Training Centre at Entebbe accepted its first students on May 10th, just fourteen months after the builders had begun work, and a few weeks before their departure . . . The 8 Despatch No. 490/52, p. 5. The year 1952 did not mark the beginning of com munity development in Uganda. For some years a Public Relations and Social Welfare Department had been as active as its limited resources of money and men would permit.

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T H E V O L U N TA R Y ORGANIZATION

centre provides accommodation for 50 married students accompanied by their wives, 80 single men and 20 single women . . .

This training center at Entebbe offered courses covering all aspects of community development, as Table 58 shows.
Table 58

UGANDA: CONTENT OF COURSES, LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT TRAINING CENTRE, ENTEBBE, 1954
COURSE MAIN SUBJECTS

Community development assistants

Chiefs

Cooperative assistants Labor inspectors

Traders Literacy supervisors Citizenship

Courses for women

Adult education teaching methods. Making teaching apparatus and use of various visual aids. Playwriting and acting. Blackboard work. Model-making puppets. Lecturing. Demonstrating games and physical train ing. Club work. Lectures on the work of all government departments. General administration, financial and judicial. Local government office administration. Civics. Bookkeeping, theory and practice. Cooperative practice. Cooperative law. Civics. Industrial relations. Hygiene and safety job instruc tion. Efficiency in labor. Task work. Workmen's com pensation. Trade testing. Labor legislation. Civics. Trade and civics. Civics and techniques of teaching. Water. Food. Health. Agriculture. Wealth. Local gov ernment. Protectorate government. Transport. Postal services. Education. Police. Prisons. Club work and development of the community. Cooking. Laundry. Child care and education. Mothercraft. Home hygiene. First aid.

Source: Annual Report of the Department of Community Development for the Year Ended 31st December 1954, Entebbe, Uganda, 1955.

But breaking-in and training are only part of the teamsters art. No less important is the inculcation of staying power. In men as in horses, this is often more a matter of breeding than of training, and breeding takes time. Impressive as the Uganda program is, nobody either in or out of the gov ernment is suggesting that it is more than a blueprint the pedigree, if you will, of the cultivated, civic-minded, dedicated citizen. And among those who are most convinced of the propriety of what they are doing, there are some who are beginning to yearn for a greater sense of urgency everywhere and a greater readiness on the part of those who have enjoyed the benefits of education and other opportunities that have been denied to so many to place service before self . . . not just by giving from a dis tance either advice or even money but by working with the community. 9
9 Annual Report of the Department of Community Development for the Year Ended 31st December 1955, Entebbe, Uganda, 1956, p. 22.

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It would be tragic indeed if, after taking so much trouble to get him to the water, the horse should lose his palate for it. Programs to Create Communities The Belgians approached community development as most other aspects of government more from the point of view of what they be lieved was good for the entire Congolese (Belgian-African) community than what was good for the Africans, most of whom are still living in anachronistically small communities. Accordingly, there has been more emphasis on development than on community, though it does not fol low that the community life of the Congolese people has not been as greatly strengthened as that of the peoples in British and other African ter ritories. Indeed, it is arguable that, by putting social action on more of a business footing, the Belgians have been less bothered by their failures, less excited about their successes, less hesitant in their advance, and less restricted in their scope; that, in short, the Belgian Congo is likely to finish up with stronger communities than some of the other territories. What the Belgians have been doing in their paysannats indigenes to strengthen peasant farming has been described in Volume I.10 But the paysannats are more than farm projects. They are community develop ments of the most radical kind, since they are concerned with building communities where none worthy of the name existed, and in which the quality of life will be comparable to the best offered by the towns com munities that will be characterized by increased stability, higher living standards, and an intensive social activity that will lead to a strength ening and an evolution of the social structure. 11 To this end, all paysan nats have been supplied with social welfare centers around which the community side of their life is intended to revolve. Most of these centers consist of a social services building, a school, a collective storehouse, a collective workshop and a guest house. Some of the larger ones also have a hospital, and all of the smaller ones have dispensaries. With so much expensive plant and equipment involved and so much at stake socially, politically and economically, the Belgians have con tended that they were the ones to write the rules, decide the plays, and generally manage the players affairs. Those who have joined a paysannat have, in fact, had to do as they were told. They have had to take the land allocated to them, grow the approved crops in the approved rotations, and settle for whatever return on their cash crops the authorities named. Not withstanding, the role of the African has been far from passive. Each paysannat is established only after the administrator of the Territory has convened the councils of chiefs, and village heads, and has explained to
10 See pp. 178ff. 11 United Nations, Economic and Social Council, Principles of Community De velopment, E/CN .5/303, January 31, 1955, p. 75.

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them the purposes of the collective systems and gained the consent of the parties concerned . . . A 'paysannat council is held every three months to settle disputes, to keep the land records up to date and to settle changes, transfers and new applications for land. 12 Increasingly, Africans have been employed on the team that runs the agronomic and social affairs of the paysannat. The results of the paysannat project have (1959) far exceeded official expectations, and not merely from a numerical point of view, though it is no small achievement to have put upward of 500,000 people into farm "collectives and to have made them so popular that there are always more applicants than vacancies. Even more gratifying to the administration has been the fact that most of those who have come, have stayed; and that those who have stayed have developed an esprit cle corps seldom surpassed in the old Africa or the new. Much the same kind of pattern of government-inspired and governmentdirected rural community development has been established, more re cently and on a smaller scale, in the French and Portuguese areas. As yet little such work has been done under government auspices in either Liberia or Ethiopia. In the newly independent countries of Ghana, Guinea and the Republic of Sudan the pattern of government activity in this field continues to bespeak its metropolitan origin. Community Development by Private Industry The community development experiences of business and industrial corporations have likewise been of large hopes, mounting difficulties and small successes. One instance must suffice that of the Firestone Planta tions Company in Liberia. Elsewhere13 we have spoken of Firestones great economic achieve ments at Harbel, near Robertsfield. The companys achievements in the social field, though notable, have not been of the same order. This has not been from want of effort or desire on the managements part: no com pany in Africa has tried harder to help its employees. But the fact is that after a generation of management that would be called enlightened in any of the worlds free countries, the plantations are still more a transient camp than a permanent community. The majority of the workers continue to stay only for one season and then pocket their money and go back to their bush farms. They are unlikely to return to the plantations before the money runs out, and when they do return, they are unlikely to stay more than a year or so. While they can often be made to see the point of the companys generous medical services and may even have gone to the plantations for the purpose of getting the white mans free "needles, they still prefer the medicine man for many things. They can see merit also in
12 Ibid., p. 74. 13 See Volume I, pp. 153-54.

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the companys free education program, but what educated Liberian wants to stay around plantations tapping rubber or totting up the days yield? The place of the educated man, even if he has had but two or three years schooling, is behind an office desk, and not many of these are to be found in Harbel. Nor has anybody to convince him that security for old age and survivors is something to be prized, for the tribe has always made provision for the old and the survivor, and nobody has had to work thirty years to qualify for it. Need we wonder, therefore, that the path of the Firestone community developer is rather tiring, and as ill-lit as the paths of the bush about him? URBAN AREAS The problems of the community builder are multiplied when he takes them to the towns. In the country he does at least have straw for his bricks; in the towns and on the mining compounds (which are towns except perhaps in name and administration) often the only straw available is that carried in by the winds of discontent. For the Leopoldvilles, Nairobis and Luanshyas of Africa are not communities: like all cities, they are places of catch-as-catch-can contest, of lonely crowds and anony mous individuals. This does not mean that the towns of tropical Africa lack community nuclei, or that the nuclei cannot be enlarged. The very fact of there being towns means that those who live in them have many things in common besides loneliness and anonymity among them idle ness (especially at the weekends), the temptation to squander earnings and health, the discipline and boredom of repetitive work, and, not least, a skin color that frequently puts the towns choicer offerings out of reach. The community developer who comes to town needs, therefore, to be a man of many parts. It is not enough that he be builder and architect. He needs also to be coach and player, master and servant, teacher and stu dent, and, for good measure, alchemist, capable of transmuting dross into durable metal. He must also be able to play these parts with constancy and charm. Fortunately, there are such men. The Nuclei The obvious starting point for the urban community developer is the nuclei. These, which exist in every town and compound, are composed of people belonging to the same tribe or kindred. Common language and background draw them together, just as Puerto Ricans, Germans, Poles and a hundred other groups are drawn together in New York. Common obligations and common circumstances tend to keep them together. In deed, because of their separateness, they frequently develop more co hesion and unity than the larger groups from which they are drawn. But like most exiles to the Babylons of this world, they spend a good deal of

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time remembering their far-away Zions. Weekend tam-tams in the compound of a senior tribesman, picnics, dances and pep talks form a major activity of many such tribal groups. Those that carry on "service activi ties tend to confine them to such things as the provision of scholarships for the children of fellow tribesmen, loans to help a man with his taxes or bride wealth, and funds for the becoming burial of deceased members. Seldom do their interests reach out beyond the tribal group. At the same time it is difficult for such groups of people to live long in a town or on a compound without becoming aware of the world about them and wanting to be of it as well as in it. Especially is this true of the younger members of such groups. Evidence of a change of orientation from "old-worldliness to "new-worldliness is to be had on almost every hand. The Boy Scout movement, the Red Cross and similar societies are being increasingly well represented in the larger towns and mining cen ters. So, too, are sports clubs. Many of the teams put up by these clubs are admittedly tribal in composition, but the trend is toward intertribal and, in some places, interracial teams. It is also true that most of the spectators are as partisan as American alumni, but, even so, their partisan ship can be, and often is, demonstrated as vigorously for a town or com pound team as a tribal one. The first loyalty of the 70,000 spectators that regularly fill Leopoldville's stadium is to the home team, be it African, European or interracial, and not to the players who happen to be their kin or speak their language. Then again, most mines and almost all of the large towns today have community centers for the promotion of welfare and solidarity. On the social side, a good center, such as those found in the Rhodesian Copperbelt, is likely to number among its amenities a canteen, a beer hall, a cinema, a library, a games room, an auditorium (doubling as dance hall and theater), classrooms, special-interest groups (with a strong emphasis on the "Do It Yourself type of work), music clubs and a counseling serv ice. Some of the Copperbelt centers hold regular dances as formal as any student graduation ball. On the health side, a good center, such as may be found in a hundred towns from Dakar to Zanzibar, will have maternity and child welfare clinics, a dispensary, classrooms for instruction in public health and hygiene, and perhaps a domestic science section in which women and children are introduced to the principles of household man agement and nutrition. In many localities the womenfolk are second only to the children and young people in susceptibility to this "new-worldliness. Unlike the men who come to town or mine, the women quickly find themselves with less rather than more work to do. Besides, African women, like the women of every land, can seldom resist the seduction of the shop window with its array of things that are pleasant to the eye and good for morale es pecially if their neighbors, with whom they live in the closest physical proximity, have already yielded to it. A further reason for their suscepti

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bility is sometimes the fact that they are not properly supported by their menfolk. "Many husbands think they are entitled to the whole of their earnings and so put clothes, bicycle gear and personal pleasures before house maintenance even food. 14 Any delicacy of feeling such women may have had about the propriety of playing an unaccustomed role in the community is soon dispelled by hunger their own and their childrens. All of the great civilizing agencies at work in urban Africa govern ments, corporate bodies and voluntary organizations (secular and re ligious) are now keenly aware of the importance of nourishing the nuclei. No doubt much of their keenness is self-interested. It is the towns and the mines that are the chief generators of wealth. It is to the towns and the mines that men and their families must be drawn increasingly if budgets, balance sheets, contributions and offerings are to grow. And it is to them that the immigrants must become wedded if the efficiency of the generative mechanism is not to be impaired. The towns and the mines, therefore, must be humanized we might almost have said communized. Further, it is the towns and the mines that are the great generators of prostitution, venereal disease, divorce and other social disorders that do so much to undermine the happiness of a community and the stability of its homes. And it is the towns and the mines that generate most of the political unrest. To regard them as concentration camps of cheap labor, as was often done in the past and is still done in some quarters, is to invite the speedy disruption of their economy and the certain alienation of their inhabitants their Communizing, in fact. At the same time, the dis interested concern that is to be found in these agencies for people who have been unceremoniously parachuted into the white mans world must not be underrated. The least anyone can do for such people is to give them the chance to survive the jump and find their bearings. Most of the agencies are attempting to do more than that. To describe adequately what is being done for the urban dweller by the various administrations would be tedious, for in general it follows the pattern of community development in rural areas. If there is a difference, it is one of emphasis rather than technique. Where communities do not exist to begin with and they seldom do in the rural sense they have to be synthesized. It is this that largely explains the prominence given to housing and to educational, recreational and counseling services in the urban welfare programs of most governments. Government Activities The provision made over the past two or three decades by the Belgian Congo government for the newly-come-to-town in its centres extra14 B. G. Ballenden, Welfare Supervisor, Rhokana Corporation Ltd., Kitwe, Northern Rhodesia, in conversation, April 1955.

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coutumiers may have been more ample than that made by some other governments, but it has set a standard below which no African govern ment can afford to fall. These centers in which Africans live away from the tribe and tribal jurisdiction are to be found near every large European town. Each is administered by a chief with the help of an assistant and a democratically elected council which advises the chief about local regu lations, taxes, budgets and the uses to which the centers income is to be put. These councils have worked in close association with the European authorities, from whom they have learned the business of local govern ment and the heavy responsibilities resting upon all those who minister to the welfare of their fellows. One of the biggest responsibilities has been that of providing housing, because of the fantastic growth of most of the larger towns since the end of World War II. In a single five-year period the African population of Leopoldville, for instance, grew from 110,000 to over 275,000; by 1959 it was close to 350,000. To meet this responsibility the government has used various methods none more community-minded than that associ ated with the name F. Grevisse, one of the contributors to this study and a former District Commissioner of Elisabethville. In 1933 the centre extra-coutumier of Elisabethville had 9,000 inhab itants. By 1959 it had over 60,000,15 most of the difference being accounted for by the postwar expansion of the Katanga copper industries. The Grevisse method was predicated on the inability of any one agency to deal with a "crisis situation,, that was daily getting worse. Such a situation called for cooperation by the state, the municipality, the men needing the houses, and their employers. This cooperation was readily forthcoming. The state agreed to be responsible for providing the road net and utilities (infrastructure) of- the city, and a loan fund for the purchase of building materials by those needing houses. The municipality agreed to look after the distribution of building plots, to let and supervise all contract work, and allocate materials to individual builders. It also made itself respon sible for pouring the concrete foundations, building the walls and main taining a supply of windows, doors, roofing and facing materials. Those needing houses and approved by the local authorities agreed to be re sponsible for all assembly and finishing work. Their employers agreed to give them a monthly lodging allowance sufficient to cover rental and loan amortization charges. In this way the builders became in time home owners, without having to dip into wages. The African workers of Elisabethville were not slow to see the merit of such an arrangement. By the end of 1954, within four years of launching the Grevisse plan, they had built nearly 7,000 houses, providing accom modation for some 55,000 persons.16 Grevisse reports that the loans made
15 The total African population of Elisabethville was as large again. 16 This may seem to us like overcrowding, but not to Africans. Anyway, the authorities encourage them to build one or two extra rooms, the rental from which will enable them to pay off their loan more quickly.

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to them for this purpose amounted to 184 million Belgian francs, or ap proximately $3.7 million. To further encourage Africans to make their homes in the centre extra-coutumier, a mutual society of home builders was formed in 1952. By levying a 4 per cent tax on the money loaned to its members by the government, this society has been able to ensure that the house of any member shall pass, at death, to his heirs "free of all charges. The increase in the ratio of women to men and the rise in the birth rate at the Elisabethville center may perhaps be taken as measures of the grow ing sense of security engendered by the Grevisse plan, and also of the growing acceptance by the African worker of the town as his "com munity. In 1933 there were only 57 women for every 100 men, and only 58 children for every 100 women. In 1948 the corresponding figures were 81 and 101. By 1953 they had risen to 89 and 167. Over the same 21-year period the birth rate at the center rose from 15.0 to 43.8 per 1,000, while the death rate fell from 20.8 to 8.6 per 1,000. The figures for more recent years tell the same story of growing family stability, and larger, longerlived families. After housing comes the slow and wearisome business of what, for want of a better word, may be called "habilitation. As the Belgians have them selves put it, most of the Africans who come to live in these centers find themselves "severed from traditional usage . . . Social education, ma terial and moral help are, therefore, indispensable. 17 And with the Congo government "habilitation has come to mean everything from educational, medical and health services, child care and allowances, home management counseling and recreational and trade-training facilities to social legislation (on minimum wages, the rights of employees and em ployers, etc.) and professional organizations (including trade unions). Each centre extra-coutumier, therefore, has its school or schools, its health center (equipped with dispensary, clinics and classrooms, and attended by fully qualified medical personnel), its sports clubs, recreation center, adult groups and, perhaps most important of all, its foyer social, or social home. The social home is where the battle for the African woman is being fought where the biggest pitch is being made for the womans accept ance of the town. The Belgians have argued that it is the woman who can do most to make or break a community, and who stands in most need of adjustment to urban life. Commenting, in a paper prepared for this study, 011 the work of the social homes, Nancy Berg says:
[They] give the African women training in home economics and child care so that they can better adapt to the material life of their community. In addition, they are a means by which the social service officers, through case work, coun seling and personal contact, can help the women and their families to adapt to
17 Social Action in the Belgian Congo and Ruanda-Urundi, Belgian Government Information Center, New York, 1954, p. 45.

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the social changes taking place in the urban areas. In brief, they are a means of easing the transition which Congolese society is making at the present time.

Each home has a complement of three or four European graduate so cial workers, including home economist and nurse; several locally re cruited European auxiliaries, paid or unpaid; and ten or so African as sistants (monitrices), not the least of whose functions is to learn enough to be able to extend the outreach of the home. Although the Belgians have had their staffing difficulties,18 the social home program has developed at an impressive speed which shows no sign of abatement. By the late 1950s there were around fifty such homes in the Belgian Congo and Ruanda-Urundi. Activities of Corporate Bodies Activity by corporate bodies in the field of urban community develop ment has followed similar lines. More accurately, in many instances, it is the administrations that have been following. But whether as leader or follower, the contribution of these bodies has been remarkable. Consider, for instance, what is done by the large industrial firms of the Belgian Congo. True, some of the services, such as housing, food ra tions and medical care, are decreed by government. But, without excep tion, they "have gone far beyond government requirements, until today the services offered by them are, in Nancy Bergs opinion, "probably as extensive and as well organized as any in tropical Africa. Those offered by the great transportation company Office dExploitation des Transports Coloniaux (Otraco) to its employees and their families living in Leopold ville may be taken as fairly standard.
There are two social centers located in the compounds of the workers. These centers, like the government centers, offer courses in home economics and child care for the women . . . However, the scope of their work extends far beyond these courses for women: the bulk of their activities is directed at the workers of Otraco. During the perm anence [office hours] the social workers deal mainly with employee problems. . . . They visit hospitals . . . and make regular visits to the homes of workers in the compounds to check on living conditions.

There is even more to industrial social welfare than this, Nancy Berg reports:
When the wife of an Otraco worker becomes pregnant, she receives food rations in addition to those received normally as part of the family allowance or her husbands pay. She can go to the company clinic for medical attention, 18 It has been difficult, Mrs. Berg writes, to find a sufficient number of women who meet the requirements for colonial social service and who are at the same time willing to undertake the obligations. The three-year contract [for the European graduate social workers] seems long; the work is hard and often goes unrewarded . . . The heat is fatiguing . . . and, in a city like Leopoldville, the social service officers are to a large extent cut off from the social life of the European colony due to the character of their work . . .

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and to the companys foyer social to make clothes for the baby. When the baby is born, the company defrays hospital expenses. The mother and child receive extra food rations until the child reaches six months of age. The child attends the company school. Boys can obtain training as qualified workers in the com panys schools after they finish primary school. There are evening courses for adults. The young men are given jobs at Otraco. When they decide to marry, they can ask the company for a loan with which to pay the bride wealth. The company will also make loans to its workers so that they can buy sewing machines and bicycles, or construct a house . . . Sports activities, movies and study groups for evolues are provided under the direction of male social workers.

When an employee or his dependents die in Leopoldville, the com pany covers the funeral expenses. Thus, the company is really a small welfare state providing security from womb to tomb. Whatever may be said against paternalism of this kind and plenty of people have much to say against it the Africans seem to like it. The company certainly gains by it and a community springs from it, as another contributor, George W. Carpenter, points out:
The company gains a skilled, contented, loyal and constantly improving labor force; its accident rate declines and productivity increases. Mechanization can be carried farther, and more and more difficult processes become feasible. The urban community gains responsible citizens and wholesome families. It is relieved of the burden of a large floating population of immigrants, unattached women, vagrant youths and wild children . . . Both the rural and urban communities have better sex ratios, and normal family life is encouraged instead of destroyed.

Many such urban communities now exist in the Belgian Congo. Aside from those of Otraco, which also has townships at Matadi, Thysville and Coquilhatville, the most notable are those of the Union Miniere du Haut-Katanga at Elisabethville, Jadotville and Kolwezi; Symetain at Bunia and Kalima (Kivu), Geomines at Manono (Katanga), Forminiere at Tshikapa (Kasai), Huileries du Congo Beige at Leverville (Leopold ville Province) and Compagnie du Chemin de Fer du Bas-Congo au Katanga at Luluabourg (Kasai), Jadotville and Kamina (Katanga). Outside the Belgian Congo, several very fine corporation townships are to be found in the Rhodesias (at Luanshya in the Copperbelt, for example, and at Shabani in Southern Rhodesia) and at least one in Kenya (that of the East African Railways and Harbours in Nairobi). The domain of the voluntary secular organization is much wider. It extends from ocean to ocean and from tropic to tropic. The town or com pound that does not have at least one such agency is rare. It is also very badly off, for although the Red Cross, the Y, the Womens Institute, Les Volontaires and similar organizations are habitually short of money and helpers, they symbolize service of a kind that is indispensable if community development is ever to become self-starting and self-propelling. So far the Africans Africa has seen very few such developments.

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What few it has seen owe as much, it would seem, to religious as to secular influences. THE INFLUENCE OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH Imponderables are always troublesome. Faith cannot be priced; the im pact of a sermon, spoken or lived, cannot be measured. And because they are troublesome, there is a rather natural tendency to underrate them, if not to ignore them. But to do this with the influence of the Christian church on the community life of tropical Africa would be quite wrong, for several reasons. In the first place, every mission station has been the nucleus of a community (often a very small one) and a nucleating agent since missions began, which was long before most governments and corporations began. In the second place, the secular agencies have gen erally taken the view that the church was a useful aide-de-camp to be taken along wherever they went, to deal with all those awkward matters for which they had neither the time nor the understanding. In the third place, there are about 20 million Africans who call themselves Christians, who belong to one or other of the confessions, and who, in greater or less measure, live by what they confess. And in the fourth place, the churches have shown that while they have no monopoly of community spirit, their best variety of it retains its potency longer than most. Not that the business of the Christian church is community develop ment. Indeed, many Christians have long contended that, since they are "pilgrims and strangers on this earth, it is a waste of time even to think about such a matter. And those Christians who are deeply concerned about community development would be among the first to admit that a purely "social church was no church at all. The real business of the Christian church, as George Carpenter puts it, is to create "a fellowship of believers whose members assemble together for common worship, and share a common belief, experience, motivation and obedience. But because this is so, no community having such a fellowship in its midst can expect to remain untouched by it. And since there are "fellow ships congregations, assemblies, missions, etc. in fully three fourths of tropical Africa, it is probably true to say that only in the solidly Islamic areas along the southern margins of the Sahara are there any people who are not being touched by the Christian church. It is also probably true to say that everything the church does and stands for has some influence, for better or worse, on the community it seeks to serve. Consider, for instance, the kind of thing a well-equipped bush mission station does. It runs a school, where the children of the district learn not only to pray and sing but also to read, write and calculate, and where they encounter, for the first time in all likelihood, the notion that all people are not as they are that there are different ways of looking at life, of spending ones energies and ones leisure. It runs a medical center, to

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which all who have need of doctoring, nursing, injections and drugs may come, whether they are members of the mission church or not. There they learn that sickness is a physical and psychological phenomenon, not the result of sorcery, witchcraft or "wishing by ill-disposed persons; that it is possible to avoid about half of the customary sicknesses by keeping clean and about half of the rest by eating different foods and sleeping under a net. It runs a number of training programs, in farming and per haps in printing, motor maintenance, carpentry and masonry, that open up possibilities of better living. It almost certainly runs a riot of recreations, from soccer and glee clubs to drumming and dominoes. And its doors are never closed to those seeking comfort or counsel, a go-between or a good listener. The well-staffed, well-equipped urban mission station or church cen ter is likely to offer even more in the way of community services every thing, in fact, from scout troops, sports clubs, sewing bees, pre-adolescent and premarital instruction groups, and prenatal and postnatal clinics to adult school groups and classes for the training of church members as office holders, speakers and counselors. All of these services, as Carpenter points out, will have this in common, "that they bring together in intimate fellowship a group of people within or related to the total congregation in a way that meets a particular need of the group and fosters their iden tification with the total life of the church. The churches, urban and rural, have served other secular functions, too. They have taught the Africans to raise and administer funds, to take care of property, to keep accounts, run committees, organize conferences and speak in public in short, to take the kind of responsibility that is indis pensable to the development of a democratically ordered community. The importance of the churches specifically religious work in fostering the growth of community-mindedness is stressed by Carpenter. In fact, it is possible to contend that this is where a mission or a church plays its biggest community-building role, particularly when it serves an "im migrant population, such as is found in a town or on a mine.
The African uprooted from the social complex of family and tribe in which his whole life has been cast greatly needs to know that he still belongs to a sustaining fellowship . . . The church, continuing the familiar liturgy or some thing akin to it, reiterating its faith in God as a Father whose love for His children never fails, assuring one of the comforting presence of neighbors and friends, fellow-pilgrims on lifes way the church is in itself a reintegrative force of great importance to the African . . . This fellowship tends to strengthen the character and reinforce the motivation of the individual. It provides the sanction of group judgment and approbation in relation to personal moral judgments, actions and relationships . . . Further more, the church brings to bear the religious sanction of divine purpose and judgment, and gives meaning to human life as part of Gods creative and re demptive purpose in the life of the world. To the extent that these functions of the church are effective in the life of its members they become "new creatures of enhanced value as members of society.

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While both the Protestant and Catholic communions in Africa con tinue to exercise these functions with much fidelity, it is open to question whether they are doing so as effectively in the towns as in the rural areas, or as effectively in the rural areas as they once did. Nor are the technical reasons for this obscure. Carpenter sets them down as follows:
City churches tend to be large and heterogeneous in membership compared with the small Christian congregations of rural areas. The individual may there fore feel lost. He may fail to find the intimacy of fellowship and participation which he needs. . . . Many sophisticated Africans regard the message of the church as an old story so familiar as to be meaningless. . . . The social atomization of humanity in the cities deprives the church of the prestige of social acceptance which it often has in smaller communities. Afri cans are accustomed to act in groups: their attitude to the church is often deter mined by an unconscious social consensus more than by personal, individual choice. In the cities, the church must win people one by one, or at best, family by family, because community life is still too unformed for group attitudes to be effective. So far as they are effective, the effect is negative most people do not go to church in the cities, and many regard it with antipathy or disdain. . . . It is not too much to say that Protestant witness in many African cities is seriously weakened and impaired by sectarianism, the immediate and obvious effect of which is duplication of effort, a multiplicity of competing congregations and an excessive number of church buildings designed chiefly or solely as places of worship, with a conspicuous lack of suitable facilities for religious education and the group life of the church . . . Effective parish organization becomes less and less possible as the Christian community is split up into more and more unrelated groups . . . Group activities of all kinds become secularized, be cause sufficient numbers of people with the same interest are not found in one congregation or even in one denominational group. As a result of all this the church becomes peripheral rather than central to the life of the community, and fails to be the focus of social integration . . .

Sectarianism and disdain of the church are not necessarily confined to town churches.
Sects and divisions may invade rural areas from the cities . . . Skeptical secularism becomes the practice, if not the conscious philosophy, of many young Africans in the cities, and that, too, has spread into rural areas. Moral vice and social disease are equally contagious in city and village. There is no quaran tine between the communities.

Other reasons are less technical than spiritual, deriving from the nature of the enterprisers rather than of their enterprise. The Christian church in tropical Africa is still led in most areas by people of European descent, men and women possessed of high ideals, strong convictions and unques tioned dedication. They are also possessed of a book, a message and an authority that set them on high ground the highest in the world, so they believe. They are therefore conspicuous people, constantly watched and talked about, and constantly being weighed in the balance of the Africans shrewd judgment. To be found wanting, to fail to practice what the book teaches human as this is is liable to have grievous conse

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quences, not only for the person at fault but also for his colleagues, the local church and, often, the community. The teacher who blows off steam at his class today is quoted throughout the district tomorrow, often in extenuation of his quoters greater excesses. The pastor who tells his African callers to use the back door may find that they stop using any door.1 9 Churches practicing any species of discrimination whatever need not be surprised to find themselves slowly losing ground to splinter churches that yield none of the expected fruits of Christian living. Yet, its faults, limitations and failures notwithstanding, the Christian church must still be reckoned one of the great community-building and community-strengthening forces in tropical Africa. It is a generation since Dr. J. E. K. Aggrey, the famous Gold Coast educator, addressed a con ference of Christian students held at the University of Toronto on the subject of what is best for Africa. But what he said then would be en dorsed by many of Africas present-day leaders.
Only the best is good enough for Africa. If you can show me a bridge, a hospital, raised by disciples of Muhammad or Confucius in my country; if you can tell me the name of a missionary from China or Turkey who has died for my people, then I will . . . accept the deletion of the name Christian from the title of this students Federation. I put my hand before my eyes and I see in Africa, from north to south, from east to west, bridges and roads and hospitals and schools and thousands of men and women living a new life: and all that comes from Christ . . .

These words would be endorsed by thousands of the common people for whom let those of Aiyetoro speak. Aiyetoro, the so-called Apostle Community of southern Nigeria which was mentioned in Chapter 8,20 is a small urban community that owes absolutely nothing to either governments or corporations. Established in the late 1940s as an experiment in cooperative enterprise by a small group of Yoruba-speaking fishermen who had decided to break away from the ancient, unchanging system of living, 21 Aiyetoro had at the start only one source of revenue, smoked fish, which was marketed in Lagos, about a hundred miles away. From the beginning, all the money thus derived was turned over to the community treasury, any surpluses being set aside for development work and the promotion of new trades and industries. Within the span of a decade the community has grown from a hamlet of mud-and-thatch huts to a well-planned town complete with shade trees, playgrounds and all modern conveniences all except bars, since the drinking of alcohol is prohibited along with smoking and the making of unnecessary noise. Each year sees the people of Aiyetoro learning new
19 In some tropical African territories there are still more missionary homes where Africans are not regular or natural guests than where they are. See Peter Letchford, Canadian Secretary of the South Africa General Mission, in the Christian Graduate (London), September 1957, p. 131. 20 See Volume I, p. 275. 21 The Times British Colonies Review, Third Quarter 1957, p. 19.

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skills, living better, putting more money in the treasury, and winning new converts to their way of life. What, we may ask, is the secret of their success? They themselves say that there is no secret: all they have sought to do is to follow the way of the early Christian believers
[who] continued steadfastly in the apostles doctrine . . . ; were together, and had all things common; and sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need . . . continuing daily with one accord in the temple . . . ; and . . . [who] did eat their meat with gladness and singleness of heart . . .22

Those who have seen the Apostle Community do not find it hard to accept their explanation or to agree with the London Times corre spondent who, in a moment of un-Times-like gusto, declared: The people of Aiyetoro have pioneered a way of life in which they take great pride and which seemingly makes them well contented. They are certainly on the way to conquering the old enemies of mankind disease, idleness, squalor, ignorance, and want. 23 No community developer could ask for more. The kind of movement considered so far seeks, by doing a little for a lot of people, to tap the wellsprings of their desire for a better life and so to get them to bestir themselves on their own behalf. That is, it is a pump-priming movement. Needless to say, some communities can be primed more quickly than others. Some, like Aiyetoro, take very little priming. Others, like Awgu, prime easily enough, but have difficulty in staying primed. Their springs, seemingly, are shallow and subject to periodic exhaustion. And there are many communities throughout tropical Africa, which, for all their priming, have not yet produced anything more than a small, inconstant trickle of results. Of course, there is no telling what a primed pump will yield. Before now, if we are to believe the witness of the movie screen, the fluid that has come out has been very different from and more intoxicating than the fluid that went in. But that is a chance all gamblers must take, and com munity development is nothing if not a gamble on the capacity of people for self-generating progress. Most of the time, however, it is true to say that like yields like. Where the emphasis has been on spiritual gains freedom from fear, superstition and tyranny, or greater happiness, dignity and decency the yield tends to be strongly religious and political. Where the emphasis of the priming agent, whether self-styled com munity developer, district officer or teacher, missionary or local chief, has been on material gains more money, better houses, bigger crops and so on the yield tends to be as strongly economic.
22 Acts 2:42-46, A.V.

23 The Times British Colonies Review, loc. cit.

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COOPERATIVES The work of specific cooperatives has already been alluded to on more than one occasion. Here the main concern is with the parentage and upbringing of the movement, its vitality and preoccupations, and the problems incidental to its growth. Though the cooperative movement is nowadays represented in many parts of tropical Africa, it is still best represented by far in the British and formerly British territories. With some reason: it was in Great Britain (in the nineteenth century) that the movement originated, and it was to the British dependencies that it was first carried as a form of organization deemed to be "eminently suitable for transplantation to . . . peasant societies. 24 As long ago as pre-World War I days government servants and traders were talking cooperation in British East Africa. Already in 1913 a few African farmers in Uganda were marketing their cotton crop cooperatively for the purpose of getting a better price for it. By 1930, 12,000 Chagga coffee growers were members of the five-year-old Kilimanjaro Native Coffee Planters Association (now the Kilimanjaro Native Co-operative Union, Ltd.). Cooperation took hold more quickly in its new milieu than in the old. Whereas to the British the idea of mutual aid generally represented a revolution against the operative tradition of individual enterprise and the motto Each man for himself, to the African it was scarcely more than a modernized version of a native tradition. 25 This is not to say that the African cooperates better than the British. Cooperation spells many things, some of which the African finds difficult, irksome or unnecessary. In a sentence, a cooperative society the physical expression of a co operative movement is a group formed by individual producers or consumers, or both, to carry on any mutually advantageous activity. Its chief distinguishing marks are: (1) that it is a voluntary association; (2) that it is run democratically, on a "one man one vote basis; (3) that it exists to serve the greatest good of the greatest number of its members, and is therefore opposed to throat-cutting and coercion; and (4) that bene fits from its operations accrue to members in direct proportion to the business transacted and not in proportion to capital invested. The relevance of such societies to the African producer or consumer is clear if we recall some of the circumstances which habitually incommode him. First, his indebtedness. Almost everywhere in the world where the change-over from the old subsistence, moneyless economy to a cash crop economy has been made, it has been accompanied by the rise of the creditor and the debtor. Inexperienced and illiterate, the grower of such
24 Co-operation in the British Dependencies, mimeographed pamphlet ID 1176, British Information Services, New York, May 1953, p. 2. 25 Ibid .

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crops as cotton, coffee, cocoa and grain has been pretty much at the mercy of the buyer, shopkeeper and trader. In many cases, however, mercy was not the currency in which they dealt. Rather it was fast talk ing, sleight of hand, extortion and lies the victim of which was soon likely to find himself owing money and so compelled to mortgage future harvests, leading to further indebtedness and ultimately to loss of all in centive. Second, his low standard of living. True, this is in part due to his characteristic indebtedness, but it has always been a low standard; consequently it has always been difficult, if not impossible, for him to accumulate goods or capital in excess of immediate needs. There has never been much room for errors and none for omissions. Progress, technical or material, was practically out of the question. Third, his in ability to do anything very profitable with such occasional surpluses as he might find himself possessing. There were few ways of storing grain, fewer of meat. There were few means of transportation, none adequate. There was no marketing organization that could give him the benefits of timely buying and selling. For the urban African there has been the further circumstance of loneliness and loss of association with the corporate life of village and tribe. For each of these conditions the cooperative society offers a cure. For indebtedness it offers credit associations from which money govern ment money, as a rule, to start with may be borrowed at low rates of interest. It also offers the chance to learn thrift and the elements of busi ness management, since it is the borrowers who are responsible for run ning the associations. For low standards of living it offers purchasing societies in which money again, government money as a rule is to be had for the purchase by a community of agricultural implements, stocks of seed and fertilizer, fruit trees, pedigreed breeding animals, and so on. Such societies will also give a member, from time to time, the chance to visit demonstration stations where his very own problems are being tackled rationally. For wasted surpluses, casual commerce and costly middlemen it offers the marketing society able to provide through its collective funds initially government supplied, too, as a rule the transport of produce to the market at a much lower cost, and to help the grower to get a higher price for his produce by arranging the sale without the services of the trader. It can also shield the producer from some of the worst effects of world market fluctuations, which in the case of cocoa, coffee, cotton and most of the other African cash crops are often con siderable. For loneliness it offers companionship, teamwork and the chance, once in a while, for some fun. How do such societies begin? Ideally, they should be the offspring of the people. For no matter how well-conceived and well-nourished gov ernment babies are, they are seldom greatly loved by those on whom they are foisted. There have been some very satisfactory societies of in digenous parentage. Thus, several of the womens societies formed since

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the end of World War II have had cooperation as their raison detre. In southern Nigeria, for instance, There are women's societies which run a bakery, a laundry, a weaving workshop, a calabash manufactory, a gari [manioc] mill, and so on. In these ways the women [have provided] themselves with necessary services, cut out the middlemen, and [raised] their own standard of living. 20 But, on the whole, the initiative has come from without, since the people most in need of cooperatives are without means and quite un familiar with the ways of bankers, bookkeepers and businessmen gen erally. As a rule it has come from governments. In the case of the British government the initiative was taken reluctantly. To a large extent this reluctance, as J. G. Liebenow, a consultant to this study, has pointed out, was born of fear: fear lest "the cooperative might fall under the sway of an African who might find the temptation to line his pockets irresistible; fear that "the cooperative might serve as a cover for political or national istic agitation; and, in the multiracial areas, fear lest it should alienate the Europeans and Asians who were already running cooperatives. Since 1946, when the British government passed the enabling bill (the Co-operative Societies Ordinance), the initiative in each dependency has rested largely in the hands of the government-appointed Registrar of Co-operative Societies. It is his job (among so many others that he has been called "Commissar of Co-ops) to register new societies, approve their by-laws, supervise and audit their accounts, settle disputes and keep an eye on the selection, training and performance of his field agents, the Co-operative Departmental Inspectors. It is the inspectors who are largely responsible for encouraging the formation of cooperative societies; teaching the members and prospective members of such so cieties the rudiments of bookkeeping, auditing, business methods, and the law and economics of cooperatives; and checking and correcting ac counts and, when necessary, writing up the books. Types of Cooperatives The range of economic interests to which the cooperative principle can be applied is virtually without limit. At different times and places it has been applied to manufacturing, welfare and crafts as well as to credit and thrift, producer marketing and processing, agricultural development and consumer goods. A fairly typical example of a manufacturing cooperative is the Kasitu Valley Union in Nyasaland. This is a union one of two such unions in the territory of small cooperative dairy societies. Its business con sists in taking the dairy societies surplus milk and converting it into ghee, a more durable and more salable commodity. In 1957 this union
26 R. K. Gardiner and H. O. Judd, The Development of Social Administration, Oxford University Press, London, 1954, p. 77.

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processed and sold nearly 30,000 pounds of ghee. With the proceeds (about 6,000) it was able to give the producers more money than they would have got for their milk (always supposing they would have found a market for it), and at the same time to build up its capital reserve. Welfare societies make a special appeal to women. One of the most popular cooperative projects undertaken by them is the building and running of maternity homes. In the Eastern Region of Nigeria there were already five such cooperatives in 1953, with a total membership of some 6,000; more than a thousand deliveries were made in the homes run by them. Since 1953 many other maternity cooperatives have been formed, in both the Western and Eastern Regions. In most cases the homes have been paid for by the women cooperators own subscrip tions, and their maintenance costs, including the cost of midwives, met by periodic mass "subscription meetings. The only serious problem here an understandable one in view of the fact that maternity, unlike acci dent or illness, does not come upon one unawares is to get women to subscribe for the years in which they do not expect to be needing the home. The craft society is not widely found in these days of mass-production techniques, and, so far as can be seen, it is not likely to have any great future. However, it is doing useful work in several communities, notably in Nigeria, where there is a strong tradition of craftsmanship. Prominent Nigerian representatives of this type of society are the Awka Carvers Union, the womens Akweti Weavers Society, the Benin Shoemakers, the Oyo Leatherworkers, and the Arochuku Embroideresses. The members pool their resources for the purchase of needed materials, tools and equipment (the Benin Shoemakers ordering their equipment direct from the United Kingdom), and in some instances market their products co operatively. Credit societies, sometimes called thrift and credit, or thrift and loan, societies, are among the most popular and most necessary of cooperatives. They are designed to relieve indebtedness; to provide short-term loans for land improvement, purchase of equipment, and maintenance during the "hungry months; to promote the saving habit; and, not least, to give their members some understanding of modern business. One of the terri tories where they have come to assume a major role is the Eastern Region of Nigeria. In 1957 over 80 per cent of the more than 1,000 cooperatives were either thrift and credit or thrift and loan societies. Producer and processing societies are somewhat less numerous than credit and thrift societies, but they handle by far the largest volume of business. In 1957, for instance, the 3,800-odd such societies in British tropical Africa exclusive of Southern Rhodesia did an aggregate business of more than 4 2 million, or approximately two thirds of all the business done by all cooperatives. Although many of these societies, especially those in Kenya and Tanganyika, are largely or exclusively European in

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membership, there can be hardly any question that those serving the African serve him well. They take what he has but doesnt need, and often does not know how or where to sell, and turn it into something he doesnt have but needs desperately a reasonably reliable income. By customarily paying it to him in two installments, the first on delivery of his crop and the second after it has been sold and all servicing charges have been cared for, they provide him with a useful curb to his im providence. They also provide him with a useful goad to his ambition and self-esteem, since the better he farms, the bigger his crop, the larger his share in the equity, and the higher his standing in the community. Not least, they can provide those cooperators who are willing to deny themselves part of their earnings as many are with a capital fund for development or welfare work. What a marketing cooperative organization can do for its members, and how it does it, is seen to good advantage in Ghana, where almost all of the farming is done by small holders or peasants, and where nine tenths or more of the farm revenue is derived from a single crop, cocoa. The marketing of this crop by primary marketing societies began, in a very small way, in 1929. Today about one fifth of the cocoa crop is handled cooperatively. The small primary society in a given district arranges for the collection and transport of its members crop to the depot of the regional marketing cooperative union to which it is affiliated. This union, in turn, prepares and transports the crop to the headquarters in Accra of the Ghana Co-operative Marketing Association, Ltd., to which all of the unions serving the various cocoa-growing areas of the country belong. With funds loaned from the Co-operative Central Bank, this association pays each union enough to make an advance payment to each member of each affiliated society at the time the crop is collected. In 1951, a good year but by no means phenomenal, more than 4 million was paid to the 17,000 members of the societies in this way. A second payment of 120,000 was made later when the crop had been sold and all accounts settled. A further sum was put into a reserve fund maintained by the Co-operative Bank. During the same year the Marketing Association loaned 110,000 to members of societies for farm redemption and im provement, and for educational purposes. Very few societies exist specifically and solely for the purpose of pro moting agricultural development, because this calls for equipment beyond the means of the ordinary farm community. Usually this kind of development can be undertaken only by credit and thrift societies, or producer marketing and processing societies that have been established long enough to have accumulated a substantial capital reserve. Coopera tive farm development therefore tends to be in the nature of a plowback operation. One of the best examples of farm development financed in this way is provided by the Kilimanjaro Native Co-operative Union, Ltd. This union is made up of about 35 marketing societies, with an ag

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gregate membership of over 35,000 coffee growers. Almost all of these belong to the Chagga people who live on the slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro. As its profits grew, the union extended its operations beyond the mere marketing of coffee to the raising of its yield and quality. To this end, it built and staffed a school for the training of inspectors, instructors, nurserymen and growers. In the training special emphasis is given to such matters as the making and use of compost, anti-erosion measures, the control of pests and diseases, irrigation, and the improvement of cultural methods. By means of loans the union makes it possible for its more pro gressive members to exploit their training and to carry out its policy of retiring old and inferior trees. The headquarters of the union, in Moshi, is a building of which any town in rural America or Europe might be proud. It is open to members of all races, and contains a cultural center, a museum, a library, shops, offices, restaurant and garage. The union also prints its own books and pamphlets on coffee culture and runs its own interracial hostel and commercial school. Possibly the least well-favored and least disciplined member of the cooperative litter is the consumer society. Where good consumer societies exist, as, for instance, in parts of British East Africa and the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, the chances are that some or all of the fol lowing circumstances contributed to their success: an ample supply of capital for premises and goods; local prosperity leading to lively demand for a wide range of goods and rapid turnover; good management; and not too much competition from the large trading companies. In point of fact, the majority of consumer societies are badly located, poorly housed, inadequately capitalized and stocked, indifferently run if not blatantly mismanaged, and no match in variety, quality or attractiveness for the department stores and bazaars of the nearby towns. Salt, kerosene, matches, tobacco, singlets, soap and scrap metal (for conversion into household and farm gear) comprise perhaps 90 per cent of their normal offerings. Of all the modern business channels the cooperative one is probably the easiest to dig, and the hardest to keep open and clean. Almost every body can see advantages in cooperation. The government official sees it as a way of capitalizing the Africans instinct for teamwork, which none who have watched him in action as a hunter, tree feller, bush burner, road builder or dancer can deny. He also sees it as a way of lifting the Africans lowly economic status, essential to the development of a stable middle class. The cooperator sees it as a way of escaping from the clutches of the money lender, the middleman and the petty trader, and of getting more for less. The educator sees it as a mold capable of carrying, be sides the raw material of economic advancement, the essences of order, efficiency and self-help. The politician sees it to be a tool for the fashion ing of leaders. But, as Europeans have long known and as Africans and

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Asians are now learning, the running of a cooperative calls for more than enthusiasm and a supply of cooperators for those very things, indeed, which in Chapter 12 were set down as being necessary for the advancement of the African in trade. It calls for training programs, which officials often find easier to plan than provide. It calls for capital, which few cooperators have and most outsiders are shy of investing in novelties. It calls for discipline regard for the spoken word and the written bond which, as every educator knows, is more easily applauded than prac ticed. Not least, it calls for sophistication the ability to buy and sell at the right time, skill in handling goods and money, and integrity in ac counting for them which is not conferred by political edict, or, for that matter, by the accolade of self-government. TRADE UNIONISM The success of any pump-priming operation depends on three things: an adequate supply of priming fluid, the ability of people to do the pump ing and their belief in the utility of doing it. In tropical Africa, as we have seen, none of these things can be taken for granted. When the fluid the money and personnel is available, able pumpers are often lacking, and vice versa. And when both fluid and pumpers are available, there is not infrequently a scarcity of believers. The history, to date, of trade unionism in tropical Africa is one of slow priming, fitful pumping and small returns. Although activities of the trade union type, including strikes, were being conducted in various territories as far back as the 1920s, it was not until the early thirties that the British government the first to do so recognized the right of workers in its African territories to organize trade unions. Even then workers were in no hurry to take advantage of their rights. Two years after Parliament had passed the enabling act, only three small unions had been registered in the whole of the British co lonial empire. Most of the headway has been made since the mid-forties, and in territories administered, or once administered, by Great Britain and France: the west African members of the French Community, Com monwealth West Africa, Kenya, the Republic of Sudan and the Federa tion of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. The increase in the number of registered unions in some of these territories has been considerable. In Ghana, where as lately as 1941 there were no registered unions, there were 41 by 1951; by 1953 there were 75; by 1957, more than 100. (Since then the trade union movement in Ghana has undergone reorganization as a result of which the 100-odd unions have been replaced by 24 with a total mem bership of approximately 350,000.) In Nigeria the number of registered unions increased from 50 in 1941 to 135 in 1953 and to 177 in 1955. In French West Africa the number increased from 0 in 1937 to 350 in the mid-1950s.

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In Belgian Africa, where unions have been legal since 1946, there were only some 5,000 trade unionists in 1950. By 1959 there were between 80,000 and 100,000. In Liberia there are a very few government-assisted unions. In Portuguese Africa and Ethiopia there were still no trade unions as late as 1959. Characteristics of Unions These unions are typically small. In 1955 the average nominal mem bership of the Nigerian unions was less than 1,000. The majority of the unions had fewer than 200 members. In the same year the average nominal membership of the Kenya unions was less than 500. The paid-up mem bership was certainly smaller, since almost all trade unions in tropical Africa are reluctant to drop from the rolls any person considered likely to be good for a dues payment, no matter how tardy. Even the large unions are small by European and American standards. The Northern Rhodesia African Mineworkers Trade Union, the largest of its kind in tropical Africa, has a membership of only about 20,000. The Railway African Union of Kenya, the largest in the colony, had about 9,000 mem bers in 1957. Because they are small, they are weak too weak, in some cases, to be able to exercise even the rudimentary functions of trade unionism. By the time the one or two necessary officials, say the chairman and secretarytreasurer, of a small union have collected their expenses and honoraria, there is very little dues money left for extension work. And in a small, largely illiterate group, it is seldom possible to find those who are skilled in negotiation, the making of agreements, and the settling of disputes. Many unions are weak for another reason. They are forced rather than natural growths. Unlike European and American trade union movements, which came into existence on their own account and from a deeply felt need, most of those in tropical Africa are the products of paternalism, of belief that what is sauce for the metropolitan gander is sauce for the colonial gosling. While there may be good grounds for the belief, the fact is that chefs the world over are reluctant to accept the sauce-making recipes of others, and that for many people sauce is an acquired taste which comes only with maturity. There are those who believe that the African worker is still too imma ture for trade unionism. There are others who believe that trade unionism which is government-inspired is bound, sooner or later, to be govern ment-controlled. Neither school of believers has to look far for supporting evidence. Those of the first school point to the widespread dearth of leadership and of understanding of what unionism entails and of efficiency in the handling of union business and funds. They also point to the fre

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quency with which such statements as the following occur in reports on labor conditions:
. . . in certain instances unions have been started by a small number of people solely with a view to making good jobs for themselves as Executive Officers such as Secretaries and Treasurers.27 . . . His behaviour at best showed a greater interest in his own financial improvement than was consistent with his devotion to the cause of the miners, and at worst, exposed him to the charge that he deliberately used his position to enrich himself at the expense of union funds.28

Those of the second school point to the fact that in many territories the most influential trade union officer is the one appointed and paid by the government; he not infrequently regards his primary tasks to be the maintenance of industrial peace, the discouraging of strikes and the fos tering of unions of an amenable, nonaggressive type. They also point to the fact that in the Belgian Congo all unions have been under government control, not only in their formative period but throughout their life span; Belgian officials have examined their budgets and accounts, constantly checked their compliance with the manifold regulations, scrutinized mem bership lists for illegal admissions, taken part in the union meetings, and seen union minutes. Another characteristic shared by most of the unions is their color-consciousness. It is not difficult to see how this came about in some instances. As James Griffiths, a onetime British Secretary of State for the Colonies, has pointed out,
When the African . . . peasant is brought to work in a mine or a factory, it is as green labour: he is an unskilled labourer working under the close super vision of a white boss. He tends to think of himself not as a miner, or artisan, working with other miners and artisans, but as a poor black worker who has to obey the dictates of a supervisor . . . of a different colour. It is natural, there fore, that he should regard the trade union, not as an organization of workers to improve the conditions of their employment, but as a shield and protector against colonialism. To him it seems that the appropriate grouping for the trade union is not the workshop or even the industry, but one that gathers within its fold all the black workers in defence against the white employers and workers alike.29

But not all the color-consciousness of unionism in tropical Africa can be explained as an incidental by-product of association between white employer and black employee, and its corollary, skilled white and un skilled black. Some of it seems to be the calculated end product of an attempt to keep employers white and the white skilled, and the employees black and the black unskilled. At least this is how it appears to such
27 Labour Department Report, Sierra Leone Government, 1939-40.

28 Report of the Commission of Enquiry into the Disorders in the Eastern Provinces of Nigeria, November 1949, Colonial No. 256, H.M.S.O., London, 1950, p. 30. 29 The Times British Colonies Review, Autumn 1952.

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trade union leaders as Tom Mboya of Kenya and Lawrence Katilungu of Northern Rhodesia. Being small, weak and on the defensive, most African unions devote a large part of their time to the redress of individual or collective grievances against plant managements, and to seeking to improve plant working conditions. Accordingly, in function, at any rate, they are not very dif ferent from the labor-management committees or works councils that many companies have set up. Union names frequently reflect their limited scope and no less characteristic anchorage to a place and a com pany. The United Africa Company Singlet Factory Workers Union and the Church Missionary Society Bookshop African Staff Union, both of Lagos, are cases in point. There are still few industry-wide unions of the kind with which Europeans and Americans are familiar, and almost none in which specialized skill that is, craft or trade is the basis of union. The difficulties notwithstanding, a number of powerful unions have grown up in recent years. This is particularly true of the Confederation Generale du Travail (CGT), which musters almost two thirds of all the trade unionists in the territories formerly constituting French West Africa; the Confederation Africaine des Travailleurs Croyants (CATC), which is strong in Senegal, Guinea, Dahomey, Yaounde and Brazzaville; the Force Ouvriere, which includes a large proportion of European workers in the same general areas; and the west African Federation des Cheminots Africains. The power inherent in the numerical strength of these unions has been enhanced by their willingness to join forces when the need arises. Thus, a coordinating committee of the west African branches of CGT, CATC, Force Ouvriere and the Cheminots is generally credited with hav ing sped up the enactment and the implementing of the 1952 Code du Travail dOutre-Mer, one of the most liberal pieces of labor legislation ever passed by the French government.30 Although these unions, with the exception of the Cheminots, are offshoots of the great metropolitan federa tions of the same name, the power they wield is their own, and most of their leaders are African-elected Africans concerned more about doing something for those who put them in power than about upholding any doctrinaire position taken by the parent bodies. Thus, the CGT, which in France has communist affiliations, is "regarded by most Africans as African and [is] often so described; while the CATC, which is "closely associated with, and fostered by, the Catholic missions, has in fact a majority of Moslem members in French West Africa, and admits theists of all types (including Animists) to its affiliated unions. 31
30 The extreme importance attached by the French African trade unions to the 1952 Code du Travail was due primarily to the fact that its intention was to secure equality of rights for African workers in such matters as the forty-hour week, holidays with pay and (partially) family allowances. Thomas Hodgkin, Nationalism in Colonial Africa, Frederick Muller, London, 1956, p. 130. 81 Ibid.

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Not the least reason for the power of these French unions is that they are large enough, being for the most part federations of unions, to have a decent income from dues. This enables them to maintain both a field staff and a headquarters staff. With the former they can keep their members well informed of the work of their union and so disposed to go on supporting it. With the latter they can keep government and manage ment apprised of their demands, and see to it that these demands are continually put before the public in speech, newspaper and pamphlet. These unions have seldom had any difficulty in making the headlines or in getting summit-level hearings. Because they are very largely a product of the local economic environ ment and owe little to external movements and financing, the trade unions of British, and ex-British, tropical Africa, even the biggest of them, are of smaller stature than those of French provenance. All the same, there are some sturdy middleweights among them, notably the Northern Rho desia African Mineworkers Trade Union and the organization of European workers called the Northern Rhodesia Mine Workers Union. The latter, under its agreement with the Copperbelt mining companies, controls the range of jobs undertaken by its members and so, by elimination, those that can be undertaken by the members of the African union. There are also strong mineworkers unions in Ghana and Nigeria. Other occupa tional groups served by fairly large unions are the railway workers (e.g., in the Republic of Sudan, Nigeria, Ghana and British East Africa), public utility workers (e.g., in Ghana and Nigeria), teachers (e.g., in Ghana and Nigeria), and local government workers (e.g., in Ghana, Nigeria and Kenya). In several territories attempts have been made to develop a central organization on the model of the British Trades Union Congress for the purpose of acting as a general staff to the entire trade union body, and dealing, on its behalf, with the territorial government. To date, Ghana and the Republic of Sudan are the only territories, either British or exBritish, to have succeeded in their attempts. Since 1957 the Sudan Gov ernment Workers Trade Union Federation has had the support of most of the 100 or so unions unions that cover everybody from bakery as sistants and dock workers to schoolteachers and civil servants. Since 1959, the Ghana Trades Union Congress has had the support of most of its 24 national unions that now "represent not only a substantial part of the population, but one of the important factors in the nation-building process. Elsewhere, such federations as have been established manage to flourish only during times of crisis. At other times they have been weakened or rent by personal rivalries, disagreements over means and ends, administrative inefficiency and conflicting loyalties, as between the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) and the leftist World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU). There have been one or two crises during which they were forcibly restrained from flourishing

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by their territorial governments. This was the case in Kenya during the Mau Mau emergency, when enough union leaders and members were detained on allegations of complicity with Mau Mau to leave the local federation temporarily impotent. Union Interests Broadly, the interests which the trade unions of tropical Africa seek to further are of two kinds: defensive and aggressive. There are grievances to be settled; wrongs, real and imagined, to be righted; exploitation to be eliminated. There are also rights to be won: the right to strike; the right to bargain and to be heard in the councils of employers; and the greater right or so most colonial trade unionists conceive it to be to frame ones own industrial laws and administer them, which implies the right to be politically autonomous. The incidence of these interests is still patchy. Some union members can give no reason for their membership beyond the fact that they were asked to be members and that it is pleasant to belong to any group that helps to fill the empty hours of a migrants life. Others have yet to grasp the idea that membership confers obligations (including the regular pay ment of dues) and the privilege of working for a cause bigger than a grievance. Even among mature trade unionists there are frequently wide disparities of interest. Thus, speaking generally, "there is a marked tend ency for the demands of French African trade unionists to be dominated by the idea of equality, in the sense of equality of wages and conditions and equality of trade-union rights for African and European workers. 32 British African trade unionists, on the other hand, "are concerned less with equality of rights, and more with the rights of African workers as such, a fact which, as Hodgkin goes on to observe, "necessarily gives their demands a strongly nationalist flavour, and their activities frequently a political appearance. Where African trade unionists have come to grips with the world of work and their own shortcomings as workers, however, they have not been slow to perceive, and promote, the true functions of unionism. To find out what unionists held these functions to be, the Institute of Extra-Mural Studies of the University College of the then Gold Coast conducted an inquiry in 1953. In descending frequency of selec tion by the group of unionists surveyed, the functions considered most appropriate to a trade union were as follows: negotiation on wages (selected in 79 per cent of the total possible number of times), prevention of dismissals (78 per cent of the total possible times), increase of produc tion (73), prevention of victimization (72), settlement of individual com plaints (59), holding of strikes for the purpose of getting higher wages (42),
32 Ibid.

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obtaining of cash benefits (42), organizing of social activities (38), organiz ing of political party activities (17), and holding of strikes for the purpose of bringing about political changes (10). Several things about this list call for comment. The low rating of political functions is surprising, all the more so when we recall the prom inent part which the unions played in the 1950 political disturbances and the fact that in 1953 political change "Self-government now was re garded as the key that would open the gates of Utopia. The modest store set by cash benefits is in sharp contrast to union practice in the United States and Europe. "Presumably this can be explained, a published ac count of the inquiry observes, "by the widespread family system which renders union financial assistance in times of unemployment, sickness and other distress less urgent than in more urbanized societies. 33 The disinclination of those questioned to employ the strike as an instrument of union policy is something new, since in colonial Africa, as elsewhere, the strike has traditionally been looked upon as one of the stoutest "defences of the poor, and "the only argument with which workers can collectively press their economic claims and challenge managerial autocracy. 34 It is all the more surprising since, in at least two African territories Ni geria and the Republic of Sudan general strikes proved to be "the midwives of trade unionism, and have acquired a special sanctity on that account. 3 5 Possibly the Gold Coast unionists were still remembering their own general strike of 1950, which, useful as it may have been to the poli ticians of the Convention Peoples Party in whose interest it was called, brought them only discredit, confusion and the dissolution of their con gress. The emphasis on protection job security, prevention of dismis sals and victimization (which was defined as punishment short of dis missal) suggests that the trade unionist is as interested in having steady employment as he is in having good employers. Perhaps most unexpected of all is the high priority given to increased production. Usu ally in tropical Africa it is the employers who are concerned about pro ductivity levels and the difficulty of getting the workers to raise them. It is therefore a matter for encouragement that for every 79 times a Gold Coast unionist bestirred himself in the cause of wages, he bestirred himself 73 times in the cause of productivity. Just how far he was willing to carry his concern for the latter cause, the surveyors did not tell. Whence comes the sense of responsibility disclosed by the ranking of these trade union interests? In part it comes, as hinted earlier, from the hard school of experience in which men have been made to see the empti ness of hopes divorced from reality, and of platforms lacking proper eco nomic support. In part it comes from exposure to the experience of others, especially the hard-bought experience of trade unionists in France and
33 The Times British Colonies Review, Winter 1953, p. 24. 34 Hodgkin, op. cit., p. 133. 35 Ibid.

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Great Britain. Their cautionary voice is being listened to with increasing respect in the lands of tropical Africa. In part, too, it comes from the training in trade unionism which unionists and others are getting from the unions themselves, from the labor departments of government, from such international bodies as UNESCO and the ICFTU, and, not least, from the extramural departments of African universities. Indeed, in the case of Ghana, it might be claimed that the Institute of Extra-Mural Studies of its University College has been the biggest single factor in the growth of trade union responsibility. Since 1948 the institute has been ex plaining assiduously, insistently, persuasively and if we may believe its now-departed government critics at times inconveniently and embar rassingly what trade unionism stands for, and seeing that it shall not want for leaders or for discerning followers. To this end, the director and his African and European associates have conducted evening classes on trade unionism wherever the local people could be induced to attend them; weekend (and longer) residential courses at which trade unionists from different parts of the country could swap problems and answers, learn to show becoming respect for other mens judgments and modesty for their own, and to distinguish fact from emotion, reason from sentiment; and interterritorial seminars attended by trade unionists from inside and outside Africa for the purpose of acquiring finesse in the arts of negotia tion, collective bargaining, consultation and arbitration, and in the no less necessary art of making friends of management and influencing gov ernments. The University College may have sponsored more formal activi ties during the past decade or so, but none more formative or, we venture to think, more widely appreciated. But this is not to say that there is nothing wrong with African trade unionism that a few well-spaced extramural departments, or UNESCO or ICFTU teams, cannot put right. For one thing, in some territories there are still no trade unions to put right; and if there were, it is doubtful if the governments of those territories would view with favor the idea of campus-based crusades to make trade union sympathizers of all working men. And for another, the function of adult education is not to serve as either the receiving or transmitting antenna of trade unionism, but only "to teach people to weigh opposing points of view, and to think critically and constructively for themselves; 36 and there is no guarantee that the results of such weighing and thinking will be the same among the Somali and Azande as among the Fanti and the Ashanti. Not all intellectually awakened men, even in the United States, care enough for the hazards of the trade union course to be willing to run it. In tropical Africa there are millions of workers in whose minds the notion of union with strangers
36 David and Helen Kimble, Adult Education in a Changing Africa: A Report on the Inter-African Seminar Held in the Gold Coast from December 10 to 23, 1954, International Federation of Workers Educational Associations, London, 1955, p. 22.

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for the sake of personal or group advantage still has no place. Further more, it is unlikely that the advent of such a notion will be materially hastened by stirring up various forms of activity where, in fact, no activity exists. 37 We can be quite sure that trade union activity will grow rather than decline, for it yields economic and political dividends esteemed by all those who seek to capitalize their peoples potential on the floor of the worlds exchange. As Hodgkin has put it,
[Trade unions] are a means of providing political education, in the broadest sense, for a section of the community that has little opportunity to play a prom inent part in nationalist political parties. They tend to substitute a new rela tionship based upon common economic interests for traditional tribal ties. At the same time they make it possible for the collectivist values of traditional African society to be restated in modem language, in opposition to the naive Benthamism (or Burnhamism) of many Westernizing nationalists. Or to put the same point differently they counteract the nationalist tendency to pre sent political independence, or liberation from European control, as an end in itself; and draw continual attention to the facts of poverty, hunger, disease, slums, insecurity and social waste, which will not be altered simply by the transfer of political power from Europeans to Africans.38

To the extent that they do this, they are at one with the cooperative and community development movements, and as deserving of sympa thetic encouragement. Already, as we hope to show in Chapter 20, some unions have influenced the character and outlook of African national ism in important ways.
37 Nelly Xydias in Social Implications of Industrialization and Urbanization in Africa South of the Sahara (prepared under the auspices of UNESCO by the Inter national African Institute, London), UNESCO, Tensions and Technology Series, Paris, 1956, p. 305. 38 Op. cit., pp. 137-38.

CHAPTER

19

Colonial Policies
BELGI AN BRITISH FRENCH POLI CY POLI CY POLI CY

I TALI AN POLI CY PORTUGUESE SPANI SH POLICY

POLI CY

O ne of the first overseas regions to be discovered by Europeans, tropical Africa was one of the last to be controlled by them. It was long thought of less as an asset than an obstacle, since it stood in the path of every India-bound mariner, and it was to India and "the Indies that most sixteenth-century mariners were bound. If it could be got around without the necessity of providing numerous ports of call as indeed it could be once the Portuguese discovered how to turn wind and current to their advantage so much the better. Though the demand of the Americas for African slaves later took many Europeans to the west coast of Africa, few settlements were founded other than forts where attacks from hostile tribes could be repelled, slaves rounded up, ships repaired and revictualed, and sick mariners given a chance to convalesce. Even as late as the eighteenth century there was little thought in anyones mind of establish ing a reign of law over the raided hinterlands. As for the east coast, once the excitement of the Great Discoveries was over, the Europeans under standably lost interest in it. They found that the Arabs had for centuries been doing a steady business in east African slaves and ivory and were in no mood to hand it over to a bunch of infidels. It was not until the early nineteenth century that European govern ments began to take a close interest in tropical Africa. Even then the interest appears to have been inspired less by colonial ambition than by
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humanitarian sentiment. Slavery and the slave trade, at long last, were coming to be seen for the evil things they were, and Christian nations on both sides of the Atlantic were willing to join forces in excising them from their social systems. As far as west Africa was concerned, the task presented no very serious difficulties. The sea-borne slave traffic the worst part of the abomination could be and was suppressed by naval action, from reasonably accessible Atlantic bases. In east Africa the matter was different. The Arabs did not share the moral scruples of the Christians concerning the slave trade, and saw no reason for denying themselves the handsome profits to be derived from it. Nor were the slave-running dhows much troubled by the naval patrols sent to intercept them; the short sea passage between the major east coast slave ports and those of Arabia made interception much more difficult than it proved to be on the Atlantic slave run. The only way to destroy this trade, it was soon agreed, was to discover its sources of supply. It was the search for these, more than anything else probably, that underlay the explorations of the tropical African interior in the middle and late nineteenth century. From these explorations came, first, the realization that, with local exceptions, the native people were living in the jaws of darkness outside the broad stream of human progress; and, second, the belief that, given stable and humane governments, the greater part of their territory could be developed to the mutual profit of both the developed and the developer. To the Christian churches the realization was a call to missionary enterprise. Scarcely had the explorers returned before mis sions were claiming the kingdoms of Africa for God and His Christ. In deed, some of the early missionaries were as much explorers as preachers, teachers and doctors. To the manufacturers of the time, the belief was a call to increased output, which alone would lift them out of the pit of depression they had recently fallen into and set their feet on the ground of firm demand. Before long, nationals of every leading state in Europe were running loose in land that was still largely unmapped and, on that account, was often supposed to be no mans land. Some of them found their intentions misunderstood. Others returned with more malaria than minerals. Others did not return. But one thing was soon agreed upon: whether it was a matter of developing natural resources or evangelizing peoples, some form of government sponsorship, or at least government protection, was needed. Although few, if any, of the European governments were eager to give such sponsorship or protection, they were reluctant to see others provide it and thereby acquire perhaps important new national advan tages. The Partitioning And so the whole region of tropical Africa, with the exception of the already sovereign Liberia and Ethiopia, came to be staked out among the

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major European powers, Great Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, Portu gal, Spain and Italy. The speed of the partitioning was a little less than seemly; it was all done in forty years. The results were often as unhappy for the governed as they were unflattering to the governors. While lofty humanitarian principles were voiced in the council chambers and on the lecture platforms of Europe, the practices adopted by the men charged with the responsibility of securing their countries best interests were frequently neither very lofty nor very humane. Whoever has handled the treaties to which ignorant chieftains affixed their wavering Xs as symbols of their acceptance of the white mans rule cannot escape the conviction that varying degrees of deception must have been employed to persuade Africans into signing papers which they could hardly under stand. 1 To make matters worse, the task of humanizing the society of tropical Africa and raising its low levels of production and consumption was found to exceed the financial resources of most of the colonial powers. Almost without exception, the cost of running African colonies proved greater than the revenues derived from taxation a state of affairs not calculated to endear itself to the electorate at home or to make for liberal, long term development policies in the field. In the circumstances, the coloniz ing powers were generally only too willing to leave the initiative in eco nomic affairs to such private companies and individuals as were able to put up the necessary capital and find the necessary manpower. In some instances, they left the initiative in political affairs to private companies and individuals. Also, they were often willing to condone treatment of the African that was out of harmony with their protestations of concern for his life and liberty. Some of the methods used to recruit labor and keep it differed from those of the slave driver in nothing but name, and resistance to them by the conscript not infrequently led to countermeasures of the most brutal sort. All the same, the early accomplishments of the colonizing powers were far from negligible. By the beginning of the present century, the worst of the slave trade was over.2 By then, intertribal warfare, as endemic as malaria in most sections, had had its heyday and was proving increasingly unprofitable to the participants. Christian missions, many of them com bining medical and educational work with evangelism, were to be found in almost every colonial territory and in almost every part of every terri tory. Their work may not always have been as wise as it was kind, nor
1 H. R. Rudin, Africa in Perspective, Journal of International Affairs, Vol. VII (1953), No. 2, p. 121. 2 It has not been stamped out everywhere even today. As recently as October 1954 an African woman and two men were sentenced to four years imprisonment [in Kampala, Uganda] for attempting to sell another African into slavery. New York Times, October 21, 1954. And since 1945 the French government has more than once accused Saudi Arabia of encouraging African Moslems to make the had] in order to increase the slave labor pool in that country.

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as kind as it was sincere, but it wrought a mighty transformation in the land nonetheless. Sir Philip Mitchell, speaking out of his unexcelled wealth of experience, has placed on record his conviction that without the Bible and the determined men and women who carried it and its message of hope hope of the end of the slave trade, of prevention of epidemics and relief of famine, of protection from the savage whims of tyrants or the obscene orgies of sorcerers there would have been no achievements worthy of the name.3 By 1900, too, roads and railways had been built, steamers had begun to ply the larger lakes and rivers, postal and tele graph services were in operation, and the staggering task of making the African tropics a more rewarding setting for both indigenous and Euro pean enterprise was well begun. Unevenness of the Early Accomplishments Some of these early colonial accomplishments were more substantial than others, and some regions soon had more to show than others. This was almost bound to be the case in a country so uneven in endowment and opportunity. The damp equatorial climate of Douala took a much heavier toll of the Frenchmans vitality and initiative than the cool upland climate of Nairobi took of the Englishmans. The Portuguese emigrant found con siderably less difficulty in establishing himself as a farmer on the high savannas of Angola than in the lowland forests of Mozambique. The vast mineral wealth of Katanga quickly proved to be a much stronger lure to investors and settlers than the equally vast and more durable forest wealth of the lower Congo. The strategists, on their part, could not fail to be impressed by the greater significance of some areas than others. The headwaters of the Nile, by virtue of the control they exercise over the water supplies of the Sudan and Egypt, were of infinitely more interest to the British than the headwaters of the Niger, which exercise no such control over the water supply of Nigeria. The Germans, newly embarked on an imperial career, were for the most part more interested in the coastlines of the Cameroons, Southwest Africa and Tanganyika than in the back country, which was less likely to be attacked by armies than their coaling stations were by navies. The patchiness of the early accomplishments of the colonizers was also due in part to the unevenness of the human material with which they worked. The Yoruba of Nigeria were from the beginning the readiest of learners; before the nineteenth century was out they had begun to send their sons to Great Britain for higher education. The Kikuyu were no less eager or apt to learn, and much the same was true of the Ganda, the Chagga, the Wolof and the Ashanti. On the other hand, the Shilluk, the
3 In an address (Africa and the West in Historical Perspective) given at the Johns Hopkins Conference on Contemporary Africa, August 1954. See C. Grove Haines (ed.), Africa Today, Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore, 1955, pp. 3-24.

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Dinka, the Giriama, the Masai, the pagans of central Nigeria, to name but a few, showed very little interest in updating their economy or their social customs. But there were other differences between colony and colony. There were differences in the intellectual caliber and spiritual convictions of the colonizers, the administrators and the peoples who made laws for the African and saw to their execution. There were even more radical dif ferences in philosophical approach to the whole range of colonial interests not least the interests of the peoples whose lands were being colonized. Almost from the start it became apparent that the colonial powers had no intention of hewing to a common line, whether in regard to the economic role to be played by their African possessions or the direction and pace of the developments to be undertaken in them. It is with these differences and the outcome of them that we shall be concerned in this chapter. The Nature of Colonial Policy It is not possible for a country with a colony or protectorate or other kind of dependency to escape having some intention about the way of running it. The way that country addresses itself to the problems it en counters in that colony is determined, directly or indirectly, either wholly or in part, by this intention. When, therefore, we speak of the African colonial policy of the Belgians or the British, the French, Italians, Portu guese or Spanish, we are in fact speaking of the image of the Africa they are seeking to bring into being. The stream of colonial policy has many tributaries. Some flow more strongly than others, and for longer periods of time. Some disappear temporarily, only to reappear when the climate of public opinion changes. Some are perennial, deriving their strength from deep-seated sources of national wisdom and pride. But almost all the tributaries have their watershed in the homeland and they are more sensitive to changes in in tellectual and moral climate there than elsewhere. Even in these vocal and fluid times, when things done in secret in Mozambique are soon thereafter shouted from the housetops of Manhattan, colonial policies still tend to be shaped as much by the constraints and compulsions of the national temperament and the cherished ways of doing things at home as by the logic of events in the colonies and the pronunciamentos of political scientists in the council chambers of the United Nations. Characteristically, a colonial or 4native policy is not a body of care fully mapped and measured doctrine the work of a group of men sitting in a European office to be consciously applied today and changed or discarded tomorrow by the stroke of a pen. Rather is it a pool of ideas and convictions that has been preserved by the guardians of that nations culture and into which each new generation has poured its experience. The pool may not appear very attractive to the foreign

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observer, but it is rich in the things which have given significance to that nations history and have been worked into its constitution and which, for better or worse, that nation is determined to perpetuate wherever it is given half a chance. The objectives of its policy may never have been precisely defined, but they are generally perceived by those entrusted with colonial administration as surely as most Americans perceive, with out being able to specify fully, the responsibilities of their citizenship. The absence of clearly stated political premises and objectives can be a considerable impediment to the student of colonial affairs, but seldom has it seemed to bother the colonial administrator. BELGIAN POLICY There are those who say that until 1958 the Belgians had no colonial policy. And in a sense this is true, for the Belgian approach to the devel opment of the Congo has been avowedly empirical. Lacking overseas territories until the early years of the present century, and deprived there fore of long administrative experience in the colonial field, the people of Belgium inclined to the view that there was no good historical, prac tical or sentimental reason why they should saddle themselves with the ill-fitting harness of other nations making why, in fact, they should not make their own, bit by bit, as they went along. This they sought to do. While they did not have all the success with it they could have wished, they certainly learned a great deal about the harness-making business. What they learned did nothing to weaken their faith in the wisdom of empiricism. Indeed, their willingness to modify or remake any Congolese law in the interest of orderly development was never more evident than during the closing days of their colonial administration. To the extent that nobody can tell with certainty what the social, eco nomic and political consequences of orderly development are likely to be more than a few months ahead, the Belgians can perhaps be said to have had no colonial policy even as late as the middle of 1959. But to the extent that they were determined to make every man, woman and child the beneficiary of such development, the Belgians can be said to have been policy-conscious since the early years of the century. For most of this time, the Belgian concept of orderly colonial develop ment rested on three premises. The first of these is that the Africans basic needs are economic: better food and more of it, better houses and more plumbing, more money to spend and more things to buy a higher stand ard of living generally. The second premise is that once you have a vigor ous national economy, it is possible to have a stable society, for a stable society means schools, colleges, welfare centers, hospitals, dispensaries, prisons, and the armies of trained technicians that go with them, all of which cost money to build and maintain money which could only come,

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22Q

in the amounts needed, from a thriving and efficiently run local economy. Belgium, never a rich country and only a little more than one eightieth the size of the Congo, could not be expected to find this kind of money in her own coffers. The third premise is that it would be time enough to talk of political goals when the economic and social goals had been reached. Meanwhile, so the argument ran, it could be assumed that the well-fed, well-housed, reasonably healthy and secure African would not object to a little shepherding and directing perhaps even a little experimenta tion in the ordering of his civic life. Economic and Social Development Fortunately, the Belgians did not find it too difficult to provide the Congo with a vigorous economy. The territory is generously supplied with natural resources mineral and vegetable. It has a large reservoir of manpower that can be and frequently is increased by immigration from adjacent countries. And from the time the Belgian government took over its direction in 1908, it was fortunate in the caliber of the men guiding its development. The economic programs undertaken by them were remark able as much for their humanitarianism as their foresight. Like other in vestors, the Belgians were interested in the possibility of quick and profit able returns, and they had their share of them; but on the whole they were more interested in the long-term consequences of their intervention. They early recognized that there was an upper limit to the number of people that could be drawn into their industrial orbit without serious in jury to the indigenous economy, and that any such injury would be fatal to their plans for the better feeding of the Congolese people. How to make the most of this labor supply became a major preoccupation of the government and of the great corporations from the 1920s onward, and it is widely agreed by those who have studied the problem that they did make the most of it. Thanks to the prosperity that came to the Congo, especially after World War II, there was no shortage of funds with which to under write the costs of the governments social program. Instead of having to inquire, How much will it cost? administrators were in the happy, almost unique, position of being able to ask, What do we need? Their needs, of course, were enormous, and though money goes further in the Congo than in some other places, it is likely to be a long time before all the needs are fully met. But by the end of 1959 the accomplishments were already very great, however assessed. No one who has visited the African satellite cities around Leopoldville, with their fine schools, hospitals, wel fare centers, dispensaries, fully equipped housing developments, recrea tion halls and sports facilities, can doubt either that the Belgians took their social responsibilities seriously or that a large number of Africans responded to their newly acquired social opportunities with enthusiasm.

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This does not mean that everybody in the Congo is well off. lik e every other country in the world, it still has its underprivileged peoples. Nor does it mean that everyone there is healthy, though the Congo system of medical surveillance does mean that any city dweller with an ounce of initiative and the wit to hold a job has just about as good a chance of keeping fit as any citizen of Chicago. Nor does it mean that the Belgians were satisfied with things as they were. On the contrary, they had long known that sewers, schools, sports stadiums and, for that matter, ten-year development plans were only the paraphernalia, not the proof, of prog ress. And they would have been the first to admit that, away from the big towns, mines and plantations, even the paraphernalia were frequently still lacking. Political Development Important and appreciated as the economic and social gains were, they were far from satisfying everybody. This, too, the Belgians had long known. They had seen the winds of nationalism rise to disquiet the spirits of men in almost every territory around them, and they had no reason to suppose that those winds would die down when they reached the borders of the Belgian Congo. With every African in Brazzaville, just across the Congo River from Leopoldville, enjoying (down to 1958) the rights of French citizenship; with the people of Uganda actively working toward independence and those of the Republic of Sudan already inde pendent; and with a steadily growing number of Angolan Africans quali fying for Portuguese citizenship, there could be no question of creating a political shelter belt around the Congo. And this the Belgians had understood. Their task, as they saw it, was to accommodate the desire of the educated African for a voice in the running of the country to their own determination to go on being, so to speak, the voice trainer and impresario. In addressing themselves to this task in the postwar period, they made the following assumptions: that they intended to stay in the Congo; that they intended (in the phrase of a former Governor-General, Leo Petillon) to live together with the African, while remaining ourselves; that they needed the intelligent, uncompelled support of the African quite as much as he needed their capital, skill, and administrative and political ma turity; and that there was much worth preserving in the African order, including the African political order. Translated into action, these assumptions spelled paternalism, African and expatriate both being treated by the government much as a parent treats a minor. Until the late 1950s nobody had a vote, or any effective means of protest. Until then, too, all legislative power was vested in the metropolitan government, for fear, so it was said, that white colonials might exert a preponderant influence and thus jeopardize the welfare

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of the African peoples. 4 Almost the only people not regarded paternalistically were the officers of the Societe Generale de Belgique and the Union Miniere du Haut-Katanga. Controlling, as they did, a large part of the economy of the country, they were consistently in a position to put pres sure on the government; and they did not hesitate to do so. However, the government frequently showed itself capable of resisting such pres sure, just as it did of resisting pressure from its Congolese wards. Further, the government was alive to the importance of good color relations. There was very little discriminatory legislation on its books, and Europeans who exhibited racist tendencies frequently incurred the governments disfavor and were even asked to leave the country. True, there was always an unofficial color bar or, as some would prefer to call it, a culture bar, based on standards of hygiene, interests and abilities; but it could be crossed. Thus, there was no legal reason to prevent an African who could afford to from living in the European quarter of any Congo city, or eating in any European restaurant. Provided he had the ability and qualifications, any African could attend a European high school and either of the two universities. In the latter part of the 1950s the doors of the civil service were open to Africans on the same terms. A number of Africans were appointed, after competitive examination, to posts traditionally reserved to Europeans. Other qualified Africans were named to the Governor-GeneraFs council and other advisory bodies. From the middle 1950s onward, Africans sat together in numerical equi librium with Europeans on certain local councils, rural and municipal. Beginning in 1957, Africans and Europeans living in the towns of Leo poldville, Elisabethville and Jadotville were able to elect their own com munal burgomasters. Setting the Stage for Independence What the Belgians were slower to see was that even enlightened paternalism is only a way of upbringing, and that the more enlightened it is, the more impatient those being brought up are to see the end of it. Until the disturbances of late 1958 and early 1959 the Belgians had not begun to talk of the end, let alone of a date for the end. As late as the fall of 1959 they were still reticent about dates, but on January 13, 1959 they did at least begin to talk about ends. On that day the Belgian government produced a plan (long in the making) that provided for a rapid increase in self-government. Among other things, the plan provided
4 George W. Carpenter in a lecture (The Belgian Congo and the United States: Policies and Relationships) given under the auspices of the Norman Wait Harris Memorial Foundation at the University of Chicago, November 1953. See Calvin W. Stillman (ed.), Africa in the Modern World, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1955, p. 220.

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for the immediate setting up, in both the rural and urban areas of the country, of popularly elected councils that would take over the responsi bility of running their local affairs. It also provided for the setting up of 135 territorial councils, composed largely of members chosen by universal suffrage, and vested with wide executive powers; and of six provincial councils, the members of which were to be elected by the territorial coun cilors. The main function of the provincial councilors was to advise the provincial governors who represented the Governor-General of the Congo. The plan also provided for the formation of a General Council composed mainly of persons chosen by the local councilors and of a Legislative Council composed of 12 members designated by the six pro vincial councils. (The General Council, which replaced the existing Gov ernment Council which advised the Governor-General, was intended to be a prelude to a house of representatives. The Legislative Council was intended, in time, to become a kind of senate.) On the same day, King Baudouin broadcast a message to the Congolese people promising that it was the firm resolve of his government to lead the Congolese peoples, without petty recriminations but also without un due haste, to independence in peace and prosperity. The early reactions to it were mixed. Some African leaders mainly, it would seem, those who had previously not thought it necessary to have views on the sub ject expressed themselves satisfied with it. Some other African lead ers notably those in the Leopoldville and Matadi areas, where the chief disturbances occurred received it coldly. Most of the European set tlers were equally cold toward it; for them an independent Congo meant a Congo in which they would be likely to have as little independence as the African had previously had. Twelve months later the government announced that it would give the colony its independence on June 30, 1960. In the intervening period it had apparently come to believe that haste can no more be curbed than recriminations can be avoided, and that in the matter of birth, whether of a nation or a child, the shorter the labor, the better for the mother if not always for the child. Ruanda-Urundi. In many respects the colonial experience of RuandaUrundi has paralleled that of the Belgian Congo. But in matters of policy the two territories have tended to develop along somewhat different lines. The main reason for this is that Ruanda-Urundi is administered as a trusteeship territory, and the United Nations Trusteeship Council is more interested in political than in economic and social targets. Recog nizing this, the Belgian administration of the territory has since 1945 pur sued a planned and deliberate program of political reforms. In the re port published following its tour of Ruanda-Urundi in 1957, the U. N. Visiting Mission confessed to being well pleased with these reforms so far as they went.
There can be no doubt that the political reforms of 1952, the institution of a whole system of indigenous councils, the systematic encouragement of the

C OL O N I A L P O L I C I E S indigenous population to abandon certain of the customs underlying the feudal regime, the holding of elections, and particularly the 1956 elections, and the transformation of the Council of the Vice-Government General into a General Council, are measures which have gradually but profoundly modified the politi cal atmosphere in Ruanda-Urundi. The mission considers them a guarantee that the favorable advancement of the country will continue.5

But the pace of reform has been slow, and in the Belgian view cannot be greatly sped up in the present cultural context. To set target dates as some members of the Trusteeship Council have been urging for the attainment of self-government, whether partial or complete, would be to hinder rather than forward the work. The important thing, the report continues, is to ensure a genuine self-government in harmony with the real and lasting progress made by the people. 6 This kind of harmony, most people agree, is timeless; it cannot be scheduled. But even at the policy level, it would look as if the hopes of the Bel gians for Ruanda-Urundi are not very different from those they cherish for the Congolese nation. According to a recent utterance of the Gov ernor of Ruanda-Urundi, What Belgium is seeking through the social and economic advancement of the masses and through the political educa tion of this community now being formed, is, in the final stage, the birth of a viable state which will maintain the closest ties with Belgium. 7

B R IT ISH POLICY There was a time in the British Commonwealth, as elsewhere, when colonies were regarded as either a source of income or a place of settle ment, or both, for Europeans. Native rights and welfare counted for little, and nothing was said about tutelage toward self-government. Dur ing the last half century a different view has gained ground, a view which has been variously expressed but seldom more plainly than by Arthur Creech-Jones, onetime Secretary of State for the Colonies. The purpose of British colonial policy, he asserted, is to guide the colonial terri tories to responsible self-government within the Commonwealth in con ditions that ensure to the people both a fair standard of living and freedom from oppression from any quarter. 8 The view has been endorsed by every one of his successors, and would undoubtedly be subscribed to by the great majority of British policy makers and parliamentarians. The statement is worth examining, since it was carefully weighed. The word self-government implies absolute political independence, but not automatically full membership in the comity of Commonwealth nations.
5 The Belgian Congo Today (Belgian Congo and Ruanda-Urundi Information and Public Relations Office, Brussels), July 1958, pp. 4-5. 6 Ibid., p. 5. 7 Ibid. 8 The Colonial Territories, 1949-50, Cmd. 7958, H.M.S.O., London, 1950.

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For, as Kenneth Bradley reminds us in his working paper, from which the quotation is taken,
The grant of self-government to a colony is a matter only for the British and the colonial government concerned, but any application by the latter for full membership of the Commonwealth would also have to be considered by the other Commonwealth governments. In the past no difficulty has arisen - no objections were raised to the full membership of India, Pakistan, Ceylon and Ghana but it is not so certain that this will always be the case.

The people of the statement are those, of every community resident in a colony, who, as Bradley puts it, by sinking their roots in its soil and by contributing to its development, have established their right to a say in its future. In west Africa these are the indigenous peoples. The Euro peans, Asians and Levantines have their roots elsewhere. They do not intend to retire in west Africa, let alone die there or raise an Africanborn generation there to carry on their work. For a variety of reasons, of which the mosquito is perhaps the most potent, west Africa never has been settler country. At first considered its major disqualification, this fact has of recent years helped more than any other to encourage the peaceful development of self-government. In east and central Africa, on the other hand, several communities can claim to have dug their roots deep into the ground. The forebears of the present Bantu population were living in the region upward of five hundred years ago. There were Persian and Arab settlements on the east coast before 1000 A.D. British and other European settlers began to arrive about sixty years ago and for two generations have owned and farmed land and been responsible for every form of economic development and social progress. The Indians and Pakistanis started to immigrate about the same time and are now firmly established in their own busi nesses and as skilled artisans throughout east Africa. They together com prise the peoples of east and central Africa, and self-government for the countries concerned does not mean self-government by and for the Africans alone, but by all the communities for the peoples as a whole. This conception of colonial peoples is, in Bradleys view, extremely im portant. It lies at the root of British policy and affects every aspect of it. No less laden with meaning is the reference to a fair standard of liv ing. In this phrase, to quote again from Bradley,
lies hidden much of the wisdom of Britain's three hundred years' experience in colonial administration. That experience has clearly shown that if any form of political democracy is to have a chance of survival it must be based on carefully laid foundations . . . There must be in the community enough people who are capable of judging between political issues, and between the honest leader and the demagogue; enough men of integrity and public spirit to provide the states men; and enough capable people to run the machinery of government. In other words, the first prerequisite to self-government is an adequate middle class of educated people in business and the professions to provide leadership. This in turn implies that reasonable standards of living, health and education must

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have been made available . . . Only if the majority of the peasants and in dustrial workers are healthy enough to be productive, productive enough to rise above the mere subsistence level, and educated enough to understand something of civilized values can they throw up and support an adequate supply of essen tial leaders. It is also necessary that a self-governing democracy should be eco nomically viable. Unless the new state can stand on its own feet economically, it will not long retain its independence. All this is implied in the words a fair standard of living.

The final phrase of Arthur Creech-Jones statement freedom from oppression from any quarter is perhaps the most crucial. It implies an ability in the candidate for self-government to withstand both external aggression and internal corruption and conspiracy an ability to curb the knaves who exploit the fools, and to confound the fools who claim that self-government is automatically good government. The British have been in the colonial business too long not to know how easily the dema gogues of today can become, by dint of a little spellbinding, the dictators of tomorrow. Nor does anyone have to tell them that the hand of the oppressor falls heaviest upon those who are youngest in the art of political self-defense. It is easy to make statements of political intention. To put them into effect is another matter. It is difficult enough when the people are familiar with the processes and institutions of democracy. It is much more difficult when the people are, for the most part, strangers to them and unprepared for the intellectual and emotional demands that have to be made upon them. It is extremely difficult when differences of social (including lin guistic and religious) background are compounded with those of the physical environment, educational and economic attainment, and political attitudes to create a dozen diverse "situations within a single colony. The problem, therefore, of preparing for self-government roughly 60 mil lion Africans 9 whose almost only common bond is the color of their skin, along with roughly 750,000 Europeans and Asians, who do not even have that in common, is awesome indeed. It is not one to be resolved by ex pediency or wishful thinking. It calls for bold political strategems, ardu ous economic and social development programs, an almost God-like pa tience with human infirmities not all of them African and a sense of humility which administrators habituated to being their own bosses must surely find elusive. In short, it requires unlimited gumption, and grace. Economic and Social Development At the outset, the British government made it clear that, while it had no intention of making the African pay taxes into the British Treasury, it had every intention of making him pay his way at the earliest possible moment. Though very few colonies did manage to pay their way, this
9 Before Ghana and the Republic of Sudan became independent the number was close to 75 million.

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remained government policy until 1929. In that year the first of several Colonial Development and Welfare acts was passed, making it possible for the colonies to get capital grants and loans for economic and social purposes. The amounts of money made available were not large, but in the aggregate they were large enough to encourage the various colonial governments to raise their sights and, from 1945 onward, to carry on a determined assault against the Africans ancient trinity of evil ignorance, poverty and disease. In this the colonial governments were greatly assisted by the postwar rise in demand for, and prices of, many of their staple exports. Some of them also managed to attract useful amounts of private capital and loans from the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and various United States agencies. Approximately half of all the moneys so derived in this period have gone into economic projects. Among these were such large undertakings as the Owen Falls hydroelectric power project and the Tanganyika Groundnut Scheme. Most of the projects have been much more modest in scope, being concerned with such things as conservation of soil and water supplies and the improvement of native stock and crops; that is, they have been aimed at benefiting the African directly rather than indirectly. Whether or not the economic progress made as a result of these development programs has been on a big enough scale to keep pace with the rate of population increase, it is probably too early to say. But this much is certain: unless the colonies can learn to feed themselves better, and to wring from the soil larger and more fre quent crops, for cash as well as for consumption, there is little point in talking about social and political development, because there will be little to develop. Throughout this "planning era and, indeed, since long before it the British government has known that the success or failure of its colonial plans would rest ultimately on what it was able to make of that most important of all Africas underdeveloped resources, the African him self. In its view even the fight against hunger is as much a fight against mans ignorance as against the lands impediments. Accordingly, almost every pound put into economic development has been matched by a pound for social welfare. In a very real sense, of course, every pound for the one is a pound for the other, since in the Africans Africa, economy and society are simply the two sides of a single coin, the shape of almost every economic action being set by the social mold of the group. It is perhaps for this reason that the British administrator has never wasted much time discussing the relative importance of education, health and economic pro grams in promoting the Africans well-being, and preparing him for the responsibilities of self-government. They are interdependent. The untutored Yoruba cries out for education, but what is education without health? The educated Yoruba is eager for freedom, but what is freedom without security? And how can his land be secure, unless it is

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in good heart and strong in sinew in the flow of sustenance to and from its fields, forests, pastures and waters? How can these things be derived without a strong sense of civic responsibility? How can this be generated without education? Political Development It may be contended, however, that the most significant feature of British colonial policy continues to be its provision of opportunities for the responsible African "to run his own show. Successive British governments have argued that the education for selfgovernment begins at home, in the local community, and that the best way for African peoples to learn to use the vote in national affairs is to learn to use it, or at least how to exercise their individual judgment, in local affairs. After all, British people, including British colonial administrators, are democrats by tradition and conviction, and, on that account, as much given to developing democratic institutions wherever they go as they are to developing golf courses and gardens. As was indicated earlier, democratic institutions of a sort existed in parts of Africa long before the British administrator got there. Many African groups were in the habit of administering their affairs through councils of elders. While the members of these councils were seldom chosen by popular vote, their powers were strictly circumscribed and fre quently subject to abrogation. Even among those peoples who believed in "chiefly rule, democratic procedures were quite common. It was cus tomary for the successor to a dead chief to be chosen by the chiefs own people through their councils, and these councils had an uncanny knack of choosing the right man. In the best democratic tradition, his power could not be bequeathed. To begin with, the British administrator had difficulty, understandably enough, in spotting exactly how some of the Africans political institutions worked. More than once, he found himself backing the wrong man. But at least he was generally wise enough not to interfere unduly with the Africans institutions. In some cases, it was not so much a matter of wis dom as of want of men and money to do otherwise. When Sir Frederick (later Lord) Lugard introduced, around the turn of the century, the policy of indirect rule in northern Nigeria by recognizing the existing adminis trations of the emirates, he did so on grounds of common sense and economy. As time went on, though, British administrators everywhere began to see that tribal institutions could and should be developed to equip the Africans for the larger life of the Commonwealth. To this end, customary courts of justice were given official status and considerable powers in the handling of civil and criminal cases. British administrative officers ceased to try cases, except those of a serious nature; they became instead advisers to the native courts. Along with these duties, the chiefs

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and their councils were given executive responsibilities, as native au thorities, with power to make by-laws and see that they were obeyed. Later they were allowed to levy local taxes and spend them for the benefit of their people. "They became, says Bradley, "embryo local authorities in the modern British sense, and local government was born. (Unfor tunately, the chiefs and elders proved less successful in the executive than in the judicial sphere, probably because their functions, except in time of war, had been almost exclusively judicial. They had never had to collect taxes, make roads, control farming methods, or try to improve water sup plies and housing conditions.) Meanwhile, education was making its converts, and the towns, mines and plantations were attracting many thousands of "powerless people from the matrix of tribal society. When these people returned to their homes they grew restive. Some wanted more liberty, others more prog ress; some wanted responsibility, others license. A rift began to open between young and old, between the unlettered, though far from un cultured, and the schooled. The next step, therefore, was to get young educated men elected to the councils, and to persuade the elders to satisfy their demands for a bigger voice in the business of the community by making them responsible for such matters as the state of the roads, the local water supply, and sanita tion. Where the idea was tried, it rarely failed to catch on. Understand ably, it caught on fastest among those groups which had developed only a rudimentary form of political organization, and among those where the pressures of nationalism were still weak. In British East and Central Africa (except perhaps in the rather autocratic kingdom of Buganda and the closely knit "empire of Barotseland on the upper Zambezi) the policy of treating local government as a school for democracy has proved its worth. It has provided the ambitious educated African with much-needed opportunities for self-expression. Also, it has made him see and feel the problem of administering a backward country to say nothing of raising its economic, social and political status as no amount of telling could ever have done. In British West Africa the story has been different. For one reason or another, the full superstructure of local government native courts, au thorities and so on was barely completed when it was overwhelmed by the headlong rush of the Gold Coast and Nigeria down the steep places of democracy into the sea of self-government. No sooner were the quasiautonomous central governments installed in Accra and Lagos than they abandoned the principle of indirect rule in their southern territories, relegating their chiefs and elders to their traditional roles as guardians of custom, religion and land, and erecting in its place a Western system of elected local councils, complete with chairmen, committees and clerks. In this system, the British administrators role (where one exists no

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longer at all in Ghana, of course, and only until 1960 in Nigeria) has be come advisory. But it is a busy one. The decentralization of executive power and the passion of "new-broom politicians for sweeping away all the ills of society overnight demand an army of local government officials which the British administrator must help to train. Until they are trained, there is bound to be muddle and inefficiency, if not corrup tion and nepotism, which he must do his best to contain. Regional Applications So far we have been concerned with the general directives of British colonial policy in Africa. We must now see how they are affected by considerations of geography, history and race. West Africa Until 1957, the year of Ghanas independence, the British were re sponsible for the administration of six west African territories: four dependencies (Gambia, Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast and Nigeria) and two trusteeship territories (British Togoland, which was administered on behalf of the United Nations as part of the adjoining Gold Coast, and the British Cameroons, which adjoins Nigeria and is similarly admin istered). Since these territories do not have any British "settler communities, there has never been any question, in recent colonial times at least, that sooner or later all six would be given the option of being self-governing. The questions which have arisen between the governors and the governed have mostly had to do with the timing of developments, not the target. Needless to say, the governed have generally belonged to the "sooner school of thought; the governors, to the "later school. In most instances, the "sooner school has prevailed. Less easy of resolution are the internal questions, for the inhabitants of these territories are far from being alike ethnically, or living alike economically and socially, or thinking alike politically.
Gambia is the smallest of the six territories. It consists of a narrow strip of country on either side of the river from which it takes its name. It has a population of less than 300,000 and an income (derived mainly from the export of peanuts) of about 4 million. Whether such a terri tory could ever stand on its own feet as a self-governing state is question able. A tidy-minded world government would probably prefer to see it united with Senegal, which all but encloses it and to which it belongs geographically. For the present, the Gambians, to whom the government has been giving more and more scope, seem content to leave things as they are.

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Sierra Leone is much larger and it has a population of more than 2 mil lion. Further, its economy rests on a broader base. But it is disunited in culture and feeling. In the Freetown region live some 30,000 Creoles, descendants of liberated slaves and exiled British prostitutes, who have become one of the most advanced and respected communities in west Africa. The rest of the country is populated by indigenous, more back ward people, from whom the Creoles have tended to hold aloof. The British government has recognized the cultural difference between the two peoples. The inhabitants of the Colony, as the Creole area around Free town is called, have had the vote and democratic local government for some years. The people of the hinterland, the so-called Protectorate, were not administered at all before 1896 and have been administered since then by a rather slowly developing system of indirect rule. The government has never been too happy about the division, or the desire of the Creoles to perpetuate it. In 1948 the Colonial Office sug gested to the people of Sierra Leone that their rather rudimentary Legis lative Council should be reformed so as to provide both for an 'unofficial majority and for more adequate representation of the Protectorate. These proposals were not received kindly by the Creoles and the other inhabit ants of the Colony, who saw that in any democratically derived legisla tive system they would be heavily outweighed. Being in the main a sensi ble and philosophic people, however, the Creoles realized that revolt would be futile and bowed to the Colonial Office. Under the 1958 consti tution there is an elected majority in the 51-man legislature (now called the House of Representatives), the Colony being represented by 14 mem bers and the Protectorate by 24. Most of the remaining seats are filled by indirectly elected chiefs. What will happen when the British leave in 1961 is not yet clear, but the chances are that the leaders of the Colony and the Protectorate will continue to take the liveliest interest in each others affairs when they are not preoccupied with their own.

The Gold Coast, now Ghana, has come to be thought of in many quar ters as the Colonial Offices "prize exhibit. It completed the strenuous, obstacle-strewn course all aspirants for political independence are re quired to cover in less than a decade, just about the fastest time on record. Its leaders were not slow to show they were capable of taking over, and of proving the Nkrumah thesis that the only way to play the harp is to play the harp. (The harps may not always have sounded very alluring and there were undoubtedly times in the pre-independence years when it looked as if the Colonial Office would run out of harps, or at least out of teachers.) By 1957 the colony had demonstrated an ability to conduct its legislative affairs in the manner of a British parliamentary democracy, complete with universal adult suffrage, secret ballot and "loyal opposi tion. Not least, it had demonstrated an ability to pay its way, and even to build up capital reserves sufficient to cushion falls in the price of cocoa,

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its leading export, and to underwrite the cost of large programs of educa tional, research and welfare work. At the same time, the Gold Coast "exhibited' better in some lights than others, as none knew better than the Colonial Office. Take, for instance, the matter of its "uncooperative minorities, as Dr. Kwame Nkrumah has long been in the habit of calling all those groups that do not share his enthusiasm for the Convention People's Party. The people of the south the Colony proper, from which most of the party's leaders were drawn were more often at loggerheads than in love with the Ashanti of the center and the Moslem and pagan tribesmen of the Northern Territories. For a while it looked as if the fires of nationalism might be strong enough to weld them together politically, but the nearer independence drew, the lower the fires burned. By 1954 the Ashanti were uncooperative to the point of being in open revolt against the party. A year later, a group of northern leaders declared that
unless special arrangements are made by Her Majesty's Government for the protection of the people of the Northern Territories before handing over these large minority groups . . . to a Government dominated by those whom that population still regard with some suspicion for fear that they may become oppressors, we shall oppose . . . self-government or may even secede before such a declaration.10

Nor was their suspicion unfounded, for only a few days earlier (Decem ber 10,1955) Dr. Nkrumah had spoken of having the police and the army at his disposal, and being able to use both, if he so wished. Unfortunately as it seemed to many there was nothing the Colonial Office could do at this late date but counsel moderation and remind the Gold Coast government that to deny its people the right to oppose was to deny the very thing that was responsible for its existence. But the minority question is much more complex than this. Within the countrys borders there are more than a hundred native states. Dur ing the colonial era most of them remained untutored in anything but tribal living, were sharply divided on matters of religion and politics, and had very different ideas about what constituted good government. To offer self-government to such a country might well have seemed more an act of folly than of statesmanship, and many people, in and out of the Gold Coast, were not slow to say so. The events of the independence era have, it seems, done little to change the opinions of such people. They find no evidence that the Ghanaians are governed more efficiently, more justly or more understanding^ than were the Gold Coasters of ten or twenty years ago. On the contrary, they read of muddle and manana; of corruption among the high and intimidation of the lowly; of open con tempt for the traditional rulers, the chiefs and their elders, and the ven erable political institutions of which they were the guardians; and, worst
10 Quoted in New Commonwealth, January 23, 1956, p. 91. The Northern Terri tories have since been renamed the Northern Region.

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of all perhaps, a cynical disregard for the plighted word. But at least a new insight has been gained into mans relationship to man; a peoples regard has been won, and a new dimension dignity has been added to their daily lives. These are achievements of which any "abdicating power might feel proud.
'Nigeria is the largest and most heterogeneous of the British West Af rican dependencies, and herein lies, perhaps, its biggest problem. So far there has been little sign that the various political entities into which it is divided can sink their differences in the cause of national unity. As in Ghana, the northern part of the country, the Northern Region, is Moslem, conservative and backward educationally. It covers about half the total area of the country and has more than half the people. It is ruled by emirs and sultans. Its culture, as well as its religion, came from the Sahara and beyond. Consequently its people, mainly Fulani and Hausa, have little in common with the negro peoples of the southern half of the country. Such close and peaceful contacts as have developed between the two are largely the result of economic necessity and Fax Britannica. Political democracy has in recent years begun to make inroads on the old society, but not, to use Bradleys phrase, "with the speed and fire of the ebullient south. Where political changes have been introduced, they have been compelled rather than willed. It is not that the northern leaders are op posed to change, but rather that they doubt the ability of west Africans in general and their Moslem followers in particular to make democracy work. The southern half of the country, as in Ghana also, is much more highly developed economically, more progressive culturally, and more nationallyminded. Up to now, it has produced most of the countrys leaders. The Western Region of the south is inhabited mainly by the Yoruba, who were giants in the land centuries before the British came. They have shown themselves to be proud, intelligent and eager for material progress, and astute in trade and politics. Since World War II their long-dormant nationalism has been fanned into flame by the leaders of their Action Group (under Chief Abafemi Awolowo). The Eastern Region is inhabited by a number of ethnic groups which have, until recently, practiced a species of apartheid and have had little to do with one another. The most numerous of these groups, and by far the most powerful, are the Ibo, the "rugged individualists of west Africa. More than any other people the Ibo have been eager to grasp the sweets of Western commer cialism and to exploit the politics of democracy. Under their leader, Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, and his party, the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons, they have come to be one of the strongest political forces in the entire country. Until 1947 British policy was designed to promote the parliamentary unification of Nigeria, coupled with some degree of administrative au tonomy for each of the three regions. In that year the swing toward

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federalization began with the setting up of regional advisory councils for the discussion of local affairs. This was followed in 1949 by the passing of a new constitution establishing the principle of federation, with central and regional legislatures and governments, all with elected African ma jorities and African ministers, the balance of power being heavily weighted in favor of the central government. But the regions proved less anxious to foster the development of Nigeria as a self-governing nation than to advance their separate interests, with the result that the constitu tion had to be recast. The 1954 constitution redressed the balance of power in favor of the regions and paved the way for them to become virtually self-governing in such matters as education, health and welfare. (The Northern Region did not reach this goal until 1959, some two to three years after the southern regions.) Under an agreement signed not without misgiving 011 the part of the British and the northerners in October 1958, the entire country is to become self-governing on Oc tober 1, 1960. The grounds for misgiving are considerable. For one thing, the tutelage period has been very short. For another, only a few thousand Nigerians have had administrative experience of any kind, and almost all of these are southerners. For a third, the only bond uniting the three regions is opposition to colonialism, and among the northerners even this is more formal than felt. Once the restraining hand of the British administrator has been lifted, there will be little to stop the leaders of the three regions from deciding that the best way to remain in power is to become more powerful. For that matter, there will be little other than the per sonality of these leaders to stop the three regions from disintegrating under the stresses of their own internal antagonisms. In an age when nationalisms were never more fiercely defended or more scrupulously defined, and when nations mustering fewer than a million souls can make themselves heard in the councils of the United Nations, it is asking much of nearly 35 million people (1959 estimate), divided into some 250 ethnic groups and united by none of the bonds that ordinarily draw men to gether in nationhood, to stay together longer than considerations of expediency require.
Trust territories. Although the juridical status of a trust territory is different from that of a colony, British policy toward the British Cameroons and the onetime British Togoland has been essentially the same as for Nigeria and the onetime Gold Coast. As James Coleman has noted, British policy in Togoland was strongly opposed all along to the erecting of institutions or the taking of measures which would in any way tend to endow the territory with a separate status.
Following the dramatic postwar political development in the Gold Coast and particularly after 1951 when it became increasingly evident that the Gold Coast was approaching the threshold of self-government spokesmen for the

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British government repeatedly stressed that when the Gold Coast attained full self-government the Trust Territory should remain integrated with it and that the Trusteeship Agreement should be terminated. Indeed, throughout the 42 years [Coleman was writing in 1956] of British administration there is little evidence to suggest that the British government envisaged any arrangement other than the permanent association of British Togoland with the Gold Coast. . . . On all counts earlier self-government, participation in a larger area of economic interchange, and uninterrupted development the peoples of British Togoland could, it seemed, but benefit from continued association with a self-governing Gold Coast.11

In May 1956, 58 per cent of those who availed themselves of a plebiscite for this purpose signified their desire to go along with the British govern ments view. Accordingly, on March 6, 1957 the administration of the territory passed to the new-born sovereign state of Ghana. The policy of the British government toward that part of the Cameroons falling under its jurisdiction has been much the same. For all practical purposes, the territory has been treated as an integral part of the adjoin ing areas of Nigeria, with which it shares a common legislative and ju dicial system. It is also regarded as having the same right of self-de termination. However, the government appears to be somewhat less sure than in the case of Togoland of the importance of "continued association with the parent colony. The Secretary of State for the Colonies has more than once stated categorically that "there can be no question of obliging the Cameroons to remain part of an independent Nigeria Judging from the mounting opposition in the southern Cameroons to such an idea, there seems to be a good chance that the right of self-determination will be exercised in favor of secession; but whether in favor of independence or a United (ex-British and ex-French) Cameroonian Republic is not yet clear. What is also not yet clear is the attitude likely to be taken by an independent Nigeria to such an "independent line of action. East Africa British East Africa consists of the Protectorate of Uganda, Kenya Colony, the Protectorate of Zanzibar, and the Trusteeship Territory of Tanganyika, which is administered, like British Togoland and the British Cameroons, on behalf of the United Nations. In Uganda and Zanzibar the non-African "settler community is small and consists mainly of Asians. In Kenya and Tanganyika the settler community is larger, and consists of Europeans and Asians. In the first two the political problems are not very different from those in the Gold Coast and Nigeria and they are being tackled in much the same way. In the other two the British government is faced, as Bradley puts it, "with the task of creating a multiracial or, better, nonracial democracy in socie
11 Togoland, International Conciliation No. 509, Carnegie Endowment for Inter national Peace, New York, September 1956, pp. 15-16.

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ties where the white man will always be a minority a problem in race relations which no other nation has yet solved. The Protectorate of Uganda is a landlocked, lake-and-swamp-strewn country about the size of Oregon. All but about one per cent of its popu lation of approximately 6 million is African. Indians and Goans make up the bulk of the non-African population of 67,000 or so. The European element is very small about 9,000 in 1958. The country consists of four provinces the Eastern, Western and Northern provinces, and Buganda. Of these, Buganda is by far the most important. It was already a well-organized monarchic state with a com paratively advanced culture when the British arrived. The events of the past sixty years or more have done little to shorten Bugandas lead over the rest of the country. In the economic and political fields they have almost certainly lengthened it. But the Ganda the people of Buganda are outnumbered at least four to one by their neighbors in the other provinces. Understandably, they have come to have much the same reservations about the advantages of political democracy as the Creoles in Sierra Leone. While the British are willing to grant Buganda a greater degree of autonomy than the other provinces, they have all along insisted that Uganda should be developed as a political unit. However, rather than live to see the day when they, the former overlords of the land, might be outvoted and eventually dominated by the peoples of the other provinces, many Ganda would prefer to be completely separated from the rest of the country. This, say the British, would be to commit economic suicide since, in their view, only a united Uganda could ever hope to stand on its own feet as a self-governing state. Whether the insistence of Buganda to retain its distinctive political personality is compatible with the growing political aspirations of the other provinces is open to question. Less open to question is the difficulty of sustaining sovereignty on a diet of locally grown animosities and deep-rooted tribal prejudices.
Zanzibar, which in the mid-nineteenth century was probably the greatest slave market in Africa, became (with the neighboring island of Pemba) a British protectorate in 1890. About two thirds of the present population of some 300,000 consists of Africans of mixed origin. Arabs and Indians make up most of the rest. The protectorate is administered by a British Resident working in cooperation with an Arab sultan. From the outset the aim of the British government has been "to entrust increasingly to His Highnesss subjects the responsibility for the administration of their own affairs as they show the desire and the ability to assume it. Even so, the protectorate has not been blessed with perfect rest. Many of the sultans Arab subjects claim that the British pay no attention to the evidences of either "desire or "ability. Some are overtly hostile and demand the end of a system in which legislation is largely by decree and in which they have no real voice.

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These men want a common voting roll for all subjects of the sultan, an unofficial majority in the Legislative Council, the member system whereby "unofficials may be appointed as cabinet members, and signifi cant representation on the Residents Executive Council, where policy is decided. So far not many Indians or Africans as the 1957 elections showed have been anxious to go along with them. Until they are, the British are unlikely to alter their intentions. They have not labored all these years just to replace one tyranny by another.
Kenya is endowed, in its quarter of a million square miles, with some of the best, and some of the worst, country in tropical Africa. Fully 95 per cent of its population of approximately 6.35 million (1958) is African. The Africans belong to many ethnic groups, some of them separated by wide linguistic, social and cultural divides. Indians, Pakistanis, Sikhs and Goans, who constitute about two thirds of the non-African population, are also divided, as much by ambition as by religion. The Europeans, who make up almost all of the rest, are also divided, by honest convictions and unseeing prejudice. Notwithstanding, many of the prerequisites of a politi cal democracy exist in the colony. Its economy is diversified, and its for tunes are no longer tied exclusively to external demand for a few primary products. It has a growing professional class (still largely European) backed by sound public and social services. Political developments in Kenya during the sixty-odd years of British occupation have followed the normal pattern in a "settler colony, with the European immigrants gradually acquiring a larger say in the conduct of their own affairs, both local and central, and, until quite recently, govern ment officials looking after the interests of the other communities. Because many of the African peoples were only loosely organized, it has not been generally possible to resort to the techniques of indirect rule so widely practiced elsewhere. Instead, it has frequently been necessary to organize district councils with government-nominated chiefs, an alien conception that has been slow to commend itself. At the present rate of development it will be many years before the organization of local government reaches the stage where it can be called a firm foundation for parliamentary democracy. By 1948 Hindus, Moslems and Arabs had secured separate, elected rep resentation in the Legislative Council; Africans were also represented but by governor-nominated men. The "unofficials, half of whom were Euro peans, were in a majority on the council, and some of them, including one African, were on the Executive Council. In 1954 a further consti tutional advance, the "Lyttelton constitution, was made with the estab lishment of a 16-member Council of Ministers in which administrative responsibility was for the first time shared by European, Asian and African alike. Partnership was thus extended from parliament to cabinet, and multiracial government became, for the first time, something more than a

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form of words. It said much for the determination of the British govern ment to go ahead with its policy of partnership that these reforms were made at a time when not only Europeans and their families but also loyal Africans and their leaders were under daily threat of attack, and murder, by Mau Mau gangs. But the Lyttelton constitution satisfied few of the people on the spot and by 1956 was deemed to be unworkable. In 1957 it was superseded by the Lennox-Boyd constitution, Mr. Alan LennoxBoyd being Mr. Oliver Lytteltons successor as Secretary of State for the Colonies. While retaining the basic principles of the Lyttelton constitution, the Lennox-Boyd constitution gave the Africans a larger representa tion in both the Legislative Council and the ministries. But the African leaders of the country have shown no greater liking for it than its predecessor. To Tom Mboya, who speaks for many of them, any constitu tional change short of undiluted democracy is either too little or too late, or both. To those, in and out of Kenya, who share his belief, the British government affirms that only a fool or a knave would want to give the colony self-government before its people have demonstrated that they have not only the will to compose their rival nationalisms but also the skill to do so. Of either will or skill there is at present (1959) little sign.
Tanganyika is more than half as large again as Kenya, with a popula tion (98 per cent African) of some 9 million. Most of the non-African population is composed of Asians (including Arabs). Europeans number about 21,000. For a variety of reasons, Tanganyika remained more or less in moth ball^ as Lord Twining, a former Governor of the territory, recently put it during the first twenty years of the British administration. There was no money; [the trust territory] was believed to be a pawn in inter national politics which led to a lack of confidence in it as a country in which to invest capital; and it had rather a poor time and remained backward. 12 In spite of this unpromising start, the political problems of Tanganyika have so far proved more manageable than those of Kenya. It is even pos sible to contend that there have so far been no unmanageable political problems; that cooperation among all three racial groups has been good; that almost everybody has tried to make the policy of partnership work; and that the political outlook in Tanganyika remains brighter than in most other multiracial colonial territories. Nor is it difficult to see the raison d'etre of such contentions. Because of long delay in resolving the question of the territorys political future (for a while there was talk of entrusting it to Germany again), and because of their heterogeneous cultural back grounds, the settler groups did not start pressing so soon or so vocifer
12 Lord Twining, speaking in London on October 2, 1958, at a joint meeting of the Royal Commonwealth Society and the Royal African Society. See The Last Nine Years in Tanganyika, African Affairs (London), January 1959, pp. 15-24.

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ously for power as their contemporaries in the other multiracial territories. Because of lack of funds, education everywhere the main seedbed of African nationalism was likewise late in being developed. At the end of World War II the leaders of the various groups in the territory watched, in Bradleys words,
the acrimony engendered by rival nationalisms beyond their borders, and were quick to learn its lessons. They decided to pin their faith on multiracial part nership and to promote it in all practical ways while the going was still good, and before race relations came to be bedeviled by political rivalries or by prob lems of land shortage.

In 1951 a committee of the "unofficial members of the Tanganyika Legislative Council, which included representatives of all the main racial groups, made two very important recommendations to the government. They recommended, first, that local government should be reformed so as to bring the long-established system of indirect rule in the tribal areas into a framework of councils on which Europeans, Asians and Africans would all sit and cooperate. They took the reasonable view that if the local leaders could learn to work together on their common problems, similar cooperation might someday be achieved in the central government. The recommendation was accepted and has amply justified the confidence of its sponsors. Second, they recommended that the "unofficial representa tion in the Legislative Council should consist of 7 Europeans, 7 Asians and 7 Africans, all elected, instead of the existing 14 "unofficials, only four of whom were Africans and all of whom were nominated. By making such a change the British government would be giving tangible expression, so the committee argued, to its oft-repeated belief in "racial equality for its own sake. The committee also took the view that it would be soon enough to ask for self-government when the council had demonstrated full part nership to be a workaday possibility as well as a worthy ideal. With this principle of "parity of representation the British government concurred, but it declined to give effect to it before 1955, when it increased the parity unit from 7 to 11. In a country where "parity spells inequity rather than equality, a political system based on race is obviously a poor foundation for self-government, but in the British view it could well be a stepping stone to it. So far it has proved to be a rather slippery one. For a time Julius Nyerere, the leader of the dominant African party, the Tanganyika African National Union, regarded it more as a stumbling block than as a stepping stone. To him, Tanganyika is primarily an African coun try in which the will of the majority largely unlettered and ignorant of national issues though it is should be reflected in every political arrange ment. To the government, Tanganyika is a multiracial territory in which at the present time the contribution of the non-African to wealth and welfare, government and development far outstrips that of the African a fact which, in the governments view, should be recognized politically.

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Notwithstanding the Africans small contribution to these things and the lack of assurance that his leaders are capable of safeguarding the rights and interests of non-African groups, the government agreed in 1959 to abolish the parity principle. Beginning with the 1960 elections, the "racial labels will disappear from the seats in the Legislative Council and seats previously known as "African will be open to candidates of any race. Not the least encouraging aspect of this change is that it is widely supported by the European and Asian minorities.
Somaliland Protectorate. Also falling in the British East African sphere is the small Somaliland Protectorate. Perched high on the "horn of Africa remote from other British territories, and poor, both in people (approxi mately two thirds of a million) and physical resources, it has attracted little attention or money. For long, few British people so much as knew there was a British Somaliland. Between 1884 (the year in which the British government began to administer the territory) and 1956 it was visited by only one Member of Parliament. Understandably, therefore, very little thought was given by Parliament during this period to the development of democratic institutions. Indeed, as late as 1956, the British Governor was still the sole executive and legislative authority; and the only councils on which Somalis could sit were advisory. With their kinsmen in the Italian Trust Territory of Somalia being groomed for self-government in 1960 and their fellow Mohammedans in Egypt constantly inciting them over the radio to rebellion, the Somalis have grown restive. Belatedly, the British have done something about it. In 1959 they opened the doors of both the legislative and executive councils to Somalis. They further promised to give the protectorate its independence at the earliest feasible date and to allow it to exercise the concurrent right of self-determination. That is to say, they agreed to let the country leave the Commonwealth and, if the electors so desired (which they have since said they do), join with Somalia. But in the colo nial schoolhouse it is the schedule rather than the curriculum that excites the student. There are those who doubt whether the schedule can at this late date be accelerated fast enough to sustain the confidence of the Somalis in British intentions. If confidence should fail, the Somalis might well turn to Egypt for assistance. In that event, they would almost cer tainly find that they had exchanged one form of tutelage for another.

Central Africa
Bechuanaland Protectorate. The large, sparsely peopled and ill-endowed Bechuanaland Protectorate is administered as are also the extra-tropical protectorates of Basutoland and Swaziland by the British High Com missioner in the Union of South Africa, who is responsible to the British

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Parliament through the Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations.1 3 The governments policy continues to be essentially what it has been ever since 1885 when the territory came under British protection, namely, to rule by indirection, using existing tribal authorities and institutions wher ever possible. That is, native policy follows much the same lines as in territories administered by the Colonial Office. So far most of the pressure for change has come, not from within the protectorate, but from the South African government, which has long felt that Bechuanaland, along with Swaziland and Basutoland, should be run from the Union. For this feeling the British government has a good deal of sympathy; indeed, as far back as 1909 it agreed (in the South Africa Act of that year) to the eventual transfer to the Union of all three protectorates, subject to the concurrence of the protectorate peoples themselves. In the past decade or so, the Union government has taken the view that the present arrangements are now intolerable on the grounds, among others, that they endanger both the military and internal security of the Union. Weak states within or on the borders of the Union, it is argued, "offer an easy prey to a hostile power; they can also "easily prove a refuge for sub versive elements and a headquarters for the organization and guidance of movements within the Union itself. 14 To the British government, the present arrangements are not only tolerable but necessary so long as the peoples of the protectorates are out of sympathy with the racial policies of the government to which they would be transferred. Since it is clear that the Bechuanaland peoples would vote against such a transfer, and that the British Parliament would never consent to it in the face of local opposition, the South Africans will presumably have to go on living with the intol erable, unless, of course, they decide to take the law into their own hands, as they have done in the mandated territory of Southwest Africa. Mean time, the British government continues to do what it can with the help of its Colonial Development and Welfare funds to bolster both the protec torate's economy and its peoples morale.
Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. The fusion of the two protec torates of Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland with the self-governing colony of Southern Rhodesia into a federal state in 1953 was, as Eugene P. Dvorin clearly shows in his paper prepared for this study, at once the most difficult, controversial and far-reaching development that had taken place in British Africa up to that time. It was also unique. The political union of these three territories had been discussed for fully twenty-five years before it was achieved. Its advantages were obvious. The three territories are contiguous, similar climatically, with compatible
13 The reason it is not administered by the Colonial Office is that most of its day-to-day relations are with the Union, which is a member of the Commonwealth. 14 W. E. Barker, South Africa's 6-point Claim to the Protectorates, Journal of Racial Affairs (Stellenbosch), October 1956, pp. 25, 26.

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economic interests; while the Rhodesias were settled by much the same European stock, cherish the same European traditions and share the same railroad system. The obstacles to such a union were equally obvious. There was the relative poverty of the two protectorates compared with Southern Rhodesia. Worse, there was the suspicion with which the Afri cans of the protectorates and the British government regarded the native policy of the Southern Rhodesian government, the leading advocate of federation. The first obstacle was removed, so far as Northern Rhodesia was concerned, by its copper customers, thanks to whom the budget of the country ran neck and neck with that of Southern Rhodesia during the years immediately preceding federation. The second obstacle took more shifting, if indeed it was ever shifted in the eyes of the Africans. Even in the eyes of the British government it is probably truer to say that the obstacle was shrouded rather than shifted. What did most to shroud it was the conviction that it would be easier to find the development capital needed by all three struggling countries if they were under one coordi nated management, and that something must be done to block the north ward course of South Africas economic and ideological empire. It was argued, to quote again from Bradley, that
if a great, single state, securely founded on British liberal principles, were not quickly established north of the Limpopo, the next serious economic depression might well compel Southern Rhodesia to seek refuge in political union with South Africa. In any case, if no firm barrier were established against it, there was grave danger of the racial ideology of South Africa spreading northward, to the ruin of Britain's policy of partnership in east and central Africa and, who knows, to an eventual clash with the African democracies of the west coast and a conflict which would rend the continent.

After one of the most bitter colonial controversies in the history of the British Parliament, a bare majority of members voted in favor of federa tion. In the Rhodesias and Nyasaland opinion was likewise divided; while most of the Europeans were in favor of it, most of those few Africans who had any idea of what it was all about were strongly opposed to it. Under the 1953 constitution, the federal government, with its seat in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia, was charged with self-governing responsi bilities in such fields as defense, external affairs, transport and commu nications, immigration, customs and excise, currency and health. The territorial government of Southern Rhodesia remained self-governing in domestic matters. The two northern protectorates continued "under the special protection of Her Majesty to enjoy separate governments in all strictly territorial matters. Land rights, long the rallying cry of the agi tator, were specifically protected, as also was "the political advancement of the peoples. The constitution also provided for the safeguarding of African interests in the Federal Assembly and for the representation of Africans by Africans in that Assembly, and for the power of veto by the British government of any legislation which in its view was clearly against

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African interests. As of 1959, there were 12 elected African members in the Federal Assembly. Four of these were elected indirectly by Africans in the northern protectorates, the remaining eight by a mixed, but over whelmingly European, electorate. As of the same year, only the altera tion in the size of the Federal Assembly and the suffrage system had been submitted to the British government. In each instance the government ruled that the Africans interests were not being jeopardized. Wisely, perhaps of necessity, there was no attempt to make the three territorial governments toe a common political line. Southern Rhodesia has long professed the faith of its founder, Cecil Rhodes, in Equal rights for all civilized men, and has believed that it is time enough to give a man the vote when he is civilized. So far not more than 10,000 Africans have acquired the necessary civilization or what amounts to the same thing in Southern Rhodesia the necessary standard of living. Of these, fewer than 2,000 have chosen to exercise their voting privilege. However, a common voters roll has been established, the only kind of roll, so the Southern Rhodesians contend, that makes it possible to abolish race as an instrument of power, and of politics. Northern Rhodesia has followed a different political pattern. As the European settlers have increased in number and economic importance, they have been given more and more political responsibility. In 1959 they held a majority of the seats in the Legislative Council, and most of the portfolios in the Executive Council. The Africans, who continue to be taught the processes of Western democracy from the primer of indirect rule, held nine seats and two portfolios. But the government has every intention of giving them more responsibility when they show themselves ready for it. The policy of the Nyasaland government has been more conservative. Because there are very few European settlers in the country, the balance of political power still lies with the Governor and his officials. Most legislators continue to represent their own racial group rather than the wider interests of the territory as a whole. As was only to be expected, the federal constitution has had plenty of critics in its short life. The better the African has come to understand its provisions, the more displeased he is by them. At the present time (1959), there is hardly an educated African in Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland who does not feel that its effect, if not its design, is to per petuate the domination of the white man, or at least to postpone the day of independence. In Southern Rhodesia, too, African feeling has hardened against it increasingly as the bright promise of "partnership has failed to materialize. The British government and people also have become increas ingly disturbed, not only by the failure of federation to promote racial partnership but also by the growing insistence of Rhodesian leaders to be done with all external restraints and turn the Federation into a Dominion.

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For it seems that many Rhodesian supporters of federation are disen chanted by the implications of partnership they failed to see in 1953. What will happen in I960, when the constitution comes up for review, not even the Federal Prime Minister, Sir Roy Welensky, is willing to say. But everyone is agreed that it must be changed. As it stands, it serves better as a sword for battle than as a plowshare for husbandry. And it is to the husbandman of human rights lauded long ago by Rhodes that the future of the Federation, as of all the earth, belongs. The resilience of British colonial policy to changes of circumstance and sentiment is a favorite theme with political commentators. Deeply attached as the British are to precedent and tradition, they do not hestitate to ignore both when the occasion serves and, instead, either to take their cue from their critics or to sit down in front of a blank piece of paper and wait for a new idea to strike them. Being for the most part more interested in questions of performance than of pedigree, they do not much mind whence the guidance comes so long as it takes them one step forward. They dislike long-term planners and distrust the imagination of those who profess to see what is around the corner. Their behavior is often the despair of their friends, even as it is the entertainment of their enemies, and they are given to inordinate optimism. Agonizing reappraisals seldom form a part of their stock-in-trade. But none can doubt that they have already guided many African feet into the way of democracy, or that they are determined to leave in the tropics of Africa a memorial worthy of the Christian ideals and faith that embued their missionary forefathers a free commonwealth of nations, as Bradley puts it, "based on personal freedom, impartial justice and honest administration

FREN CH POLICY Frances interest in sub-Saharan Africa goes back to the beginning of the fifteenth century, if not earlier. About the year 1402 Jean de Bethencourt, conqueror of the Canary Islands, determined "with the help of God . . . to open the road to the River of Gold, which, if he succeeded, so his biographers claimed, would be "greatly to the honor and profit of the kingdom of France. His biographers do not disclose whether in fact his resolve was matched by performance, but thereafter the French appear to have taken a growing interest in the west coast of Africa. In the seven teenth century, trading settlements were established at St. Louis and on the island of Goree (near the modern Dakar), quite close to the "River of Gold shown on many medieval maps. Although these settlements do not seem to have been greatly to the profit of France, they were much to her honor, since it was there that she first attempted to put into practice her egalitarian principles.

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The first experiments by the French in the fine art of making citizens out of "savages and of using them in the administration were not particu larly successful. Trade was hard to come by because St. Louis and Goree were far from the sources of ivory, gold, gum arabic, skins and slaves, and what trade there was was mostly controlled by Moorish or negro middlemen. Until abolished in 1807, slave raiding was habitual and punctuated by tribal warfare, pillaging and massacre. Attempts to settle Europeans near the ports were soon abandoned for these reasons, and also because the negro neighbors of the settlers found it much more to their liking to live parasitically on them than on one another. Slowly it became apparent that pacification of the hinterlands was the price of progress and, as William Moreland says in his working paper, "that nothing could be done for France or Africa until the peoples had been forcibly led to peace ful sentiments among themselvesIn justification of their semi-military approach to administration, the French were wont to argue that the average African understands force, and is seldom slow to respect the user of it. They also argued that it is better to shed a little blood today, even the wrong blood, than to shed a lot tomorrow; and it is undeniable that most of their wars, or pacification campaigns, have been little ones. From the outset of their modern colonial career in Africa, dating from shortly after the First Treaty of Paris in 1814, the French realized, how ever, that a policy of pacification alone was not enough. It would con ceivably make a good plank, but not an entire platform. True to the tenor of their eighteenth-century revolutionary principles and their much older humanitarian traditions, they began to work for the abolition of slavery in all French possessions. On August 23, 1848 the slaves in St. Louis and Goree were freed, following a decree issued by the Second Republic on May 5th of that year. Elsewhere in Senegal, and in west Africa generally, it proved difficult to enforce the decree, but successive French govern ments slowly whittled down the areas where slavery was either known or presumed to exist, in spite of the uncooperative attitude of certain tribes who were by tradition slaves to other tribes. The French government did more than provide for the emancipation of slaves. In keeping with the spirit of the Revolution, it decreed that the slaves should have the right to be equal as well as free: they should have the right to become French citizens. At first only certain inhabitants of St. Louis and Goree were accorded the status of concitoyens. As time went by, new decrees extended the categories of African eligible for citizenship, but the implementation of the decrees was hindered, outside the main ports and trading centers, by the reluctance of many of the African chiefs to be "pacified The Moslemized peoples of the savanna zones proved particularly reluctant, and for many years gave the French little peace and plenty of trouble. As a result, the French began to feel that perhaps treaties of friendship with their African neighbors might in the long run

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make a bigger contribution to the pacification of the country than acts of warfare. Before the nineteenth century was out many dozen such treaties were signed. Though sometimes signed under duress and with a bloody preamble, these treaties were for the most part liberal and farsighted, and called for the collaboration of the chiefs and their peoples in the stamping out of brigandage, the encouragement of agriculture and commerce and the abandonment of slavery, as well as their protection against less amenable tribes. Unluckily, just when the policy of pacification through participation, pursued so vigorously by Faidherbe during the later years of his governorship of Senegal, was beginning to yield results, France found herself unable to continue it. The war with Germany in 1870 made it necessary for her to withdraw from Africa every available fighting man. In the long run this withdrawal was all to the good of the colonial cause, for it compelled those who were left in Africa to rely for their authority less on force than on respect. Indeed, even before the Franco-German War, Pinet-Laprade, who in 1865 succeeded Faidherbe, was constrained to exhort his subordinates: Be benevolent always; the French influence here rests on the most solid of bases affection. Affection, of course, is a fragile flower and does not readily thrive on African soil; moreover, it is doubtful if the colonial administration of that time was based on anything so spiritual. But increasingly, during the later years of the nineteenth and early years of the twentieth centuries, the French came to see that good government in Africa, as in Europe, must be based on regard, if not affection. In the following decades the French government did much to establish this regard through its policy of assimilation or, perhaps more accurately, identity. Institutionally, the policy of identity found expression in the granting not only of citizen rights but also of municipal self-government on the metropolitan model and of a measure of territorial self-government through an elected General Council with powers extending over the area covered by the municipalities. It also found expression in the educational sphere, especially in French West Africa, where the schooling was pre dominantly public, free, secular, and conducted in the French language. With the great extension, around the turn of the century, of Frances responsibilities in Africa, the policy of identity lost ground for a while. The mass of Africans came to be thought of as subjects, not citizens. They lived under customary law, not the French legal code.
Their lives were governed by the system known as the Indigenat , which virtually deprived them of the liberties of criticism, association and movement, and gave to the French administrator power to inflict disciplinary penalties, without trial, for a wide range of minor offences; and they were liable to . . . travail force, for public, and sometimes private, purposes.15 15 Thomas Hodgkin, Nationalism in Colonial Africa, Frederick Muller, London, 1956, p. 35.

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The 1944 Brazzaville Conference, which, under General de Gaulles chairmanship, set itself the task of defining the nature of the postwar bond between metropolitan and overseas France, was divided on the merits of "identity and paternalism. Many of its resolutions read, in Hodgkins phrase, as uneasy compromises of the two. However, the pressure from the new African parties which emerged after the liberation of 1945 and from the left-wing parties in France proved strong enough to push the Fourth Republic much further along the road of identity than the Brazzaville Conference had contemplated. The 1946 Constitution The French were never more aware of the importance of identity than in 1946 when, almost a hundred years after they had adumbrated the prin ciple of black citizenship, they passed the constitution of the Fourth Republic. According to this document,
France forms with the people of its overseas territories a Union based upon equality of rights and duties without distinction of race or religion. The French Union is composed of nations and peoples who wish to place in common or co-ordinate their resources and their efforts in order to develop their civilization, increase their well-being, and ensure their security. Faithful to her traditional mission, France proposes to guide the peoples for whom she has assumed responsibility toward freedom to govern themselves and democratically to manage their own affairs; putting aside any system of coloni zation based upon arbitrary power, she guarantees to all equal access to public office and the individual or collective exercise of the rights and liberties pro claimed or confirmed above . . . The French Union shall be composed, on the one hand, of the French Re public which comprises Metropolitan France and the Overseas Departments [e.g., Algeria] and Territories [e.g., French West Africa, French Equatorial Africa, Madagascar] and, on the other hand, of the Associated Territories and States [e.g., Vietnam].

Except for the very limited number of concitoyens living in Senegal, this new constitution amounted to a new bill of rights. Whereas the effect, if not the intention, of the earlier colonial formulas had been to train the African in such a manner that he should be an able and devoted auxiliary to the European, the new constitution had as its objective the association of Frenchmen and Africans in the task of making the sons of [these countries] co-citizens in the greater mother country which is the French Union. 16 In a word, the primary aim of the 1946 constitution was to make the African a dark-skinned Frenchman and to turn the onetime colonies henceforth to be called overseas territories into something like the metropolitan departements. Native institutions, such as chieftain
16 Jean Cappelle, Afrique Occidentale Frangaise in VEncyclopSdie de VEmpire
Frangais, Paris, 1949, Vol. I, p. 272.

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ship and polygamy, were retained only if they could be shown not to interfere with the gallicizing process. The area of the Africans liberty was, accordingly, restricted. So, too, was the area of his equality. The constitution did not imply that all Africans should be equal to all Frenchmen; only that all Africans should have equal opportunities to make the most of their inequalities. Nor did it suggest that the principle of fraternity should be carried to the point where every white Frenchman should have at least one African brother-in-law, but merely that a white Frenchman is no worse, or no better, for having one. Let us briefly examine some of the implications of this postwar, prede Gaulle policy for the Africans and Europeans who daily lived with it. As a nation, the French have never been unduly troubled by the color of a mans skin, or by the fact, and consequences, of miscegenation. Pro vided a man knows his job and does it well, nobody is likely to think the less of him for being of mixed blood.17 Even before 1946 there was nothing to stand in the way of the African concitoyens advancement except his own physical and intellectual limitations. But until 1946 there was only a handful of concitoyens. After October 27, 1946 there were many millions of them. If any circumstance was likely to test the Frenchmans metal, this was surely it. Yet, apart from some small-scale disturbances (and one major one, in Madagascar), some labor strikes, and some loss of face (the African did not take kindly at first to the postwar administrators, many of whom lacked the sense of mission civilisatrice which inspired most of their predecessors and were inclined to be insensitive to the Africans finer feel ings), the crucial transition passed off uneventfully. By 1950 a great many Africans had come to see that the French meant to do pretty much what the constitution said. Equally important, they had come to see that the citizenship which it conferred upon them was itself no passport to wealth or position and that its benefits could be reaped only if there was first a willingness to suffer the discipline of arduous mental and physical toil, and to pay the cost in human decencies. Those who did so found they had few grounds for complaint, about either the opportunities for promotion or fraternization. There were no "reserved seats for Europeans in government or in private enterprise. There were no separate-and-unequal facilities, whether schools, trains, buses, banks or lavatories. French citizens of African blood could live in any quarter of any town, subject only to the zoning laws governing type and quality of house. They could carry on any legitimate trade or profession. They were acceptable in hotels and restaurants on the same basis as any European,
17 In what used to be French West Africa (including French Togo) there are approximately 25,000 persons of mixed African and European blood, known as Eurafricans. The first generation of these people is usually born of African mothers and European fathers. The succeeding generations are generally the offspring of marriages between Eurafricans. Contrary to American custom, mulattoes are more often thought of as belonging to the light band than the dark band of the racial spectrum. Many Eurafricans have risen to positions of great prominence.

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namely, that their manners and dress should be in keeping with the tradi tions of the place. Where segregation appeared to exist it was a by-product of natural selection and not of discriminatory law. Fraternization of an easy-going, unstaged kind could be observed at various levels. At govern ment receptions it was not uncommon to see African men dancing with European women; if the converse was less frequently observed, it was largely because there were far more male than female evolues. More important, once a man had established his right to citizenship which he could do under one or more of 17 categories he could aspire to any public office, subject only to the usual democratic requirements of integrity and competence. In all such matters, as M. Letourneau, a former Minister of France Overseas, declared in a speech made at Abidjan in March 1950, there was "no difference between the sons of France born in these latitudes and those born in . . . France. Even before Letourneaus time there had been a negro Under Secretary of State for Colonies, a negro Governor-General of French Equatorial Africa, a negro Gov ernor of Senegal, and a negro President of the French Senate. With the extension of citizenship to the inhabitants of the entire French Union, it became the policy of the administration to permit full participation of all citizens, regardless of origin, in the common work on a basis of equality. From 1950 onward this "equality was applied, in the words of the Lamine Gueye Law of that year, to "the conditions for entrance, recruitment and advancement of all civil servants, and to "pay and appurtenances of what ever nature. Differences of compensation, vacation time, personal allow ances, etc., were thenceforth based solely on seniority and place of duty, both in respect of its inherent character and its relation to the civil serv ants domicile. Economic Objectives To give effect to the provisions of the 1946 constitution, with its specific references to the Africans resources, well-being and security, called for more than gestures of high regard for the Africans personality, the validity of his culture, and his intellectual capacity. It called for practical eco nomic plans and the money and manpower with which to undergird them. The plans were the easiest to come by. Dozens were already in existence, the French having learned from their prewar and wartime experiences that tropical Africa is no place for the casual, "any fool can do it type of undertaking. Money for the plans was made available by both public and private agencies, and in gratifyingly large amounts. It was the manpower with which to put the new constitution in business that took the most finding. France has seldom if ever known what it is to have a large labor surplus, particularly in years following an exhaus tive war. But it was plain to all thinking Frenchmen that, unless skilled workers were available in much greater numbers than formerly to execute

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the work of upgrading their overseas economy, the new constitution would remain a piece of beautiful prose and little more. Accordingly, every encouragement was given to Frenchmen to take part in their governments "Point Four program, and though the supply seldom matched the demand, the postwar migration of technicians, scientists, administrators and newly trained cadets was impressive. The European population of Dakar alone more than trebled during the first postwar decade, largely as a result of the overseas development program. Nor was it merely a matter of finding Europeans. More important was the need to find Africans. Before the 1946 constitution became law, there had been no real problem here. Labor was a commodity that could be acquired at will, moved about, and dismissed to the bush when not re quired. A fresh supply could always be found by the European conscriptors or the African chiefs. But the constitution abolished forced labor and gave every man the right to choose his employer, and to change him if he thought his interests and rights were not being adequately protected. The immediate effects were startling for the Europeans. Many Africans did not care to choose employers; instead, they preferred to be selfemployed or, better still, unemployed. But gradually the situation im proved. As Moreland points out, Africans found there was prestige to be had, as well as money, from driving trucks and operating factory machines. "As Africans increasingly saw the personal advantages of having mechani cal skills, as opposed to performing manual labor, to supply their needs, the demands by them for technical and vocational training also grew; pro ficiency in these fields became more popular. When labor came to be more specialized, the African worker came to be more interested in conventions governing conditions of work, rates of pay, health benefits, unemployment insurance everything, in fact, in which a French worker might be expected to take an interest. In 1952 all such matters were incorporated into a Code du Travail that is a landmark in labor legislation. Its generous, non-discriminatory provisions are a moving expression of faith in the African's ability to play the role of "the solid citizen and his determination to do so. The objectives of French economic policy in Africa were often set forth in the postwar period, but never more explicitly than at the opening of the Grand Conseil of French West Africa in 1950. While speaking of his own "diocese, Paul Bechard, the then High Commissioner of the Republic for French West Africa, was also speaking for his colleagues in equatorial Africa and elsewhere when he said that the first objective must be production which is the basis of exportation; then must come industry which makes possible the development of internal trade. To promote this development, there must be created a road and rail network, ports and airfields on one side, and [centers of energy supply] on the other. These are the real arteries and propulsive centers of the economy. This infrastructure, which involves enormous capital investment, can be

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accomplished only through public financing, with little hope of immediate or early direct financial return. Thus will be created the essential tools for the development of new sources of riches, frequently unforeseen. But the simple transfusion of capital cannot raise the standard of living; this requires the strenuous efforts and cooperation of the entire body of workers. Although agriculture is now the foundation of African economy, it should be coupled with a parallel industrial effort. It is essential to build up local indus tries, such as cement, lime, brick, . . . etc., rather than import these com modities at enormous cost, often twenty to thirty times their value at point of origin . . . Processing industries also must be installed to extract from raw products the commercially exportable ingredients. These industries will per mit a competitive and marketable value to be placed on produce by reducing the heavy freight charges, and relieve the pressure which bears so heavily on the road and rail networks and the ports. The simultaneous development of agricultural production and the creation of processing industries will provide the foundation for social progress and raise the standards of living of the west African people, which is the supreme objective of the French Government.

Social Objectives In the same speech M. Bechard also defined French policy in social matters.
Protection of humanity against disease, misery and ignorance; raising of the standard of living by the development of technical instruction, by professional education, by the growth of capacity for work and production these objec tives are the only true, the only justifiable goals.

Although nobody is likely to claim that any of these social goals were reached in the few years in which the French were able to pursue them, nobody can say that they were not pursued energetically and intelligently. Take, for instance, the urban problem. The wartime experiences of the French administration had clearly shown that there could be no real social welfare for the African who went to town so long as he was left to his own ignorant devices. If he were, then he would surely turn the towns into pestilential slums and centers of disaffection. At the same time, the govern ment was reluctant to "decree urbanization, or to impose a given type of dwelling or civic form on a community. Such regimentation would, in its view, have been tantamount to an arbitrary violation of those very liberties which had been carefully spelled out to the African, and would have been so regarded by him. What it did, therefore, was to provide as much of the social infrastructure roads, water, lighting, etc. as could be squeezed out of its always inadequate budget, and leave the "suprastructure more or less to the people concerned. The improvisations resulting from this division of responsibility would not have pleased many community plan ners, but they appear to have pleased a great many Africans and adminis trators. Nobody who visited the Medina section of Dakar or the Poto-Poto and Bacongo sections of Brazzaville in the middle 1950s could fail to

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be impressed by the mounting evidences of order and decency they offered, or the ability of their inhabitants to integrate themselves into the community life. The French government was equally unwilling to "decree detribalization, though, like the urbanizing process, it added greatly to the com plexities of the mission civilisatrice. All along the government took the position that the higher values of African group life were not incom patible with those to be looked for in a community of Frenchmen. Wher ever the organization of a group was found to be efficient, the administra tion sought to protect and strengthen it. But, the governments regard for him notwithstanding, the pristine African has been having an increasingly difficult time of it. It could hardly be otherwise in a society that had no use for his language, the custodian of his beliefs and ideas and the symbol of his separateness from other men and tribes; in a society that insisted the chief end of man was to glorify the Fourth Republic and enjoy it for ever to speak in French, to think in French and to live like a Frenchman. Birth of the French Community There is, it goes without saying, a world of difference between calling a man a Frenchman and getting him to feel that French citizenship is the highest good and that, in the modern economic context, the only kind of African government capable of being efficient and of winning the worlds confidence is one deriving its inspiration from the France of 1789. The Frencli did make many African converts to this thesis. In every part of French tropical Africa there came to be those who genuinely appreciated their association with French culture and with Frenchmen. But, apart from the vote, the great majority of African "Frenchmen did not have anything very much they had not already had before they became citi zens. And the vote was a tool of limited utility, since, with the exception of all but the most local of issues, the African voters were likely to be out voted by the people of metropolitan France. The administration therefore found increasing difficulty in persuading the rank and file that government from Paris, Dakar, Brazzaville and Tananarive was better than govern ment by their peers in the bush and market town. It is against this background of mounting African disillusionment that the events of 1958 and 1959 must be viewed. Of all Frenchmen, none was more aware of it than General Charles de Gaulle. He had lived in French tropical Africa during World War II long enough to get the pulse of what, even then, was happening to it. In Brazzaville in 1944 he had seen how that pulse had quickened when, as head of the Free French forces, he had announced his governments intention to turn over, bit by bit, the internal management of the tropical African dependencies to the people living in them (an intention that was reiterated in the preamble to the 1946 consti tution). During the years of retirement from public office, the General had

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continued to keep his communication lines open. To his suburban redoubt came, at his summons, highly placed Frenchmen of all shades of color. More than this, on a number of occasions during this period he revisited French Africa, where, as a private citizen enjoying great prestige, he was sought out by people of every political opinion. When he returned to power in May 1958, de Gaulle needed nobody to tell him whither the Fourth Republic was headed by its reiterated insistence on converting all French Africans into Frenchmen. He knew that if the French Union was to survive, it could be only on the basis of a new deal for the over seas territories no less than for metropolitan France. What was needed, as he said in the speech delivered in Paris at the Place de la Republique on September 4, 1958, was a community formed between the French nation and those of the Overseas Territories that so desire, within which each Territory will become a State that governs itself. This community, he went on to say, would be "effected by virtue of the free determination of all, each territory being given the opportunity through its vote in the referendum which was to be taken on September 28 "either to accept Frances proposal, or to refuse it, and by so doing, to break every tie with her. He even accepted the possibility that a territory which elected to join the Community might subsequently wish to withdraw from it and "assume its own destiny independently of the others. How de Gaulle himself supposed the voting would go his historians have not yet disclosed. However, it certainly went much better than many Frenchmen, and most non-Frenchmen, dreamt it could have done. For, as the world knows, only one territory Guinea voted not to join the Community, and even Guinea has had some second thoughts about the wisdom of cutting itself off from the one source of assistance that is likely to be available without strings attached. The cynic will probably say that it went better than many Frenchmen deserved. But then every nation has its undeserving. Luckily for France, most of hers never served overseas. And it was overseas in the lonely cercles and the frustrating cities, in the stuffy business houses, the overcrowded clinics and schoolrooms, the jostling market places and the understaffed missions that the "Com munity was born, and it is there that it will continue to be nurtured and sustained. ITALIAN POLICY By the time the Italians became interested in the colonization of tropical Africa there was little left to colonize. What there was Eritrea and that part of Somaliland unclaimed by the British and French consisted largely of inhospitable highland and desert or semi-desert for which their competitors had little use, and with which they themselves did little until the 1930s. The invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 marked the beginning of the Italian

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governments determination to make something of its African territories. It had something to work with at last a large, habitable and highly diversified country that could, in time, be made to carry the cost, not only of its own development, but also of that of its poorer neighbors. Nor did the government lose time in retooling the economy of the country for this purpose. Money and men were poured in for the building of roads, public offices and factories and the establishment of settlers on the land and in the towns at a rate without parallel, down to that time, in the history of colonial Africa. The overspill into Eritrea and Italian Somaliland was not inconsiderable. While most of this development was directed to the strengthening of Italys autarkic economy, some of it undoubtedly benefited the indigenous peoples. As Margery Perham remarks in her study of Ethiopia, It was impossible to spend tens of millions of pounds in the country without a proportion of this reaching the native population. Large numbers were in troduced, for the first time, to wage-labour at rates which appear, when the low cost of living is considered, to have been reasonably high, while there were plenty of new goods upon which to spend the wages.18 But, as Miss Perham points out, the gains, such as they were, were highpriced, for this extravagant economic erection [was] planned on a basis of false hopes, paralysed by control from Rome, riddled with corruption and founded upon the neglect or exploitation of the great mass of the people. Little was done for their education; indeed, most of the children attending school in 1935 found themselves schoolless thereafter. Equally little was done for their health. The hospitals and dispensaries built by the Italians were operated primarily for their own people. Most of the existing medical missions serving the indigenous people were forcibly closed or destroyed. No thought at all was given to their political advancement, for none was intended. The destiny of the colonized people, Ethiopian, Eri trean and Somali alike, was to serve the glory of fascist Italy and the needs of her administrators, settlers and soldiery. When, in 1950, the Italians returned to tropical Africa, it was as peni tents and not as victors, and only for a ten-year period. The gist of the policy they have since been carrying out in Somalia19 on behalf of the United Nations is set forth in Article 3 of the Draft Trusteeship Agree ment for the Territory of Somaliland under Italian Administration, ap proved by the Trusteeship Council of the United Nations on January 27, 1950. It reads as follows: The Administering Authority shall: 1. Foster the development of free political institutions and promote the de18 The Government of Ethiopia, Faber & Faber, London, 1948, p. 185. 19 The independence of Ethiopia was restored by the British in 1941. Eritrea con tinued under British administration until September 1952; since then it has been an autonomous unit, under the Ethiopian Crown, in the Federation of Ethiopia and Eritrea.

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velopment of the inhabitants of the Territory towards independence; and to this end shall give to the inhabitants of the Territory a progressively in creasing participation in the various organs of Government; 2. Promote the economic advancement and self-sufficiency of the inhabitants, and to this end shall regulate the use of natural resources; encourage the development of fisheries, agriculture, trade and industries; protect the inhabitants against the loss of their lands and resources; and improve the means of transportation and communication; 3. Promote the social advancement of the inhabitants, and to this end shall protect the rights and fundamental freedoms of all elements of the popu lation without discrimination; protect and improve the health of the inhabitants by the development of adequate health and hospital services for all sections of the population; control the traffic in arms and ammuni tion, opium and other dangerous drugs, alcohol and other spirituous liquors; prohibit all forms of slavery, slave trade and child marriage; apply existing international conventions concerning prostitution; prohibit all forms of forced or compulsory labour, except for essential public works and services, and then only in time of public emergency with adequate remuneration and adequate protection of the welfare of the workers; and institute such other regulations as may be necessary to protect the in habitants against any social abuses.

Although this policy was not of their making, and although they must have known that there was no chance of implementing it fully by 1960 (when the territory is to get its independence), the Italians have shown a high regard for the spirit of it. They have coaxed the Somalis, but seldom tried to coerce them. They have footed many bills that were not theirs, and taken the burden of many mistakes they did not make. In the presence of hostility, at least in the early days of their trusteeship, they have carried themselves with dignity. Not only for the spirit of it, either; wherever possible, they have observed the letter of their undertaking. Thus, they have been responsible for most of the modest strides made in democratiz ing the countrys political systems, in promoting local self-government, in Somalizing public services, in modernizing the schools and extending their scope, and in increasing the medical and public health facilities and getting the still largely nomadic population to make more use of them. In short, they have kept in mind the necessity of achieving the difficult objective, as Lawrence S. Finkelstein has put it, of raising by its boot strap a country which did not even possess one. 20 If they have failed to reach this objective in the given time, it is for want of resources, and not of energy or initiative. As the Somalis now know, and as the Italians have known much longer, there is no substitute for leather when it comes to the making of bootstraps.
PO R TU G U ESE PO LIC Y

Every colonial policy is both a projection of history and a response to environment, intellectual and moral as well as geographical. To borrow
20 Somaliland under Italian Administration: A Case Study in United Nations Trusteeship, Woodrow Wilson Foundation, New York, 1955, p. 11.

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the language of some of our modern sociologists, this means that every colonial policy tends to be a compound of tradition-direction, other-direction and inner-direction. In contrast to French policy, which has tended to show strong signs of inner-direction (UEtat cest moi was perhaps the classic expression of this concept, but the political mystique of many twentieth-century French statesmen, including de Gaulle, is not very dif ferent), Portuguese policy has tended to be tradition-directed; and for an understandable reason. With only a handful of people a million at the most in the early sixteenth century the Portuguese managed to colonize Brazil, maintain establishments in India, off the coast of China and around the coasts of Africa from Tangier to Malindi, to send missionaries to practi cally every pagan country, to maintain research enterprises second to none in the fields of navigation, cartography and astronomy, and to do trade with practically every country in the known world. It was a stupendous and heroic achievement, one that Lusitanian poets and historians have never tired of telling, and one that has often been memorialized in shrine, monument and institution. Perhaps the very brevity of her Great Age has served to focus attention on it and to strengthen the affection of the Portuguese for the past and for those insti tutions, such as the Catholic Church, that have resisted the erosive agen cies of time and fortune. Be that as it may, the Portuguese continue to be deeply conscious of their cultural and spiritual inheritance, and dedicated to its protection. Portugal, said Commander Manuel Sarmento Rodrigues, then Minister of Colonies, in a speech before the Portuguese National Assembly on March 1, 1950, is not a European continental nation, but a maritime and missionary power. The overseas expansion started by the Portuguese five hundred years ago is the strongest reason for the existence of the nation. We all have this feeling it was born with us and therefore not one of us can doubt that the guarantee of our independence, and of our future existence, lies not in Europe; . . . our main field of action lies overseas. Cultural Assimilation With so much colonial experience behind her, Portugal sees less reason than most of her critics for changing the direction of her policy, or its source of inspiration. Her spokesmen consider it a point of national honor to proclaim on every possible occasion, as Cecil Scott has phrased it in his working paper, the incontrovertible superiority of Portuguese culture which five centuries of experience in Africa have, they feel, demonstrated beyond need of further proof. As the Portuguese delegate declared when leaving Lisbon to attend the 1951 meeting in Dakar of the Scientific Coun cil for Africa South of the Sahara, We go not to learn, but to teach. The words were proud, but the spirit sincere. There have been shifts and twists of emphasis, but the objective of

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Portuguese policy down the years has seldom been in doubt. In Com mander Sarmento Rodrigues words, it has been to Christianize, colonize and civilize . . . In diffusing our blood, our language and our religion, our only purpose was that high aim of making others equal to us and uniting them in the bonds of brotherly love. Such sugary sentiments may not have been well received by the Africans who found themselves chosen to work on the roads and at the docks, but no one who has met Commander Sarmento Rodrigues can doubt that they were honest. Nor can it be doubted that these sentiments find daily expression in the work of the Portuguese governors and their aides. Whether in Lisbon, Luanda or the bush, the avowed aim of Portuguese rule continues to be the creation of a society which in time will become a complete moral, political and eco nomic unity. 21 Though the moral aspects of Portuguese colonial policy are not always the most apparent, they are continually exercising the minds of its expo nents. And it must be said to their credit that, even in the early days, the Portuguese seldom made a mans race or color or status the subject of discriminatory legislation. Being close to Africa, the peoples of the Iberian Peninsula, Spaniards and Portuguese alike, became aware sooner than most other Europeans of the racial and cultural differentiation of mankind. Any predisposition they may have had to think of themselves as better than other men was probably removed by the Moorish occupation. When they came to Europe, the Moors had already evolved a culture that was in no respect inferior, and in many respects superior, to that possessed by either Portuguese or Spaniard. So it was difficult for the Portuguese to despise a man simply because he was dark-skinned. If they did despise the majority of the Moors, it was because they were unbelievers. But they knew a powerful alchemy for turning unbelievers into brothers. Just as the Romans employed the device of citizenship whenever they needed or wanted to swell their ranks with barbarians, so the Portuguese employed the device of conversion. To qualify for membership in their club, it was not necessary that a man be white, only that he be a Christian a man with human dignity, with aspirations worth fostering, and with all the makings of a brother. The missionary zeal of the first Portuguese adventurers has, in this materialistic age, largely passed, but the ambition to redeem the Africans from what the Portuguese Colonial Charter calls their state of social deg radation still remains. Indeed, this is the first and great commandment of Portuguese policy. By living together and by educating the [African] people we have been transmitting our mentality, our faith, our culture and our customs in such a way that those who become assimilated are later
21 Dr. A. A. Mendes Correa, Dean of the Escola Superior Colonial, in an address before the Geographical Society of Lisbon, May 2, 1949.

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naturally fitted for Portuguese legislation and institutions 22 In other words, when the African has learned to speak and write Portuguese, has thrown over tribal traditions and accepted the moral sanctions of Portu guese culture, is willing to live with one wife and generally to work and behave like a Portuguese, he may become a Portuguese citizen and so enjoy full juridical equality with the citizens of Lisbon. Class distinctions may remain, as they do among the citizens of Lisbon, but not racial distinctions. So far less than one per cent of the Africans have taken advantage of these opportunities. But the goal is there, and more and more are being persuaded to work toward it. The fact that an African, in order to reach it, must turn his back on the good as well as the bad in his cultural tradition is not regarded as important, since that tradition, along with the language that goes with it, is held unbecoming in an assimilado. Economic and Political Implications It logically follows from such a premise that the Portuguese have no use for self-determination, and equally no use for the commonwealth concept. Central to all their political thinking is, in Dr. Armindo Monteiros words, the overriding idea of national oneness. 23 There is only one state, one territory, one population, one citizenship, one government. Portuguese Guinea, Angola, Mozambique are provinces of Portugal, just as much as Algarve and Estremadura. None has the right of secession. Each is repre sented in the National Assembly. Each is part of Patria-mai, the mother country. Together they form a single entity governed from a single center, Lisbon. There is probably no more centralized government in the world. The economic unity is not as evident as the political unity, but it is a favorite theme of Portuguese ministers, students of government and busi nessmen. Like France, Portugal is poorly off in many of the necessities of a modern, diversified economy. She has little coal and no iron ore to speak of, and, of course, none of the tropical and subtropical ingredients of manufacturing industry such as rubber, cotton, sisal and palm oil. In the circumstances, it is natural that the Portuguese should be drawn to the idea of developing the overseas and metropolitan provinces on comple mentary lines, using colonial raw materials wherever possible in metro politan factories and shipping back the products of those factories to the overseas provinces. And they have been no slower than any other colonial power to exploit the idea to the extent, in some instances, of requiring raw material producers to sell their goods at prices below, and to purchase their manufactured necessities at prices above, those to be obtained on the
22 Mareelo Caetano, Colonizing Traditions, Principles and Methods of the Portu guese, Agenda Geral do Ultramar, Lisbon, 1951, pp. 35-36. 23 In a speech at the opening of the Colonial Governors' Conference, in Lisbon, June 1, 1933. At the time Dr. Monteiro was Minister of the Colonies, as the Overseas Provinces were then called.

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open world market. Even so, they would be quick to scout the suggestion that a colonys sole function is to provide a blood bank for sufferers from economic anemia. In a speech before the Assembly of the League of Nations in 1936, Dr. Monteiro contended that Portugal had long sought to make the keystone of its colonial economic policy welfare rather than profit. While there is room for honest doubt about the length of this policy, it is undeniable that the notion of trusteeship has gathered momentum in the council chambers of the Portuguese in recent years. In his address to the continental and overseas delegates of the Portuguese National Union in 1953, Dr. Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, the Prime Minister, said as much when he declared:
Unless I am mistaken, there has been above all a reawakening of the national consciousness, as intensely revealed [throughout the Portuguese territories] by an ever more perfect identity of interests, by complementary economic devel opments, by communication between peoples, by cooperation between public services . . . and in particular by spiritual communion in the face of all our great problems . . .

This is not to imply that life for the bush African is much easier or more rewarding than it was fifty years ago. Nor is it to imply that his labor is nowhere being exploited. Unfortunately, in neither matter has progress been spectacular. But the course has been set, the goal announced. Com mander Gabriel Teixeira, a former Governor-General of Mozambique, summed it up in these words in an interview in 1954: We are going our way, slowly. Recent events in other parts of Africa only serve to strengthen our determination to keep to our course and our tempo. This way may not be the way of parliamentary democracy. It certainly is not the way of the British and French, or even the Belgians. It involves many restrictions which Africans in other territories have already found irksome and have outgrown. Those who tread it must be willing to deny themselves the free dom to speak as they feel, the freedom to work as they choose or do not choose. They will almost certainly find that making a nuisance of oneself doesnt pay; that recalcitrance is liable to be punished by means more punitive than persuasive; that all forms of dissidence are liable to be ex tinguished without debate or question. They may also find it quite difficult to worship God in the way of their preference. But in defense of their chosen way, the Portuguese argue, as Commander Teixeira did in the same interview:
History and philosophy not expediency are the best guides for African development. It is not a matter of who is likely to, or going to, absorb whom in Portuguese Africa, but rather of how soon African and European will learn to live together with mutual regard and dignity. For the present it is nonsense to treat all Africans alike. The only thing they have in common is color. It is equally nonsense to give an illiterate African a voting paper with symbols [such as cocks, elephants and cows] and call it an exercise in democratic pro cedures. It is consummate nonsense to give him freedom and authority before he knows what to do with them. What is important is to give him the kind of

C OL O NI A L P O L I C I E S justice he understands and to make only those laws we can enforce . . . If we don't, we shall lose his confidence, and when we have lost that we have lost everything.

SPANISH PO LIC Y

Like the Portuguese, the Spanish are not given to making declarations of colonial policy, and for much the same reason. They regard all their possessions African and European as one and indivisible. For ad ministrative and economic purposes, Spanish Guinea is Spain. This is not to say that the Spanish government has no policy for its colonies (as Spanish Guinea and the other overseas territories continue to be called), but only that it generally works on the principle that the least policy is the best policy. In its view, the more policies there are, the more do simple people become disturbed by them; and it has no desire to see its people disturbed as the people of neighboring Nigeria, the Cameroons and the onetime French Equatorial Africa have been. Further, once announced, policies are difficult to change without loss of authority, and the Spanish rule of the past generation has been nothing if not authoritarian. Possibly the most succinct statement of Spanish colonial policy is the following quoted by Lord Hailey: [to spread] patriotism and the Spanish virtues and culture, without uprooting the African, but with the definite purpose of improving his living conditions. 24 The fact that this state ment has an educational context serves only to heighten its general sig nificance, since the best test of a governments policy for its people is the kind of schooling it is willing to provide for them. At best, the schooling provided is schooling for assimilation or eman cipation, as the Spanish call it. At worst, it is schooling for servitude. All of it is schooling for continued subjection to an alien will and alien ways. The possibility that some of the schooled might prefer to stay with their own virtues and culture, or even to be uprooted, has yet to be officially conceded. 24 See
p. 1220.

An African Survey: Revised 1956 , Oxford University Press, London, 1957,

CHAPTER

20

Nationalism and Politics

GROWTH THE FACTORS OF T H E POLITICAL ROLE

ASSOCIATION IMPEDIMENTS P AT H IN T H E N A T I O N A L I S T S

L ike most of the other fighting words of our time, nationalism means
different things to different people, including political scientists and lexicographers. As with colonialism, democracy and freedom, it is more readily defined by what is done in its name than by what it is. And in tropical Africa a great many things are being done in its name. There are nationalistic movements in religion, education, economics and art, as well as in politics. And in politics there are movements that seek to pro mote nationalism on different scales, with different coverages, and for different objectives. There are, for instance, the tribal nationalisms of the Yoruba, Ewe, Ganda, Luo and Kikuyu; the territorial nationalisms of Nigeria and, until its emergence as an independent country, Ghana; and the interterritorial nationalisms of Togo, the Cameroons, the United States of West Africa and Pan-Africa. There are white and brown as well as black nationalisms, the European and Asian settlers in Kenya and in the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland being no less interested in their rights as nationals than are their evolue African neigh bors. There are Christian and Moslem nationalisms, incipient and mature nationalisms, democracy-oriented and fascism-oriented nationalisms. There are also nationalisms that are directed toward such limited goals as multiracial partnership, the abolition of color bars and other forms of discrimination; and those that are directed toward the severance of all imposed political bonds and the winning of unconditional sovereignty. In view of all this we shall not waste time devising definitions, beyond suggesting that African nationalism is what African nationalists like, and that African nationalists are those, of all racial origins, who believe in

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the right to govern and be governed in the way of their own choosing, and to resist, by whatever means in their power, those who would withhold that right. About this kind of belief, or the promoting of it, there is nothing very new. The traditions of many groups in tropical Africa, as elsewhere, tell of oppression and the painful duty of resisting it. Judging from the mor tality rate of the pre-European empires of tropical Africa of Ghana, Tekrur, Mali, Songhai, Gao, Dendi, Kano, Bornu, Darfur, Gondar, Harar and a dozen more it may be assumed that the resisters were not infrequently rewarded for their pains. There were resisters, too, in early European times, as, for instance, in upper Senegal (1886-1888) under the marabout Mamadou Lamine; in Dahomey (1890-1893) under King Behanzin; in Southern Rhodesia (1892-1894) under the Matabele King, Lobengula; and in Tanganyika (1891-1894) under Mkwawa, paramount chief of the Hehe. Todays resisters may be more peaceful than their fathers but they are none the less resolute on that account, or less willing, when the need is upon them, to die fighting as their fathers did.

GROW TH FACTORS

We do not have to go far to find reasons for the unparalleled growth of nationalist movements in our day, for this is the day of nationalism. It has its sweet singers on short-wave radio stations, its lobbyists in the labor unions, its strategists in the council chambers of the United Nations. There is barely a characteristic of the life of any non-self-governing territory that does not, from time to time, provide these singers, lobbyists and strategists with the theme of an attack on colonialism, or a defense of self-government, even though it be bad government. And, after all, what can the modern world offer African man that is at once as beguiling and as challenging, as pleasing and as flattering, as the creed of nationalism? For convenience the growth factors may be divided into two categories: predisposing and precipitating. They may overlap here and leave a few gaps there, but they will probably serve as well as any to remind us that every child of the human spirit is the progeny of the general and the par ticular, is cradled in time and in place, and owes as much to the nurture it gets as to its nature. PREDISPOSING FACTORS
INTERNAL

Economic The coming of the European as miner, manufacturer, trader, administra tor and settler on the land has had profound results for the African. As earlier chapters have shown, it has loosened the shackles of his social

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order, brought him into touch with men of diverse backgrounds, given him a new idea of the material and intellectual possibilities of life and the means of realizing some of them. It has also created a host of new ways of earning a living, and of acquiring wealth and status. It has, in fact, created a new middle class composed of traders, well-to-do farmers, teachers, lawyers, doctors and clergy. How this came about James S. Coleman recounts in a paper prepared for this study:
In many instances this new class is made up of persons drawn from the lower strata of traditional African society, partly because of indiscriminate missionary education and partly because of the social mobility and freedom allowed the non-conformist under the European pax . This new class lacking status in the traditional structure and in general denied participation in the European super structure has everywhere tended to provide both the leadership and the financial support for nationalist movements. The unwilling contribution of colonial governments and extra-territorial enterprises to the development of this new class has tended to be overlooked. By providing salaried employment to clerks and artisans indispensable to the conduct of colonial government and large-scale commercial activities an opportunity was created for the accumu lation of capital later used by those groups either to undertake professional training or, what was frequently more desirable, to set themselves up as traders . . . A study of their biographies reveals that most African nationalists received their initial boost as employees of either the colonial government or one of the large extra-territorial firms.

Besides opportunities, the new economic order created fears and grievances. There was the fear of change from subsistence to cash crop farming, from communal forms of ownership to private ownership sometimes to ownership of nothing and from bush life to town life. There was the fear of want of food, security, companionship and redress. There was the grievance of land alienation in some areas (notably in Kenya, where more than 10,000 square miles of highly attractive farm land was early reserved for European settlement). There was the grievance, mostly in the same areas, of race prejudice. And there were the grievances, almost universal, of low wages and the exploitation which they frequently betokened, of poverty in the midst of abundance, and of the difficulty of discharging family obligations in a money-wise world. It is of such stuff, as Chapter 18 suggests, that the cloak of trade unionism is made a cloak that fits the nationalist as well as it does the unionist. Indeed, it is difficult for the man who dons this cloak not to look like a nationalist. Thomas Hodgkin tells why this is so:
African nationalism, like other nationalisms, is in part a revolt against an inferior economic status. In all the main regions of agitation . . . demands for economic development have been written into political programmes, and have swayed African opinion in times of tension and upheaval. These have included demands for higher prices for farmers; for higher wage and salary levels for manual and clerical workers, for a larger share in internal and foreign trade for African merchants (as against European, Lebanese or Indian firms); for the nationalisation, or profit-squeezing, of foreign concessions; for more rapid in

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dustrial development; and (in countries of European settlement) for the break ing up of European estates and their redistribution among African peasants. The fact that the economic claims and interests of different sections of African society . . . may be divergent is of subordinate importance, so long as for all sections the colonial regime is regarded as the main obstacle in the way of economic advance.1

Frequently the unionist not only looks and talks like a nationalist, he is a nationalist and a leader at that. Among those who have used trade unionism as a means to political power are Dr. E. M. L. Endeley, former president of the Cameroons Development Corporation Workers Union, who became Leader of Government Business in the British Cameroons, and Tom Mboya, General Secretary of the Kenya Federation of Labour, who is today one of the most influential African politicians in his country.
Social

New economic classes become new social classes if not in the eyes of the conservatives, in the eyes of the progressives. The prestige that has come to be associated with the abundance of things a wealthy educated man may possess has been a powerful factor in enabling such men to assert the leadership of nationalist causes. And because Western education is the master key to Western wealth and power, it is without doubt the most important single factor in the recently accelerated growth of African na tionalism. Coleman notes that
Early missionary education provided the African recipients with a back ground which was a technical prerequisite of their pursuit of higher education. Without higher education it would have been impossible for Africans seriously to have challenged the colonial system. It is the doctors, lawyers and others with higher Western education who occupy the top rung in the new nationalist leadership even in the Moslem areas of northern Nigeria.

The association between the availability of post-primary education and the vitality of nationalism is very close. Almost without exception the territories which have had the longest and most ample experience of such education are the territories with the most articulate nationalisms. Within those territories, it is the groups which, either by accident or design, have had the best education that are the banner-bearers of nation alism a fact which may explain, in part at least, why the Yoruba and the Ibo of southern Nigeria are politically more articulate than the Hausa and Fulani of northern Nigeria, the Creoles of Sierra Leone Colony (Free town region) more than the indigenous peoples of the Sierra Leone Pro tectorate, the people of Buganda more than the people of Bunyoro, Toro, Acholi and Karamoja in Uganda, and the Kikuyu and Luo more than the Masai and Teita in Kenya. It is easy to see why the association between the two should be so close.
1 Nationalism in Colonial Africa, Frederick Muller, London, 1956, p. 115.

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*75

While primary education is essentially a technique for making oneself understood, post-primary education is essentially a training in the art of understanding others their times and inventions, their thought and influence. Not the least of the uses of post-primary education is that it promotes the habit of criticism of oneself and ones teachers, of speculation concerning the fitness of things, and of experiment in the hope of increas ing that fitness. Though the field of African social experiment is large, the paths across it are convergent, and all can be made to serve the purposes of the political reformer. The organizing experience gained by a man in running a district welfare association can easily be put to advantage in developing a party system. The village group that is willing to discuss the pros and cons of land consolidation or well digging can as easily be used to tout the idea of self-determination or universal suffrage. The man who is good at public speaking or writing can as easily persuade his audience to lay down their tools in defense of political rights as of economic ones. Religious The disruptive effect of the Christian religion on African society is dis cussed elsewhere; here we are concerned only with the extent to which the Christian religion has influenced the growth of African nationalism. And on this subject opinion is divided. On one side there are those who maintain that missionary insistence on the rejection by converts of the religious sanctions of chieftainship and of such practices as dancing, polyg amy and clitoridectomy has provided the African nationalist with one of his strongest weapons. Economic exploitation is bad; social discrimination is worse; but could anything be more humiliating than the denial of a peoples birthright its traditions by unknowing strangers?
If one cannot find satisfaction and security in the past, one must certainly look to the present and the future. One must justify himself and his people by trying to compete with the white man on his own terms. It is at least a reason able hypothesis that the determination and seriousness of nationalistic move ments is one of the results.2

On the other side, there are those who argue that the sum total effect of missionary enterprise has been to dull rather than whet the cutting edge of African nationalism. And it is true that many of the fundamentalist missions have held, with St. Paul, that on earth man has no continuing city; that his citizenship is in heaven, whence eventually will come both his temporal and spiritual salvation; and that meanwhile he should come out and be separate from all unnecessary earthly entanglements. On the same side are those who argue that the growth in recent years of separatist, or splinter, church groups is incompatible with the spirit and purpose of
2 William Bascom, African Culture and the Missionary, Civilisations, Vol. Ill (1955), No. 4, p. 50L

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nationalism and may, in fact, be related to the failure of nationalists to give them the kingdom. Some, however, see in the phenomenon of the separatist church an assurance that the African will go along with any man who promises him more than the next, especially the man who does it to the accompaniment of religious music, symbolism and ceremonial. In evidence they cite the leaders of the Convention Peoples Party in the Gold Coast who in the early 1950s won sympathy and support by singing Lead, Kindly Light at their mass meetings, and reciting nationalist prayers and a nationalist creed in which Kwame Nkrumah took the place of Christ, and the Gov ernor, Sir Charles Arden-Clarke, the place of Pontius Pilate. They also point to the nationalistic overtones of many of the separatist churches in southern Africa. Some of these, notably the Ethiopian churches, stand for, and have in fact achieved, independence of control by European clergy. Others, notably the Zionist churches, owe an almost unques tioning allegiance to a leader inspired by apocalyptic hopes of a total reconstruction of society. And almost all of them stand for the principle of Africa for the Africans. Then, too, there are those who see in nationalism a flowering of the Christian ethic, for does not the New Testament repeatedly affirm the sovereignty of the human spirit, and the equality before God of all men, whether Jew or Gentile, Greek or barbarian? Certainly biblical texts have been used with great frequency by nationalists to advance their political ends. Moreover, the indigenous church has provided many African leaders with a forum and a following, and an area of relatively free expression not found elsewhere, as Coleman puts it, that have been subtle contribu tions to the development of African nationalism. More than one Western church leader has argued, with R. W. Stopford, that almost every where in Africa the church has been ahead of the government in develop ing self-governing institutions. 3 By contrast, the influence of Islam on the growth of African nationalism has so far been very small, and negative at that. In George Carpenters words :
The characteristic pattern of the Islamic state has been a personal despotism resting on mass loyalty grounded in religion, on fear, and on military force . . . The pattern is quite incompatible with the complex administrative structure and varied technical competence required for the multiple functions of modem nations; it cannot engender a patriotic loyalty transcending religious and cultural differences; it does not provide scope for potential leaders nor assure security to competent servants of the state.4
3 Nationalism in Africa, East Africa and Rhodesia, September 9, 1949, p. 9. 4 The Role of Christianity and Islam in Contemporary Africa, p. 98 in Africa Today (edited by C. Grove Haines), Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore, 1955.

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Political Territorial nationalisms are the product of the European presence, Coleman maintains.
That presence has provided a framework in which certain common sentiments and a sense of common destiny could develop: a territorial system of law and order permitting relatively free circulation of goods and peoples and the con sequent development of a common set of assumptions and expectations regard ing political authority; a common territorial currency, language, communications media and political institutions; indeed, even a common set of grievances.

Unintended by-product of the European presence is perhaps a more precise way of putting it, for when the colonial powers first began to talk of self-government in tropical Africa, they had in mind native-style rather than Western-style autonomy. Real national self-government, declared Sir Hugh Clifford, Governor of Nigeria, in 1920, can be realized only through the local tribal institutions and the indigenous forms of govern ment. The concept of independent African nation-states larger than the tribe or the language group was not anywhere officially contemplated in those days. Nor is it yet contemplated in parts of tropical Africa. There is, of course, nothing unprecedented about this, Coleman notes. The British did not plan Burma, nor the Dutch the Republic of Indonesia. But unintended though the birth of territorial nationalism may have been, the cradle in which it was laid could scarcely have been better adapted to its early needs. The existence of a central territorial framework of government compelled politically conscious Africans and Europeans alike to think in territorial terms. With the birth of political parties, they were obliged not only to think, but to organize and act in territorial terms if they wanted to act meaningfully. The European presence did more than provide a cradle for African nationalism. It provided a climate for it. This climate may be measured in various ways. It can be measured by the degree of legitimacy possessed by a given nationalist movement, that is, by reference to the declared objectives of a given colonial policy. It can be measured by the number of freedoms, e.g., of communication by speech, press, etc., of assembly and association, and of movement (entry, emigration), enjoyed by a given people, African and non-African alike. It can be measured by the number of students who are sent abroad for advanced training, and by the avail ability of such training at home; by the degree of upward mobility of Africans in government and private employment, and by the extent to which the new elites are permitted to compete, economically, socially and politically, with the old elites. Not least, it can be measured by the sensitivity of the government to political pressures and public opinion, internal and external. On any of these counts, some African territories can be shown to provide a consistently better climate for the growth of nation

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alism than others. Some can be shown to have a rather more attractive climate than was formerly their luck; a few to have a distinctly austere climate; and one or two a climate that is positively inclement. Writing of the mid-1950s and using the criterion of legitimacy, Cole man graded the territories in the following descending order of con geniality to the nationalist cause, or, what amounted to much the same thing, of nationalist progress: *
1. British West Africa, including Cameroons under United Kingdom trus teeship Senegal and French trust territories 2. The rest of French tropical Africa (since 1947) Uganda Northern Rhodesia Kenya (prior to the 1952 Mau Mau troubles) Tanganyika 3. Southern Rhodesia 4. Belgian territories * The Portuguese and Spanish territories were not listed by Coleman, pre sumably because there was nothing to list.

On any of the other counts, the rating would have been much the same, for just as legitimacy is an abstraction which, to be understood of the people, must be expressed in concrete freedoms, so public opinion and political pressure cannot exist without the exercise of such freedoms.
EXTERNAL

In a sense, all internal growth factors have their roots outside the terri tory, and so are as much external as internal. At the same time, a useful distinction can, we believe, be made between those factors which, while external in origin and inspiration, operate indigenously, that is, those that have given the nationalist his case, and those which operate extraterritorially and merely fortify or frustrate him in the prosecution of it. It is perhaps the distinction between the players on the field and their any thing but bipartisan cheerleaders on the side lines. Among such external factors six are worthy of examination. These are the independent native states of Haiti, Liberia and Ethiopia; the United States; the metropolitan countries; communism; the liberation of colonial Asia; and the United Nations. The Independent Native States The existence of independent native states and their ability to keep going, often with very little outside encouragement, have long drawn the

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respect of the politically awakened colonial African. In many of the non self-governing territories the names of Toussaint LOuverture, Edward W. Blyden, Arthur and Edwin Barclay and Haile Selassie are much better known than those of the colonial governors, or their metropolitan masters. And it is not without significance that the first and major literary work of Nnamdi Azikiwe, eastern Nigerias leading statesman, bore the title Liberia in World Politics.5 The fact that these states were recognized as legitimate and theoretically endowed with sovereign equality in a modern states system, says Coleman, widened the vision of thoughtful Africans regarding the possible/ which awareness tended to sharpen their discon tent with a colonial status. The United States Of the various American contributions to the growth of African nation alism, those made by religious and quasi-religious organizations have been among the more influential. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries many missions were strongly millennial in their outlook. While there was nothing exclusively American about millennialism, it was from the America-based Watchtower movement, the missionary arm of Jehovahs Witnesses, that Africans caught what was perhaps the most infectious of all forms of millennial ism. To a world living in a time of unparalleled woes, it offered the fol lowing assurances: first, that the Kingdom of God is at hand; second, that this kingdom will be an earthly kingdom; third, that it will be a king dom in which not only tears and death, but poverty, tyranny and even barrenness shall be unknown; and fourth, that only Witnesses will be citizens of it. Such teaching could hardly fail to affect the attitude of those who accepted it toward civil authority. What was the point of supporting a godless government, especially when it might any day be ousted by a theocracy? The voice of the Witness therefore tended to be one of muted opposition, if not of open rebellion. Though the Watchtower movement was not, and is not, nationalist in the usual sense of the term, it has been regarded by many governments as being as subversive as any nationalist movement and therefore liable to repression. In at least three territories, Nyasaland, Northern Rhodesia and the Belgian Congo (where it is called Kitawala), the movement has been under a long-standing government ban. Nothing serves the bona fide nationalist better than other peoples repression, and there is little doubt that many African Witnesses have been repressed even persecuted and killed for their convictions.
5 In this two-volume study Azikiwe does not ignore the mistakes and shortcomings of the Liberian experiment, but the burden of his argument is that, all things con sidered, the country has shown that it is capable of governing itself.

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Probably more influential Hodgkin calls it the most important single outside stimulus to African nationalism 6 was the movement to which Marcus Garvey gave his name. In Garveyism the alloy of pan-Africanism was smelted into the iron of Ethiopianism. Garveys Universal Negro Improvement Association (founded in 1914), his African Communities League, his Negro World, and his international conventions for Africans and non-African negroes became as much a part of Garveyism as his African Orthodox Church. Garveyism may not have been a very well tempered weapon with which to beat the colonial powers, but it was a popular one in British and French West Africa and the Cameroons after World War I, and it was successful in spreading the idea of independent African churches as an instrument of African liberation. 7 Even today the name of Garvey is greatly respected by many of the older nationalists, including Dr. Kwame Nkrumah. There have been other American instruments of African liberation. Among these were those negro writers who, from World War I onward, made African history and art, and African culture generally, their special field of interest. While their primary reason for doing so may have been the desire to destroy the inferiority complex of the American negro by giving him a past which he could honor and respect, Coleman says, this literary movement had a secondary impact upon thoughtful Africans which was an element in their own nationalist build-up. Many of the more attractive, if not always warrantable, interpretations of their history and culture were widely circulated, and as widely quoted.8 High on the list of the interpreters were Charles Morrow Wilson, Carter G. Woodson, W. E. Burghardt Du Bois and Ralph J. Bunche. Nor was it simply a literary and intellectual movement. The five PanAfrican Congresses organized by Du Bois and others along the lines of the Garvey conventions did almost as much to foster African negro nationalism in its early days. So, too, did the American negro press, which from the time of the Italian invasion of Ethiopia gave increasing publicity to African causes, and hospitality to African students of journalism Azikiwe among them. Such pressure groups as the National Equal Rights League of Democracy Congress of America, the National Race Congress of America, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the Council on African Affairs influenced African nationalism by the comfort and encouragement they gave to African students in the United States and their frequent, well-publicized pronouncements of the evils of colonialism. These activities and the intellectual ferment which they symbolized served to sharpen the racial consciousness of the new African elite, and to provide them with an external movement with which they could identify
6 Op. cit., p. 101. 7 Ibid., p. 102. 8 It is said that articles from Garvey's Negro World were frequently quoted on the drums.

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themselves and from which they could derive strength, leadership and confidence in the rightness of their cause. Nor must we forget the instrumental role of the United States in rela tion to African students. No African can be in the United States long without having his race consciousness sharpened by the apparatus of social and economic discrimination he encounters, and the stories he hears from American negroes, with whom he tends, either from necessity or inclination, to consort. This sharpening process is especially apparent in the case of the student who tries to work his way through school, and the one who has come from a part of Africa where there is little, if any, discrimination. Not all Africans take the calculated insult and the downthe-nose look with the good grace of a Kwame Nkrumah, and at times during his ten-year residence in America even he found it difficult to believe that anyone could refuse a man a drink of water because his skin happened to be a different color. 9 On the other hand, no African student can be in the United States long without becoming infected by its social mobility, its impatience with authoritarianism, and its readiness to take a tilt at all foreign windmills (and some domestic ones, too), or without sensing that its dominant ethical assumptions and ideals are still Lin colnian. If we could cast up a balance sheet of African student experience in America, it would almost certainly have more entries on the credit than the debit side. At any rate it is uncommon to meet an African alumnus of an American institution who does not speak gratefully, and proudly, of the years he spent in it. The Metropolitan Countries The influence of the metropolitan country on the rise of colonial nationalism appears to have been in direct proportion to the effective strength of anti-colonial opinion in that country. It has therefore been greatest in the British territories, least in the Spanish and Portuguese, and greater in the French territories than the Belgian. The influences at work have been of four main kinds: humanitarian, religious, trade unionist and political. On the humanitarian side, we may cite the activities of the (British) Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society, which while it neither indicted imperialism nor advocated self-government, did much to increase the Africans self-esteem. It also helped to ventilate his grievances at the court of public opinion. On the religious side, the Protestant churches of the United Kingdom, France and Belgium and their affiliated Christian councils and missionary conferences have from time to time, and with increasing frequency in recent years, spoken out strongly against the denial of the basic human rights of liberty, equality and brotherhood.
9 Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah, Thomas Nelson & Sons, New York, 1957, p. 43.

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The trade unionist influence has been most conspicuous in French areas, thanks, in large measure, to the exertions of the Confederation Generate du Travail, the Confederation Africaine des Travailleurs Croyants, and the Force Ouvriere, which are patterned on the metropolitan trade unions of the same name, and, as shown in Chapter 18, are deep-dyed in egali tarianism. In British Africa, the metropolitan link, formerly loose and unavailing, has become much closer since the end of World War II. Some African unions have been actively courted by the Trades Union Congress and, upon occasion, subsidized by it. From time to time, the congress has also loaned its legal specialists to unions involved in strikes and arbi tration, and advised them on matters relating to their economic and politi cal advancement. And while it may not always preach what the unions like to practice, its benedictions are a constant source of comfort to their nationalist hearers. On the political but non-communist10 side, the Fabian Colonial (now Commonwealth) Bureau, the Congress of Peoples Against Imperialism, the Movement for Colonial Freedom, and the Africa Bureau to name only a few of the more notable British pressure groups have proved themselves to be doughty critics of their countrys colonial policies and willing tutors of aspiring nationalists. Upon occasion, they have proved to be no less doughty critics of the more aspiring nationalists. As in the United States, the Africans on whom these movements have made the most direct impact are the students. And since it is to the United Kingdom that most of the students have gone, it is there that the impact has been greatest. In the mid-1920s a few British West Africans then studying in the United Kingdom organized the West African Students Union. For nearly two decades this union served as a seedbed for the germination of African nationalist ideas and programs. It was here that many of todays leading west African politicians dreamed their first dreams of positive action, peoples parties and self-government within the shortest possible time. In the post-World War II period, as loyalties and ambitions became increasingly territorialized, the nationalist cause was strengthened by the formation of national student unions (e.g., the Gold Coast Students Union), and by metropolitan branches of such west African political organizations as the Action Group (Nigeria), the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons, the Uganda National Congress, and the Kenya African Union. Almost every one of these groups was in turn strengthened by the ministrations of those British political groups notably the Fabian Colonial Bureau that were working toward the same ends.1 1
10 Because of its international nature and direction communistic influence is dealt with lower down, under a separate heading. 11 During the second world war members of the West African Students Union met regularly with Fabian leaders to formulate questions for Labor M. P.s to put before the House of Commons regarding specific African grievances and needs.

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Because of their much smaller numbers, African students in France long had difficulty in organizing and maintaining seminaries of this sort.12 Of those that have been established in recent years, the most influential is probably the student union of the Rassemblement Democratique Africain, which publishes its own journal, La Voix dAfrique Noire. As for Belgium, Portugal and Spain, until the past few years they had no Africans to form such unions, for there were no African students in their metropolitan centers of higher learning. Even today the number of such students is small in 1958 there were no more than 100 in Belgium and 50 at the most in Spain and Portugal and their corporate life almost nil. Where these metropolitan organizations have helped most is in con vincing the African nationalist that, at least in the United Kingdom and France, he was not up against a monolithic community; that there was in fact as much concern with the dignity and rights of man in the metro politan countries as in his own; and that he could count on a vast fund of altruistic support for his program, even among the governing classes. The fact that he faced an ideologically differentiated not to say divided community in which politically significant groups sympathized with him, aided and encouraged him, and provided him with formulas and tech niques for realizing his objectives, says Coleman, has tended not only to fortify him in the pursuit of his objectives, but also to attract him in many instances to a programmatic nationalism. Communism If communism is not the most powerful of forces within the African nationalist movement, it is not from want of effort. This effort has been sustained and intelligent, and devoted to the twin purpose of seduction and disaffection. While most of the effort appears to have been directed by national communist parties and front organizations, notably those of the United Kingdom and France,13 some of it has undoubtedly been directed by international agencies. The primary target of the metropolitan Communists has been the African students in their midst. Their tactics, as Coleman describes them, have followed the customary lines:
. . . solicitation regarding lodgings, social relations and entertainment; un conditional support of all nationalist objectives; arranging of summer tours behind the Iron Curtain; and the stimulating vision of a return to Africa armed with funds and the potential might of the Soviet Union to become leaders in African Soviet Republics. 12 As late as 1945 there were only about 100 French African students enrolled in metropolitan universities. Around 1950 there were about 1,250. The corresponding figures for British African students in metropolitan universities were approximately 500 and 3,500. 13 The Belgian Communist Party has been unable to play the same role because few Congolese students have resided in Belgium, and those who have have been carefully chaperoned. As for Portugal and Spain, neither country has a communist party.

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Although few were won by this wooing, many were moved by it to the point of a benevolent interest. Prominent among those Africans whose nationalism was fed, in part at least, on a diet of communist comfort and dialectic, are Jomo Kenyatta (who spent some months in Moscow in 1931), I. T. A. Wallace-Johnson, co-editor with Nnamdi Azikiwe of the African Morning Post (Accra) in 1934-1935, founder of the West African Youth League, and leading radical nationalist of Sierra Leone for over twenty years; Ladipo Solanke, founder and long-time leader of the West African Students Union; Dr. Felix Houphouet-Boigny, founder and first president of the Rassemblement Democratique Africain, which in its early days (about 1945) had close connections with the French Communist Party; and Kwame Nkrumah, who still speaks of himself as a Marxist so cialist. 14 The international Moscow-directed agencies have worked rather differently. Their objective, seemingly, has been to foster revolt within key African areas. For a time the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) had several members in British tropical Africa and affiliates, through the Confederation Generale du Travail (CGT), in French tropical Africa. Though most of the memberships have lapsed, interest in the WFTU is far from dead. Representatives from both British and French territories continue to attend most of the congresses organized by the WFTU. Other agencies that have been used to further Russian ends are the International Students Union and the International Federation of Democratic Women. For a time, too, the Russians were using front or ganizations, such as the Free Council of Democratic German Youth, to bring African students on scholarship to universities located behind the Iron Curtain. But this did not prove to be a very profitable investment of their funds; too many of the scholarship holders went solely for the ride. The Liberation of Colonial Asia The political coming out of Asia during the past generation has been followed with the keenest interest by African nationalists. As early as 1927 Lapido Solanke affirmed that It took the white race a thousand years to arrive at their present level of advance; it took the Japanese, a Mongol race, fifty years to catch up . . . there is no reason why we west Africans should not catch up with the Aryans and the Mongols in one quarter of a century.15 Solankes time scale, like his ethnology, may have been on the roughand-ready side, but few of his African contemporaries would have quar reled with it; and none would have quarreled with the conviction that what the people of Asia could do, the people of Africa could also do. Nor could any say that the people of Asia were not doers, when almost every
14 Op. cit.y p. 13. 15 United West Africa, an unpublished manuscript cited by James S. Coleman.

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year of the past score and more has seen a new independence movement gather speed or a new Asian name added to the scroll of sovereign states. Of all the Asian independence movements, the Indian movement has undoubtedly stirred the imagination of African nationalists the most. And it is not difficult to see why. First, there was the personality of Mahatma Gandhi. The message cabled by the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC) on his death expressed the sentiments of all African nationalists, for whom Gandhi was the bearer of the torch of liberty of oppressed peoples, and whose life had been an inspiration to colonials everywhere. Second, there was the passive nature of it. Most of the African nationalists had been raised in the conviction part-religious and part-political that the really durable victories are the bloodless ones, and that a good cause is advanced much faster by going to prison for it (as many Indian and African leaders have done) than by dying for it on a battlefield. Third, there was, and still is, the kinship between Indian and African students living in London and elsewhere a kinship fostered in the early days by the interest of Indian nationalists in the West African Students Union and in the short-lived but influential journal Pan-Africa (to which many of them contributed articles), and, more recently, by the presence of Indian groups along with African ones in the Movement for Colonial Freedom. Fourth, there has been the consistent condemnation by Indian government spokesmen of African colonialism and race dis crimination. This condemnation has been widely voiced in the press, on short-wave radio programs beamed to African countries, and at inter national conferences. At the Colombo Conference of Asian Prime Min isters in early 1954, Prime Minister Nehru, the most consistent and respected critic of them all, himself a prison graduate, affirmed that colonialism is a violation of fundamental rights, and a threat to peace, and in the following year at the Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung he pleased his African admirers even better by affirming that it is an intoler able humiliation for any nation of Asia or Africa to degrade itself by becoming a camp follower of one or the other of the power blocs . . Fifth, there has been the generosity of the Indian government in provid ing scholarships and travel grants to African nationalist leaders, actual and potential, and in encouraging its own elite to learn about Africa. (Since 1954 there has been an African Studies Program in the University of Delhi, in which work up to the doctoral level is offered.) In Colemans view, the continued assertion by India of the role of leader of the newly independent and colonial areas of the world will mean a continuing Indian influence upon emergent African nationalism and in favor of neutralism. He also believes that the real significance of the Indian factor is that it has given and continues to give African nationalists a sense of power derived from external allies, as well as conviction that their cause will triumph. On the other hand, there are those who argue that the leadership of India is in danger of being completely neutralized

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by the unfortunate image of that country created by Indians living in tropical Africa and by those with whom African students come into con tact in India. Increasing numbers of Africans find themselves out of humor with the hard bargaining and not always scrupulous practices of Indian traders, and contemptuous of the inequities of the Hindu caste system. The United Nations Since 1945, the United Nations has also been a predisposing factor of some magnitude. By the sympathy and support it has tendered to aspiring nationalists and nationalist groups it has forced African governments to recognize their accountability at the court of world opinion. It is true, as Vernon McKay has pointed out, that much of what the United Nations has done has been ignored by the governments concerned, but the trust territories and, indirectly, the other territories in Africa have benefited from the fact that every year the colonial powers present their records and defend their policies before the United Nations a continual inter national justification which helps them to reappraise and perfect their methods of administration. 16 More important perhaps from our present point of view is the manner in which the work of the United Nations has affected the political be havior of Africas people, Asian and European no less than African. This it has done mainly through its 12-member Trusteeship Council, which annually receives petitions from, and examines conditions in, the territories falling under its surveillance and triennially sends missions to these terri tories. The publicity given to the petitions and petitioners has been especially significant. It has raised the morale of nationalist leaders both in and out of the trust territories, and enormously helped their credit rating with their followers. It has also turned more than one unknown petitioner into a leader overnight. Whether or not publicity of this kind does more good than harm, it has unquestionably accelerated the growth of African nationalism in a number of areas; in some it may even have precipitated it. PRECIPITATING FACTORS We have already suggested that it is difficult to draw a firm line between factors that predispose and those that precipitate. The trouble is that in the climate in which African nationalism is being raised, one days predis position may become the next days precipitation. But this is no reason for not recognizing the difference between the two, for it is real enough, espe cially in politically critical situations.
16 The Impact of the United Nations on Africa, p. 384 in Africa Today (edited by C. Grove Haines), Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore, 1955.

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As any social psychologist will affirm, the members of a group living in a critical situation are highly suggestible. Their passions are easily manipu lated, directed and ignited. The more critical the situation that is, the greater the stress of life, its frustrations and confusions the greater the ease with which these passions can get ignited. The tinder or, to change the figure, the precipitant of nationalist passion can be of several kinds. It can be economic. It can be supplied by a companys refusal (justifiable though it may be on the grounds of productivity) to respond to a labor unions request for increased wage rates. The miners of the Rhodesias and elsewhere have more than once used such a refusal as the occasion for a display of nationalist fervor. It can be racial. It can be supplied by an unpopular decision (right though it may have been) by the referee of an interracial soccer game as happened in Leopoldville in June 1957 after a European team was awarded a penalty that led to the defeat of the opposing African team, and subsequently to the injury of several Africans and Europeans. It can be religious. It can be supplied by a missions con demnation (high-principled though it may have been) of a cherished African practice. There are many, including some Christian Kikuyu, who believe that the Church of Scotlands denunciation of the Kikuyu custom of clitoridectomy had as much to do with forwarding the nationalist aims of the Kikuyu Central Association as the land question. Most of the really powerful precipitants, however, would appear to be derived from other compounds, such as constitutional change or the prospect of it, astute leadership and provocative journalism.
CONSTITUTIONAL CHANGE

No political atmosphere is more unstable than the one that echoes with the uncertain sound of the lawmakers trumpet. Such an atmosphere is at once a source of bewilderment to those who live in it and an incitement to their nationalist leaders to fill as best they may whatever vacuums appear in it. It is, further, a breeder of baleful miasmas the chief of which probably is a fear lest the uncertainties be so resolved by the gov ernors that the disabilities of the governed shall be increased rather than diminished. In Colemans view this fear of new disabilities resulting from political change has been one of the most powerful precipitants of politi cal activity. Among the evidences advanced by him in support of this view are the following: 1. The resurgence of nationalism among the Creoles of Sierra Leone Colony when it became apparent that the constitutional changes recom mended by the British government would put them in a minority position vis-a-vis the tribal peoples of the Sierra Leone Protectorate. 2. The chain-reaction awakening of all groups in the Togoland Trust Territories as a result of the independent calculations made by them regarding the different status they would have under the British, French

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and United Nations schemes that were proposed in the early and middle 1950s for the solution of their political problems. 3. The very remarkable, almost violent, outbreak of northern Nigerian nationalism following on constitutional developments that created the vision of domination by the southern Nigerians. 4. The pathological fear regarding political union with Kenya, or con stitutional change toward a unitary Uganda state which has stimulated the Ganda to militant outbursts of nationalism on three occasions in the past fifteen years. 17 The crucial point, says Coleman, is that although nationalism is pri marily a movement to bring about change, it tends to be precipitated by the prospect of change.
ASTUTE LEADERSHIP

But the threatening atmosphere of political uncertainty and disability, real or imagined, does not automatically rain nationalism. To use the rain makers jargon, a nucleator is needed: a leader who can release the latent energies of his people and give direction to their disorderly emotions, loyalties and desires. It is still an open question whether it is men who make movements, or movements men. While we have no intention of debating it, we believe that, in the realm of tropical African politics at least, a case could more easily be made out for the former than the latter. Almost all of the stronger nationalist movements have been sired by individuals, or small groups, and have been characterized by stronger loyalty to the sires than to the things for which they stand. This is as true of such post-World War II movements as the Parti Democratique de la Cote dIvoire (sired by Dr. Houphouet-Boigny) and the Convention Peoples Party (sired by Kwame Nkrumah and still referred to by him as my party) as it is of the much older Aborigines Rights Protection Society (long dominated by the remarkable Gold Coast lawyer W. E. G. Sekyi) and the Senegalese section of the French Socialist Party, organized and led during the 1930s by the equally remarkable Wolof lawyer Lamine Gueye. Nor could it very well have been otherwise in a world where until recently the masses were politically inarticulate, unaware and impotent, and where a man had to be exceptionally well qualified to get anywhere beyond the village limits. As different as the leaders of nationalist movements are, the more suc cessful of them have generally had at least three things in common. In the first place, they have either been or made themselves economi cally independent of the government, deriving their support from business, professions, farms, plantations, trade unions, journalism and so on. Nnamdi Azikiwe, for instance, is a banker, company director, newspaper
17 Coleman was writing in 1955.

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owner and editor. His compatriot and political opponent, Obafemi Awolowo, founder of the Action Group of Nigeria, is a barrister. Dr. Felix Houphouet-Boigny is a physician and the owner of extensive cocoa plan tations. Dr. E. M. L. Endeley, for many years the leading politician in the British Cameroons, is a physician, landowner and corporation director. Sir Milton Margai, long-time leader of the Sierra Leone Peoples Party, is also a physician and the owner of a lucrative nursing home. Sayed Ismail Ahmed El Azhari, who was the first Prime Minister of the Republic of Sudan, is a secondary school teacher by profession. Though Kwame Nkrumah could by no stretch of the imagination have been called a man of means in his nationalist days, he, too, managed to stay out of govern ment employment until he became Prime Minister thanks largely to his academic qualifications. Most of the leaders, in other words, have not had to wrestle with the spectres of intimidation and hunger; they have been free to speak their mind. At the same time, and this is our second point, most of them have sprung from, or have been able to identify themselves with, the people they en deavor to lead. "Sons of the soil have had a special legitimacy, in Cole man s words. True, some of them, like Jomo Kenyatta, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Kwame Nkrumah and Dr. Hastings Banda, were away from the soil for long spells, but their return to it was usually very well publicized often to the accompaniment of libations and affirmations of their weddedness to it and its people.18 In the third place, most of them have been clever men. Almost without exception they have shown themselves to be shrewd judges of the temper of their people, and of the amount of taxing and shoving they will take. They have, likewise almost without exception, been accomplished per formers on the platform, with a turn for flamboyancy that few African audiences can resist. And, to give them their due, they have seldom showed reluctance to go to prison. In Africa, as in Asia, the fraternity of the prison graduate is a noble one and greatly respected by the common people. Membership in it never yet hurt any nationalist leader.
PROVOCATIVE JOURNALISM

The nationalist newspaper,19 according to Coleman, has been

one of the most effective instruments in the hands of the new leadership for the exploitation of political uncertainty and threatened disabilities . . . It performs the indispensable function of linking leadership and following. In emergent Africa no aspiring leader can seriously make a claim to power without having his own newspaper. The areas of relatively advanced nationalism coincide with areas in which the African-owned-and-edited press is most advanced.
18 It has often been said that no small part of Kwame Nkrumahs early popularity arose from the mystique, cultivated assiduously before his marriage to an Egyptian in 1958, that he was married to the people that every woman in Ghana was his bride. 19 See Chapter 16 for a discussion of the African press in general.

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On several occasions the African press has provided the build-up for a crisis atmosphere. One such occasion is described in the Report of the Commission of Enquiry into Disturbances in the Gold Coast, 1948:
Beginning about September 1947, the press in general, which had hitherto exhibited a reasonably balanced opinion on affairs, gradually degenerated into an instrument of abuse of the Government. Immediately before and after the unhappy events of February 28, 1948, its tone and content were calculated to inflame the populace, to keep alive public tension and to provoke further mischief.20

Though this expresses the opinion of the administration, none of the journalists concerned would have denied that their editorials were in fact inflammatory, and intended so to be. Two other such occasions were those of the Uganda disturbances of 1949 and 1954. Of the April 1949 disturbances the Commissioners of Inquiry had this to say: . . . Next to the leaders of the Bataka Party and the Uganda African Farmers Union responsibility for the disturbances must be laid at [the] door [of the vernacular newspapers]/ 21 all but two of which were consistently and virulently anti-administration. The 1954 disturbances, associated with the Kabakas exile, were laid at the door of the same papers by many people not connected with the administration. And there are those who feel that of all the factors contributing to the restiveness of the Kikuyu in the immediate pre-Mau Mau period, the ver nacular press was the most potent. [African vernacular papers] were all from the first, with the exception of the African Star, strongly nationalist view-sheets . . . By [the time of] the declaration of the Emergency there were about forty [of them], mainly in Kikuyu . . . mostly highly seditious and taking a bitterly anti-White Quit Kenya line. 22 Where there is little or nothing in the way of an African-owned press, and where either governments or foreign corporations have been able to develop what is usually referred to as responsible journalism (as in the Rhodesias, Tanganyika, the Belgian Congo and French tropical Africa), the role of the newspaper in parlaying incidents, criticism and discord into crisis situations has been almost negligible. It is not only the African-owned-and-edited papers that go in for pro vocative journalism. Some of the European-owned-African-edited papers are anything but sedative. However, unlike the African-owned papers, the cause of their provocation is not always the same. One day it may be the irresolution of the government to carry out announced constitutional changes. The next day it may be the alleged malfeasance of some nation20 Op. cit., H.M.S.O., London, 1948, p. 32. February 28, 1948 was the day on which two Africans were killed and five others were wounded following the refusal of a contingent of ex-servicemen to halt a grievance march on Christiansborg Castle, the Governor's residence outside Accra. 21 Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Disturbances in Uganda during April 1949 , Entebbe, 1950, p. 100. 22 New Commonwealth, August 19, 1954, p. 171.

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alist leader. The day after it may be the snobbishness of the local expatriate population. Among the more notable exemplars of this type of journalism are the Daily Graphic of Accra, the Daily Mail of Freetown and the Daily Times of Lagos. Consistent supporters of constitutional government, they have demonstrated remarkable objectivity in news coverage and editorial comment, including biting criticism of the British administration as well as of nationalist leaders, Coleman reports. In particular, the Daily Times of Lagos has been called simultaneously pro-nationalist by British admin istrators, pro-North or pro-British by southern nationalists, pro-NCNC by the Action Group, and pro-Action by the NCNC. Most of the other Euro pean-owned newspapers, whether edited by Africans or Europeans, have generally refrained from provoking either the European or African reader to do very much beyond writing letters to the editor. On balance they have probably done more to slacken than to quicken the pace of nationalism. TH E RO LE OF TH E PO LITIC A L ASSOCIATION To thrive, nationalism needs more than precipitants. It needs support, direction and momentum; in other words, it needs vehicles. In colonial Africa, as in other non-self-governing regions, many types of vehicles have been tried out in their time:
[from] self-appointed committees of intellectuals, advocating limited reforms; pressure-groups, constructed by particular interests chiefly, religious, regional, economic for purposes of political action; mafias and underground move ments, seeking to displace the colonial State, and using, or prepared to use, violence and armed revolt for the purpose; [to] loosely organised congresses, demanding national independence or democratic rights; and, finally, political parties in a stricter sense i.e., associations possessing a definite machine, a constitution and a platform, working within the framework of some kind of parliamentary system, and concerned to win the support of an electorate.23

Of these the most consequential by far have been the congress and the party. Both have been represented in colonial Africa for many years. The National Congress of British West Africa was organized in 1917; the Nigerian National Democratic Party in 1923; the Kikuyu Central Associa tion (of Kenya) in 1928; the Senegalese section of the French Socialist Party (SFIO) in the 1930s. In the 1930s also a number of youth move ments, congresses and leagues came into existence. In different ways and degrees, all of these were concerned with the need for more liberty to run their countrys affairs in their own way, and more opportunity for becom ing competent to do so. They may not always have followed the wisest paths or been run efficiently, but they made wonderful proving grounds for men and ideas, strategies and tactics. On their membership rolls were the names of many who were subsequently highly influential leaders of nationalistic causes, among them Lamine Gueye, the founder of the Sene23 Hodgkin, op. cit ., p. 139.

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galese section of the SFIO, who gave his name to two of the most liberal, and liberating, laws passed by the French Assembly since the end of the war; Joseph Casely Hayford, one of the prime movers behind the National Congress of British West Africa, whose influence as lawyer and journalist won him a place among the founding fathers of Ghana; and Jomo Kenyatta, the first secretary of the Kikuyu Central Association, who, on his return to Kenya from Europe in 1946, was hailed among his own people as the greatest leader Africa had so far produced. The real burgeoning of organized political activity came in the 1940s. Of the two types of political association, the congress initially enjoyed the greater vogue, as it still does in some territories. What was needed to impress the colonial powers with the strength of the sentiment for self-rule was an association that could claim to speak for all the people; one that was free from the reproach of privilege and partisanship; one, moreover, that was powerful enough to run country-wide press campaigns, mass demonstrations and, if need be, country-wide boycotts and strikes. For this, the congress was better fitted than the party. In any case, as J. G. Liebenow points out in a written comment, the raison d'etre of African political parties was lacking in most (including most British) territories, since there were very few elective offices at either the territorial or local levels down to the end of World War II. THE CONGRESS The more important congress-type organizations dating from this period are the following: 1. The Graduates General Congress of the Sudan. Although founded in 1937, it did not commit itself to a forthright political program until 1942, when it began to press for the granting of the right of self-determination, directly after the war. Its name notwithstanding, the congress claimed to speak for all Sudanese people; and it is true that from 1943 onward membership in the congress was open to all who had graduated even from primary school. 2. The National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC), founded in 1944. The objective it set itself was internal self-government for Nigeria, whereby the people of Nigeria and the Cameroons under British Mandate shall exercise executive, legislative and judicial powers. Its membership was open to tribal unions, trade unions, political parties, professional associations, social and literary clubs, etc. 3. The Kenya African Union (KAU) formed the same year as a supratribal version of the dissolved and outlawed Kikuyu Central Association. Until it, too, was dissolved and outlawed (at the time of the Mau Mau troubles 24), it was the one legal African political organization in Kenya
24 Coleman is disinclined to regard Mau Mau solely as a manifestation of national ism. Rather is it, in his view, a complex mixture of nationalism with a strong tradi-

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and, Coleman says, sought to represent itself as an all-Kenya united front movement. Under its president, Jomo Kenyatta, it stood for selfgovernment by Africans for Africans and for electoral and land reform directed to that end. But in spite of its name and purpose, it remained to the end an essentially tribal Kikuyu movement. 4. The Nyasaland African Congress (NAC), likewise founded in 1944. Originally there was nothing more nationalistic about its aims than the intention to recommend and lay before the Nyasaland government bills for the benefit of Africans, and to seek to keep the government from pass ing discriminatory bills. However, since 1951, thanks first to the idea and later the fact of federation with the Rhodesias, the congress has been work ing for immediate self-government on the Ghana model, the control of all non-African immigration, and the reversion of all alienated lands to the ownership of the African people. 5. The Rassemblement Democratique Africain (RDA), founded in 1946, for the purpose of promoting "equality of political and social rights . . . local democratic assemblies; and a freely agreed union of the peoples of [French] Africa and the peoples of France. Its membership was open to "every national group, to men of all social conditions and every territory. In a sense, it was as much a party as a congress, for it competed in the territorial elections. 6. The Northern Rhodesia African National Congress (NRANC), founded in 1946,2 5 and, like the NAC, having quite modest aims (the break ing of tribal bars, for instance) to begin with. However, in 1949 it became, says Coleman, the principal instrument for organizing the anti-Federation fight in the colony. 7. The United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC), founded in 1947, for the purpose of ensuring by all legitimate and constitutional means [that] the direction and control of government should pass into the hands of the people and their chiefs in the shortest possible time. Its membership was open to "the people and their chiefs. 8. The Uganda National Congress (UNC), which, since its founding in 1952, has "led the agitation for . . . greater self-determination in Uganda, according to Coleman. 9. The Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), founded in 1954.26
tional bias on the part of Westernized leaders, and nativism, manipulated by the leaders, on the part of the masses. Both have been generated to an especially high level of intensity as a consequence of the acute and largely unassuaged sense of frustration on the part of the Westernized elite, growing out of the . . . almost total absence, until recently, of meaningful career and prestige opportunities within either the old or the new systems, and of the masses, resulting from the land shortage and the overcrowding on the reservations. 25 More accurately, the Federation of African Societies of Northern Rhodesia, which had existed since 1945, was then renamed the NRANC. 26 Its forebear, the Tanganyika African Association, had been in existence since the early 1940s, but it was neither national nor noticcably nationalistic in sentiment.

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It stands for the recognition of Tanganyika as an African country and the attainment of self-government by the speediest possible route. 10. The Southern Rhodesia African National Congress (SRANC), founded in 1957. Southern Rhodesia has had several congress-type organi zations in the postwar period, but, for one reason or another (including inadequate leadership and governmental restraint), none of them has done very much to further the political ambitions of the African. The recently reconstituted SRANC differs from its predecessors in at least one important respect, namely, that its membership is open to people of all races "Africans being taken to cover all those who have made Southern Rhodesia their home. It also has an able and seasoned "congress leader in Joshua Nkomo. Its aims are very much like those of other African congresses: the abolition of "imperialism, colonialism, tribalism and all forms of oppression, "the promotion and maintenance of the national unity of the people of the colony, the establishment of better human rela tionships, and of "parliamentary democracy, based on universal adult suf frage, since this alone can produce a government responsible to all the inhabitants of the country and aware of the needs of all. THE PARTY But nationalists, in common with other people, find it easier to sing the praises of unity than to work at being united. They, too, have their per sonality problems, vested interests, private feuds and ambitions, and ideo logical differences. Frequently the only thing that unites them is belief in the need for change. When governments begin to recognize this need and do something about it, the facade of unity collapses, to disclose the existence of often quite large "back-room differences. This is what has been happening, notably in French tropical Africa, Commonwealth West Africa and the Republic of Sudan. In each of these territories constitu tional reform has been followed in some instances anticipated by a shift of political attention from the congress to the party. In the Sudan, for instance, the beginnings of a modern party system date from 1948, the year in which the "transitional constitution went into effect, a constitution that provided for an all-Sudanese legislature and a partially "Sudanized executive. In Ghana, the Convention Peoples Party (CPP), a chip off the congress (UGCC) block, dates from 1949, just prior to the widening of the franchise and the establishment of responsible government recommended by the Coussey Commission.27 In Nigeria, the start of the Action Group and the Northern Peoples Congress (a party, its name notwithstanding), and in Sierra Leone, the start of the Sierra Leone Peoples Party (SLPP), were likewise closely synchronized with constitutional developments. And
27 A commission appointed by the British government to formulate plans for con stitutional reform, and named for its chairman, the eminent African jurist, Mr. Justice (now Sir Henley) Coussey.

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the further along the track of constitutional reform a country gets, the more its national unity suffers. Thus, whereas the Gold Coast had only one party in 1947, there were seven in the country in 1957. Nigeria, which had none in 1947, had six major parties and several minor ones in 1957. In east and central Africa, where the pace of constitutional reform has been slower, there has been less wear and tear of such unity. Indeed, in the Portuguese and Spanish territories, what wear and tear there has been is less the work of the ruled than of their rulers, who still have no great liking for African natonalism, let alone for African congresses. Al though some of the longer-established congresses in British East and Cen tral Africa think of themselves as parties (the Northern Rhodesia African National Congress voted in 1954 to convert itself into a political party), so far their political sway among their own people has not been seriously contested. Important as it is, constitutional reform is not the only reason for the decline of the congress and the rise of the party. Also important, in Hodg kins view, is the dissatisfaction of many of the younger nationalists with what seemed to be the old-fashioned agitational methods, and personal ascendancy, of the generation of nationalist leaders that the tide of revolt of the early post-war years had carried to the front. 28 This, he believes, was partly responsible for Kwame Nkrumahs successful challenge of J. B. Danquahs leadership of the UGCC, and Obafemi Awolowos no less successful challenge of Nnamdi Azikiwes leadership of the NCNC. Nor has the dissatisfaction always stopped at the ways of leaders and the means employed by them. Not infrequently it has extended to the ideas that have moved them or failed to move them. To quote Hodgkin again:
It was primarily ideological divisions that split the RDA. At the outset . . . the Senegalese socialists broke away. In 1950 the conflict between the Right wing, led by the President, M. Houphouet-Boigny (and including most of the RDA parliamentary representatives), who favoured a policy of compromise with the French administration, and the Left, led by the Secretary-General, M. dArboussier, who favoured la lutte a Voutrance and continued co-opera tion with the French Communists, came to a head leaving the Right in con trol of the machine, while the Left retained its influence in Senegal and the Cameroons, and among trade unionists and students.29

The decline of the NCNC at the end of the 1940s can also be attributed in part to ideological schism. There is a world of difference economic, social and political between northern Nigeria and the Eastern and Western Regions of southern Nigeria. The Ibos of the Eastern Region and the Yorubas of the Western Region, while willing to take what is offered them by Europeans, are seldom willing to take each others offer28 Op. cit., p. 150. 2 9 Ibid., p. 151.

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ings. Once the NCNC came to be represented as an Ibo-sponsored, or at least Ibo-dominated, idea, it lost a lot of its attraction for the Yorubas. Much the same is true of the Graduates General Congress. Sudanese radicalists found themselves opposed by gradualists, and the followers of one religious faction (Khatmiyya) by the followers of another (Ansar), and separated from one another by so broad an intellectual divide that there was little chance of any traffic moving across it. It was this, in part, that led in 1945 to the formation of the Umma Party the party that stood for independence from Egypt, no less than from Great Britain. Some of the parties are not chips off the old congress block but splinters off the chips. Notable examples of such are the Bloc Democratique Senegalais (BDS), which broke away from the Senegalese section of the French Socialist Party in 1949 on the initiative of Leopold-Sedar Senghor and other new-generation African socialists; and, in the Gold Coast, the Moslem Association Party, the Togoland Congress and the National Lib eration Movement of Ashanti, all of which were, in effect, breakaways from the Convention Peoples Party, and most of whose leaders were drawn from the same party. Several parties are reconstituted chips, formed by the amalgamation of splinters. In this category come the Ghana Congress Party, established in 1952 as a merger between the rump of the UGCC, the moderate National Democratic Party, and a few individual CPP dissidents; the Front pour lAction Civique du Tchad, formed as an electoral alliance between the local section of RDA and the local Socialists against the dominant Union Democratique Tchadienne; and the Sudanese National Unionist Party, established in 1953 as the result of a merger between the Ashigga and other minor parties and groups sup porting the principle of a constitutional link with Egypt. 30 Then there are parties that came into being independently of existing congresses and parties. As Hodgkin says, Many of the most effective parties, both in British and French West Africa, have been brought into being through the initiative of a semi-political associa tion which was already well established, and could thus provide the new party with a ready-made leadership and body of support. This kind of historical con nection existed between M. Houphouet-Boignys Syndicat Agricole Africain and the party organised in 1945 under his direction, the Parti Democratique de la Cote dIvoire. The Kamerun National Congress (formerly the Cameroons National Federation), of which Dr. Endeley is President, had a similar link with the 11,000-strong Cameroons Development Corporation Workers Union, reor ganised on Dr. Endeleys initiative in 1947. In Nigeria Mr. Obafemi Awolowos Action Group (1951) was the offspring of the Yoruba cultural association, Egbe Omo Oduduwa (i.e., society of the descendants of Oduduwa, the legendary ancestor of the Yorubas), a body which Mr. Awolowo inspired, created (in 1948) and led; while the Northern Peoples Congress (1951) led by the Sardauna of Sokoto, was simply a Moslem, predominantly Hausa, cultural society the Jamfa renamed and adapted.31
80 Ibid., pp. 153-54. 31 Ibid., pp. 154-55.

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And in Sierra Leone, the Sierra Leone Peoples Party, founded in 1951 and led by Dr. M. A. S. (now Sir Milton) Margai, had as its parent the Sierra Leone Organisation Society, the primary aim of which was to promote the cooperative movement. Then again, as Hodgkin goes on to point out, several parties have come into existence as a result of outside encouragement. In some instances, notably the French African Socialist parties, the encouragement has come from political leaders and parties in the metropolitan country. In a few instances, of which the Northern Peoples Congress of Nigeria is perhaps the most striking, the encouragement has come from the colonial ad ministration. Characteristics But whatever their origin, nearly all of the parties have two very im portant features in common. In the first place, they have a great capacity for taking Africans and making nationalists of them. This is as true of the special-interest parties, such as the Moslem Association Party and the (Ashanti) National Liberation Party of Ghana, as it is of the personality parties, such as the Ghana Congress Party, and the peoples parties, such as the CPP of Ghana, the NCNC of Nigeria and the Union des Popula tions du Cameroun (UPC) of the French Cameroons. The first of these may be, and often are, more interested in developing or protecting an ethnic nationalism than a territorial one, and the second may be, and often are, less assertively nationalist than those of the third, but all three are energized by the desire to serve as the instrument for uprooting colonialism from the body politic and establishing national independence. In saying this, we are not suggesting that where the party goes today, there the seeds of nationalism will germinate tomorrow. As with all seed, some falls on dry, unresponsive ground, and some is swallowed up by the cares and pleasures of daily life. For that matter, not all the seed that germinates is fruitful, for many who call themselves nationalists know only their partys slogans Free-dom, Islam, S.-G. will make us all rich. Understanding of what the slogans imply in constraint, loyalty and sheer hard work is usually much later in coming, and may not come at all. Party membership figures (some of which, notably the RDAs, are enor mous) therefore tell very little about the strength of any given cause or the degree of sophistication of those identified with it. More important, by far, is the quality of party leadership. The second widely shared characteristic of African political associations is their role as leadership cramming schools. Almost all the angry young men of postwar Africa have looked upon the party as the vehicle likely to convey them most quickly to power. Its often elaborate structure, simulating that of a government-in-being (complete with cabinet, caucuses and committees), enables the man with talent to be spotted quickly. Its

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customary dearth of funds means that the man with talent finds himself called upon to exercise it in different ways as organizer, administrator, planner and tactician. And in a still largely illiterate world its purpose is advanced more rapidly by personal advocacy than by printed word or recorded voice, so that the party not infrequently becomes more closely identified with the salesman than the product he is selling. At times it would almost look as if the salesman has sold himself. At any rate, there was a time when the creed of the Convention Peoples Party of the Gold Coast read I believe in Kwame Nkrumah . . which, of course, was not necessarily the same as believing in national sovereignty and demo cratic government. Among those who have been through the cramming process and emerged as leaders, not merely of a party, but of a people, we must name, besides Kwame Nkrumah, Nnamdi Azikiwe in the Eastern Re gion of Nigeria, Dr. Houphouet-Boigny in the Ivory Coast, LeopoldSedar Senghor in Senegal, Sekou Toure in Guinea, Sylvanus Olympio in Togo, Joseph Kasavubu and Patrice Lumumba in the Belgian Congo. Not all African political associations work solely for political ends, how ever. Some have been quite as concerned with economic ends. Indeed, Coleman quotes Senghor as saying around the year 1955 that the main complaint French West Africans had with the French connection was economic in character and not political. While not all of Senghors com patriots (certainly not Sekou Toure) would agree with his judgment, it is one that finds support among many foreign observers. Melville Herskovits, for instance, has said that the outstanding thing about the discussions he had with a number of Africans during a visit to Dakar around the same time was the way in which they accept the present political situation and tend to think in terms of economic rather than political activity. Indicative of this preoccupation with economic matters was the sustained drive by French West African politicians to bring about a literal transla tion of the 1946 constitution, especially those portions of it dealing with equality of opportunity and conditions of employment, including such fringe benefits as family allowances, for African and European. But it should not be supposed from all this that the African leaders in the former French areas have shown themselves less capable of pursuing political ends than they were economic ones, or conversely in the case of those in British areas and elsewhere. Big sticks can be used for many purposes, and it is quite evident that the political associations, whether congresses or parties, of tropical Africa are becoming increasingly adept in using them. It is no less evident that these associations will be using them for an increasing variety of purposes, as the impediments in their path are cleared away.
IM PED IM EN TS IN T H E NATIONALISTS PATH

Nationalism has made such strides in tropical Africa in the postwar period that it is easy for us to forget the impediments it has encountered.

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These impediments have everywhere been considerable; for the fact is that much in the environment of tropical Africa is unfavorable to the progress of nationalism. Some things are downright hostile to it. NATURAL IMPEDIMENTS In earlier chapters we have spoken at length about the intrinsic nature of the land and life of tropical Africa. Suffice it to say, therefore, just three things under this heading. The Scale of the Region To harness the vast rivers, tame the immense forests and savannas, and control the great deserts, plagues and pests of tropical Africa calls for correspondingly large-scale thinking, planning and acting. African man, however, remains for the most part a small-scale thinker, planner and actor. He is a Lilliputian in a land of giants. But unlike the Lilliputians he has not yet developed much facility for working with his fellows on large-scale projects; accordingly he is still unable to make the giants sub ject to his will. A nationalism that is impotent to control the sources of power and remove the sources of weakness in its system is a frail thing. It is perhaps too frail to stand exposure to the harsh winds of a world of power blocs, high interest rates and soaring efficiency levels. Resources Unquestionably great as the resources of the region are, their distribu tion bears little relation to the incidence of nationalism. Indeed, at times it would almost look as if the resources are greatest where the manifestations of nationalism are fewest, and smallest where they are most numerous. Certainly there are few, if any, territories richer than the Belgian Congo, where, down to 1958, nationalism was little more than a patriot dream that sees beyond the years. And there are no poorer territories than Somalia (for what does it have but some small crop surpluses, some poorquality livestock, some salt and the smell of oil?), where nationalism is to have its fulfillment in nationhood in 1960. Though Ghana is better off, it is far from rich. Already it has discovered that more than a change of name and status is needed to lift the incubus of dependence on a single commodity. Then, too, the resources are, in general, of such a kind that they cannot be exploited without large amounts of capital being sunk into them capital that is scarce in most of the areas concerned and hard to come by abroad, often for no other reason than that the controllers of it are nervous about what may happen to it in nationalist hands. Nowadays it takes several million dollars to develop a sisal or rubber plantation of economic size, and many times more millions to install a Volta-sized power plant.

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The Number of Ethnic Groups In a region where there are probably not less than 600 groups of people who do enough things so differently as to be recognizably distinct from one another in many cases as distinct as Spaniard, Swiss and Swede it is easy enough to talk of the grounds for self-determination, but it is much harder to see how nation-states can be established on those grounds. Anti-colonialism does not of itself constitute grounds for the building of a nation-state; the very act of setting up such a state removes the grounds on which it is set up! For nationalism to flower in nationhood that is at once viable and strong, something more than a shared hatred of colonial ism and a shibboleth is needed. What is needed just as much (apart from a broad-based economy) is the means of rallying the voluntary support of enough people to make self-government possible and of keeping it under the changing banners of party politics, through all the exactions and tyrannies of small men raised to great power, and in face of the duplicity, lies and ignorance of those outsiders who come to praise but stay to blame. Thus, what is needed as much as anything is adequate means of communication and persuasion. In many areas, including some of those in which nationalism is a burning issue, such means barely exist and this not so much because of unwillingness on the part of the ruling powers as because of the staggering dimensions of the task. Consider, as a case in point, the problems of communication and per suasion in British East Africa. In the four territories of Kenya, Tanganyika, Uganda and Zanzibar there are at least 200 distinct indigenous groups, in a population of about 20 million. In Tanganyika alone there are over 100 such groups, in a population of not more than 9 million. Nearly all of these groups have their own language or dialect. Most of them have their own ways of doing things, behaving and thinking, their own valua tion of what is good and bad, right and wrong. And their ideas on such matters are not infrequently divergent. What is regarded as good govern ment by a Lango is likely to be regarded as intolerable interference by a Masai; and a Masais idea of independence is usually very different from that of a Kikuyu. To preserve what is good and eradicate or neutralize what is evil, most of these groups would still be willing to go to consider able lengths. Consequently, any government or party that seeks to get the people of British East Africa, or even of Tanganyika, to the point of consensus, whether in the realm of economy, morality or government, need not look for an easy victory, or be in a hurry. To get a consensus at all, it will need to stop its ears to the cries of the more determined nationalists who claim that every man has an inalienable right to live as he pleases, and to be communicated to in his own tongue. For how is the government of a country like Tanganyika, with a per capita income of approximately $50 a year and a rather modest physical endowment, to tackle the

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problem of reaching and persuading over 100 different ethnic groups? By recruiting a task force of anthropologists to plumb the psychocultural base of their ethnocentrisms, and measure the hazards of fiddling with them? By training a corps of linguists to communicate to each of the groups its social and political plans and the impossibility of bringing them to pass without higher taxes and higher productivity? By printing its litera ture on the development of cash crop farming, coffee cooperatives, child care and multiracial rule in all of these languages? By building in each language area elementary, secondary and technical schools where vernacu lar training can be had in the strenuous business of running a country with enough skill to become self-supporting and respected in a highly com petitive world? Of course not. Neither the Tanganyika government nor any other in tropical Africa commands the kind of money needed for such enterprises. Most of the languages spoken in the region have never been reduced to writing, and, with the exception of Swahili, those that have are almost entirely without reading matter, except for the Bible or parts of it. Furthermore, many of the things a teacher, doctor, agronomist, social worker, administrator or politician wants to say to these people can not be expressed in their languages; the words for them do not exist. ACQUIRED IMPEDIMENTS Other impediments acquired rather than natural also stand in the path of those who wish to settle for nothing less than self-determination and sovereignty. First of these is the existence of more than one kind of nationalism and nationalist a subject referred to at the beginning of this chapter. To the outsider all nationalists, like all imperialists and politicians, are apt to look alike. But we greatly oversimplify the case if we suppose that all na tionalists in tropical Africa stand for the same things. Almost every territory has its own special brand. Some territories have more than one brand. In Nigeria, for instance, there are nationalists, like Nnamdi Azikiwe, who have stood all along for state-wide sovereignty. There are those, including many of the most influential Moslem leaders, whose po litical ambitions would have been satisfied with the granting of autonomy to the three Western, Eastern and Northern regions of the territory. And there are those, like the members of the Ibo Union, who believe that the only feasible nationalism is one based on tribal cohesion. In the areas where French influence is strong, there are nationalists, like Dr. Houphouet-Boigny, who believe their goal was as good as reached with the granting of self-government within the framework of the French Com munity and those, like Sekou Toure, who have seen their goal as complete independence from the French Community. In the British territories there are those, like Tom Marealle, Chief of the Chagga of Tanganyika, who see no contradiction between nationalism and multiracial partnership, and

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those who, with Jomo Kenyatta, contend that in Africa only Africans have a right to be nationalists. There is yet another brand of African nationalism the non-African. Europeans and Asians may form rather small minorities, but many of them are more than a match for the African when it comes to nationalistic fervor and political acumen. Africa is their home, and has been for two to three generations in many cases. They neither have nor want an other home. They have worked for what they have and they see no more reason for giving it back to the Africans than the up-state New York farmers do for giving back their lands to the Mohawks. They neither want to impose their way of life on their neighbors nor to have theirs imposed upon them. They merely wish to maintain their separate identity which is exactly what most African nationalists are interested in doing. Like the African nationalists, they have different views on the degree of identity that is desirable and feasible, and the means of securing it. In some cases the differences of viewpoint are not serious. Thus, in the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland the aims of the new Central Africa Party, formed in 1959, read very much like those of the United Federal Party: both parties look forward to multiracial partnership, the main difference between them being one of schedule. In other cases the differences would appear to be fundamental. Thus, it is difficult to see how the white supremacists of the Dominion Party in the same Federation could ever come to an accommodation with the CAP or the UFP. Like most African nationalists, too, the European and Asian nationalists are becoming increasingly impatient of political paternalism the govern ment knows best kind of philosophy and increasingly set upon re placing it by something more adult. In the eyes of many indigenous African nationalists, the attitude of the European and Asian nationalists in their midst is now a more serious impediment to their political progress than the paternalism of the metropolitan powers.

CHAPTER

21

The Machinery of Government

TH E QUESTION OF D E S I G N PARTS PROCESS T H E WORKING THE

AFRICANIZING

U ntil the partition of the late nineteenth century, tropical Africa had, for hundreds of years, been governed almost exclusively by Africans. Most of the governments, it is true, were only tribe-sized and, to a Westerners eye, wretchedly poor and indifferent to human suffering, but they had, to an Africans eye, the overriding merit of being indigenous. They were of the people. To a degree, also, they were governments by the people. For while the heads of these governments the chiefs, the elders, the kings and the priests may frequently have had total powers, their subjects had no difficulty in recognizing abuse of such powers when they saw it, and in doing something about it. The relationship between government and people was usually close, as T. R. Batten has pointed out:
The aims and methods of tribal government were familiar, and in many cases the people themselves shared in forming decisions which might affect the welfare of the tribe. Even where government was despotic and cruel, at least its policy was understandable, and if it became too oppressive there was always a hope of successful rebellion, and of change to a ruler who might govern more in agreement with the wishes of the people.1
1 Problems of African Development, Oxford University Press, London, 1949, Part

II, p. 113.

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Partition and the establishment of European rule over virtually the whole of the area altered all this. It made the aim of government much more difficult for the African to understand.

Its driving force was no longer a council of elders, a chief, or a war-leader, who spoke the same language, who had the same background of ideas, and the same ignorance of affairs outside the tribal borders. Effective power was transferred to a white race of different language and religion, who ordered their lives by different ideals, and whose motives and policy were often difficult to understand. Their actions, however wise and necessary in their own eyes, might therefore sometimes seem wrong and oppressive to men whose ideas were bounded by the tribe.2
European rule also put the business of government on an entirely new plane. Government ceased to be a matter of preserving the status quo, and became one of promoting and enforcing an alien, and often un wanted, way of life. In place of maintenance, it offered expansion; for tribal autonomy, it offered colonial dependence; for personal negotiation, rule by proxy; for liberty to make war, constraint to keep the peace; and European punishment to fit almost every African offense, civil and criminal alike. The machinery of government became more complicated. In most of the indigenous systems there had been no government machinery to speak of. With some notable exceptions (which include the Ganda, the Chagga, the Ashanti and the Dahomey), government was primarily a matter of compliance with word-of-mouth orders or with the sense of the meeting. Since every mans status and attendant responsi bilities were known to every other man, no man needed a police man, or a tax inspector, or a security agent to tell him what he had to do. For the man who did fall short of his responsibilities, there were sanctions; but since he would know as well as his accusers what these were, they likewise required no very elaborate machinery for their enforcement. The indigenous systems were bookless, printless and paperless. They needed no files, no archives, no gear of any kind, and no clerks, messengers or administrators. Their only communication system was the bush tele graph. Their headquarters were where the chief or his council happened to be: they could operate as efficiently under a tree as in a house.

T H E QUESTION O F DESIGN The running of machinery presupposes the existence of designers, and their ability to design what other people can be made to want, and to run efficiently. Tropical Africa has always been as hard on the designer of machinery as it has been on the user of it. It was especially hard on the early European designers of government machinery.

2Ibid., pp.

113-14.

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For one thing, the designers knew next to nothing about the region or its peoples. They seldom had accurate maps. They almost never knew where one tribe or kingdom ended and another began. As a result, tribes having nothing in common with one another frequently found themselves lumped together in the same administrative area, while people of common tribe and tongue found themselves living on opposite sides of a boundary and compelled to learn the quite different ways, laws and languages of their newly acquired rulers. The designers knew even less about the cus toms of the people, with the inevitable result that many well-disposed tribes were frequently alienated by their rulers apparent lack of feeling for their culture, and many who were ill-disposed to begin with became openly hostile. For another thing, the designers had very little money to work with. The partitioned territories were poor; they had already been bled of their two most accessible sources of wealth, slaves and ivory. It was to be many years before their budgets were bigger than those of a small-sized Ameri can town. Even today, very few of them are self-supporting, and the aver age per capita income of the region as a whole is still well under $100 a year. Consequently the designers had to come up with something that was low-priced, for while the metropolitan taxpayers may have appreci ated the prestige (and not all of them did) of belonging to a colonizing and civilizing power, they could hardly be expected to appreciate having to pay for the prestige. Then again, the designers could make very little use of indigenous gov ernment systems. Except in a few areas where the possibilities of indirect rule existed, the indigenous systems were usually incapable of being remodeled. This being so, the designers found themselves pretty well obliged to work with the metropolitan models, adapting them as best they could to the different environments encountered in the various colonial territories. What Lord Hailey has said of the colonial policies of the partition powers applies no less to their whole governmental effort: it was the re sult of the projection into overseas areas of certain domestic characteristics and philosophies of life. 3 There was, naturally, no guarantee whatever that either these characteristics or these philosophies were capable of flour ishing on tropical soil. On the contrary, there was an excellent chance that they were not. Not only were the resources of men and money at the disposal of these governments small, but the environmental conditions physical, social and psychological were exceedingly trying, and the opportunities for abuse of authority vastly greater than those with which the government official was presented in Europe. It follows that the machinery had to be kept as simple as possible. The simpler it was, the easier it was for the European to run and the African
8 An African Survey: Revised 1956, Oxford University Press, London, 1957, p. 542.

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to comprehend, the more likely it was to be kept in working order, the cheaper its maintenance, and the longer its working life and that of the Europeans in charge of it. It also follows that a great deal of thought had to be given to the kind of people to run the machinery of government. The best-designed ad ministrative machinery in the world quickly becomes ineffective in the hands of the inept, unjust, indiscreet, intemperate or intolerant. While the colonial governments of tropical Africa have had such men, on the whole they have been served uncommonly well by their public servants, junior and senior alike. Indeed, such success as the European administrations of tropical Africa have enjoyed over the years probably stems as much from the quality of the men attracted to them as from the quality of the machinery. Or, to put it in another way, the designers have been keenly aware ever since the beginning of the parti tion period that the whole of government is much more than the sum of its working parts and that a government can be only as good as those who run it. Whatever faults the European administrations in tropical Africa may have had and they have had plenty if we are to believe all that their critics have said complexity has certainly not been one of them. Indeed, it is unlikely that in the whole of human history there were ever so many people governed by so few with so little fuss as during the heyday of African colonialism. At no time during its non-self-governing epoch did Ghana, with an area nearly that of Oregon and a population of not less than 4 million, have more than about 2,500 British civil servants, or more than about one tenth that number of commissioners (provincial, district and assistant district) and police officers. Even on the eve of its inde pendence, when the civil service list was swollen with expatriates busy Sudanizing the country, the Republic of Sudan had no more than 7,000 people in the entire political service, of whom only about 1,000 were ex patriates and this is a territory of almost a million square miles with a population (at the time it became independent) of not less than 9 million. Those who care to wander off the highways of tropical Africa may still come upon cercles, homas and postos whose officers in charge, barely ten years out of school, maintain law and order, almost singlehanded in some cases, over territories the size of Connecticut or the Carolinas, and enjoy the esteem often the affection of the 100,000 and more people who constitute their charge. For that matter, it is impossible to go anywhere, even in these impersonal times of quick transit and rule by loudspeaker, without being struck by what one man can do to put across a new government edict, or a new tax, when he happens to have the right look in his eye. (It must also be admitted that the man with the wrong look can do very little, except earn the fear and hatred of those he works with.)

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T H E WORKING PARTS

Notwithstanding the modern proliferation of government agencies, the business of government remains what it has always been: the making of laws, the applying of them, and the settling of disputes arising from their application. Its main working parts are, therefore, three in number: legislative, executive and judicial. But since the divide between the executive and judicial functions of most government administrators in tropical Africa is fine to the point of being undemarcated (and perhaps undemarcatable), these two parts will be fused in the following discussion, and designated as administrative. LEGISLATIVE Several of the territories under review are still dependencies, of one kind or another, of European powers. In each such territory control of legislation and of legislative institutions is in the hands, not of the local people (whether African, Asian or European) but of the metropolitan government and its local agents. The attitude and activity of the legis lators differ widely from territory to territory, since no two European powers have exactly the same idea about the purpose of government, or the methods needed to achieve it in a given economic and social context. There are scarcely less wide differences in the attitude and activity of those legislated for; not infrequently, the only things they have in com mon are a dislike of all imposed legislation, and the desire to do some thing about it. Because the colonial powers have all along based their legislation on different political, and often different social, premises, it will be necessary to deal with their activities in this field under separate headings. Belgian Until 1959 there had been comparatively little remodeling of the legislative machinery of the Belgian Congo since 1908, when the Belgian government took over its control from the Congo Free State. In almost all major respects the Charte Coloniale carried as much weight with the legislators of 1958 as it had done with those who wrote it fifty years earlier. The power of legislation for the colony continued to be delegated from the Belgian Parliament to the King, who exercised it by royal decree. The Belgian Parliament continued to retain certain powers. Among other things, its authorization was still required for colonial loans and agree ments with commercial companies and companies seeking concessions, and it still passed on all budgetary matters. The Belgian Minister for the Colonies continued to issue to the Governor-General of the Colony in structions on the main lines of policy to be followed, and remained largely responsible for the appointment and dismissal of administrative officials.

308

FIGURE

43

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309

He likewise continued to advise the King (who might or might not take his advice) on all senior appointments (e.g., Governor-General, Vice Governor-General and governors of provinces) and to be advised, in turn, by the Colonial Council. This body, though somewhat less official in composition than when first established, also continued to serve the functions outlined in the Charte; that is, it continued to give the Minister its opinion on all proposed legislation, and to make its own legislative and administrative recommendations. If the Minister wished to override the council's recommendations, he might, but he had to give his reasons for doing so. As in the early years of the century, the office of Governor-General continued to be one of great prestige with little power. Only in emergen cies might its incumbent introduce new legislation or suspend laws in being. In either case his legislative actions became a dead letter if they were not confirmed by royal decree within six months. The legislative powers of his gubernatorial colleagues, the governors of the six provinces, were nominal. Even some of the routine executive business conducted by the Governor-General and his six colleagues in the Government Coun cil, such as the granting of land concessions and the annual recruitment of the force publique, or militia, required the sanction of a decree. In other words, there was virtually no devolution of legislative authority in this half-century period. And it is a little difficult to see how there could have been any, without the setting up of a representative legislature in Leopoldville. Of the need for such a legislature, the Belgian govern ment remained unconvinced until the troubles of late 1958 and early 1959, when it declared its intention of organizing a democracy in the Congo capable of exercising the prerogatives of sovereignty and of deciding upon its independence. To this end it established a Legislative Council that was intended to serve as the first form of a Senate, and replaced the old Government Council by a General Council that was intended to serve as the preliminary form of a Chamber of Representatives. Ruanda-Urundi. The Trust Territory of Ruanda-Urundi has been governed on the lines of the Belgian Congo proper. Its Vice GovernorGeneral the ranking Belgian authority in the territory has had the same limited legislative power as the Governor-General of the Belgian Congo. The Vice Governor-Generals council (created in 1947) has played a purely advisory role. Legislation introduced into the Belgian Congo did not automatically go into force in Ruanda-Urundi, however; in de ciding the propriety of such legislation the Vice Governor-General was given wide discretion. While for many administrative purposes RuandaUrundi has been treated as part of the Belgian Congo, it has had its own judiciary and its own budget, the funds for which have been quite dis tinct from those of the Belgian Congo.

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British

T H E M A C H I N E R Y OF G OV E R N ME NT

The British have always believed in being master in their colonial house and in staying master of it as long as they deemed their presence there to be desirable. Thus it has been the practice of the British government to control the external relations and policies of each African colony, and to assume responsibility for the protection of each colony in time of war. Equally, it has been its practice to reserve the right to make laws for the colony, to appoint the Governor and decide the extent of his executive powers, and reverse his decisions whenever it saw fit. It has also made a practice of controlling the appointment of all other senior posts in the civil and defense services of each colony, of supervising the administra tion of justice, of appointing and dismissing judges, and of having the final word in the matter of a colonys annual budget. At the same time, the British government has seldom failed to relax its legislative grip on a colonial government as its leaders, African and nonAfrican, have given proof of ability to provide impartially for the welfare of all their peoples. Quite early in the history of Britains African colonies provision was made for the governors of them to receive advice on the exercise of their powers from legislative bodies known as assemblies or councils. The membership of these bodies was, to begin with, mainly official, that is, it consisted of men appointed by the government and, for the most part, government (civil service) men. The unofficial minority was made up largely, if not always entirely, of representatives of special interests (min ing, business, industry) or special groups (racial minorities, European settlers). Initially, African interests were represented by Europeans, usually missionaries; but increasingly they have come to be represented by educated Africans. The official members were nominated; the un official, either nominated by the Governor or elected. Over the years, the unofficial membership of these legislative bodies has been increased, the basis of its selection broadened, and its role en larged. Also, the legislative power of these bodies has been increased by a continuous process of devolution. However, their power has always fallen short of that of the British Parliament. Batten has characterized the standard model (not that there is really such a thing in British colonial constitutional practice) as follows:
It may debate and vote on legislative proposals put before it. It may criti cize annual estimates. And it may question the government on detailed matters concerning its administration. Criticism from unofficial members may often lead government to modify its original proposals, but it need not do so. The official members have to vote for the government proposals, and where they form the majority they can always outvote the unofficial members.4 4 Op. cit ., pp. 128-29.

T H E M A C H I N E R Y OF G OV E R N M E N T

While the legislative council has everywhere been the most con spicuous feature in the progress of the British dependencies towards the stage of Responsible Government, 5 this progress probably would not have been as steady or as efficient without the help of a second legislative institution early introduced by the British into their colonial administra tion, namely, the executive council. For this council, in Lord Haileys words, may be said . . . to have provided the bridge over which the Legislative Council passes on its way to gain control of the executive agencies of rule. 6 In some territories the bridge was built before there was any traffic to use it, that is to say, before the legislative council was set up. Usually the two were set up side by side. The members of the executive council, drawn initially from the ranks of the senior government officials in the colony and of recent years, in some cases, from the un official members of the legislative council, are expected to advise the Governor on problems of administration, the preparation of the budget, and on all bills to be put before the legislative council. As in the case of the latter, the Governor is under no obligation to accept the advice tendered to him. Even so, no Governor can feel happy about refusing advice which represents the opinion of a considerable portion perhaps the majority of the articulate people in the colony. Accordingly, not the least of a Governors tasks is to modify his, or his governments, pro posals enough to win a qualified assent to them; and failing that, to per suade his opponents that while they are fully entitled to fight for the minority or special interests they represent, he must always be guided by what he considers to be the interests of the colonial community as a whole. At first the unofficial as well as the official members of these British colonial legislative bodies were Europeans. In the years following World War II, African representation increased substantially in almost every colonial territory. As early as 1946 the unofficial members of the Gold Coast Legislative Assembly, most of whom were directly elected, had a clear majority over the official and nominated members. By 1954, three years prior to the granting of its complete independence, the colony had a wholly elected legislature, with an all-African cabinet of ministers chosen from its members. Some reserve powers were still vested in the Gov ernor, but they were not once exercised during the years in which they were in force. In 1947 a new constitution gave the Legislative Council of Nigeria an unofficial majority for the first time. However, only a minority of the unofficials were directly elected. The same constitution also gave the Houses of Assembly of the three regions and the House of Chiefs for the Northern Region, all of which it brought into being, large unofficial majorities. But while these bodies were given some financial powers, they
5 Lord Hailey, op. cit., p. 288. 6 Ibid.

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were given no legislative powers; consequently most of their time was spent in rather fruitless discussion. Later, in 1952, another constitution gave the country an African ministerial system, and the House of Rep resentatives (as the federal or central Legislative Council came to be called) and the three regional assemblies a majority of elected members. However, for various reasons, including the countrys much greater size and ethnic and religious complexity, Nigeria found it impossible to keep up with the tempo of legislative reform in the Gold Coast. The de mand for responsible government, though loud and insistent, was only tar dily matched by the unity needed to underwrite it. Many of those cam paigning for it were united only by opposition to continued British con trol. As the prospect of its removal in 1960 has come closer, the spirit of regional particularism, if not of separatism, has tended to become fiercer. Good progress toward responsible government has also been made in the British West African territories of Gambia (where since 1954 both the legislative and executive councils have had unofficial, and largely elected, majorities) and Sierra Leone (where the same has been true since 1951). In east and central Africa, with the two exceptions of the Republic of Sudan and Southern Rhodesia, the devolutionary process has taken place rather more slowly. Thus it was not until 1944 that the first African was nominated to the Kenya Legislative Council, and as recently as 1958 there were fewer than 20 Africans in a council of more than 80; neither the Legislative Council nor the Executive Council had an unofficial elected majority.7 It was not until 1945 that Africans (three in number) were appointed to the Uganda Legislative Council, and not until 1946 that the first two Africans were appointed to the Tanganyika Council. The corresponding dates for such appointments in Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland and British Somaliland were 1948, 1949 and 1957 respectively. Even today (1959) only the two Rhodesias, out of all the east and central African de pendencies, have a legislative body with an unofficial elected majority. Uganda, with a council composed of 62 members (exclusive of the Gov ernor and the Speaker), of whom 32 are on the government side, comes nearest to doing so. As for the Bechuanaland Protectorate, it continues to get its laws in the form of proclamations issued by the British High Commissioner. The names of the highest governmental institutions the Native Advisory Council, the European Advisory Council and the Joint Advisory Council
7 While the Macleod constitutional proposals of early 1960 envisaged the pos sibility of the Legislative Council having an unofficial majority, they made no pro vision for allowing that majority to nominate its own ministers. The Governor would remain the head of government and would retain complete freedom in the selection of the Council of Ministers (which provides the bulk of the membership of the Executive Council and is the principal instrument of government).

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bespeak the strictly limited extent of their powers. (However, in late 1959 there was talk of turning the Joint Advisory Council into a Legisla tive Council with powers to legislate for peace, order and good govern ment . . . subject to the assent of the High Commissioner, who would also have power to ensure the passing of any law which he considered necessary.) The position of British Somaliland is only a little better, for although it has (since 1957) a Legislative Council which can initiate and debate legislation, every act of the council remains (1959) subject to the veto of the Governor. In the opinion of the British government it is likely to be a while before some of these territories are ready for legislative re sponsibilities comparable to those possessed by Ghana on the eve of its independence. But whether the time is long or short, whether the place is east, west or central Africa, it remains the avowed intention of the British govern ment to hand over eventually all legislative powers to its dependencies. So far the handing-over has taken place only in the Republic of Sudan (1956) and Ghana (1957). In British Somaliland it will take place in June 1960; in Nigeria, October 1960; in Sierra Leone, April 1961. In Southern Rhodesia the process began much earlier (the country has had respon sible government since 1923) but has not yet been consummated; all measures that could be regarded as differentiating between Africans and non-Africans continue to come under the jurisdiction of the British Sec retary of State for Commonwealth Relations. In the related case of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, legislative powers are divided between the federal legislature (in Salisbury) and the three territorial

F I G U R E 44

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legislatures (in Salisbury, Lusaka and Zomba), but subjects regarded as being of special concern to Africans, such as the system of land rights and the procedures of native (African) administration, remain entirely within the sphere of territorial legislation, which, in the case of Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, continues to remain within the jurisdiction of the Colonial Office. Judging from the present temper of British public opinion, it is unlikely that the Federation will be granted the status of a self-governing dominion until its electors have shown themselves willing to treat all civilized men in the Federation as equal, and to give all Fed eration men an equal opportunity to become civilized. Of such willing ness there is much talk, but still rather little sign. French Carrying their metropolitan preference with them wherever they have gone, the French have worked on the principle that the fewer people there are, within reason, to handle the machinery of government, the better it generally works. They have, accordingly, long been drawn to centralized systems of rule in which lawmaking is the prerogative of the authorities whether civil or military in Paris. This preference continued to find expression in some of the legislative arrangements made by the French for their tropical African territories down to the birth of the French Com munity in 1958. After 1946 all these territories sent deputies to the French National Assembly, senators to the Council of the Republic, and councilors to the new Assembly of the French Union. By 1957 they were sending 33 African deputies (out of a total of 39 deputies sent from these territories) to the National Assembly, 23 African senators to the Council of the Republic, and 37 African councilors to the Assembly of the French Union. In the first postwar decade French criminal law and trial on criminal charges by ordinary French courts were extended to all the inhabitants of French tropical Africa, instead of being restricted, as they were before the war, to the few thousand Africans who had become French citizens. On the other hand, in conformity with the principle of leadership entrusted to Metropolitan France during this transitional period, legislative powers with regard to penal law, civil liberties, and political and administrative organization in the Overseas Territories [continued to rest] with the French Parliament. 8 As if to dramatize the constitutional unity of the overseas and metro politan provinces, the postwar, pre-de Gaulle governments of France made increasing use of African deputies at the ministerial level. Lamine Gueye was Under Secretary of State to the Presidency of the Council in the Blum cabinet (1947); Fily Dabo Sissoko, deputy from the province of French
8 Democracy in French Africa South of the Sahara: The Development of Local Assemblies, African Affairs (French Embassy, Service de Presse et dInformation, New York), February 1955, p. 4.

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Sudan (French West Africa), was appointed Under Secretary of State for Commerce and Industry in 1948; Joseph Conombo, deputy from the province of Upper Volta (French West Africa), was appointed Secretary of State for the Interior in 1954; Leopold-Sedar Senghor, deputy from Senegal, was appointed Secretary of State for Scientific Research in 1955; Hammadoun Dicko, deputy from French Sudan, was appointed Under Secretary of State for Industry and Commerce in 1956; and Dr. Felix Houphouet-Boigny, deputy from the Ivory Coast, held ministerial rank in several successive French governments, and continued to do so in the de Gaulle government. However, between 1946 and the demise of the Fourth Republic in 1958 French tropical Africa made very considerable progress in the direction of greater legislative, as opposed to merely administrative, autonomy. In 1946 territorial assemblies were established in the territories of French West Africa, French Equatorial Africa and in the two Trusteeship Terri tories of the French Cameroons and Togo. In Madagascar five pro vincial assemblies one to each of the then five provinces were set up. These assemblies were modeled on the General Councils which exist in the metropolitan departements. While they had some executive power (more especially in regard to budgetary matters), and had to be consulted by the administration on a wide range of subjects, they had next to no legislative scope. Indeed, in most fields they could merely pass resolutions for submission to the Minister of Overseas Territories. Under the loi-cadre 9 of June 23,1956 the territorial assemblies could be given much the same powers in internal affairs as the legislatures in, say, pre-independence Ghana. Beginning in March 1957, when the provisions of the law went into effect, these assemblies were elected by universal adult suffrage on a single electoral college; and they had fully responsible executive councils, or cabinets, drawn from their members. Until the end of 1958 their powers were not such as to make them in any way inde pendent of Paris, however, or of Paris territorial representatives in Dakar, Brazzaville and elsewhere. The division of responsibility between the territorial and metropolitan governments on the eve of the Fifth Republic has been summarized by Hella Pick as follows:
Before the Loi-cadre far greater powers resided at Dakar and Brazzaville than now, but even so the g ouvernements-generaux in these two centers still retain enough power, especially in financial matters, external trade, control of the police, communications and other common services, etc., to make them an important factor in territorial development. These gouvernements-generaux are controlled, not by African elected members, but by French High Commissioners who act in a dual capacity, both as head of their respective groups and as repre sentatives of the French Government . . . The functions of the gouvernementgeneral are exercised through the Services dEtat, which now work in the terri
9 So called because the law provided a framework (cadre), or the general principles, to be followed in developing the governmental institutions of the overseas territories of France.

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tories side by side sometimes at cross purposes with the territorial public services; the latter are responsible not to the Governors, but to the elected Min isters. The gouvernem ents-generaux . . . and Services d Etat are responsible to Paris. Their work is, however, debated by the Grands Conseils of [French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa], consisting of members drawn from the territorial assemblies . . . The Grands Conseils have no legislative powers.10

While all this undoubtedly made good the claim of the French to have started their tropical territories on the road to decentralization, the fact is that Paris itself continued to retain the power to legislate for French Africa on many issues; it also continued to supply and control the capital budgets of French West and French Equatorial Africa, and the individual territories; and to pay for the cost of the state services. It is also a fact that the French set themselves a very different objective from the British in promoting decentralization. For, whereas the British have everywhere been moving toward autonomy, the French have been moving toward interdependence, or as Dr. Houphouet-Boigny and his friends prefer to call it, the communaute Franco-Africaine. In the loi-cadre these men saw the constitutional frame of such a community. All that was needed, in their view, to fill in the frame was the granting of a still greater degree of autonomy to the individual territories, and, its corollary, the diminution of the powers perhaps even disappearance of the quasi-federal administrations at Dakar and Brazzaville. These autonomous territories would then federate with France. This, in fact, is what all of them, with the exception of Guinea, elected to do in the referendum of September 1958. As a result of this referendum, the Community territories became autonomous in the management of their own affairs. However, they continued to [place] in common with France certain responsibilities such as defense and external affairs, and to preserve special and reciprocal ties with the Republic, particularly in the financial, economic and political fields. 11 In 1959 two legislative bodies were set up, the Executive Council of the Community and the Court of Arbitration, to help the Community find its feet. The former of these, composed of the prime ministers of all the member states and the French ministers responsible for Community affairs, is the supreme organ of the Community on the government and administrative level. The latter is charged with settling any disputes that may arise between the member states of the Com munity. (A third purely advisory body, the Senate of the Com munity, was also established.) The utility of these new instruments has yet (late 1959) to be demon strated. Most Community decisions had, down to that time, been made by the President of the Republic a fact which perhaps partly explains
10 French Africa on the March, Venture, London, January 1958, p. 7. 11 Maurice de Murville, French Minister of Foreign Affairs, speaking in the General

Assembly of the United Nations on September 30, 1959.

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317

why the African leaders in these states now have such widely differing views about their future relationship with the Community. On the one hand there are those who believe with Houphouet-Boigny that the Com munity must transform itself into a multiracial federation with strong metropolitan ties if it is to survive. On the other hand there are those who look, with Leopold-Sedar Senghor, toward a Commonwealth d la frangaise, that is, toward a federation of sovereign African states grouped around the Mali Federation (consisting at present of the Republic of Senegal and the Sudanese Republic). Fortunately, the constitution of the French Community does not exclude the realization of either goal. Portuguese The Portuguese constitution, which since 1951 has applied to all the overseas provinces as well as to Portugal proper, assigns a much higher range of authority to the executive than to the legislative institutions of the government. 12 Unlike the British, French and Belgian constitutions, it provides no parliamentary arena where a man may habitually and freely say what he feels about his governments conduct of its African affairs; nor does it provide him with an opportunity of radically influenc ing his governments legislative program. As a member of the National Assembly in Lisbon, about all he can hope to do is to give his judgment on such matters as the authorization of development loans, and the re spective roles of metropolitan and overseas governments in the granting of concessions. Almost all real power lies with the Overseas Minister. He is charged with responsibility for all matters affecting the higher or general interests of the nations overseas policy, or those common to more than one prov ince. More specifically, this means that he is responsible for the whole financial administration of the overseas provinces; for determining the legality or desirability of all colonial measures proposed by his govern ment; for authorizing all loans which are not repayable from current receipts; and for seeing that no legislative enactment can come into force, even though approved and promulgated by the government, until he has ordered its publication in the Boletim Oficial of the province or provinces concerned. It is true that the Minister can draw upon the good offices of a large number of advisers and advisory bodies such as the inspectors, whose business it is to keep in close touch with all that is going on in the overseas provinces, and the Overseas Council, which hears appeals brought before it from the overseas provinces and offers the Minister ad vice on such matters as he may lay before it. It is also true that the Over seas Council is the supreme administrative tribunal in matters affecting the
12 Lord Hailey, op. cit., p. 353.

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overseas provinces. But the Minister is not bound to accept its decisions even when he is bound to consult the council, and in cases of urgency he is under no obligation to consult it. The legislative powers of the Gov ernor-General of an overseas province are consequently small. All the same, in the exercise of them he is expected (though not compelled) to be guided by the judgment of the legislative council of the province and the government council. Among other things, he is expected to discuss his budgetary plans with the legislative council and secure its approval of them; and he must submit the budget itself to the vote of the govern ment council. Even in regard to African affairs, which are his special responsibility, his powers are more executive than legislative. For the most part they have to do with controlling the manner in which the governments native policy is implemented, and in making sure that the laws concerning individual rights, freedom of labor, and native usages are enforced. The powers of the government councils and legislative councils are even more restricted than those of the Governor-General. Indeed, the powers of the small, eight-member government councils are really no more than advisory. Those of the larger legislative councils, which have existed since 1955 (in Angola and Mozambique), are legislative only to the extent that the council members are able to influence the legislative intentions of the Governor-General. Thus, in legislative matters [the Governor-General] is, in principle, guided by the vote of the Legislative Council, and if he disagrees with that vote, the disagreement must be immediately reported to the Minister, with whom the final decision will rest. 1 3 Spanish As in earlier times, the people of Spain continue to regard Fernando Po and Rio Muni (or continental Guinea) as if they were part of the mother land. Legislation is effected by decree from the metropolitan Direction General de Marruecos y Colonias; the local budget is drawn up and approved by the metropolitan Cortes. There is no local institution possess ing legislative power. The authority of the Governor of Fernando Po is almost wholly confined to the realm of administration; and that of the local junta, or council, is purely advisory. Other Territories
Liberia. The governmental machinery of the free, sovereign and inde pendent republic of Liberia bears a marked likeness to the American model of the mid-nineteenth century. (The Liberian constitution dates
13 F. C. C. Egerton: Angola in Perspective, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1957, p. 115.

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from 1847.) It is directed by an elected President, and an executive branch and a judiciary of the Presidents own choosing. It is cared for by two legislative bodies, the Senate and the House of Representatives. While, as in the United States, the President and the executive branch can do many things on their own initiative, they need the approval of the legislature for all legislation proposed by them. However, this approval is rarely withheld, because, unlike the United States, Liberia has been a one-party country for eighty years. To be a member of the legislature it is necessary to be a member of the True Whig Party. It is even said, according to Lord Hailey, that all officials of the civil service pay a months salary into its Party funds. 14 Whether this is true or not, the monopoly of the vote by one party for so long a period has made it practically impossible, up to now, for any opposition candidate to obtain more than a token support. And within the ruling party, power has, up to now, been very largely in the hands of the Americo-Liberians, who form less than 2 per cent of the population. In the past decade or so a few indigenous Liberians have had seats in the legislature and posts in the executive and judicial branches of government, but their ability to in fluence the course of legislation in Monrovia remains small almost as small as the ability of the Monrovia government to influence the course of customary legislation in the hinterland.
Ethiopia. For centuries Ethiopia had the simplest legislative machinery of any territory in Africa, perhaps in the world. It could even be con tended that it had none and needed none, since all the legislating was done by the Emperor. There are many who feel that, the existence of legislative machinery notwithstanding, the Emperor is still the law of the land the true embodiment of everything thats excellent. While this feeling flatters the Emperor, it does not entirely please him. Over the quarter century and more of his rule, he has made several moves to get [his] beloved people . . . to share in the responsibilities of the public affairs of [the Ethiopian] government. 15 In 1942 he gave his nation its first constitution and nominated parliament. In 1955 he gave it a new and more liberal constitution, which, among other things, provided for a Chamber of Deputies elected by universal suffrage, a Senate Chamber, an independent judiciary, and defined the powers of both Parliament and Emperor. In 1957 he gave the country the first free election in its history. But the Emperor continues to guard the substance of power, even though his people now have some of the forms of it. He has the right of absolute veto over all legislation, the right to appoint and dismiss judges, cabinet ministers and senators, to legislate by decree when Parliament is not in session, and to dissolve it when it is.
14 Op. cit., p. 357. 15 H. M. Haile Selassie, in a speech to the newly elected legislators, November 1957.

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Republic of Sudan. Until January 1, 1956 the Sudan was administered jointly by the British and the Egyptians, the British doing rather more of the administering. In the months following its declaration of independ ence, the Republic operated under a transitional constitution based on the self-governing statute which brought it into being. This constitution pro vided for government by cabinet (headed by a Prime Minister elected by the House of Representatives from among its members) and by a five-man Council of State invested with the powers and prerogatives of chief of state. It was intended to last only until a new parliament, to be elected in 1958,could sit as a constituent assembly and approve a permanent consti tution. In preparation for this event, a National Constitutional Committee was appointed in September 1956. At that time the draft constitution was ex pected to provide for a unitary state with an elected chief of state, a bicameral parliament, a cabinet headed by a Prime Minister appointed by a chief of state and responsible to the lower house, and legislative ma chinery closely resembling that put into operation and left in operation by the British, for all of which there was apparently wide support. But, as has been the case in more than one country newly come to autonomy, the expected has not happened. Before the committee had completed its work, the army took over the government. On November 17, 1958 the Council of State and cabinet were dismissed; parliament and all political parties were declared dissolved; and the provisional constitution was suspended. At present (1959) the constitutional authority is invested in the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces.

ADMINISTRATIVE
CENTRAL GOVERNMENT

Belgian The running of the Belgian Congo during the past half century may be likened to the running of a large, efficient and profitable company, which in a very real sense it has been. The head offices of the company have been the Ministry for the Colonies in Brussels. The board chairman has been the King; its director, the Minister for the Colonies; its executive secre tary, the Governor-General. Only executive appointments at the lowest level, that of fourth-class agent, have been made by the Minister or Governor-General; all the rest have been made by royal decree (arrete
royal).

The companys chief field office, or general secretariat, has been at Leopoldville. Its operations have been divided into a number of directo rates, or directions generates. These covered the following fields: politi cal and judicial affairs; native affairs, including education, labor and so cial security; finance, customs and excise; economic affairs, land and

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mines; agricultural and animal husbandry; public works and communica tions. The head of each directorate has been responsible to the GovernorGeneral for carrying out the administrations policy in the field or fields concerned. Because of the size of the territory, most of the governments operations were provincialized. Thus, each of the six provinces of the Belgian Congo (Leopoldville, Kivu, Kasai, Equateur, Katanga and Orientale) was under the management of a Governor, with its own Provincial Secretariat, Provincial Commissioner (the Governors deputy), district commissioners and other administrative officers, and its own technical and advisory staff. Besides running the secretariat the Governor, or his deputy, was expected to visit each district in his province at least once a year. Each commis sioner of a district was expected to make a detailed inspection of his area at least twice a year and to supply the Governor with a detailed report on his observations. He was assisted in his advisory work by members of the provincial land, agriculture, public works and veterinary services. His administrative assistants were expected to spend almost two thirds of their time in their territoires keeping in close touch with native govern ment authorities and guiding their development. The fourth-class agents were responsible for all census work and for such other activities (local public works, compulsory cultivation programs, etc.) for which no techni cal personnel was available. Down to the end of 1958 very few Africans had held executive positions in either the general or provincial secretariats. Since 1921 there have been African agents auxiliaires, but these have been employed almost ex clusively in teaching or in routine work in the post office, customs and medical departments of the government. However, the scale on which the establishments in the provinces were being organized in the late 1950s and the promulgation in 1959 of a new unified statute for public servants [giving] the Africans access to all the grades of the administra tion clearly indicated that the government wanted to see a progressive devolution of executive authority. The judiciary has consisted of European and native courts. The former comprised (1) police courts, which were presided over by an administrator and were empowered to deal with those criminal offenses, committed by Africans, for which an imprisonment of not more than two months was held to be adequate (or was, in fact, the maximum) punish ment; (2) district courts, which were presided over by an administrator and were empowered to deal with all criminal offenses committed by Africans; (3) prosecutor courts, which had unlimited civil jurisdiction and appellate criminal jurisdiction in regard to first-instance decisions of the district courts, and which also had jurisdiction for all criminal offenses committed by non-Africans; (4) courts of appeal (two in number), which were subject in civil matters to the overriding jurisdiction of the court of

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cassation in Brussels. The personnel of the courts of appeal, as of the prosecutor courts, was made up of professional lawyers. The native courts served two purposes: they were intended to make good the gaps in the European system of justice, and to enable the African to perpetuate those aspects of his own juridical systems that were regarded as having intrinsic value and as forming, in Lord Haileys words, an appropriate bridge between African social life and that of Europe. 16 The criminal jurisdiction of these courts (which, like the European courts, were hierarchical in structure) was normally confined to offenses against customary law, whether committed in or out of the customary setting. Their civil jurisdiction extended to all matters not involving written law. Ruanda-Urundi. For almost all administrative purposes the Trust Terri tory of Ruanda-Urundi has been a seventh province of the Belgian Congo. Such differences as there are are mostly nominal. Thus, the chief execu tive is called Vice Governor-General instead of Governor. And instead of being divided into districts and territories, Ruanda-Urundi is divided into residencies and territories. In actual fact, the two residencies are the districts of Ruanda and Urundi. The judicial system is broadly similar to that of the Belgian Congo.
British

Consistency is a word not often heard in British colonial circles. Look ing at the British record in legislation, the cynic might be tempted to say that it is a word not often respected. But he would be wrong, for while the British may not rate consistency as high as, say, flexibility, they have never had anything against it. It is simply that they see no virtue in being consistent in the presence of inconsistent circumstances as those they face in the field of colonial lawmaking and legislature making undoubt edly are. In their view no two African territories can be legislated for in the same way at the same time, or even in the same way at different times. But when it comes to applying the law and seeing that it is kept, the British have shown themselves more than a match for any of their con sistent colonial colleagues. Inconsistency of administrative procedure, legal interpretation or personal dealings is apt quickly to acquire uglier names inefficiency, complacency, lack of integrity, corruption that can destroy a governments reputation as easily as a persons. In the day-to-day handling of their colonial business, therefore, the British have generally inclined to the view that what is good for Gambia is good also for Uganda and Nigeria. In large part the credit for this view must go to the Colonial Office. Most of its members have never been to Gambia, Uganda or Nigeria, and
16 Op. c i t p. 620.

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approach the problem of governing colonial peoples without the prejudices they would be almost certain to derive from living among them. Being a branch of the British civil service, the Colonial Office is staffed by career men; and being for the most part able and dedicated, these men see themselves both as creditors to a proud colonial past and as debtors to a no less proud future, whether colonial or otherwise. Nothing breeds con sistency of outlook and action like the sense of being caught up in history unless it is being in a public service where promotion is wont to go to the reliable blokes and the sound fellows the consistent ones, in short. This is not to say that the Colonial Office, as managing director of Britains colonial holdings, has reduced the business of manage ment to a simple formula, let alone a logical one, but only that it has been in the business long enough to have decided which of several types of colonial management gives the most satisfactory results, from its point of view. As an example of the type of management organization developed over the years by the Colonial Office, the Protectorate of Uganda will probably serve as well as any British African territory. In Uganda the Colonial Office has been dealing all along with an essentially African territory; it has been able to follow its bent without running into the kinds of troubles that have dogged its steps (and those of the local Europeans) in such settler territories as Kenya and the Rhodesias. At the same time, it has had to deal with one of the most delicate management problems found anywhere in colonial Africa, namely, that arising from the presence, in the province of Buganda, of a people far more highly developed politically than most of their tribal neighbors and the inheritors of a centuries-old tradition of sovereignty. The basic components of the central government system developed by the Colonial Office in Uganda are simple. They consist of a Governors office, a secretariat, a number of ministries (11 in 1959), a somewhat larger number of departments, each with a directorate in either Entebbe (the administrative capital) or Kampala (the commercial capital) and most with branch offices and field staff at centrally located places in the provinces. The division of responsibility between the various offices and ministries is set down in the Colonial Offices accounting of its Uganda stewardship for the year 1958:
The Chief Secretary is the Governors principal adviser, and his deputy in the Governors absence. He leads the Government side in Legislative Council and is responsible for general co-ordination between Ministers. He also deals with constitutional affairs, defence and security, external affairs, and is the Head of the Civil Service. The Attorney General has ministerial status as the Governments principal legal adviser, but does not have executive responsibility. The Minister of Finance is in general charge of finance, economic policy and co-ordination of economic and development matters; he is also responsible for the Protectorate estimates and taxation. The Minister of Local Government is responsible for

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urban and rural local government including courts, native governments and district councils, township authorities, town planning and provincial admin istration; the Minister of Natural Resources for the development of the re sources of the land and for the departments of Agriculture, Veterinary Services and Animal Industry, Co-operative Development, W ater Development and Tsetse Control; he is also responsible for cotton and coffee marketing organi sations; the Minister of Education and Labour for the development and admin istration of the services in the title and also for the Information Department; the Minister of Commerce and Industry for commerce and trade, the Uganda Development Corporation, the Uganda Electricity Board and regional com munications; the Minister of Lands and Mineral Development for matters relat ing to land including land tenure and for the departments of Lands and Sur veys, Mines and Geological Survey; the Minister of Works for the Department of Public Works, urban water supplies and transport licensing; the Minister of Social Development for the departments of Community Development and Afri can Housing, welfare, including childrens legislation and other sociological subjects and the Minister of Health for the development of medical and health services.17

For administrative purposes the protectorate is divided into four prov inces (Buganda, Eastern, Western and Northern) and 16 districts. With the exception of Buganda, each of the provinces is administered by a provincial commissioner and district commissioners who work under the supervision and control of the provincial commissioners.
They are the principal executive officers of Government in their areas. With out interfering in technical detail, they are generally responsible for the efficient conduct of public affairs, and provincial and district teams have been set up under their chairmanship to act as informal consultative bodies for the shaping of policies and schemes of local application. The teams comprise representa tives of the technical departments and, at district level, representatives of the African local authorities.18

Justice is administered through the following instrumentalities: African courts, which operate at the local level for the most part; subordinate courts, of which there are 16, and the business of which is handled by resident magistrates; Her Majestys High Court, which has full jurisdic tion, civil and criminal, over all persons and matters in Uganda and which works both as a court of first instance and as an appellate court from subordinate courts, both protectorate and African; and Her Majestys Court of Appeal for Eastern Africa, which hears civil and criminal appeals from the High Courts of Uganda and its east African neighbors. From these courts of appeal a further appeal lies, in certain cases, to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in Great Britain. The law of the land is based on the common law of England, the doctrines of equity, and all statutes of general application in force in England on 11th August, 1902, the date of the Uganda Order in Council that outlined the constitutional framework of the country. However, in
17 Uganda,, 1958 , H.M.S.O, London, 1959, pp. 143-44. 18 Ibid., pp. 146-47.

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3*7

all cases to which natives are parties, every court shall be guided by native law so far as it is applicable and is not repugnant to justice and morality or inconsistent with Protectorate laws. It is also laid down that substantial justice should always be done without undue regard to technicalities of procedure. 19 In most respects Buganda is administered rather differently from the other three provinces. Its indigenous government systems, both central and local, were found to be so greatly superior to the average that the British had little difficulty in adapting them to the requirements of modern government. In matters affecting the welfare and justice of its own Baganda people, the Kabakas government performs the functions per formed in the other provinces by the provincial and district commissioners and their staffs, and in recent years it has assumed responsibility for certain services previously rendered by the protectorate government. It is, in effect, a central government within a central government. The Resi dent, as the chief representative of the protectorate government is called, maintains a headquarters staff in Kampala, but his executive powers nowadays fall far short of those of the provincial commissioner. There are, needless to say, differences between the way Uganda is run and the way Gambia and Nigeria are, to say nothing of the settler terri tories. No two territories have followed the same departmental or minis terial pattern (some have not yet introduced ministries); and no two terri tories make identical use of their personnel and funds or raise their budgets in identical ways. But nobody who has studied the annual reports of the territories administered by the Colonial Office can fail to have been struck by the family likenesses between them. And nobody who has been entertained by officials of the central government in any part of British colonial Africa can fail to have noticed that the houses they live in and the furniture with which they have been supplied are as alike as their in-trays. But perhaps these likenesses are the product not so much of consistency as of economy, and a desire to make the expatriate feel as much at home in Gambia where he may start his career as in Nigeria or Uganda where he may end it.
F ren ch

Having set itself different goals from those of the British Colonial Office, the Ministry of Overseas France found it necessary to use different means of pursuing them. The deconcentrating (as Hubert Deschamps calls it in his working paper) of legislative power in the years immediately pre ceding the Fifth Republic did not lead to any major departure from the
19 Ibid., p. 95. Common law is not the law in all British and ex-British territories. I11 Southern Rhodesia, for instance, the law is more Roman than English, largely be cause it was developed in the Union of South Africa, whose early settlers were Dutch.

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traditional managerial practice of always keeping the circumference tied to the center. Under the Fourth Republic the chief executive in each of the overseas territories (French West Africa, French Equatorial Africa and Mada gascar) had the rank of High Commissioner. In the associated territory (that is, U. N. Trust Territory) of the French Cameroons, he also had the rank of High Commissioner, and in Togo he had the rank of Commis sioner. As governors-general, the high commissioners for French West Africa, French Equatorial Africa and Madagascar were the representatives of the French metropolitan government in their territories and the deposi tories of the power of the Republic, charged with the responsibility of coordinating all the public services in their territories and exercising the supervisory powers of the metropolitan government over such subordinate local bodies as municipalities. They were responsible for filling all posts with the exception of those reserved to metropolitan control; they also had the right to deal directly with the Ministry of Overseas France. They were responsible for the defense and the internal security of their territories and were in particular empowered to declare a state of siege, a power which was exercisable in metropolitan France only by the Assembly or the President. Each High Commissioner was assisted by a Secretary-General, a Grand Council and various offices and departments the whole of which was referred to as the Government-General. The Government-Gen eral of French West Africa was located at Dakar, that of French Equa torial Africa at Brazzaville, that of Madagascar at Tananarive. The French Cameroons and Togo were administered as they con tinued to be until their autonomy was secured in 1960 on a similar basis. However, being trust territories, they had rather more freedom of action than the other territories. Thus, under the trusteeship agreements, their consent was required if the metropolitan government wished to create fiscal monopolies or to establish public enterprises which might involve a departure from the regime of equal economic treatment of the nationals of all member states of the United Nations. Each of the eight constituent territories of French West Africa (Maure tania, Senegal, French Sudan, French Guinea, Ivory Coast, Dahomey, Upper Volta and Niger), each of the four constituent territories of French Equatorial Africa (Gabon, Middle Congo, Ubangi-Shari and Chad), and each of the six provinces of Madagascar (Majunga, Tulear, Diego-Suarez, Tamatave, Tananarive and Fianarantsoa) had its own Governor (chef de province in the case of Madagascar), secretariat and public services. Each territory or province was divided into either cercles (as in French West Africa) or regions (as in French Equatorial Africa) under an administrator usually referred to as the commandant de cercle and corresponding roughly to the provincial commissioner of the British system. Each cercle or region was divided into either subdivisions (as in French West Africa)

3*9
FIGURE 47

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or districts (as in French Equatorial Africa and Madagascar). The sub divisions or districts were themselves divided into cantons, which, in turn, were divided into quartiers. The executive powers of a French overseas Governor have always been small compared to those of a Governor-General, to whose authority he is at all times subject. In the last years (1956-1958) of the Fourth Republic the Governor became increasingly subject to a second authority, the ministers of the elected assembly in his territory; for under the loi-cadre of 1956 these ministers were given considerable executive as well as legis lative responsibility. However, the Governor-General continued to work, not through the territorial public services, but through the federal Services dUEtat, which were responsible only to Paris. Just as the administrative responsibilities of the Governor were sub ordinate to those of the Governor-General, so those of the territorial assembly (or, in the case of Madagascar, the provincial assembly) were subordinate to those of the Grand Council of the Government-General. This is seen in the funds allocated to the two governments. Thus, in some years prior to 1958 the budget of the French West African government was anything up to twice as big as the aggregate of the eight territorial budgets. It is also seen in the taxing authority of the two governments. Thus, the Grand Council decided the basis of assessment of all taxes (in cluding those paid into the territorial budgets), while the territorial assem bly decided only the actual rate at which the territorial taxes were to be levied. Then again, it was the Grand Council of the GovernmentGeneral, rather than the territorial assembly, that did the disposing of all development money provided by such metropolitan agencies as FIDES (Fonds dInvestissement pour le Developpement Economique et Social) and had the responsibility of seeing that all development so financed was satisfactorily carried out. As of late 1959, few significant changes had been made in the ad ministrative machinery of the now autonomous territories of the French Community. Most of the changes amounted to little more than changes of name and personnel. Even the independent Republic of Guinea was seemingly content to jog along with the model it had inherited from the French which was, perhaps, not surprising. After all, the making of new models, whether of automobiles or of administrations, takes money and skills, both of which are still scarce in Guinea; and there is always the possibility that the new model will be less serviceable than the old. Portuguese In line with its assumption that the overseas provinces are an integral part of Portugal, the Portuguese government has been trying for many years to put their administrative organization onto the same footing as that of the metropolis. To this end the Organic Law passed in 1955 decreed

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that, sometime in the future, the basic unit of the administration should become the metropolitan concelho, or council. But, as Egerton has noted, the concelho, being an institution to which local self-government is com mitted, presupposes a certain degree of capacity for such self-government, and the existence, within a reasonable area, of a considerable population of fully qualified citizens. 20 While there are such areas in Portuguese Africa, notably the municipalities of Luanda and Lourengo Marques, they are small in size compared to those where there are no such qualified citizens. For the time being, therefore, the overseas provinces must continue to be administered largely on the basis of the circunscrigao. This is a more or less arbitrarily chosen area sometimes very large which is in capable of self-government. Each circunscrigao, or circumscription, is divided into postos, or posts, usually from two to six, each posto being in charge of a chefe do posto, or chief of post. From the administrations standpoint, the council ranks with the cir cumscription. Both are headed by an administrador, who centers in himself wide powers in every line of European administration, and super vises native policy. He serves both as magistrate and manager, and is appointed by, and responsible to, the Governor-General. In both cases his work is coordinated by an officer holding the rank of intendente (usually in the senior grade of administrador) and carried out with the aid of chiefs of posts. Until 1955 the circumscriptions were grouped in districts and these, in turn, in provinces or subprovinces, of which Angola had five (six if the Luanda region, which was administered differently, is included) and Mozambique had four (five if the Lourengo Marques region, also adminis tered differently, is included). The Organic Law, however, has grouped the councils and circumscriptions directly into districts corresponding to the old provinces or subprovinces, and where the interests of the Africans were believed to require it, into new intermediate-sized units known as intendencias. Angola, for instance, now has 13 districts and four intendencias. Each district is administered by a Governor, a Secre tary-General, administrators and chiefs of posts, and has its own depart mental services covering such matters as registration and census, native labor and immigration, and native justice. The administration of the provincial, that is, the central, government is in charge of the Governor-General, assisted by a Secretary-General of his own nomination and, if he wishes to use them, two provincial secretaries. To these secretaries he may, by what is called a portaria, delegate such of his administrative responsibilities as he sees fit. The major government services organized departmentally at the provincial level are education, finance, justice, health, agriculture, industry, mines, veterinary affairs and survey.
20 Op. cit.} p. 116.

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With slight modifications, the civil and criminal codes of the Portuguese territories are those of metropolitan Portugal. All offenses (other than those committed by officials or alleged against them, which are dealt with by an Administrative Court) are brought before either the Ordinary Courts or the Special Courts which serve both as higher courts of first instance and courts of appeal. The supreme court of appeal the High Court is located in Lisbon. Other Territories
Liberia. In so far as one man can be said to manage a still rather un manageable country, President Tubman is that man. For he is popularly, and reliably, credited with knowing everything of consequence that goes on; with seeing everybody who seeks an audience; and with keeping a check on the doings of all his lieutenants. He is said to scrutinize all ex pense items in all departments exceeding $100, and even smaller amounts toward the end of the fiscal year, when his departmental heads are in clined to look around for ways of spending any credit balances they still have. Only the most routine actions may be taken by any member of the administration without prior consultation with him. In the handling of the executive business of the country, the President is able to draw upon the resources of ten departments, the heads of which constitute, with him as chairman, the membership of the cabinet. The members are the Secretary of State, Secretary of the Treasury, Attorney General, Postmaster General, Secretary of National Defense, Secretary of the Interior, Secretary of Public Works and Utilities, Secretary for Agri culture and Commerce, Secretary of Public Instruction, and a Director General of the National Public Health Service. All office holders are nominated by the President and subject to confirmation by the Senate. The judicial branch of the government is headed by a Supreme Court consisting of a Chief Justice and four associate justices. Subordinate courts are established, as necessary, by acts of the legislature. All judges are appointed by the President. For purposes of administration the country is divided into two main regions, designated the County Jurisdiction and the Hinterland Jurisdic tion. The County Jurisdiction applies only to a strip of coast about 40 miles deep. Each of the five counties and the one territory in this belt are administered by a superintendent.
In the County Jurisdiction the constitutional and statutory laws of the Republic apply, together with die common law of America and England and current administrative regulations in the form of Executive Orders and Ad ministrative Circulars issued from time to time by the President and approved by the legislature. The county officials [including the superintendent] are ap

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pointed by the President with the advice and consent of the Liberian Senate, and hold office during good behavior.21

The Hinterland Jurisdiction is divided into three administrative provinces, which, in turn, are divided into eight districts. As in British territories, the provinces are administered by provincial commissioners, the districts by district commissioners. But, unlike their British counterparts, the Liberian commissioners owe their appointments to the head of the state, and can be relieved of them at his will. As Earle Anderson has observed, the President does not believe in leaving the creation of
effective and honest government in the Provinces to the unsupervised authority of subordinates, not even to subordinates of cabinet rank. Instead, he has time and again made extensive trips into the interior, has heard complaints, tried cases, acquainted himself on the spot with local conditions, [and] dispensed summary justice where, as happened in some instances, he found District Com missioners or other officials abusing their power.22

Ethiopia. Separated though he is from the Liberian President by more than mileage, the Emperor of Ethiopia shares his predilection for per sonalized administration. He, too, is credited with knowing everything of consequence that goes on; with seeing everyone who comes and goes; with requiring that even routine administrative decisions be referred to him; and with being the one person in the entire country who can get things moving once they have been stalled, as they readily are, by the entangling tape of his ministries. This is not to say that the Emperor is content to have it so. On the contrary, he has consistently shown himself to be the countrys leading advocate of greater administrative efficiency. To this end he has brought in American agricultural and State Department experts, British police instructors, French railway engineers, Canadian educationists, Swedish public health, mining, business and defense service specialists. But the national diversity of his hired help is generally taken to be an expression of the Emperors intention to maintain the age-old dynastic tradition of not letting the left hand know what the right hand is doing, and of not letting either hand have too much free play. Certainly there is little or no evidence that the administrative reforms under way are headed in the direction of greater departmental and ministerial autonomy, let alone greater provincial autonomy. It is still laid down that all departments and ministers of the government shall carry out their duties under the direction of the Prime Minister. The Prime Ministers duties are still restricted pretty much to those of administrative aide-de-camp to the Emperor, being defined as responsibility for the good administration of the minis tries, the harmonizing of their duties and the transmission of the Emperors
21 R. Earle Anderson, Liberia: Americas African Friend, University of North Caro lina Press, Chapel Hill, 1952, p. 213. 22 Ibid., p. 220.

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of

governm ent

orders. And the good administration of the ministries still requires that their ministers spend much of their time at the Gibbi, the imperial palace, waiting to see the Emperor. Even in so small a matter as the residential qualifications of a candidate for parliamentary election, good administra tion requires that all disagreements arising therefrom be referred to the Emperor for settlement. The twelve provincial governments are likewise kept on a tight adminis trative rein. The Governor-General of each province is supplied with a director and secretary appointed, as he himself is, by the Emperor. These directors are capable and dedicated to the Emperors policy of centralization and modernization. Their task is to watch quietly and check the governor-general, to supervise expenditure of funds, and to forward all accounts to the central Ministry of Finance. 2 3 The law of the land is administered through district, provincial and high courts, the Supreme Imperial Court and a political court, a purely Ethiopian institution for the trial of political offences. 24 Any person accused in one of the lower courts has the right to have his case transferred to the high court, provided he asks for this before any evidence has been taken in the court of first instance. In recent years the legal code of the country has been reformed. Slavery and slave trading have been abolished, polygamy, except for Moslems, forbidden, and banditry outlawed. The administration of the law has been greatly humanized. Thieves no longer have their hands cut off. Executions are no longer public (but gallows may still be seen in some public places, their deterrent value being said to be substantial). Guarantors of loans can no longer be seized bodily by creditors; and the inhabitants of a region in which there is an unsolved crime can no longer be incarcerated en masse and for an undisclosed period. Even so, the judicial power of the Emperor remains considerable. Thus, every Ethiopian continues to have the right to appeal a grievance directly to the Emperor. However, in these times of transportation by Rolls Royce, the appellant is less likely to exercise it by throwing himself in the royal path than by taking his complaint to the court of cassation provided for the purpose.
Republic of Sudan. In the seventy-odd years of the condominium, the British developed an administrative service (called the Sudan Political Service) which they came to look upon as the elite of all their overseas administrations. The Sudanese frequently had other words for it ex pensive, exclusive, exploitative but they were ready to concede that it was efficient, uncorrupted and seemingly incorruptible. Upon becoming independent in 1956 they paid the British the compliment of leaving its machinery intact. Their country, consequently, continues to be adrnin23 Simon D. Messing, Changing Ethiopia, Middle East Journal, Vol. 9 (1955), No. 4, p. 426. 24 The Statesmans Year-Book, 1959, Macmillan & Co., Ltd., London, 1959, p. 963.

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istered by provinces and districts. The provinces, of which there are nine, are each under a Governor, who is assisted by an advisory provincial council25 and a team of specialists in such fields as agriculture, health and cooperatives. The districts, of which there are approximately 70, are each under a District Commissioner or subordinate officer. The administrative (as also the legislative) headquarters, with their asso ciated ministries and departments, are located in Khartoum. While the machinery is intact, the working of it has, understandably, given some trouble. As the new rulers are finding, it is one thing to Sudanize an administration, but another thing to get the unenfranchised peoples of the south to accept rule by the Moslems of the north. Southernization would, it seems, be rather more to their liking.
LOCAL GOVERNMENT

To govern any one of the large tropical African territories is to govern a multiplicity of groups occupying discrete parts of that territory. The basis of effective government in such territories is therefore effective local government. From the first, the partition powers realized that if they were ever to win their wards over, they had to throw a wide-mesh net over the whole of the area for which they were responsible and make whatever use was possible of local talent. The first was necessary as much for the purpose of showing the flag as of keeping the peace. The second was necessary partly because it was physically and financially impossible for them to do all the work themselves and partly because they could do little to upgrade the quality of African life until the Africans were competent to do a few things for themselves.
Belgian

The Belgians have never been a people to copy, and have seldom been greatly concerned about what their colonizing neighbors were doing. All the same, their work in local government bears resemblances to that of their British and French colleagues. It could hardly be otherwise. In the Congo basin they found themselves dealing with people cast in much the same ethnic mold as those in the surrounding territories and living in an environment that, like most other tropical African environments, put a premium on inertia. They also found, as did the British and French, that it is not only the Africans who suffer from inertia in such environments. Like the British in west Africa, the Belgians were not long in coming to see that they could not govern without the active participation of the traditional rulers of the country. They had neither the manpower nor,
25 Except Khartoum Province, which is under a Commissioner and has no provincial council.

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at first, the financial means to do the job themselves. Their attempts in the early, unhappy days of the Congo Free State to rule by dividing had led only to disaffection and hatred, and would, had they been continued much longer, almost certainly have resulted in the paralysis of all govern ment. In 1906, as a result of the findings of the Commission of Inquiry appointed in 1904, the first of a series of decrees dealing with local govern ment matters was put into effect. What it did was to reinstate the institu tion of chieftainship as understood by the indigenous people and make it the instrument of indirect rule, which it has continued to be in most parts of the Belgian Congo and Ruanda-Urundi. In the Belgian Congo proper, the role allotted to the chief was, to begin with, of very small consequence. In their solicitude not to overlook any body with chiefly pretensions, the Belgians rounded up virtually all those who claimed to have a following, if only a hundred or so adults. By the end of World War I more than 6,000 chefferies had been recognized enough to defeat the purpose they were intended to serve, namely, the re-establishment of tribal authority. To forestall this possibility, and to increase the effectiveness of African participation in local government, the Belgians began, in the early 1920s, to put the chefferie system on a more manageable footing. Where the chefferies were large and more or less coincident with ethnic boundaries, they were left undisturbed. Where they were very small, several of them were grouped together in a secteur. Each administration unit, whether chefferie or secteur, had a council that operated along the lines of the French council of notables. In the case of the chefferie, the council was composed of the traditional leaders, such as the heads of kinship groups; in the case of the secteur, it was com posed of the chiefs of the constituent units, along with members of native tribunals and other persons nominated by the district officer (commissaire de district), who was himself a member of the council and entitled to preside over its meetings. In Ruanda-Urundi, the Belgians found a ready-made and well-made framework of local government, one that lent itself to their designs. While also a land of chiefs and subordinate chiefs, Ruanda-Urundi was a land of two kingdoms, whose hereditary rulers (Bami; singular, Mwami) commanded the feudal-like fealty of their chiefs and followers. Although the Belgians, like the Germans before them, have clipped the wings of their absolutism, the Bami of Ruanda and Urundi continue to exercise wide authority over their nearly 5 million subjects, a circumstance that has enormously facilitated the work of the Belgian-appointed resi dents who act as advisers to the Bami and see that the wishes of the central government are carried out. They retain the right to receive tribute (now in cash); to appoint chiefs, subordinate chiefs and the members of their administrative staff; and, with the consent of their council (conseil du pays), to make rules and issue orders that have the force of law, including the right to raise labor levies for works in the public interest. At the same time, the central government has injected some of its own ideas into the

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administration by introducing an elected element into the chefferics and higher agencies, and seeing that among the men in such agencies there are those who have an understanding of the social and economic problems of the territory. Useful as such agencies unquestionably were in helping the adminis tration with all the minor duties connected with justice, census, taxa tion, and so on, 26 it may be contended that they were something of an anachronism in these fast-moving times. Essentially, they were tribally oriented agencies. Yet since 1920 a yearly increasing percentage of Con golese Africans have been living outside tribal borders and tribal control. This population extra-coutumiere had reached the figure of 8 per cent of the total even before World War II. By the late 1950s it had passed the 25 per cent mark, or more than one third of the adult male population. Essentially, too, they were African-run agencies. Yet the Belgians had great difficulty all along in finding Africans capable of working in them satisfactorily; and the Africans who were capable came increasingly to resent the restricted scope of the work assigned to them and the sub ordinate nature of their position. They were, moreover, essentially agen cies for the maintenance of a colonial relationship between ruler and ruled a relationship that has lost its savor for most Africans in the neighboring British and French territories and has been losing it for increasing numbers of Congolese Africans. To deal with the needs of its growing extra-eustomary population, the Belgian government set up in 1931 a new local government agency known as the centre extra-coutumier. Each such center consisted of a council (up to 12 persons), composed of representatives of the local tribunal and other local residents in good standing with the community in general and the commissaire de district in particular. The chief of the council was chosen from the councilors and served for a limited period only. The council was responsible for the maintenance of order, the making of by-laws considered to be in the public interest, and the raising of taxes (on plots of land, shops, the making and sale of palm wine, etc.) for local purposes. But, as in the customary secteurs and chefferies, the council had very little real power. It may have worn the mantle of authority, but the mantle was a strait-jaeket. Down to 1959 all councils were subject to the will of a watch committee (comite protecteur) nominated by the Governor-General and consisting largely, if not always wholly, of Euro peans. This committee was responsible for seeing that the good name, moral and social, of the centres was upheld. All council meetings were attended by, and frequently presided over by, the (European) agent territorial; and all actions taken at such meetings had to meet with his approval. Progress in setting up centres extra-coutumiers did not keep pace with the urbanization of the country and the growth in size of its extra-tribal
26 A. F. G. Marzorati, The Political Organisation and the Evolution of African Society in the Belgian Congo, African Affairs (London), April 1954, p. 104.

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population. At the end of 1952, after more than twenty years of effort, there were only 35 such centers; these served the needs of less than one fourth of the extra-tribal population. The Belgians readily admit that this scheme, too, fell short of their hopes and for much the same reason, namely, their inability to find enough Africans to play the in direct roles allotted to them. As for the cause of this inability, opinion is divided. Some continue to put it down to African incapacity; others, more realistically, to the inadequacy of training facilities and incentives. Frustrated in their attempts to make indirect rule work, the Belgians showed an increasing interest in the last years of their administration in local government by direct methods. For the most part, this interest was concentrated on the large African settlements that have grown up in the suburbs of such cities as Leopoldville, Elisabethville and Stanleyville. And not without reason, for a cite indigene the size of Leopoldvilles (now well past the quarter-million mark) is no place for administrative inefficiency, whether revealed by poor sanitation, inadequate housing, lawlessness or corruption. Each such city was put under the control of a European administrator, who was assisted in his work by an advisory council, a number of African aides, an African tribunal the members of which were selected by the district officer from the tribal groups most strongly represented in the population, and by a number of chiefs. Until 1957 all of these positions, along with those occupied by Euro peans in the administration of their own cities, were filled by nomination. But in December of that year the government allowed the people of Leopoldville to have a say, for the first time, in the ordering of the affairs of the eleven districts (communes) into which the city, including both European and African sectors, had been divided for administrative convenience. In the election held during that month, qualified European and African adult males were able to vote for the European and Afri can councilors of their choice. However, down to 1959 the elected coun cilors had no more real authority than the nominated ones. The gov ernment continued in possession of all its long-standing prerogatives, including the right to reject the advice of its councilors, and to choose whomever among them it pleased to be chief of the council, that is, mayor of the commune. After the troubles of late 1958 and early 1959 the mood of the ad ministration changed. As a Belgian government publication put it, A certain type of paternalism officially came to an end in the Congo on January 13, 1959. 27 In its place was put the policy of emancipa tion. At the local government level this policy was implemented by bills confirming the right of public meeting and freedom of association for all such political bodies as did not trouble public order, by holding elections by direct suffrage and by doing away with the last traces of
27 Belgian Congo Monthly Information Bulletin (Belgian Congo and Ruanda-Urundi Information and Public Relations Office, Brussels), July-August 1959, p. 1.

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racial discrimination. At the same time, the government made it clear that it intended to preserve much of what was deemed good in the existing order. As King Baudouin put it in his proclamation of January 13, 1959, far from imposing completely European methods on these peoples, we intend to promote original adaptations in accordance with their funda mental character and the traditions which they hold so dear. Among other things this meant that the government intended to take care that the future election borough systems shall be reconciled with the mainte nance of local customs in all their sane, respectable aspects by means of original rules adapted to our times and to the birth of a rural democracy. Furthermore, [that] the chieftains will be represented in all public bodies . . . without relying on election by universal suffrage. And it was hoped that by playing the new part assigned to them, they [would] render the Congo a service equivalent to that which they rendered in the past when they agreed to place their wholehearted confidence in and cooperate with the work of civilization undertaken by Belgium. 28 The willingness of the chiefs to play their assigned part can scarcely be doubted. What is in doubt is their ability (in view of their inadequate preparation) to play it, and the readiness of the new men so soon to have the run of the country to let them do it.
British

With their regard for tradition and their age-long habit of building a day at a time, it is hardly surprising that the British should seek to take such indigenous institutions as they could find and adapt them to their administrative needs. Wherever feasible the existing framework of native government was used.
For example, the Muhammadan emirates of Northern Nigeria already had a well-developed system of administration, taxation, and courts of law which could easily be modified to meet the new circumstances. Therefore they were recog nized as local agents of the central government, their authority and duties were defined, and they were placed under the supervision of white officials (Resi dents) whose duty it was to see that the orders of the central government were carried out. . . . It meant that new policy was enforced in familiar ways, and that it was more readily accepted for that reason.29

Wherever feasible, too, the existing authorities were invited to play new roles and serve new ends. They were seldom regarded merely as useful agencies for helping with the minutiae of local administration. Almost from the start, they were valued as the basis on which a new order of society, better adapted to modern conditions than the old, could be built.
28 Part of a statement made by M. van Hemelrijck, then Minister of the Belgian Congo, on June 24, 1959. 29 Batten, op. cit., Part II, pp. 116-17.

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Among the tasks commonly assigned to these authorities were the main tenance of local hospitals, dispensaries, schools, markets, roads and ferries, the improvement of water supplies, the provision of agricultural and veterinary services, and the establishment of local treasuries for the financ ing of such work and the payment of the salaries of those charged with doing it. Frequently the native authorities had a big share in maintaining law and order. Some of the large Nigerian administrations were given complete jurisdiction over all the Africans in their area, except for treason, sedition, corruption of government servants, and similar offenses. Com monly, also, they were given jurisdiction over such matters as school attendance, the manufacture and consumption of liquor, the carrying of weapons, the safeguarding of water supplies, and the control of tsetse fly and erosion. These native administrations varied in size and capacity from the great, well-organized emirates of northern Nigeria, with large budgets even in the early years of the colonial era, to small groups of a few thousand, hardly recognizing the existence of a single political authority at all and with an annual revenue of no more than a few hundred dollars. But there were large parts of British Africa where it was not practicable to use the existing authorities. This was especially true of British East Africa, where tribal units are, with some notable exceptions, very small, and where even the rudiments of a central local authority might be absent.
Sometimes it was hard to find any person or group of persons who were un mistakably in authority over the rest. In other cases, where a suitable form of government existed, its authority had been weakened in the process of Partition, or the chiefs were not considered reliable enough to be used as agents of the central government. For such conditions a more direct form of government was established, and headmen or warrant chiefs were appointed. Many of them were selected from chiefly families, but as government headmen they wT ere in no sense exercising traditional powers through native institutions. They were chosen purely and simply as suitable individuals to be entrusted with limited powers as government agents . . .30

Originally the duties of the warrant chiefs were to keep order, arrest criminals and repair roads. Later they were given additional responsibili ties, such as the provision and maintenance of clean water supplies, the control of liquor and infectious disease, and the collection of local taxes. With the passage of time they came also to have wide judicial powers, and since the middle 1920s they have been assisted in their work by local councils, the members of which were, to a large extent, also governmentnominated, and served under the chairmanship of the central govern ments representative, the District Officer. These councils also had treas uries, but unlike the native administrations, received no share of the territorial poll tax, and so had to levy their own small local rates. To
so Ibid., p. 117.

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carry out the work for which they voted funds, they had to depend almost entirely on departments of the central government. Nevertheless, many of them can point to a record of achievement in the agricultural, veterinary and forestry services, education and public health and welfare that com pares favorably with that of the best native administrations. Like the latter, too, the local (native) councils have frequently been able to get the ear of the central government on matters of general concern though for this most of the credit should probably go to the District Officer for allow ing free expression of opinion. Valuable as both of these institutions have been as instruments of local government and as training grounds for administrators, they have drawn the fire of increasingly large numbers of people, both African and European. The native administration system, many African nationalists seem to feel, was an imperialistic device for keeping subject peoples docile. Others have argued, to use Ntieyong U. Akpans words, that the system
could not possibly be for the progress of the territories concerned, since it merely favoured, sheltered and strengthened illiterate, conservative, unprogres sive and sometimes autocratic chiefs at the expense of younger educated ele ments who, admitted into the Native Administration Councils, would be better able to understand and follow what was going on in the councils as well as be able to take bold initiative in matters with which the councils might be con cerned.81

Others, including Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe of Nigeria, have seen the system as a rather clever piece of theater, in which the British officers of the cen tral government were given the role of producer-director and the African players were taught to think British while continuing to act African. Still others feel that it taught them to do no thinking at all. They believe that the primary aim of indirect rule was to leave the African alone to his own separate and unequal devices; that it led to a sort of quasiapartheid policy where Europeans
lived apart from the natives, had separate clubs, separate hospitals, in some places even separate churches, to which no African, no matter what his social standing, could be admitted . . . , where all senior posts in the civil or other services were clearly designated E uropean posts.32 31 Epitaph to Indirect Rule: A Discourse on Local Government in Africa, Cassell & Co., Ltd., London, 1956, p. 28. 32 Ibid., p. 29. In a written comment, J. G. Liebenow makes the further point that apart from the fact that it was sometimes misapplied (i.e., the wrong individuals were chosen to be rulers, or a portion of the indigenous system the chieftainship was mistaken for the whole), indirect rule was often built upon sand. By superimpos ing a layer of European officiality, it ignored the fact that the chiefs had the power they had in the pre-European period because there was no one (other than ancestors) who could be regarded as superior to them in their respective areas. Under colonial rule, not only administrators but also missionaries, settlers, merchants and other nonAfricans could reside in a chiefs area, but not be subject to his jurisdiction.

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In some quarters, rule by warrant chief and nominated council came to be disliked no less strongly. The warrant chiefs
owed their position not to tradition . . . but to an external authority. . . . The new chiefs were therefore not only free from traditional inhibitions but adequately strengthened and protected and could do anything that suited them, no matter how offensive and objectionable it was to custom and tradition, pro vided it did not offend, or come to the notice of, the authority to whom they owed their positions.33

Frequently the things that suited these chiefs did not suit their people, with results (such as the Womens Riots of 1929 in the Eastern Region of Nigeria) that were saddening and discreditable to all concerned. However, even its most vehement critics concede that the system of indirect rule had its points, and that, in Lord Haileys words, it has
unquestionably made a great contribution to the maintenance of order and the administration of justice; [that] in some of the more progressive areas it has made a useful contribution to the provision of local services; [that] to numerous communities it has provided an education, not easy to secure by other means, in the practice of managing their own affairs . . . [and that to] this extent it has materially assisted in preparing them to take part in the working of the new Local Government institutions indicated by the changed political outlook at the present day.34

But it was only natural that as more and more commoners became educated in the British democratic tradition, there should be a rising demand for a more democratically based local government system. It was no less natural, of course, that the intrusion of commoners into a field theretofore confined to born rulers or those who had ruling powers thrust upon them, should be resented by both classes. The change from either a hereditary or a nominated system to one more representative of the common people, largely if not wholly elected, has been going on for many years. Everywhere slow at first, the process has picked up speed since the end of World War II. This is especially true of west Africa, in parts of which the change is virtually complete. Ghana may be taken as an example. Here the native authority system was slow in coming, largely because the British took the view that they were dealing with states, such as Ashanti, to which they were bound to allow a high degree of discretion in the handling of domestic matters. And it was fast in going, because it was incompatible with the stand taken by the Convention Peoples Party, which was as opposed to sharing political power with the traditional authorities as it was to being subservient to the Colonial Office. It was not introduced into the territory until the 1930s, and by 1950 it was already being written off as obsolescent. In its place the government decided, under an ordinance of 1951, to set up a system of local government bodies, and to confine the chiefs and other
33 Ibid., p. 35. 34 Op. cit., p. 541.

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traditional authorities to the exercise of their customary, tribal functions. In 1952, local government elections the first of their kind in the history of the territory were held for the purpose of bringing into being the 280 new councils which, it was estimated, would be necessary to make the scheme workable. Of these, 229 were designated as local, 14 as urban and 37 as district councils. All but 20 of the 280 had been set up before the end of 1954. While the new system represented a major step toward the democratiza tion of local government, it was still some way from being as democratic as its British prototype. One third of the membership was reserved for the nominees of state or chiefly bodies; and some of the normally elected remainder might in fact be nominated members, serving special interests such as mining. Further, it was agreed that every local authority should have a chief as its president, and that in the case of the Northern Region, the position should carry more than mere ceremonial significance. In general the functions and powers of these councils are not very dif ferent from those of their British counterparts, or those exercised by the more advanced native administrations. Whether they will work as well as their prototypes and predecessors has still to be seen. If history is any guide, nominated or hereditary administrators and elected administrators make poor bedfellows. Each side is inclined to believe it would do better if it had the bed to itself. The local administrators of Ghana are further handicapped by their inexperience in the art of accommodation. As Lord Hailey has pointed out, the Ministers who now regulate [the course of the new institutions] have themselves little direct experience of the work ing of such institutions, and . . . they can hope for little aid from a popu lation which has itself had no knowledge of them. 3 5 The British have been concerned also with bringing the native judiciary into line with the changing facts of African life. In pre-partition times there was seldom a clear divide between the judicial and the executive responsibilities of a chief and his council of elders. In many tribal areas there was no divide at all, the members of the local court being closely associated with the executive authority and responsible to it. Throughout British West Africa, for instance, there was no codified law, except in the predominantly Moslem communities, and there was always the possibility that judgments handed down by the courts would be overruled by the executive authority. Though objectionable in theory, these arrangements worked well enough at a time when disputes were confined to domestic problems devoid of any great complexity. It was not until African societies ceased to be traditional and become acculturated infected with Euro pean social, economic and political ideas that the intermingling of the executive and judicial functions of the native councils became unac ceptable. Notwithstanding, the separation of the two has been slow to
35 Ibid., p. 529.

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of

governm ent

come about, even in the go-ahead territories of British West Africa, largely because of the difficulty of finding suitable replacements for the chiefs, and the still strong attraction to customary law and justice felt by the ordinary African. It is in the towns, as a general rule, that the process of separation has gone furthest. For the towns are not only multitribal in their ethnic com position, they are also, to use the Belgian word, extra-customary. The Africans who live there do not cannot live under tribal conditions, let alone under tribal control. Then, too, the towns are, with very few exceptions, European in origin, function, management and way of living, including way of dealing with offenders. If they are to serve the ramify ing needs of their peoples and the territories about them, the towns can scarcely avoid retaining their European complexion, any more than they can avoid conceding to the African (upon whom they are coming to rely increasingly for their manpower needs) the right of resort to his own courts, at least in those areas of his customary life which are held to be not offensive or hurtful to public order. To try to meet the judicial needs of its urbanized Africans, the British have used different methods. In Kenya they have established, at Nairobi, Mombasa and other large centers, mixed courts, the membership of which consists largely of Africans selected by the British from lists prepared by the tribal associations of the towns in question. In some other territories, Tanganyika for instance, the British have favored the establishment of courts presided over by African magistrates. Such courts are expected to enforce local rules and by-laws, try tax cases, and deal with most civil and minor criminal cases. Out of them is gradually evolving a type of natural law that covers the more common needs of men of different tribal back grounds. The judicial needs of the multitribal population of the Northern Rhodesian Copperbelt towns have been met in much this way since the late 1930s. Here the membership of the mixed urban (native) courts con sists largely of representatives of the native authorities in the areas which contribute the bulk of the mine labor supply. It is generally agreed that these courts have been of great value both in codifying customary law and in adapting it to the very different conditions of the mining compound and town. But because most of the towns are depositories of British institutions, rights and ideas, it follows that many of the offenses committed by the urbanized African are offenses against British-made laws relating to prop erty, person, taxes, licenses and so on. Indeed, during most of his waking hours and almost all of his working hours, the urbanized African lives in a British judicial setting. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that British ideas of law and order are permeating more and more the thinking of the African and influencing the

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reforms that are taking place in his customary law. In parts of British West Africa, for instance,
Side by side with the existence of traditional courts there has been created a parallel organization, based on the formalities of the English legal system. This system was originally introduced to deal with cases of major importance, but has now been extended to deal with a wide range of legal problems which result from the complexities of a modern society. The English system has therefore come to exercise a considerable influence on the community as a whole, who nevertheless still rely upon the traditional judiciary for the solution of many of their problems. Where the systems are at variance on common problems, difficulty may well arise. The final outcome has yet to be resolved. There are, however, indications that a process of integration will, at least for the immediate future, meet this situation.36

F ren ch

The approach of the French to the problem of local government has been consistently different from that of the British. While the British administrator has, almost at all times, been willing to build on African foundations, the French administrator has always had difficulty, as Lord Hailey says, in conceiving of any better destiny for the African people than that they should absorb the culture and adopt the institutions of France, which had for him not a comparative but a positive value. 37 He has, accordingly, always tended to show a preference for those methods of local rule which seemed most likely to hasten the fulfillment of this destiny. Since French government was, and still is, predicated on strength at the center, it was only natural that those trained in its ways should have sought to follow them in Africa. With one or two exceptions, they followed them pretty much to the letter. This can be seen in the role allotted by the French to the institution of chieftainship. At best, the chief has been an understudy. When he spoke or acted, he did so in the name of the com mandant de cercle and with his foreknowledge and approval. Commonly, he was little more than a bit player, who did the unwanted village chores. Robert Delavignette, formerly High Commissioner for the French Camer oons, has described the kind of chores performed, all too often, by the canton chief of his territory in the 1940s:
We demand from him too many trivial tasks and we set too much store by the way in which he performs them. Instead of entrusting to him certain im portant tasks a tax, a main road, a new crop and judging his achievement on the spot in our tours, we make his authority a travesty by using him as an intermediary in small affairs provisioning a camp, receiving a vaccinator, collecting witnesses for a petty court case, providing a supply of chickens.88 36 I. D. Cameron and B. K. Cooper, The West African Councillor, Oxford University Press, London, 1954, p. 27. r > TOp. cit., p. 543. 38 Freedom and Authority in French West Africa, Oxford University Press, London, 1950, p. 81.

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When the chief wasnt doing this sort of thing, he was frequently required to perform duties scarcely less trivial, if more prestigious. For example, he would attend receptions on national holidays, visit exhibitions in tribal costume, and serve as gentleman-in-waiting to the local French authorities. Over the years, many administrators sought to exploit more fully the potential of chieftainship. Delavignette argued that what was needed was not to re-establish [the chiefs], but to establish them. Not to re-establish them in a social structure that is dying, but to establish them in a modern Africa that is being born. 39 When he was Governor-General of French Equatorial Africa, Felix Eboue never tired of insisting that the success of the French mission civilisatrice was bound up with the ability of its agents to make more effective use of African institutions in general, and of chieftainship in particular. Cogent as their arguments would seem to be, these men were singularly unable to move the policy makers in Paris. The policy makers showed a constant reluctance to do anything that might seem to infringe upon the executive supremacy of the administration and its officers. To those who criticized it for its stand, the administration was usually able to point out that neither the chiefs nor their partisans among educated Africans appeared to be greatly interested in being anything but con sultants to the administration and guardians of their tribal custom. From 1953 onward their legal status was that of auxiliaries of the administra tion, scarcely distinguishable, at many points, from that of civil servants. Even if the chiefs and their partisans had been greatly interested in playing a larger, more executive role, it is highly doubtful whether they would have been able to do so. The trend over the past generation has been toward the democratizing of local government, and the supression of indigenous systems, where they existed, by systems of French parentage. Thus, the councils of notables (conseils de notables) which came into existence in many areas of French Africa as early as 1919, and which for long consisted, as their name suggests, of the local aristocracy, had gen erally lost favor with both people and government in the last years of the Fourth Republic. In Togo, for instance, the councils of notables were replaced by circumscription councils (conseils de circonscription) by a local decree of 1951. This decree provided that these councils, elected indirectly by universal suffrage, could acquire legal status as soon as the economic development of the region enabled them to provide sufficient resources for their own budgets. There are well over 100 of these councils in Togo, covering the cercles or regions not served by the communes mixtes. The same system was extended to the more out-of-theway parts of French West and French Equatorial Africa before they gained their autonomy.
39 Ibid.

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In the more economically and socially advanced parts of the French Community, local government has been undergoing a remodeling process for more than a generation. The main instruments used for the purpose have been the commune de plein exercice, the commune de moyen exercice and the commune rurcile. Each operates on a township (com mune) basis, and each represents an attempt to accommodate the demands of government to the economic, social and political circumstances of those to be governed. The commune de plein exercice is modeled on the metropolitan mu nicipal commune: it is run by a democratically elected body, headed by a democratically elected mayor, who is its chief executive. Even in the large European cities, the mayor is frequently an African, and the majority of the councilors are also African. Although this type of commune has existed for nearly a hundred years (the first two were established in Senegal, at St. Louis and Goree, in the 1870s), conditions favorable to its spread were hard to create until quite recent years. Even as late as August 1954 there were only 44 municipalities in the whole of French sub-Saharan Africa to which the French National Assembly was willing to grant the full exercise of municipal powers. The commune de moyen exercice , or commune mixte, may be run by either an elected or a nominated council, headed by an officially nomi nated mayor. It may be set up in any locality, rural or urban, which, on the recommendation of the chief executive of the territory and by vote of the territorial assembly, is judged to be sufficiently advanced to provide itself with adequate revenues. Such communes may be advanced to the rank of communes de plein exercice by the same procedure after a period of five years. The commune rurale, the newest and most experimental of the three, represents an attempt to cultivate French democracy at the bush-roots of African society. The working of it is seen to advantage in the French Cameroons, where it is helping to infuse new life into a countryside that was in danger of social atrophy. The councils are elected by universal suffrage and the areas served by them are much larger than those which make up the Africans customary world. Each type of commune derives its revenues from licenses and fees, par ticularly market fees; and each is empowered to levy a local rate. Each type also receives from the territorial government a part of all direct taxes levied in the area. The system of local government in the Malagasy Republic differs some what from that in other parts of the French Community. Here the French succeeded in modernizing an indigenous institution, known as the fokonolona. This community-based rural system has since 1944 been extended to the whole island. It provides for a large measure of local autonomy in the raising and disbursing of funds, and in all matters relating

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to the communitys welfare. The system also forms the base of the central government pyramid. Those who serve the fokonolona well may graduate to higher service in the islands district or regional councils. The belief that what is good for Frenchmen should be good for Africans in process of being gallicized has also found abundant expression in the realm of justice. As far back as 1848, all Africans living in Goree and St. Louis, the capital of Senegal, were accorded the rights and privileges of the Code Napoleon. Down the years these rights have been extended to more and more Africans. Until 1946, however, not many Africans found themselves close enough to the machinery of French justice to be able to use it when needed, with the result that justice indigene, cleansed of some of its more gruesome excesses, continued in force over most of the French domain. Nor did the 1946 constitution change the position overnight. It could decree that French justice in penal matters was immediately ap plicable to all of the millions of Africans it enfranchised, but it could not conjure into being the perfected, but oh! so complicated apparatus of republican justice 40 needed to give effect to the decree. Where the apparatus did exist, few courts, lawyers and judges knew enough about French law to be able to work it. As William Moreland notes in his work ing paper, even most of the administrateurs had had no instruction or training in European French law . . . , [yet] the majority of the provincial administrators suddenly found themselves French judges and their offices courtrooms for the dispensing of French penal law. They also found themselves having to rustle up additional jail space, as incarceration took the place of more colorful forms of punishment. While the administrators and their aides rose to the occasion and suc ceeded, in a remarkably short space of time, in retooling the machinery of justice, the results of the operation were, as Moreland points out, fre quently somewhat different from those intended. In many parts of French Africa, as elsewhere, customary law provided that theft, committed under certain conditions, was punishable by amputation: one hand for a first offense, the other hand for a second offense, and a leg or the head for a third offense. Repetitive theft was uncommon. After April 30, 1946, however, the penalty for theft could only be some days in prison. Stealing became very popular. Many committed theft merely for the purpose of being able to spend a few days in prison, food and lodging free, out of touch with their hungry relations and relieved of the necessity to work. The inapplicability of trying to adhere to the letter of the Napoleonic Code quickly became apparent; and, as quickly, steps were taken, at the local level at least, to make it inapplicable. Thus it is true to say that, the constitution of 1946 notwithstanding, the form of justice practiced in French Africa south of the Sahara remained a careful blend of the French code, indigenous custom and, where it applies, Koranic law. In the civil
40 From Cote d'Ivoire (Abidjan), January 15, 1954.

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realm it is probably no less true to say that of the three, the French code was the least important. For, although the African had the right to be judged by French law before the local administrator or a justice of the peace in matters relating to marriage and divorce, tribal property rights and so on, he was more than likely to prefer to be judged by his Moslem or pagan peers. It is possible that he always will.
Portuguese

The approach of the Portuguese to both local and central government is based on a very simple conviction, namely, that the end of all such government is assimilation. To the Portuguese, there are, accordingly, only two kinds of Africans: the man who is assimilated and the man who is not. The first is called a Portuguese citizen; the second, a Portu guese native.4 1 The first is treated as a Portuguese and subject to the same rights, responsibilities and laws as an immigrant from Portugal. The second is treated somewhat as a minor who is allowed to follow his fancy so long as it is compatible with adult concepts of humanity and public order, but who is quickly and painfully recalled from following it once it ceases to please his seniors and betters. Since most of the indigenous inhabitants of the Portuguese overseas provinces still rank as minors, it follows that most of them still come under the jurisdiction of the native authorities. For administrative purposes, each concelho and circunscrigao is divided into areas administered by a chefe do posto, roughly equivalent to the British district officer or French commandant de cercle. The areas arc divided into regedorias, each of which is normally headed by a hereditary chief (regedor) recognized as such by the administration. The key men at the local level are the chefe do posto and the regedor. The duties of the chefe do posto are imposing. Afonso H. I. F. de Freitas, for some years the administrator of the Lourengo Marques concelho, re cently enumerated42 no fewer than 20, among them the following:
To police his area and see that it is kept in a state of tranquillity. To maintain the prohibition on the manufacture of alcoholic liquors in his area. To fiscalize the use of guns (for hunting game). 41 In the past few years there has been some talk of reclassifying the Portuguese African, on the ground that the present either-or classification no longer conforms with the social realities. Some administrators already recognize the existence of two additional categories: those who have not yet abandoned their tribal customs but who have begun to come under the influence of European civilization, and those who have abandoned their tribal ways but who . . . are not yet sufficiently Portuguese to become legally assimilated. See James Duffy, Portuguese Africa, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1959, p. 297. 42 Native Administration in Angola and Mozambique in Record of Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Conference , held at Umtali, September 20-23, 1955, of the Institute of Administrators of Non-European Affairs (South Africa), pp. 68-69.

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To make frequent inspections of his whole area to find out the populations needs and everything regarding their welfare [and propose] what may seem convenient in order to improve [their] moral, intellectual and material conditions. To transmit to the regedors and their subordinates all orders they must ac complish . . . giving them all necessary explanations, and see that they are executed. To encourage the people of his district to farm their land more productively and grow the kind of crops deemed most advisable. To register all native weddings, births and deaths. And, by no means least, to see that the poll tax is collected according to the law.

The responsibilities of the regedors and their subordinates (who com monly work in council) are no less clearly defined. They are also com prehensive, as the following sample (likewise taken from de Freitas) indicates:
To furnish men for defense or police when legitimately required; to disclose to the district officer, or the administrator, the presence of criminals or suspects and, where possible, to arrest them. To oppose the practice of witchcraft. To see that every native in his area is accounted for, and carries the caderneta, or identity book, required of him. To encourage his people to learn Portuguese, to dress decently and cultivate their land as advised by the administration.

Among the many things they are not allowed to do are the following: to collect taxes for their own benefit; to levy fines; to act in the name of the administration without express authority; to leave the area of their circumscription without permission from the administration; or to refuse to carry out the orders of their Portuguese superiors. In short, their job is to obey the Portuguese administrative authorities, promptly and faith fully and see that the Natives under their jurisdiction also obey them. It is clear from this that the administration attaches much importance to the role of the native leaders in maintaining order and tranquillity in their areas. Frequently their work to this end is allowed to go far beyond the legal limits. Thus, officially there are no native courts, and officially the Portuguese administration takes no cognizance of customary law in dealing with offenders. However, in cases concerning Africans only, the shrewd chefe do posto (and to carry out the kinds of duties listed above the chefe has to be shrewd!) will almost always consult with the local regedor and his councilors before handing down judgment. Sometimes he does not even consult them, preferring to let them settle the issue in their own customary way. According to Cecil Scott, one of the contributors to this study, there is no doubt that a great number of disputes involving criminal offenses never come before the chefe do posto but are settled in

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accordance with traditional usage by the unofficial courts of the village elders and tribal chiefs, as they have operated for generations past.
Other Territories Liberia. During the first hundred years or so of its existence as an in dependent republic, Liberia was too much concerned about surviving to worry greatly about governing. For all practical purposes, the authority of the Americo-Liberians was confined to a narrow coastal strip. Such official relationships as these people had with the natives (as they called them) were, for the most part, nominal in amount, colonial in kind, and racist in mood. If they were productive of anything, it was a strong preference in each of the two groups for its own way of life. Accordingly, the government of the great bulk of the territory remained in the hands of the tribal peoples. Although some things have changed during the past generation, the indigenous system of government has not been greatly changed. True, the Monrovia government has divided the whole territory into districts, each of which is administered by a presidentially appointed commissioner. But it has had some difficulty in finding Americo-Liberians who were at once competent to do the work of a district officer and willing to live in the roadless bush out of reach of the gaiety and distractions of the capital and to do it for the benefit of those they ruled rather than for their own. It has also had some difficulty in commending the idea of government by edict, and by aliens, to people unaccustomed to either. The central government's difficulties have been further compounded by the ethnic and linguistic complexity of almost all of the districts. Fre quently it has found that intertribal suspicion in a district is equaled only by the suspicion with which the tribal groups in that district view the activities of its commissioner and his staff. The insistence of the AmericoLiberians on using English as their lingua franca in dealing with the indigenous people has done nothing to increase their favor, or further their ends. It is largely for such reasons that, over most of the Liberian countryside, the pattern of government remains pretty close to the traditional design closer to it perhaps than in any other colonial area of tropical Africa. Government in the tribal areas the Hinterland Jurisdiction is by clan and paramount chiefs under the direct supervision of district and pro vincial commissioners. In theory these chiefs owe their authority to the Monrovia government; but the real basis of it is usually their status, derived either by inheritance or by election, in the tribal group. Any de parture from the established tribal customs in the selection of chiefs is apt to cause trouble, as the government has discovered in various instances. The responsibilities of the chiefs, their courts and their councils are considerable. In addition to covering the traditional field of administra

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tion of customary law (or such parts of it as are acceptable to the Monrovia government), they include the provision of hospitality and entertainment for visiting representatives of the Monrovia government, the keeping in repair of roads and trails, the modernizing of huts and villages, the repair and maintenance of markets, the collection of taxes, and the requisitioning of labor for government work.
Ethiopia. In no tropical African country is local government of so little consequence as in Ethiopia. Far-reaching as many of the Restoration period changes in the government have been, they have scarcely reached or if reached, scarcely affected the lot of the ordinary countryman. Some would argue that they have scarcely affected the lot of the ordinary town dweller, even in a place like Addis Ababa. For the long tradition of centralized government shows few signs of being ended. What an edu cated Ethiopian recently said to Leo Silberman is also, it would appear, the sentiment of the illiterate Coptic priest in Debra Damo and the lettered policeman in Diredawa: In the past there has been one man who ruled this country, and that was His Majesty. For my own part I should be appalled if in the future things were arranged differently. 43 It is not difficult to see why such an arrangement should appeal to an Ethiopian. As practiced down the centuries, it has given him certain rights which, while they may seldom have had great utility, have been the source of great satisfaction, as, for instance, the right to carry a grievance directly to the Emperor. It has also relieved him of the often painful and always irksome duty of making up his own mind on important matters about which he knew nothing anyway, and of personal responsibility for the evils of his time. Sometimes it has saved him from being the plaything of greater tyrannies those that arise when there is no central authority. Nor is it difficult to see why such an arrangement should appeal to the Emperor. It enables him to know what is going on everywhere and what his people are thinking. It befits his status as King of Kings, Con quering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, The Instrument and Power of the Trinity (the meaning of Haile Selassie), and the associated belief, en shrined in the 1955 constitution, that the person of the Emperor is sacred, His dignity is inviolable and His powers indisputable. Furthermore, in a land as inhospitable as Ethiopia to road builders and police patrols and as friendly to insurrectionists and guerrillas, the investment of supreme power in one person decreases the risk of anarchy. In so far as the legislation of the post-Italian, or Restoration, period has made any difference to the ordinary citizen, it has probably meant less rather than more autonomy for him. As Margery Perham observes in her study of The Government of Ethiopia, the Imperial Decree of 1942 con tains, with one solitary exception, no trace of the principles generally described as indirect rule, or even of any local self-government . . . [It]
43 Ethiopia Elects, The Listener, November 14, 1957, p. 774.

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appears to aim at immediate bureaucratic concentration and at a complete uniformity which ignores the wide differences between the provinces and the peoples/ 44 It is true that the decree dealt only with the higher levels of administration and that silence concerning the traditional shum (kindred group) and the chiqa-shum (locally elected or selected chief or council) implied continuing consent to their activities. At the same time, as Miss Perham goes on to say, it is difficult to see how the decree could ever become effective of its purpose without sapping initiative and responsi bility from local institutions and leaders, for its whole tenor is rapid centralization and uniformity. Much has happened in Ethiopia since Miss Perham made her study, but very little that would require her to revise this judgment. Only in the municipal sector does the 1942 decree and subsequent legis lation recognize the uses of decentralization, and even here the central governments grip on the reins of power remains firm and nobody can afford to be deaf to the crack of its whip. All the officers on a municipal council are under the jurisdiction of the provincial Governor-General, who is appointed by the Emperor. The mayor (kantiba) of the council is chosen, not by his peers, but by the central government, and most of his peers are nominated representatives of the ministries of the central gov ernment. All regulations drawn up by a council are subject to the ap proval of the Ministry of the Interior. The powers of a council normally extend only to registration (property, births, deaths, etc.), maintenance of roads, water supply and lighting, traffic regulations, licensing, and such other duties mostly minor as do not come under the aegis of the central ministries. THE AFRICANIZING PROCESS As Lord Hailey has reminded us, So far as the mass of the population is concerned, the reality of constitutional advance towards self-rule is judged not so much by an alteration in the com position of a Legislature as by evidence that the indigenous people are being admitted to posts of executive responsibility. That observation is equally rele vant to those types of Colonial Government in which the objective of policy does not envisage self-rule but the political integration of the dependency with the metropolitan Power. The dispatch of representatives to a metropolitan Parlia ment may appeal strongly to the elite or to the limited class of the evolues in a Colony, but for the great mass of people the reality of the objective only begins to be appreciated when they see a substantial representation of their own community in posts of administrative or executive responsibility.45 It is a readily understandable point of view. The world over, most people would rather do their own machine-minding, no matter how poorly,
44 The Government of Ethiopia, Faber & Faber, London, 1948, pp. 349-50. 45 Op. cit.y p. 359.

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than have others do it for them, no matter how efficiently. If the machine breaks down, they can always blame its manufacturer for poor workman ship or design; if it continues to function, they can always use the fact as proof of their ability to mind something more complicated. It is also a point of view with which most of the colonial powers have some sym pathy. On the whole, it is the British who have shown the greatest willingness, and have done most, to further the Africanizing process.
Commonwealth Territories

Although the Colonial Office had begun to give thought to the Afri canizing process as far back as the 1920s, little was actually done about it until the end of World War II. Since then the policy of the Colonial Office has been, to quote from L. Gray Cowans paper prepared for this study,
to train enough Africans to fill the top posts of responsibility in the government service in order that when the areas concerned become fully independent they will need to rely as litde as possible on expatriates (whether British or any other nationality) to carry on the functions of government. Self-government in the British view means not only legislative control by the Africans but depend ence, in so far as possible, upon indigenous personnel for the executive arm of government.

To this end, numerous schemes were put into operation, most of them in British West Africa, where the need was considered to be most urgent. These included in-service training and overseas scholarships for almost every branch of the civil service. These schemes have met with varying degrees of success. For general administrative posts they have, on the whole, done the job they were intended to do; for the services requiring a highly technical knowledge, particularly engineering, they have been less than adequate. By way of extenuation, it needs to be remembered that in 1946 hardly anyone, in or out of the Colonial Office, foresaw the rapid constitutional changes which have necessitated, especially in the new regional structure in Nigeria, a proliferation of administrative posts far beyond the normal needs of a single central government. For that matter, few people foresaw the equally rapid expansion of colonial economies, and the parallel demand for technologically trained help. To cope with these expanded needs in territories like the Gold Coast and Nigeria, the British had, for a while, to make so much use of expatriate skills that many Africans were heard to complain that it took an inordinate number of Europeans to Africanize a country! The number of expatriates in the civil service of the Gold Coast continued to rise until shortly before the time of independence, as Table 59 shows. To this day, it has continued to rise in some other British territories. However, most of the responsible African leaders have realized all along

T H E M A C H I N E R Y OF G OV E R N ME NT
Table 59

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AFRICANIZATION OF THE GOLD COAST SENIOR CIVIL SERVICE, 1949-1957

YEAR (AS OF APRIL l ) EXPATRIATES AFRICANS

1949 1950 1951 1952 1953 1954 1955 1956 1957

1,068 1,043 1,200 1,322 1,329 1,395 1,319 1,227 1,135

171 268 351 520 743 936 1,166 1,364 1,581

Sources: A Statement on the Programme of the Africanisation of the Public Serv ice, Government Printing Department, Accra, 1954; Statistics of Africanisation, April 1952-June 1959, Establishment Secretarys Office, Accra, 1959.

the impossibility of doing without expatriate help, if their country is not to backslide into chaos when the administering authority goes. Only rarely, says Cowan, does one get the impression in official circles that Africanization is being pursued at the expense of high standards of efficiency within the civil service. But, as he goes on to say, no official circles can long remain closed to public opinion; if they were to do so, they would soon find themselves unofficial and outcircled. And public opinion, among those Africans who think about such things, is generally on the side of Africanization, even if it means loss of efficiency. That there has been a falling off of the standards as a result of too hasty Africanization is widely conceded. That this is the lesser of two evils the greater being mounting opposition by the African to the con tinued domination of government services by Europeans is likewise widely conceded. Once the decision to grant self-government is made, it is difficult to see what feasible alternative there is to immediate Africaniza tion, even though the personnel available is inadequate in number, train ing and experience. At the same time, as Cowan points out, sooner or later the cost to the territory in reduced efficiency of government and in the resulting heavier burden on the taxpayer from too hasty Africanization becomes a problem which must be met, either by the administering authority or the independent government. In the Gold Coast and the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan the pressure for Afri canization came so soon and developed so strongly from the postwar Labor government in Britain almost as much as from the politicians in the territories themselves that the administering authorities had scarcely begun to think about the cost factor before their administering days were done. The problem in these territories is therefore one that must be met

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by the independent power. On the face of it, the problem should be the easier to solve because of this. What the Sudanese and Gold Coast leaders objected to most strongly was not the presence of Europeans in the senior grades of the civil service but the fact that they had no control over them. Now that they are masters in their own house, they are willing enough to have Europeans do jobs for which they themselves lack the skill, the time or the addiction. Though they may say they see no reason for upholding the Europeans standards of efficiency, the experiences of their first few years of office have made them well aware of the uses of efficiency both in making friends at home and in influencing people abroad. In June 1959 there were still more than 900 expatriates in the Ghanaian civil service (or only about 150 fewer than there were in the Gold Coast civil service in 1949); in addition, several hundred expatriates were employed as engineers, architects and technologists of all kinds in development posts. In Nigeria, which is being groomed for independence in 1960, the Africanization (there called Nigerianization) of the civil service is like wise well along. In June 1958 there were 31,777 Nigerian and other west African officers on the payroll of the federal government, and only 1,514 European (overseas) officers. The same is true of Uganda. Elsewhere in British Africa progress has been much slower. This, we may take it, is partly because the demand for Africanization has been weaker, and partly because the British seafarers that they are believe a convoy can safely proceed only at the speed of the slowest unit, and in such territories as British Somaliland, Bechuanaland, Tanganyika, the Rhodesias and Nyasaland some of the units are barely under way. But not many African leaders are greatly interested in safety; they wouldnt be leaders for long if they were. The other administering powers have tended to take the view that the cost of too hasty Africanization in inefficiency, inequity and increased taxation is one that no colonial territory should be called on to bear; that their job, first and last, is to run a tight ship. To them, this has meant manning it with the best-qualified people, irrespective of race.
T h e F ren ch Community

Over the years the prevailing French viewpoint has been that the Afri can should not be given heavy administrative and executive responsibili ties until, in Cowan's words, he has absorbed enough French culture to be capable of administering a territory which is essentially an integral part of the mother country. Before any job was Africanized, the applicant had to demonstrate his ability to operate an administrative department or post in the same way, according to the same principles and with the same degree of competence, as a French officer . . . To assume an im

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portant position the African had to know not just the principles of taxation, public accounting or regulation of the public service, but French methods and forms in all these fields. Most of the Africanizing done by the French has been in the lower civil service grades; and here the process was well-nigh complete by the end of 1958. In what was then French West Africa, for instance, the cadres locaux (consisting of messengers, typists, clerks, etc.) had been 100 per cent Africanized and the cadres superieurs (chief clerks, book keepers, secretaries, etc.) three-quarters Africanized for several years. On the other hand, the cadres generaux (administrative assistants, heads of departments, professional and technical personnel, etc.) were no more than one-quarter Africanized; and only a handful of Africans in these cadres occupied posts of real responsibility where policy decisions were made. However, part of the reason for this, as Cowan points out, is that in the postwar period Africans capable of taking responsibility frequently found themselves chosen by the electorate to sit as deputies in Paris or Dakar. They were thought to be better fitted as deputies because of their knowledge of the operation of government. But on election they were forced to relinquish their public service appointments. In the other French territories the cadres locaux were likewise fully Africanized by the last years of the Fourth Republic, but the cadres superieurs and cadres generaux continued to rely heavily on European personnel. In French Equatorial Africa, for instance, the corresponding figures for the three main categories, as of about 1955, were 100 per cent for the cadres locaux, approximately 33 per cent for the cadres superieurs? and only 6 per cent for the cadres generaux. What is more, while the number of Africans employed in the civil service of these territories had been increasing steadily for many years, the number of Europeans had also been increasing in some cases more rapidly.
Other Territories

Until recently the Belgian viewpoint on Africanization was rather like that of the French. Africanization was thought of more as an incidental product than as the purposeful goal of colonial development. The Belgians were of the opinion that it was pointless to talk about de veloping a responsible democratic form of government without first de veloping an educated bourgeoisie which had a vested interest in the stability and efficiency of government. In their opinion it was only when the African had learned how to operate the basic economy of the country and to see the value of the rational utilization of its resources that he would be ready to safeguard them against exploitation by a demagogue. Consequently, in the Belgian Congo Africanization was primarily a matter

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of fitting the African to run and maintain machinery, look after office equipment, do bookkeeping and so on. Cowan reports that
in the service of the central administration of the Congo, as of January 1954, there were 5,515 Europeans and 6,009 Africans in permanent posts, . . . the corresponding numbers in 1952 being 6,066 and 4,815 respectively. No in formation is available on the particular positions held by African personnel, but it is safe to assume that none was of a policy-making nature . . . In the terri torial service (which serves the region outside the capital) none of the 1,222 officers were African, but the vast majority of the routine work is done by African clerks. The staffs of the administrative and judicial services of the circonscriptions indigenes are completely Africanized.

After the troubles of late 1958 and early 1959 the Belgian viewpoint changed radically. The governments intention thenceforth was to inte grate the maximum number of Congolese in the executive and legal sys tem at all levels 46 as quickly as possible. As an earnest of this intention, 459 Africans had already been promoted to a higher grade by the end of January 1959. To inquire about Africanization statistics in Portuguese Africa is to waste time, since the problem does not arise officially. The natives of Angola, Mozambique and Portuguese Guinea can be considered capable of controlling their own destiny only when they have become, to all intents and purposes, Europeans, and by that time there will not, from the Portu guese viewpoint, be any question of Africanization. It will merely be a question of which Europeans are in the governing positions. Much the same is true of Spanish Africa. The paternalistic administra tion of the Spanish government is not susceptible of being Africanized, because there is no expectation that at some future date Africans will have to take it over. Spanish officials with whom Cowan spoke pointed out what was obviously true that the natives [in their territories] are in no position to govern themselves and that no effort is being made to prepare them for such an eventuality. They also pointed out that the territories administered by them are so small that they could never hope to stand as an independent nation, and that, for this reason alone, talk about Africanization was irrelevant. There are African clerks in administrative offices and in the police force of Fernando Po, but even these are fre quently Nigerians who have settled permanently in Spanish territory. But it is not only some of the administering powers that have reserva tions about the Africanizing process. Some of the administered groups find the idea no more attractive. This is true not only of most settler groups, European and Asian, but also of those indigenous groups, mostly Moslem, who have been slow to imitate the ways and accept the school ing of their colonizers and who, because of this, now find themselves lagging behind their less conservative neighbors in technical and pro
46 See Belgian Congo Monthly Information Bulletin, June 1959, p. 8.

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fessional skills. In northern Nigeria, to quote again from Cowans report (written in 1955),
almost all the clerks in government offices and in the trading houses are either Ibos or Yorubas; even in the Native Administration establishments in the prov inces, southerners are to be found. The northerners are far from pleased at this kind of Africanization, yet they know they can do nothing about it until their own people are trained to take over the posts. They are fearful that the southerners will remain in control of the civil service and business after com plete independence is achieved. In consequence they are not eager to see the British administrative officer replaced by an African, since the latter represents a greater threat to their tradition than the European ever did. The same picture is to be found in the northern [French] Cameroons, where the government em ployees are chiefly from the area south of Yaounde. In French West Africa the role of the southern Nigerian is played by the ever-present Senegalese. Every where one gets the same reaction dislike and fear of these outsiders, Africans though they may be. The northerners are more anxious for northernization than for Africanization in the sense that the southerners understand the term.

In the Republic of Sudan, as was noted earlier, it is the southerners who most dislike and fear the Africanizing process; to them, this stands for northernization. Important as the issue of Africanization is, it is easy to overemphasize it. Like nationalism with which it has come to be associated in the minds of many of its advocates it is a minority movement. To the great majority of indigenous Africans it means almost nothing, if indeed the word is known to them. What Cowan has written of the ordinary rural Nigerian and Ghanaian is true also of the ordinary rural Sudanese, Angolan, Rhodesian and Congolese African: the thing that concerns him most is whether or not the administrator who collects his taxes is fair and just, not whether he is African or European. In so far as he has a preference, Cowan believes (as do many other well-informed observers) that it is probably for the European. Furthermore, even for the minority, Afri canization is not an all-or-nothing movement. Thus, no African govern ment has so far thought it necessary to Africanize its leprosy services. At the same time it would be foolish to underestimate the momentum of the Africanizing process. As with nationalism, it is growing; and it is certain that the ordinary African, of east, central and west Africa alike, will find more and more of his affairs administered by Africans. Whether he can be made to prefer the African to the European administrator will depend largely on the intellectual qualities and the moral probity of the young men now coming into public office. If they can prove themselves, Cowan contends, they will gain the place of respect which the European officer has occupied. If not, they risk being swept away by the enemies domestic and foreign of political progress. For what, in the last resort, matters most to the government of a country is not the quality of its machinery but the ability of its mechanics to keep the machinery running. And this is as much a matter of integrity as of endurance, of conscience as of carefulness.

CHAPTER

22

The New Elite

THEIR THEIR THEIR THEIR BACKGROUND PROFESSIONAL AMBITIONS EUROPEANIZATION SOCIAL STATUS

T H E I R VI EWS THEIR ARTISTIC INTERESTS

O ne of the more durable customs of colonial life is the courtesy call, the periodic paying of ones respects to the leading members of the com munity. In the old days, the calling circle was quite small and not many Africans were part of it. In bush communities it was composed of the local European representatives of the government; the European planters or farmers, if any; the European or North American missionary, if any; and the local African headman or chief. In the larger centers, it might also have included the more prominent businessmen, European or Asian, and any Africans who had been abroad. Today, in most places, the circle is wider and rather differently com posed. It may or may not include the headman: much will depend on his standing and outlook. It may still include the missionary, but more likely it will include his progeny, the indigenous church leader and school master. It will still include the local representatives of the central govern ment, if they can be found which is not always the case in this do good and be expendable age. It will certainly include those who have been abroad, for, in British and French Africa and territories formerly British and French, they are likely to be occupying positions of responsibility in business and government. Indeed, in many of these territories they will be running the show, including, as has been pointed out, the political asso
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ciations, the trade unions, the cooperatives and other community enter prises, and the newspapers. To become acquainted with the leading Africans in any large center of the more advanced territories is, however, no longer just a matter of courtesy. It is a matter of inescapable necessity. For these are the mediators of the new covenant of equal rights for all civilized men and equal opportunity for all men to be civilized, the high priests of the new order of freedom to go it alone, the apostles of the manifold graces of nationalism. These are the men with the keys of the kingdom, the chosen people: the new elite. To know them may not be to know everything about todays Africa; but not to know them is most assuredly not to know the makers of tomorrows Africa. Who are the new elite? What is their background? Where and how were they trained? What are their professional ambitions? Their views and interests? T H E IR BACKGROUND From almost every point of view the new elite are an extremely mixed group. Some of their number are scions of royal and chiefly families of venerable antiquity; others are people of lowly birth and no wealth. Some have come from bush country only recently opened to commerce, while others have come from bazaars and marts that have had dealings with the outside world for hundreds of years. Some grew up in cattlekeeping country, and some in crop-raising country. Some came from Christian, and some from Moslem and pagan homes. In an inquiry into the background of 90 west Africans (Nigerians and Ghanaians) studying in the United States during the 1954-1955 session, which he has summarized for this study, Alvin Zalinger found that ap proximately 40 per cent of them were country-born, the rest town-born; that nearly 40 per cent of them came from families where neither father nor mother had been to school, and that only three fathers and no mothers had been to college or university; that six of the ninety came from chiefly families, the rest mainly from petty trading, small farming and white-collar families; that about 75 per cent reported themselves as having a Christian father or mother or both; that 45 per cent reported themselves as coming from polygamous households; and that 24 per cent of the fathers and 28 per cent of the mothers reported as being Christian were also reported as being polygamous. This much, at all events, can be said of all the new elite: they are products of the white mans schools, either mission-run or state-run. In most cases they have managed to get both primary and secondary school ing; an increasing number of the younger ones have also been to college or university.

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It is not difficult to see why the schools (more especially the secondary schools) and the colleges should have served as the novitiate of the new elite. In the first place, it is there that the African has become enfranchised intellectually. True, a man does not need to go to school or college to graduate in the culture of his tribe. But this culture does not normally enable him to communicate with either his governors or his neighbors, and without the ability to do this, he cannot communicate where communica tion is most often wanted in the advocacy of political rights, social equality and economic opportunity. For this he must learn the language of his government. Second, it is in the schools, most of which are residential, that he has been able to learn the price of intellectual progress, in self-discipline, perseverance, courage and loyalty transcending family, tribe and even faith. Of course, not all schools, in Africa or elsewhere, are interested in inculcating such virtues, or adept at doing so, but the percentage that is is high much higher, very likely, than in America; for, whatever criticisms may be leveled at mission teachers, lack of discipline, loyalty, perseverance and courage is certainly not among them. Those who visited the Alliance High School, near Nairobi, Kenya, during the Mau Mau emergency are not likely to forget the experience. Although the school grounds were in Mau Mau country and 90 per cent of the students were Kikuyu, no stu dents defected, in spite of repeated threats to them and their parents; no teacher asked for home leave; and no activity, curricular or otherwise, was curtailed. What is more, the performance of the graduating classes during the emergency period was unsurpassed. Third, it is in the secondary schools and colleges that the African has a chance to acquire facility in the techniques of intellectual progress, such as public speaking, the running of magazines, committees and other group activities, the preparing of reports, appeals and petitions, and the raising of funds. Fourth, it is there that he has been exposed to the contagion of other mens thought his European or North American teachers/ his fellow Africans (the Alliance High School has representatives of some 20 tribes; Makerere College at Kampala, Uganda, of at least 80 tribes), and that of the great minds of other times and places. Not many African students may yet be able to talk with authority on social adjustment, group dy namics, the conquest of complexes, the development of personality and leadership potential, but many of them can talk on Aristotelian politics, Christian ethics, Thomas Paines The Rights of Man and dialectical ma terialism. This may not make them the easiest of people to get along with, but it certainly makes them redoubtable opponents of injustice and so most attractive to their less articulate fellows. Fifth, it is in the schools and colleges that the African learns skills that

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can later be converted into cash, and the cash into property, stocks and bonds, business partnerships and so on. Without such skills, the task of making ends meet is, for most Africans, unremitting and well-nigh unsupportable. Where this is so, there is clearly no time for other ends. Yet it is these other ends, whether cultural, political or spiritual, that give the elite their identity. All this is not to say that the man with the best education is necessarily the man most esteemed by the new elite. There are different conceptions and orders of eliteness, and some of them have less to do with a mans educational achievements than with his political or economic ones. In tropical Africa, as elsewhere, the best-educated people do not always make the best politicians and businessmen. They may not even be interested in being politicians and businessmen; if they are, they are unlikely to be adept at demagoguery, self-deception and the daily cut-and-thrust of the forum and the market place. At the same time, the chances of the poorly educated African coming to a position of influence and maintaining it, in any field, are quite small and getting smaller. The kinds of skill and ability most needed by the African called upon to wear the mantle of the departing European are those that come by way of the classroom and seminar, the laboratory and the field station. This nobody realizes better than the African who has already had some schooling. T H EIR PRO FESSIO NAL AMBITIONS What educated Africans hold to be the most necessary skills and abili ties, or those best befitting their newly enfranchised status, is not always easy to say. Much depends upon the amount and the quality of the edu cation they have had, but much also depends on the attitude of their rulers and the range of openings made available to them. And, needless to say, much depends on the Africans in question. Several sample surveys have been made in recent years of the prestige rating of occupations. Of these, the survey made by J. Clyde Mitchell and A. L. Epstein is undoubtedly one of the more significant, partly be cause of the size of the sample (653 students with at least a secondary school education were questioned), and partly because the country in which it was carried out Northern Rhodesia is one where the African is being encouraged to raise his sights, in some fields as high as his ability and aptitude incline him. The students were asked to rate 31 occu pations on a five-category prestige scale. When their ratings were con verted into a simple mean rank (by apportioning a weight to each of the categories), it was found that professional work, in education, religion, welfare and so on, was placed first; that this was followed by white-collar work in hospitals, mines, government and trade unions; this, by skilled manual work (such as carpentiy, bricklaying and motor maintenance) and

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boss-boy work in mines and on construction jobs; and this, finally, by unskilled work, such as gardening, wood cutting, and household and hotel service.
Response to an open-ended question made it quite clear that occupations which were normally those of Europeans, but which some Africans followed, were accorded high prestige and that, in general, those occupations which re quired the highest educational qualifications were ranked the highest. This held true even for a group of students who were training to be artisans.1

Although Mitchell does not claim that the results of this survey provide a basis for generalization, he believes, as do some other students of the African social scene, that to live like the European elite in their midst is the dearest ambition of most educated Africans; that the civilized way of life . . . provides a scale along which the prestige of Africans in urban areas (and to an increasing extent in rural areas) may be measured. At the same time the Mitchell-Epstein survey makes it clear that there are those for whom admission to the ranks of the elite, conferred by a sec ondary schooling, does virtually nothing. They have been exposed to the civilized way of life, but they have not been induced to want any part of it that they could not have had without going to school. Among the 653 there were 47 who gave the highest prestige ranking to the occupation of messenger, 26 who gave it to either domestic or hotel service, and 5 to scavenging. For these, it would seem, the quality of eliteness if any consisted in having been to a secondary school or other institution of higher learning, not in the profit derived from the experience. Anthony Wilmot notes in his report prepared for this study that in some parts of British Africa, indeed, the been-to the man who has been some where is a man above his fellows.2 We could wish that surveys of this kind told more about the motives of the respondents; that we could know, for instance, what precisely it is about the civilized way of life that most attracts the aspiring African. Is it the desire to be somebody, if only a been-to? Is it the chance to trade ignorance for understanding, superstition for reason? Is it the op portunity to acquire money and the things that money can buy? Or even of helping others to be civilized? Doubtless all this, and more, enters into the aspirants reckoning, since here, as in many another matter, he tends to take his cue from his civilized tutors, in whom all these wellsprings of action can be found. But to judge from appearances (which in the circumstances is almost unavoidable), either the tutors do not always
1 J. Clyde Mitchell, The Kalela Dance: Aspects of Social Relationships among Urban Africans in Northern Rhodesia, Rhodes-Livingstone Papers, No. 27, Man chester University Press, Manchester, 1956, p. 14. 2 In the Songea district of Tanganyika J. G. Liebenow found that many young men ranked themselves according to the distance of the places they had been to, in search of work. Thus, those who had been to the Union of South Africa ranked above those who had been only to Southern Rhodesia.

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seem to have taught as well as they knew or else the tutored do not always seem to have practiced what they were taught. Observations such as the following, from Wilmots report, are made too often, and by people too warmly disposed toward the educated African, to be dismissed as of no consequence:
Students freely admit that their main interest is to secure the employment which is at once the most lucrative and the least arduous or uncomfortable . . . Where materialistic considerations are dominant . . . ambitions toward any particular vocation show little rigidity. When the time to seek employment comes, the cash return and other material aspects of the jobs available will often be prime factors regulating the final choice, irrespective of previously ex pressed ambitions. In west Africa there is often some contempt for the illiterate peasant and no marked enthusiasm for rural occupations which would throw the educated man among such people . . . There is little acknowledgment that the illiterate to whom education has been denied may include amongst their number some who are endowed with an intellectual potential at least equal to that of many university students. There is no widespread pity or sympathy for the il literate. In many cases it has been necessary to effect a process of education in manmanagement designed to wean students away from the habit of lording it over college servants. The example of some Europeans, who have tended to be brusque in their handling of African labor, may be partially responsible for this display of snobbery.

It would be wrong to suggest that there is no ambition to serve the community. As everywhere, there are those whose sense of vocation is stronger than the climate of materialistic opinion. In a survey of the occupational preferences of third- and fourth-year secondary students in Stanleyville, Nelly Xydias found 3 that 30 per cent gave as the reason for their preference the desire to be useful to the mother country, or to the tribe, or to God; that only one fourth were primarily concerned about what other people thought of them; that less than one fourth were mainly interested in the monetary yield of the occupation, and only one per cent in considerations of easiness and security. And it is probable, as Wilmot observes, that the desire to serve is frequently stronger than young people, in their student days, are willing to admit; that it merely needs cultivating, as do all the choicest flowers of the spirit. From his long observation of the west African scene, Wilmot is firmly of the opinion that the best soil for the purpose is the faith and philosophy enshrined in the teachings of the New Testament. Unfortunately, these teachings seem to get little more than lip service from the great majority of the intelligentsia. In this, too, the tutored would appear to be merely following the cue of their European tutors, for most of whom these teachings are hard sayings.
3 Social Implications of Industrialization and Urbanization in Africa South of the Sahara (prepared under the auspices of UNESCO by the International African Insti tute, London), UNESCO, Tensions and Technology Series, Paris, 1956, pp. 353fF.

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T H E IR EUROPEANIZATION If there is one thing more than another that identifies the new elite, it is their general acceptance of the things taught them and the examples shown them by the European. Paradoxically, as was seen in the preceding chapter, it has become the custom to speak of the process by which the educated African takes over the customary European roles of adminis trator, teacher, healer, preacher and so on as Africanization. Ethnically the term is apt enough; but from almost any other point of view it could hardly be more inept, since what has qualified the African for these roles is not the color of his skin or his cultural inheritance but his schooling and apprenticeship in the ways of his tutors his Europeanization, in fact. The extent of this Europeanization naturally varies from place to place and with the individual. It is less conspicuous in Moslem territories than in Christian ones. It is less in evidence on the rubber plantation of a Liberian administrator than in his town house; and often less in evidence in the kitchen of his town house than in his living quarters. It is generally less apparent in the man who has lived all his life in his own territory than in the man who has been abroad. But it is always there, even when con cealed from view. Thus, while the Moslem administrator of Kano is likely to keep his wife (or wives) behind doors, pray toward Mecca and be a total abstainer, in the approved Mohammedan manner, he is as likely to read the London Times, speak English with an Oxford accent, and be partial to flashy European or American cars. While the Liberian planta tion may not look very different from the surrounding countryside, the chances are that its owner keeps a well-stocked larder of American canned goods and liquors. And while the boss-boys on the Copperbelt are seldom able to resist their tribal rhythms, they are probably as adept at ballroom dancing. With many of the new elite the Europeanizing process has gone further, covering not only dress, speech, food, drink and recreation, but etiquette, sentiment and intellectual tastes. An African dinner host is likely to be as punctilious in his regard for the comfort of the ladies as any American; and his table is almost as likely to be set in the approved Ladies* Home Journal manner. Africans who have returned to Nigeria or Kenya after living in Europe or North America for extended periods are almost as much given to nostalgia, and genuine affection, for the persons and places they came to know while abroad as any G. I. in foreign parts is for his homeland. There are many Africans in the former French West Africa whose knowledge and esteem of French culture would do credit to the metropolitan Frenchmen domiciled in their midst; some speak of our French culture as though it was. The same is true of some of the more highly educated Africans of British and once-British West Africa. For these Dr. Kofi Busia, a former Leader of the Opposition in Ghanas Legis

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lative Assembly, spoke when he said, at the time of Ghanas independence (March 1957):
We have also benefited from British administration and law, to which we owe our concepts of nationhood, democracy and individual freedom; and Euro pean education introduced to us under British rule has made us heirs of the literature and accumulated wisdom of the ages preserved in books for succeed ing generations. The English language has not only enabled us to communicate with our fellow countrymen of different tongues and tribes, but has also pre pared us for effective membership in the wider community of nations to which we now come as adults and no longer as wards . . .4

But extent is one dimension; depth is another, and it is here that opinion about the Europeanizing process begins to be divided. On the one side there are those who contend that the highly educated African is as much a European as the highly educated American negro is an American; that long-continued exposure to European minds and modes of thought has given him a European mind; and that it could hardly be otherwise since, intelligent man that he is, he is bound to embrace the highest when he sees it. Those who are of this persuasion point to the Kwame Nkrumahs, the Houphouet-Boignys, the Kabakas who are as much at home in New York, Paris and London as in Accra, Abidjan and Kam pala; who write as Europeans do; who have the cultured Europeans sophistication, poise and wit; and who, not infrequently, take a European for a wife. They also point to those unsung Africans who at the end of a long professional training in Europe feel themselves to be more European than African and make Europe their home. On the other side there are those who contend that the mind of the African works differently from that of the European; that no matter how steeped it may be in European ideas and ideologies, it has a hard core that is impervious to all foreign tinctures and retentive of all indigenous traditions and usages; that Europeanization is but a thin overlay. Those who follow this line of argument have no difficulty in supporting it. They point, for instance, to the many Europeanized Africans who have gone back to the bush, there to lose their European habits and religion, and even the skills they had acquired under their European tutors. Accord ing to the former Governor of one territory, this rebushing comes as easily to those educated in Europe as it does to those educated in Africa. The followers of this line of thought can also point to such atavistic mani festations as Mau Mau, the progenitors of which as far as they are known were men of as much education as any of the Africans who op posed them. While Jomo Kenyatta may never have been Mau Maus leader, he was certainly one of its fathers, and one of the most European ized Africans of his generation. For seventeen years he lived in Europe as
4 Within two years or so of expressing these generous sentiments, Dr. Busia became a political refugee. In his judgment, Ghana ceased to adhere to the concepts of . . . democracy and individual freedom almost as soon as it had gained its own freedom.

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a student, at the London School of Economics and Moscow University, and as a writer of articles, pamphlets and a monograph on the Kikuyu 5 which Malinowski described in his introduction to it as a pioneering achievement of outstanding merit. Anybody who had the chance of talk ing to hard-core Mau Mau prisoners knows that it was not only the Kenyattas that were Europeanized. Whatever the truth is regarding the Europeanizing process, it is prob ably less complimentary to the European than to the African. For what matters as much as a mans inherent capabilities in a process of this kind is the social climate in which the process is set. In tropical Africa the social climate has seldom been easy on the evolving African.

T H E IR SOCIAL STATUS Many things go into the making of a climate, whether atmospheric or social: among them environment, energy and the relationship between its physical components. In the making of a social climate, the last of these is almost certainly the most important. In tropical Africa the relationship between the components of almost any given social group is one capable of generating friction. Youth and age, peasant and ruler, progressive and conservative can rub each other the wrong way as readily in Ghana as in Georgia. To these traditional zones of conflict have been added over the years those between black and white, indigenous and expatriate, un schooled and schooled. These, needless to say, have done nothing to simplify the business of acclimatization for the new elite, or, to change the figure, to give them an assured place in the sun. In other words, the new elite are having status troubles. The most conspicuous of these troubles is that arising from the presence of the European, and the less-than-total acceptance of the elite by the European. The educated African has always been extremely sensitive to racial prejudice, and he has not had to go very far to find it. If he was not raised amid it, he has sooner or later been exposed to it. A little exposure to it goes a long way; as a professional man said to Gray Cowan, You have only to be called a damn nigger once! Most educated Africans have had more than a little such exposure. They have had it in the college classroom, the company office, the train, the ship, the shop, the club, the hotel and the church. They have had it in places where it was not sup posed to exist (as in the colonial Gold Coast and Nigeria) as well as in places like Southern Rhodesia, where it has been condoned by custom and the courts. If they have not met it at home, they have met it abroad, in the streets of Philadelphia, the lodginghouses of London and the restaurants of Paris.
5 Facing Mount Kenya, Seeker & Warburg, London, 1938.

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It is true that legalized prejudice is disappearing from the scene, and that legalized discrimination against the elite has been removed from the field of government and private employment in most territories. But what is as irksome to many Africans is the unwillingness, or outright refusal, of their European peers to accept them socially and intellectually. This non-acceptance is expressed in several ways. In one place it is ex pressed by the failure of the European to invite his African government colleagues into his home, or the failure of his wife to pay courtesy calls on the wives of his colleagues. In another place it is expressed by the habitual impatience of a European lecturer with his allegedly idle and incompetent African students. Elsewhere it is expressed in the inability of an African to catch the eye of a hotel waiter or a shop clerk, in the silence that descends on a club meeting when a leading African is put up for member ship, and in the arguments advanced for not promoting an African to a position theretofore held only by Europeans. In some territories, the most grievous expression of this non-acceptance of the educated African is the failure of the Europeans to supply him with the physical facilities necessary for leading an educated life. What, asks Enoch Dumbutshena in a recent article,6 is there for the educated Africans to do in their leisure hours?
The overcrowded African townships offer them nothing that can be regarded as recreationary . . . The type of film shown in African townships does not appeal to them . . . [and no] African can attend a cinema show in [Salisbury]. The laws and traditions of the land prohibit the mixing of Africans and Euro peans at film shows . . . [Nor can he] listen to distinguished men of learning who visit the Federation from time to time, except if they happen to address meetings of the Southern Rhodesia National Affairs Association or those organ ized by inter-racial associations. [And if we] take the environment in which such an African spends [his non-working] life, . . . the prospects of him enjoying the quietness of his home are very remote . . . Since most of the residents do not read and some spend their week-ends drinking, the week-ends are spent in a den of singing and shouting. Quiet, an element necessary to reading, is thus impossible to obtain . . . Because there are no decent libraries in these town ships, it is difficult for a man to find a place where he can read undisturbed.

True, this is not the full story, for, as Dumbutshena points out, the Salisbury City Council has recently built the Africans a recreation hall with a library and reading room, and there is in Salisbury a social and cultural club that endeavors to care for the leisure needs of the African. But, as he implies farther on, it can never be anything but a rather sad story until there are much greater opportunities for the educated African to meet Europeans, Indians and others of his own standing. Such op portunities are not yet in sight, either in Salisbury or in any one of a score of other cities in central and east Africa. In the circumstances, what is remarkable is not that the educated Afri
6 Africans Are Starved of Culture, Central African Examiner (Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia), February 15, 1958.

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can bears so much resentment against his European peers, but so little. Many of the most highly educated Africans bear none at all, and those who do seem able to particularize it. Wilmot believes this to be especially true of west Africans, who, themselves individualists, tend to judge each European on his own merits. In this connection, he tells us that
when an essay was set to a class of students at a west African college of tech nology on the subject of The person I admire most, half of the students wrote on the African prime minister of their country, one quarter on other Africans (none of whom, incidentally, was on the college staff), while the rest wrote on a variety of Europeans, some of whom were their own college lecturers.

At the same time Wilmot suggests that it is quite possible for the student who professes to judge individuals on their merits to depart from this principle when things go wrong: For instance, failure in an examination will readily be blamed on the racial prejudice of the European examiner, and in this and a host of similar ways a suspicion of Europeans is fre quently displayed. Not the least of the educated Africans difficulties, as this attitude hints, is to maintain status with his fellow African, both elite and non-elite. In some instances, indeed, this would appear to be a bigger difficulty than maintaining status with the Europeans, who, after all, are not unaccus tomed to failing examinations, to say nothing of losing jobs. This may explain why most educated Africans will work harder not to fail examina tions and lose jobs than most Europeans. It is perhaps this desire to arrive, and to be thought of as having arrived, that causes many of the elite to conduct themselves in a manner more appropriate to the music hall than to mid-century Main Street. We have already spoken of the hauteur, not to say outright bad manners, which many students affect in their day-to-day dealings with menials, and of the similar frictions in child-parent relationships. No less apparent is the liking of many educated Africans for flamboyance in writing, speech and gesture, dress and daily habits. Editorials in the African press are characteristically heavy with metaphor and latinity. Public speeches fre quently appear to have been penned in purple ink, and are delivered in a style reminiscent of Gladstonian oratory. Taste in clothes not infrequently runs to the bizarre and sometimes to the near-ridiculous; there must surely be more becoming ways of proclaiming ones loyalty to a leader than by wearing cotton cloth so patterned with his image that the wearer must needs sit on it. This liking for flamboyance is shown in other ways. It is shown in the conspicuous consumption of prestige goods, such as bicycles and shoes among those of modest means, and liquor, jewelry, clothes, phonographs, radios and motor cars among those more affluent. It is shown, too, in the cult of the grandiose, of which some of the more striking manifestations have recently come from Ghana: the erection in Accra of a 10-foot statue of Kwame Nkrumah; the conversion, at a cost of more than 100,000, of

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Christiansborg Castle, the former residence of the Governor, into the Prime Ministers official residence; and the pretensions of the government to pan-African leadership. It should not be supposed, however, that the gain in status resulting from this kind of showmanship is necessarily commensurate with the effort put into it. A good showman, it is true, can always find a following, whether on the soccer field, on the floor of the Senate, or in the college classroom; and certainly Africa has its share of those who are impressed by showmanship. But it also has many who are not. In every tribal com munity there are those, such as the more elderly chiefs and headmen the elite of earlier days who have little but contempt for the posturings, as they may hold them to be, of the new elite. Among the Teita, for instance, there is still a strong disposition on the part of the older people to equate shoe wearer and reader, and even Christian with custom breaker and ruiner of the country. What is more, in every group of shoe-wearing and reading Africans there will be those who, whether from delicacy of feeling, innate refine ment or sheer disinclination, want no part of the show. These people seemingly care very little if at all about status theirs or their neighbors, African or European. For them nobilitys true badge is the cause above renown and the high idea humbly lived. These people are not necessarily the best educated or the most affluent. They can be found in a bush schoolroom as readily as in a cabinet office; in a machine shop as on a college faculty; they may be running a clinic, a newspaper or an art school. Whatever they are and do, they are the true elite. T H EIR VIEW S What do these new men believe in? What do they think of the tradi tional cultures of their homelands? The current economic and political developments? What are their ideological commitments and loyalties? Needless to say, it is easier to put these questions than to answer them satisfactorily. Africans are not alone in their reluctance to be quizzed for the benefit of people they do not know, and for undisclosed purposes, or in their ability to answer questions according to the circumstances. Like people everywhere, many Africans answer questions according to the dictates of fashion and not of conscience; their expressed opinions are an intellectual affectation, not the distillation of their own beliefs and experience. Further, as Alvin Zalinger says in his working paper, the reasons for an opinion, the way it has been arrived at, the sacredness or rationality with which it is held may be of far greater significance than the opinion itself. In the endeavor to get at the real thinking of the new men, Zalinger conducted semi-structured, intensive interviews with the 90 students

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whose background and attitudes he was investigating. While he does not claim to have penetrated into the inner keep of their minds, or to be able to extrapolate his findings to other parts of Africa and to other elite cate gories, he does claim that in respect of characteristics which might con ceivably affect opinions and attitudes, his respondents came close to being a representative sample of the Nigerian and Ghanaian students in the United States at the time of the study (1954-1955). Since in every tropical African land it is the student, past or present, who forms the intellectual spearhead of the new elite, it is probable that many of the opinions and attitudes expressed by the ninety have a wider significance than Zalinger, with his scientific caution, is willing to concede.
Traditional Culture

The chief aspects of their culture on which the respondents were invited to express opinions were the institution of chieftaincy, the family (in cluding family obligations, the parental role in marriage, and polygamy), indigenous religion and arts, and their feelings about the older generation. Concerning chieftaincy, Zalinger found that all his respondents were opposed to it in its traditional form. Nearly half the students wanted to abolish it completely. Of these, most were in agreement with the Nigerian who said:
You just cant abolish it all of a sudden . . . The chiefs must be deprived of political power and influence gradually and without antagonizing people who believe in them. They are more than symbols to those who still believe in them.

But there was also considerable support for the rather more positivist viewpoint expressed by another student:
The chiefs have no place in these modern political and administrative devel opments. They are not versed in government and dont understand contem porary problems . . . We should pension them off, but give them no authority.

Even those respondents who belonged to tribal groups in which chief taincy has conferred great power and wealth were generally opposed to continuing the institution. As one Ashanti student put it,
Although I am in line to become a chief, I do not believe there is much place for chiefs in the Gold Coast . . . In my opinion, they should not have any political power, but be kept like art objects as a symbol of our traditions.

This feeling that the institution should be preserved, rather like the British Crown, for its symbolic value, was expressed in one way or another by about 40 per cent of the students. The farthest any respondent was willing to go was to say that
Chieftaincy has worked very well for the masses of the people and for many it still does . . . Obviously, the chiefs cannot cope with the problems of political administration in a city like Accra . . . but in small villages . . . chiefs

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can still serve many administrative functions. You cant replace them all at once without serious consequences . . . Wherever they are capable of han dling affairs . . . they should, at least for a while, be given as much power as they can handle, and as much as would be expected and desired by their people.

Concerning family institutions, by far the great majority of the re spondents took an ambivalent view of the changes that had taken place or were likely to take place in the near future. Says Zalinger:
They display a high degree of effective involvement in the norms and customs of the traditional family, and express considerable approval for the cohesion, mutual aid, respect for elders, and other personal relationships which charac terize the traditional family. At the same time they expect that Western socio economic developments are bound to result in a breakup of the extended family systems, and a development in the direction of the more isolated conjugal-type family of the West.

Many of them would undoubtedly have endorsed the following state ment made by a Nigerian respondent:
I feel sorry to see the old way go. The bond of [family] love has weakened. The family is getting further apart. But I know that we cannot have both this and progress.

There were some, however, who felt no such sorrow. Said one Nigerian student:
If the price of industrialization and Westernization is the breakup of the traditional family, it is a good price to pay . . . We cannot let the family sys tem stand in the way of these developments.

Or, to quote another Nigerian:

Our family obligations place too much of a strain on successful individuals. My father had to cater to so many people that he was not able to do much for himself . . . It isnt the close ties that I object to, but the dependency . . . There are a lot of people in Ibadan who dont work because they know they can go and live with relatives. This is why you cant amass wealth. Let them call me bad names. I will not help such people.

But in this he did not speak for all. No less than 45 per cent of the students believed that the fulfillment of ones family obligations was still the proper thing; only 5 per cent claimed that they would have absolutely nothing to do with such obligations. Weakening of the old family ties is revealed in other ways, too. Thus, of the 68 students with whom the parental role in marriage was discussed, only 9 stated that they would ask and abide by their parents wishes. Nearly half of the 68 maintained that they would ask their parents advice out of respect, while reserving the right not to follow it. Forty per cent said that they would do their own deciding in the matter. Almost as many, it seems, were less worried about what their parents would say than what the person of their choice would say a worry not unknown in American society! And the respondents had a pretty clear idea, it seems, of the kind of person they would like. Virtually all students say that they would

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want to marry a college-educated mate, regardless of tribal affiliation, nationality or color. As for polygamy, only two students fully endorsed the institution, but only one was for outlawing it. All the rest, while opposing it, insisted that polygamy was a matter that should be left to the individual. The main reasons for their opposition to it were not moralistic, but pragmatic . . . [that] polygamy is too expensive, and that under modern conditions it is no longer functional economically. But it was obviously not a matter on which the great majority of them felt deeply. The following point of view, expressed by a Nigerian coming from a polygamous family, is, according to Zalinger, representative:
I think that if people want polygamy, they should have the right to practice it. There is nothing wrong with this system except that today it is probably too expensive and too much trouble. Even though the church thinks it is wrong, I do not oppose it. People should not judge others by their own biases.

One of the most interesting facts to emerge from this part of Zalingers inquiry is the extent to which the respondents views on family affairs had been influenced by their residence in America.
Forty-three per cent of the respondents stated that their American experi ence and, more particularly, their contact with both negro and white families had resulted in changes of attitude . . . Although most of the respondents tend to be critical of the extreme form of family individualism alleged to exist in the United States and the lack of family feeling and of respect for parents and elders, there is much in the American feeling that they both admire and endorse with enthusiasm. [In particular] they admire the relative independence of young people, and husband-wife team work and equality.

The prevailing opinion was summed up by the social work graduate stu dent from Nigeria who said:
I think our changes will be in the American direction. People will be more independent and will have fewer responsibilities to the family . . . If we want all the things of the modern world, the family must change . . . Now that I have been in this country, I can see how close family relationships prevent progress. People cannot be independent and accomplish things for themselves if they are restricted by the family.

Like polygamy and other aspects of the old family system, indigenous or traditional religion was treated by the majority of the respondents as a matter to be left to the forces of erosion. These, they recognized, were slowly removing the superstitious overlay. This was good. What was not so good, in their view, was the possibility that the same forces might also remove the bedrock of wholesome belief and practice. The case for preserving the ancient good was put by one student as follows:
Our religion and juju have been referred to as superstition, but there are many aspects of our religion which could be retained along with Christianity. In fact, today many people believe in both types of religion. It should be left to the people to decide which parts of each they want to keep.

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By another it was put thus:

I don't believe in all the ordeals, tortures and cutting [of juju], but many of the medicines of our native doctors are okay. I know of many cases where the Western doctor failed and our own doctors with native herbs succeeded. [The Western doctors] could do much good if they would conduct research with our herbs.

Only one in four of the respondents held that the old beliefs should be destroyed at once and, if need be, by government action. As to how such beliefs might be destroyed at once, none did say. There was considerable divergence of opinion regarding the preserva tion of the old artistic values. Only 16 per cent of the respondents were interested in preserving much of the traditional ceremonial; and only 27 per cent had very much use for native dress, even as occasional wear. However, 72 per cent favored the retention of indigenous music, dance and plastic art forms, but here, also, there was a strong disposition to believe that they could only be retained by being changed. A graduate art student put the case for change as follows:
What I want to preserve are the basic themes in these art forms, but I believe strongly that they should be modernized. Art is always changing and is inter national.

Another student pointed out that

Music is not just Mexican, American or African music. When the ear is trained, all music is appreciated by everybody. If we produce music in Nigeria it will be modern. It will be the same with our art. [Our arts] should be studied for the meanings they have and interpreted to the world . . . Of course, there are some things such as our songs which will have an African flavor. But our objective should be to modernize them, not to keep them as they are.

On the subject of relationships between the generations, four out of every five respondents admitted that things were difficult, especially in the home circle. But most of them were convinced that they need not be as difficult as they were, since it is the work of an intelligent man to be able to adjust to both groups. Many felt that their education was only accidental and that a lot of people would be as smart if they had the education; accordingly, they maintained that we must be patient. But, as Zalinger remarks, it does not follow that back at home the respondents would be able to maintain this level of compassion and understanding.
Political Developm ent

The topics covered by Zalinger under the heading of political develop ment included self-government, forms of government, parties and their leaders, and the degree of the respondents interest in political affairs. Naturally enough, all the respondents were happy at the promise of self-government. However, they were not all sure that the announced time of its arrival would, or could, be kept. Four out of five conceded the

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possibility of a postponement. Of these, 95 per cent agreed that, if there was a postponement, it would be the result, not of British foot-dragging, but of internal dissension. The things most likely to produce dissension, it was agreed, were tribalism, regionalism, and the self-interest and petty jealousies of their political leaders.
Slightly more than 90 per cent of the respondents considered that the current tribal or regional differences were the Number One obstacle to immediate selfgovernment; 22 per cent tended to minimize these differences, maintaining that tribalism had been grossly exaggerated; 48 per cent insisted that tribalism is a serious problem only among the uneducated; while 30 per cent maintained that, in many cases, it is still a serious problem among educated people as well. Virtually all Ghanaian students pointed out that it was most serious in Ashanti and in the Northern Region, with the Nigerian students maintaining the same for their Northern Region. . . . Nearly all of the students expressed their own disapproval of ethnocentrism and most of them appeared to consider the fight against tribal and regional thinking to be extremely important . . . [However,] two out of every three maintained that current political tensions and attempts to unify groups under the banners of political parties have intensified some of the older tribal feelings and self-centeredness . . . Although most students attributed some degree of responsibility for tribalism to British rule and the creation of regions, only 2 per cent claimed that current tribal difficulties were primarily the fault of the British; and only 7 per cent maintained that the United Kingdom was currently exploiting these differences. On the other hand, 67 per cent maintained that home-country politicians and traditional rulers were primarily responsible for exploiting and intensifying tribal tensions.

A Ghanaian student phrased this majority opinion thus:

Ethnic differences are still very important for the majority of people. It is only among the intelligentsia that any sort of national consciousness has devel oped . . . It is not very realistic to blame the British for these tribal feelings. They have always existed . . . If one wants to blame somebody, it would be more honest and accurate to blame the African . . . Of course, the British have had their hand in the pot, helping to stir.

Opinion concerning the reason for granting self-government likewise reflected a desire to think well of ones rulers. Nine per cent of the respondents believed that the British were simply interested in doing the right thing and living up to official declarations. Thirty-nine per cent believed that the motives of the British were compounded of equal parts of good faith and enlightened self-interest. However, all but two stu dents saw it as being equally a matter of self-interest economic, political and military to stay within the Commonwealth after independence had been won. At the same time there were matters on which many students found it difficult to give more than a passing mark, if that, to their tutors. As one Nigerian put it,
I do not think that the willingness to grant self-government indicates a genuine change of heart on the part of the British. Rather, they see the direc

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tion in which history is moving and are adjusting to it . . . Of course, it would be unfair to say that the United Kingdom has done nothing for Nigeria. But whatever they have done has been much too slow and many of the good things were not really intended. They were mainly interested in exploiting the country and making a profit. Yet we cannot say they were there only to tap the well.

With self-government assured, how did the respondents view the prob lem of developing a government system at once viable and stable? Opinion concerning the respective merits of unitary and federal forms of government was divided. Forty-four per cent were unalterably op posed to federalism in any form. Another 39 per cent held no brief for federalism but thought it would probably serve as a temporary com promise. Only 10 per cent actually favored federalism.
The majority of those who were opposed to any type of regional federalism failed to specify what they would prefer in the way of a unitary system. How ever, 25 per cent stated that they would prefer the division of their countries into a number of smaller states with very little autonomy. The major reason for this was that such an arrangement would break the hold of the major tribal groups in the present regional structure . . . All those specifying a unitary system based on many states were Nigerian.

The division of student opinion by territory was as follows (per cent):

Ghanaian Students Nigerian Students Total

For federal form For unitary form For federal form as temporary comprc No opinion

14 73 e 9 4

9 35 49 7

10 44 39 6

Opinion concerning the respective merits of the various political parties and leaders was also divided, but on the whole unenthusiastic. Whereas 14 per cent of the Ghanaians and 6 per cent of the Nigerians were very satisfied with the current (1954-1955) political situation at home, 40 per cent of the Ghanaians and 19 per cent of the Nigerians were ex tremely dissatisfied and critical of the situation, the rest being only moderately pleased with the way things were going. All told, 92 per cent of the respondents were somewhat less than highly satisfied with the political parties and leaders in their home countries. Most of them had misgivings about the adequacy of the party programs and of their leaders. Thus, none of the Ghanaian respondents who claimed allegiance as most of them did to the Convention Peoples Party was completely uncritical of either the party or Kwame Nkrumah. Almost all of those who were not members of the party expressed doubt about the competence of the current government leaders and their ability to build a truly demo cratic system. Some doubted even their willingness to build such a system. The degree of the students dissatisfaction with home-country politics appeared to be closely related to the length of their sojourn in the United

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States. Whereas only 10 per cent of those who had been in the United States less than four years were highly critical of the situation at home, 43 per cent of those who had been in the United States more than four years were reported as being highly critical. Of course, not all students, African or otherwise, are equally interested in politics. In Zalingers group not more than half were found to be highly interested, and of the rest little more than half were even mod erately interested. The reasons for the rather surprising lukewarmness of so many (notably Nigerian) students were not always articulated, but in several cases they appear to have been related to the subjects they were studying. By no means all African students who come to this country major in political science; many are far more interested in economics, and in finding their future in the field of business, industry or technology. Economic Development While none of the respondents held self-government to be an automatic solution to the economic problems with which their countries were faced, none saw any reason why these problems should be aggravated by selfgovernment. They argued that partnership in the Commonwealth would mean greater advantages for both west Africa and the United Kingdom, and that the tempo of change and development would increase under selfgovernment. But, except for a few advanced social science students, most of the respondents had only a vague idea of what these advantages were likely to be, and how they could be secured.
At the same time, all students recognized the need for as rapid an industriali zation program as was feasible. All recognized the need for modern agricultural methods and techniques. Although the great majority of students were for large industrial developments like the Volta River project, they were much more concerned about medium-sized industries. The majority also recognized the need for greatly accelerated training programs to provide necessary tech nical and administrative specialists.

The question of how developments of this kind could be brought about was one to which many students had obviously given a great deal of thought, and for which many of them had a ready answer. Most of the capital for such undertakings, it was generally accepted, would have to come from abroad. The use of foreign capital admittedly involved risks, such as the control of business by expatriate firms and the overseas flight of profits, but more than four out of five believed that their government should take the risks. Most of the rest seemed to feel, in the words of one Ghanaian student, that
We should avoid trying to get too much help from outsiders . . . When someone has interests in a country, he inevitably gets control of it . . . My per sonal belief is that foreign capital should not be invited.

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If not from abroad, where then should the capital come from? Probably the clearest answers to this question were those given by the Nigerian student who believed that after self-government much heavier taxation should be imposed on the big trading companies in order to keep the profits in the country and by the Ghanaian student who much preferred to see some sort of portfolio investment of funds raised by bond sales. It was also recognized that such developments would call for a good deal of cooperation; that nothing was to be gained by going it alone; that there would have to be more cooperative relationships, not only be tween companies and governments, but between one government depart ment and another, and between one company and another. It was realized that there would long continue to be a need for such foreign skills as business management and planning, banking, investment and insurance, and that without the close cooperation of expatriate and national in these fields, there could be no economic development worthy of the name. Not least, it was recognized that development of almost any kind would take time. As one student put it,
To be frank, the Gold Coast hasn't enough capital to develop rapidly, but we could go gradually without too much outside help. This might mean slower progress, but I think, in the long run, it would be the better policy.

Ideological Issues In the realm of ideas, most of Zalingers respondents showed themselves to be close kin to the newly enfranchised of all lands. They had more questions than answers; such answers as they did have were not always very convincing, either to others or to themselves. Take the matter of religious belief, for instance. While three in every four respondents claimed affiliation with one of the Christian denomina tions, one in two appeared to regard this affiliation as merely nominal. One in every five called himself either a free-thinker or an agnostic. Or take the matter of political belief. While only a little over half of the respondents maintained that they were socialists, four out of five wanted government ownership of large industries and public services, with private ownership of smaller businesses and farms. Yet only one in four explicitly favored a mixture of socialism and free enterprise. Not infrequently, respondents who started from identical premises finished with diametrically opposed conclusions. As a case in point, consider the following two statements by Nigerian students:
Actually [the following of a modified socialism] is not a matter of choice. We don't have that kind of opportunity in Nigeria which is available to richer nations. Nigeria is a frontier nation and we have to start from scratch. There are no large holdings and no really wealthy businessmen. Therefore, almost all types of economic activity will have to be sponsored by government loans and a welfare state. Socialized medicine is a necessity as are other social security measures.

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I am opposed to socialism in any form. It doesnt work out, and our country is much too poor for this kind of system. The best system for Nigeria would be free enterprise, providing there are certain restrictions and a good guard against malpractices and fraudulent competition.

But even among those who think of themselves as avowed socialists or free-enterprisers, there is little familiarity with the basic principles of their creed, or commitment to it. Zalinger points out that
Their thinking is governed much more by what they consider to be the prac tical needs of their home countries than by any set of abstract principles of political theory, socialist or otherwise. Although some 73 per cent of the re spondents took the British Labor Party as a model for their political ideas, the content of this model is not the philosophy of the party, but the specific welfare state policies associated with its period of office.

The one creed on which almost all the respondents spoke in unison and with conviction was communism. Of the approximately four out of five students who discussed it, none appeared to be even moderately attracted to either the communist ideology or the Soviet Union.7 None of them believed that it held the answer to their home-country problems, or that it would make a strong appeal to the people of their home country. Their people, so three out of every four respondents contended, wanted to de velop in their own way and were not interested in copying other peoples systems, or in changing one set of masters for another, as they certainly would if they went communist. Many of the respondents also contended that, being a totalitarian and anti-democratic society, the Soviet Union was not adapted to their peoples traditional values or their present politi cal orientation toward the Western democracies. At the same time many thought that communism might have some appeal in those African terri tories in which there were
acute racial tensions, little hope for self-government, widespread hunger, severe economic exploitation, and a class of frustrated and discontented intellectuals. With respect to such areas, the respondents thought that the appeal of com munism would lie in Russias opposition to Western colonialism, its alleged idealism, whether true or not, and its symbol as a land of revolution and wide spread economic reform.

Opposed to communism though they were, they were generally ready to defend the right of a man to be a Communist, and to be given legal recognition of the fact, whether in the United States or in west Africa. Thus, 64 of the 66 respondents discussing the issue held that the Peoples Republic of China should be admitted to the United Nations, largely, it would seem, because China was a non-white, underdeveloped and longexploited country. And 70 per cent of those questioned maintained the right of Communists to form parties in their home countries and to enjoy complete freedom of activity. To deny them this right was, in their
7 Six per cent of the students maintained that they had never heard of communism before coming to the United States.

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view, as inconsistent with democratic principles as McCarthyism an ideology that, almost to a man, they found distasteful. The majority view on communism was put by one student as follows:
I dont think communism will have much effect in Africa. I never believed in the doctrine that communism appeals to illiterates. The average Chinese, even the average Russian, is not a Communist . . . Eliminate the causes of dis content in a country, and you wont have to worry about communist influences . . . Africa is not prone to violence. If there is violence, it is usually because people have been pushed too far. People at home have no preoccupation with communism. They dont know about it and they dont care. Our affiliation with Britain has made us conservative in our outlook. W e tend to be like the British, realists and moderates. If any Communists exist at home, I would favor the British attitude of free speech and the right to organize as a party. I do not favor the American way, McCarthyism and all; I think it is anti-democratic.

Nor did many of the students favor the United Nations way of dealing with ideological issues. There was strong support for the principles of the United Nations as enshrined in its charter, but it was held that these principles got no more than lip service from most of its member countries. Chickens cannot win a case in a court of oxen was the proverbial way in which one student expressed his feelings in the matter. Another put it as follows:
The U. N. in general is not a United Nations. It is a compromise between struggling powers and their allies. It functions not on principles, but on power politics and self-interests. As long as it is dominated by the big powers, there will be a division of the world into two worlds. What is needed is more autonomy and more power for the smaller countries.

Of all their disillusionments none was greater than the failure of the United Nations to deal with colonialism and the failure of the United States to give the U. N. a lead in such matters. A Nigerian student ex pressed what was virtually a unanimous opinion when he said:
American foreign policy has been a great disappointment to me. How can the government behave the way it does? It votes with the big powers, and at the same time poses as the champion of freedom and the worlds democratic leader.

Yet the disillusionment had produced little bitterness or hostility. Even the most critical respondents thought of themselves, not as uncompro mising foes, but as disappointed friends. And there had been no defec tions to the communist camp. Two other subjects on which many members of the new elite are no less forthcoming are Africanization and ethical conduct. Africanization It goes without saying that, as a class, educated Africans assume that they have the capacity to take over their own affairs. Are they not intelli

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gent men? Have they not been trained according to the highest traditions of their rulers, often in the very same schools and colleges? Do they not know the people of their lands far better than their rulers? It also goes without saying that many of them have demonstrated that they have the capacity. In almost every territory there are those from filing clerks to lawyers and politicians who can turn in as satisfactory a performance as their European colleagues. According to Wilmot, If the student bodies of west African universities and technical colleges were asked the direct question: Are the majority of Africans in higher posts justifying their appointments? the answer would be a resounding affirmative. In Wilmots view it would be a well-earned judgment, too. In these days, however, a good many educated Africans who applaud the principle of Africanization are increasingly disturbed about the prac tice of it. Some of them are disturbed about its pace, some about the kind being practiced, some about the consequences of it. There are those, of course, for whom the pace cannot be too rapid. In their opinion, the more rapid the pace, the sooner the goal of dominion will be reached, and the greater the power and the glory redounding to them. But there are those who see rapid Africanization as a horse without a rider. The goal may be dominion, but what, they wonder, is dominion without internal order and outside respect and confidence? In Nigeria this fear of going too fast too soon has been expressed in a number of ways. In recent years more than one small party has been founded on a Go slow policy, and in one federal election a seat was won on the slogan Delay Self-Government, which, to the popular mind, was virtually the same as Delay Africanization. In Wilmots opinion, the sounding of this note of caution in Nigeria is not a reflection on the course of events in Ghana or in any other territory which has moved toward self-government in recent years, but rather a symptom of the mistrust in which Nigerian politicians are held by some Nigerians and of the fear of increasing corruption. The elite have reservations about the ability of some Africans to do jobs formerly held by Europeans. While such reservations rarely imply that it would be better to let Europeans go on doing these jobs, they do frequently imply that the wrong African has been selected. To judge by the rising volume of criticism, the number of wrong Africans is con siderable. Nor, in Wilmots opinion, is it difficult to see why. There are not enough educated Africans in any country to give the selectors much scope for their abilities. The output of the schools and colleges is in sufficient to furnish the kind of competition to which all aspirants for higher-level service appointments in all democratic countries are accus tomed. Many educated Africans, moreover, greatly overvalue paper qualifications to the virtual exclusion oftentimes of qualities of character, personality, judgment and man-management.

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These reservations notwithstanding, the general view among students is that Africanization must be pressed ahead, even if it takes a lot of Euro peans to do the Africanizing. The process, they freely admit, will be painful, as all learning processes are; it will also be attended by inefficiency and inconvenience. Whether, as some fear, it will be attended by de moralization has yet to be seen. Much will depend on the ethical conduct of those caught up in the process. Ethical Conduct To speak of conduct is to speak of values. And to speak of values is to speak not only of conviction and truth but also of convention and tradition. Frequently, in the company of the educated African, it is to speak more of the latter than the former. For years now the West has come selling new wine in new bottles. While the African has taken a fancy to many of the bottles, he has not yet developed a palate for many of the wines. On the whole, the old suit him better, or so he seems to think. Take, for instance, the matter of property. In the context of the ex tended family, in which most of the new elite were raised, goods and chat tels are not regarded as possessively as in most Western societies. They tend to be thought of in much the same way as the family name: as a per quisite of birth or marriage. By extension, the material successes of one member of the family tend to be regarded as the property of all, to be shared according to need or fancy. But since, not infrequently, the expec tations aroused by a success are out of all proportion to the actual magni tude of the success, the winner of it is constrained to look around for ways of increasing its magnitude. According to Wilmot, two of the commonest ways of doing so among students are the use of scholarship money in tended for the purchase of textbooks or other educational needs, and the borrowing of funds from a society in which they hold office. This is understandable, if not very commendable. What is neither un derstandable nor commendable by Western standards is the habit of rationalizing behavior of this kind. At a gathering of African students, Wilmot reports, it was agreed that
the disappearance and misappropriation of society funds and property is more to be regarded as carelessness than dishonesty, though a measure of the latter was admitted. The same students added that the failure to complete a satis factory handover when a secretary or treasurer leaves college was quite as much the fault of the society as of the individual, and perhaps more so. . . . One student, with the obvious approval of others present, went as far as to dismiss the whole subject with the words It doesn't much matter anyway.

However, in view of the constant burden of obligation to the family, what Wilmot finds most surprising is not the existence of attitudes of this kind, but the comparative infrequency with which they are encountered.

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The prevailing sexual attitudes of today's elite can also be related, in part at least, to their traditional culture.
A representative body of African students, when questioned on this subject, stated that the majority of students, if they could be encouraged to be frank (as indeed they can be), would vote in favor of premarital intercourse, and that many practiced it.

In their opinion, such conduct was in keeping with the pre-missionary custom of most of their peoples and, for that matter, the post-missionary custom. While, as Wilmot points out, not all the evidence is on their side, enough of it is to make them look for modern justifications of the custom. These they have found, allegedly, both in biology and in the Bible; with the result that even many professed Christian students regard promiscuity as normal and right, and feel remorse, if at all, when caught rather than when sinning. Those eschewing promiscuity are certain that their number is few. In one university college, a male student declared with finality that only one of the female students was uncorrupted and incorruptible, an opinion which Wilmot was disposed to accept on the ground that Afri cans usually have a remarkably detailed knowledge about each others private affairs. Those who do eschew promiscuity are, almost without exception in Wilmots experience, those for whom Christianity is vital, as distinct from nominal. Such students, he asserts, set an example of selfless service, faithfulness and integrity which few non-Africans can emulate. They may sometimes talk as though comfort and greed ruled their lives, but their actions reveal that better motives insistently assert themselves.

T H E IR A RTISTIC IN TER ESTS In the popular mind, the elite are distinguishable from the non-elite mainly by their interest in the world of art and letters. Among educated Africans this interest derives its inspiration from several sources. One of the most productive of these has its headwaters in Western Europe. As Thomas Hodgkin has recently reminded us:
The African elite has been taught in schools organised on the model of British public schools or French lycees. It has sat for its Senior Cambridge [school-leaving examination] or its Baccalaureat . . . It has been taught to reason in the style of Hume and Ayer, or Descartes and Gilson . . . When it succeeds in winning a measure of self-government, its institutions take the form of a Parliament on the British model (complete with Speaker and mace), or a territorial assembly derived from the French Conseil-General. When this elite wants to write poetry, or do scientific research, or run a business, or make political speeches, or philosophise, it is obliged as a rule to use a European language. Friendship, family relationships, love-making, can be handled in the vernacular, but little else.8 8 The African Renaissance, The Listener, August 15, 1957.

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Other external sources of inspiration, as suggested earlier, are Eastern Europe (including Russia), America, Palestine, Arabia and India. More powerful than any of these, however, is the Africans own artistic tradition. Without doubt one reason for the strength of this inspiration is reaction against the cultural colonization he has undergone at the hands of his rulers. This reaction is especially noticeable in the former French West Africa, where the educated man has been exposed to assimilation in its most uncompromising form. Not surprisingly, therefore, it is among the intellectuals of that region that we meet the most uncom promising opposition to a continuance of the colonizing process. In Commonwealth West Africa the reaction among the intellectuals has been nothing like as strong, possibly because, as Davidson Nicol, a biochemist and writer from Sierra Leone, recently put it, the distressing but stimulat ing convenience of a setting of Afro-European conflict [has been] fortu nately or unfortunately denied them. 9 There is also a more radical reason for the strength of this source of inspiration, namely, the growing conviction of Africas most influential intellectuals that the Africans artistic traditions and abilities are as worthy of respect and emulation as those of any non-African people. True, Africa may not have produced a Shakespeare or a Descartes, a Macaulay or a Dumas (though, if it had, in the bookless, non-individualistic world of preEuropean Africa, would anybody know about it in the mid-twentieth century?). But does that prove anything about the intellectual parity of African and non-African, or the lack of it? According to Leopold-Sedar Senghor, himself a distinguished poet and professor of African languages at the Sorbonne, it proves nothing. For in his view, by Hodgkins account, the Negro-African genius is essentially different from the European, and has produced different sorts of fruits. (Only Europeans, with their itch to act as the worlds schoolmasters, or the worlds examiners, would attempt the absurdity of judging between fruits giving an alpha to Shakespeare and a beta double plus to the Benin bronzes.) African culture is what it is because Africans are what they are rational, but in a different way from Europeans, understanding through insight and sympathy rather than through discursive thought. . . . African culture is the complex of activities, symbols, rhythms, through which African man expresses his understanding of the world and society and sense of unity with them. African art is essentially a collective art, done for everyone with the participation of everyone. It is a practical art: Senghor quotes as an example an episode from Camara Layes novel, The Dark Child, in which the forging of the golden jewel, the recitation of a poem about the jewel, the dance to celebrate the completion of the jewel, are all parts of a single process. It is a committed art; the artist mirrors his people, his times, his history, but he mirrors them from a definite personal point of view. And it is an art which virtually goes on all the time.10
9 In an address at the First International Congress of Negro Writers and Artists, held at the Sorbonne in Paris, September 1956, under the auspices of Presence
Africaine.

10 Hodgkin, loc. cit.

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So, on the one side, stand the traditionalists those who want African scholars and artists to drink deep at their own Pierian springs, where, in Hodgkin's words, they can find as rich a variety of myth and story, poetry and drama, sculpture and decoration, as any man could desire based on a kind of grasp of mans essential nature that Europe has lost. On the other side stand the Westernizers those who wonder whether there is any future to a backward-looking art, or, for that matter, whether it has any relevance to the present. Or, to put it somewhat differently, on the one side there are those who say, We are very old, and all our future achievement depends upon grasping and using this ancient African in heritance; and on the other those who say, We are very young; and while we can admire this ancient culture, we must recognise that, where it survives, it is the reflection of a moribund medieval metaphysic: the ideas which we can use are secular, scientific, western. Naturally, not all see the issue so simply. In the view of many the intellectual wellsprings of Africa have been poisoned beyond recovery by colonization or, as some would have it, by coca-colonization. As these see it, wherever the colonizer has gone he has created a new barbarism islands of bogus traditionalism, occasional human zoos to divert the tourist or interest the anthropologist, among a waste of pseudo-westernised men . . . living in a cultural undergrowth that has grown up among the ruins of the old civilisation. 11 Others say that the African man of two worlds that he is can survive as an autonomous being only if he draws selectively upon both his inherited ideas and attitudes and his acquired Western values. Wherever the truth may lie, this can be said: The art of the contempo rary African intellectual, whether written or acted, whether done in wood, clay, stone or metal, with music or dance, provides an illuminating com mentary on his times, their confusion and tensions, their pride and passions. The works of indigenous writers, though marked by great diversity of style and form and varying greatly in quality of craftsmanship, have in common a capacity to stir the spirit of their African readers. The themes that occupy them are their themes: the mirth of children, the wisdom of the aged; the deeds of the fathers and forefathers of their people; the symbolism of all things, living and dead. They are themes, moreover, that are calculated to lay the ghost of barbarism, which, over the years, had come to worry Africans almost as much as Europeans. In this quick ening of interest in indigenous Africa (as the interest had never died, it cannot truly be called a renaissance, in the fashion of the hour), many writers have played a part. To name but a few of the vanguard: J. M. Sarbah, who published an important work on Fanti customary law around the turn of the century; Apolo Kagwa, who was writing on
11 Ibid.

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the Kabakaship of Buganda about the same time; the Reverend Samuel Johnson, who wrote a history of the Yoruba people of Nigeria (published in 1921); J. B. Danquah, the Ghanaian lawyer who, over the last thirty years or so, has published several monographs on the Akan people of his country; the Abbe Alexis Kagame, who has made a long study of the dynastic poetry of the Ruanda people of Ruanda-Urundi; Keita Fodeba, whose Theatre Africain in the former French West Africa is an eloquent expression of the search for new artistic forms to fit old indigenous themes; Amos Tutuola, the Yoruba writer of fantasies; and Leopold-Sedar Senghor and David Diop, whose poetry at once evokes the past and elucidates the present. Some of the writing does more. It changes the past and thereby challenges the present. Considerable effort is being made nowadays, by Senghor and other writers, to strengthen the rather tenuous cultural link between the Nile valley and sub-Saharan Africa. While the movement gathers little evidence, it yearly gathers momentum. In 1956 at the Sorbonne conference, Senghor went so far as to suggest that the his torical relationship between ancient Egypt and the peoples of Africa might well justify substituting ancient Egyptian for Latin and Greek as a classical language. 12 There has been a somewhat similar effort on the part of a number of west African writers to establish a close cultural link between the medieval Kingdom of Ghana and the country now going by that name. Here, too, the momentum of the movement has proved too much for the evidence. Nor is this all. As with every reawakening of the spirit of a people, there is a growing interest in the use of vernaculars for both literary and scien tific purposes. Recently Cheikh Anta Diop has done translations into Wolof of works by Racine, Marx and Einstein, which have demonstrated, so it is said, the ability of that language to cope with the virtuosity of Western thought. In more than one west African territory the campaign for a national vernacular is being waged with eloquence and zeal. In Ghana there is now considerable support for the adoption of one of the five main vernaculars as the official language of the country.13 In Liberia there are many who feel that Vai, one of the very few languages of tropical Africa to be reduced to writing before the time of the partition, should be used for the same purpose. In his introduction to Senghors La Nouvelle Poesie Negre et Malgache, Jean-Paul Sartre speaks for many of Africas most influential minds when he says:
Like the scholars of the sixteenth century who understood each other only in Latin, the Blacks rediscover themselves only on the terrain full of traps which White men have set for them . . . This syntax and this vocabulary, forged in another time . . . to answer to other needs and to designate other objects, are 12 See ibid. 13 See P. A. Owiredu, Towards a Common Language for Ghana, African Affairs (London), October 1957, pp. 295ff.

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inadequate to provide [the Negro] with the means to speak of himself, of his cares or of his hopes.14

The world of music has begun to come under the influence of the same invigorating winds. Not that it has yet been transformed by them, for over much of Africa music is still, to use Hugh Traceys word, in decay.
Sympathetic magic has played a large part in bringing about the decay of indigenous musical forms wherever contact with foreigners has been most effective. Imitation of the foreigner and all his ways has been considered, not without justification, to be the highroad to an easier and more prosperous life. The consequent spurning of indigenous music and emulation of foreign styles produced results pathetic by any standard.

Among these Tracey numbers American-style jive, crooning of songs that amount to little more than commercialized eroticism, and much of the hymnody of a militant evangelism. At the same time, there is, as Tracey says in his working paper, a clearly discernible tendency among many Bantu musicians to make their music more effective by expressing them selves in forms which more closely approximate to the original patterns. While this tendency is not confined to educated Africans (there are genuine country musicians who are returning to those instruments and styles of song that best express their talents), it is they who have become
sufficiently emancipated from the social pressure of their time to view indigenous music objectively and exercise their critical faculties in a constructive manner without a false sense of shame. Indeed, in the more talented individuals, a mounting enthusiasm for the genuine artistry of African musical styles with proper adherence to the rules of tone and stress has already found expression in new compositions of considerable complexity in which the virtue of continuity with the past has been rediscovered. Musicians of every country have reverted to the folk music of their own people to renew the vigor of musical composition, and Bantu musicians are now showing signs of doing so deliberately and in telligently.

Outstanding exponents of this school who are not afraid to combine the resources of traditional African music with those of the Western world are Ephraim Amu of Ghana, T. K. E. Phillips and Fela Sowande of Nigeria, and Joseph Kiwele of the Belgian Congo. The problem of escaping from what Sartre calls the prison house of alien cultures is, however, not as easily resolved for the composer as it is for the writer. For the associative, and hence evocative, power of a rhythm, an instrument, a tune and a key is much greater, even for most literate people, than that of the spoken word. And most Africans who listen to music or dance to it are not yet literate. When words are married to rhythms, instruments, tunes and keys, the associative power is greatly increased; so much so that in the part-Christianized, part-Westernized, part-Grundyized Africa of today, there are some areas of life in which the use of the vernacular in music is virtually out of bounds.
14 Translation by Thomas Hodgkin (pp. 176-77 of Nationalism in Colonial Africa, Frederick Muller, London, 1956).

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As a case in point, Tracey cites the following story told by Canon E. E. Lury of the Diocese of Zanzibar:
[On one occasion] a very beautiful setting of the T e D eu m based on a native African melody was sung in Kampala Cathedral, Uganda. One of the members of the Universities Missions to Central Africa was present and remarked afterward to the Bishop of Uganda how much he admired it. Shortly thereafter at luncheon a very keen and educated African Christian leaned across and said: Bishop, you must never allow that T e D eu m to be sung again in the Cathedral; it has too many wrong associations for us. There, in a nutshell, is shown the general attitude of Africans to their own music in church. The deplorable consequence is that there is no possibility of building an African music in African churches.

While Tracey believes that the story puts the outlook for African church music in an unwarrantably dim light, he does not for one minute belittle the difficulty which the educated African is having in emancipating him self from a viewpoint dictated by sympathetic magic where associations of ideas entail identity of motive. In the world of fine art similar difficulties, but rather different trends, may be discovered. As was shown at the beginning of this volume, the life of the pre-European African touched mystery at every point. Where there is mystery, there is fear; and where there is fear, there is a search for security. For most Africans the greatest security, or greatest defense against insecurity, lay in giving a local habitation and a name to their fears: in fashioning symbols of the animal, ancestor, deity, or whatever else was the object of their fear. Consequently almost all works of art traditionally had a religious a functional inspiration. Further, almost all of them were done by honored men for the members of their own highly integrated community. As the exorcisers of their communitys fear and the servants of its hope, they were as indispensable to it as it was to them. The community was proud of their skill, and grateful for every newly created expression of it. But all this has changed. Though the artist and his clients may still stand in fear of the unknown, they have been told that their grounds for it are baseless and their security symbols as unavailing as a rabbits foot; that if the artists work is symbolic of anything, it is of the credulity of his clients and their gross ignorance of the laws of nature. At best it has curio value. But curios are the work of craftsmen rather than artists. Gone, then, is the need for the consuming love and patience that formerly went into the work of the sculptors hands. Gone, too, the sense of awe, without which no artist can long withstand the seduction of his own success. Because the traditional art of the African is no longer functional and there is no hope whatever of the old half-religious, half-magical function being restored in a world that has learned to exorcise its fears on Christian altars, and with the help of police forces, prophylactics and sewers, it is pointless to look to the past as many African writers and composers are

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doing for a new artistic synthesis. Where shall it be sought? Certainly not in the mass production of bookends, paper knives, elephantine lampstands, coffee tables and other useful objects to be found on show outside almost every hotel in Africa and at almost every airport. Nor yet in the equally sterile copying and hybridization of Western art forms en couraged by many so-called teachers of art. Where, then? A recent unsigned article in Les Beaux-Arts would seem to point the way:
Today the individual must find within himself the need for artistic creation, and must work out his own means of expression, for he can no longer rely on tradition and collective inspiration. Standing alone before his forests, his animals, his vanishing gods, and the new life of his people in factories, mines and cities, the native artist must seek new roots in his own conscience.15

And many are seeking new roots within themselves. With what success it is perhaps still too early to say; there must be root before fruit, and in Africa both are slow to form. But one thing is certain: the Africans artistic conscience has not died. On the contrary, it is extraordinarily alive to suggestion and fertile in invention. Much of the new art, perhaps, is the work of suggestion and little else, and much has nothing to commend it except its inventions. Even so, there is a not inconsiderable residue that has all the authenticity and power of the older African art, and as much craftsmanship. To find it, we need only go to any one of the art schools, ateliers and museums opened in tropical Africa in the past generation. For whether they are in Achimota (one of the oldest in the region), Brazzaville, Dakar, Elisabethville, Ibadan, Kampala (Makerere) or Leopoldville, they clearly bespeak the resilience of the Africans artistic conscience and his ability to be himself, no matter what intellectual company he is keeping. It is true that in some of the schools, notably the Saint-Luc schools in the Belgian Congo, the student has been obliged to study art systemati cally along European lines, and that, in so doing, his art sometimes has be come more European than African in its provenance. But even this need not make him any less an artist. And further, it is arguable that, if, as many people believe, the future of the Congolese African lies in his adop tion of European culture, he should be given every opportunity of acquir ing it, in art schools and elsewhere. On the other hand, there are those who believe that the African art student should be given a maximum of encouragement and a minimum of direction. Of those who have taken this viewpoint none has been more convinced of the rightness of it than the late Pierre Romain Desfosses, a French amateur painter who, in 1946 at the age of sixty, went to live in Elisabethville. His story is briefly told in the Beaux-Arts article already referred to:
One day, when he was away, his colored chauffeur took his palette and made a crude painting. This gave him the idea to start a studio where any native, 15 The Belgian Congo: From Wilderness to Civilization, special issue of Les BeauxArts, Brussels, 1955, p. 36.

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regardless of his background or economic situation, could come and work as he pleased, free from any preconceived ideas or formal instruction. Desfosses left his pupils entirely alone to think up their own subjects and to execute them as they wished. He picked the boys and girls he thought had promise, and then gave them brushes, paints, and encouragement. The chauffeur, who started the whole thing, became known as Pili-Pili. His paintings of animals are reminiscent of Persian miniatures illustrating fables. Others followed. [Among these was Mwenze Kibwanga. Mwenze] came from the Saint-Luc art school [in Elisa bethville], and he drew like a European child who had been taught in the traditional way. Defosses did not want him; he thought that he had been spoiled for any original creation. But Mwenze begged to be allowed to stay on, and was finally accepted as the workshop's errand boy. One day Desfosses found him doing a painting in delicate strokes of alternate colours [and in a completely personal technique] . . . From then on Desfosses encouraged him, and soon he became one of the school's leading artists.16

Though Desfosses has been dead several years (he died in 1954), his atelier still opens its doors to all who show promise of being able to do original work in any of the fine arts. And the promise is certainly abun dant. What is not so certain is the ability of the promising artist to live by his art in a society that has renounced its belief in the validity of the old art and has not yet acquired either the means or the desire to patronize the new art. It is an uncertainty that bothers both teacher and student, and one that is unlikely to be quickly removed, in any town or territory. All the same, the number of domestic outlets for the artist's work is grow ing and will undoubtedly go on doing so as the economic and educational standards of his people are raised. Already there are artists, in the Makerere school and elsewhere, who are making a name for themselves as designers of textiles for the African market. Others are turning their skill to profit by designing and carving church altars and crucifixes, panels for pulpits, and statuary, or by designing and making decorative objects for the home. The work of some, notably the sculptor Ben Enwonwa of Nigeria, the painter Vincent Kofi of Ghana and the wood carver Job Kekana of Southern Rhodesia, finds as ready a market abroad as in their own country. But frail and uncertain prospects are nothing new to the man of art; nor have they ever been the foe of inspiration. Indeed, much of the world's great art has been done in the presence of poverty and anxiety. What African art needs more than security for its reinstatement as the living oracle of African society is a new self-assurance, or, to use LeopoldSedar Senghor's word, a new sagesse. This is something that cannot be bought with money, or conferred by self-government, but may be found by faith. It has yet to be shown whether the things which exercise the minds of the African elite are big enough and durable enough to capture their allegiance, and keep it.
16 I b i d p. 37.

CHAPTER

23

The Price of Growth

CAPI TAL FORMATI ON R E S E A R C H AND D E V E L O P M E N T HUSBANDRY

T o d e s c r ib e a growing thing is usually much easier than to explain its growth. Evidences of growth can be named and numbered; its sources, however, are frequently hidden and intangible, and the subject, therefore, of doubt. In tropical Africa the evidences of cultural growth are now so numerous and frequently so beguiling that there is danger not only of our forgetting whence they came but also of supposing that the only reason there arent still more of them is bad husbandry. While it would be foolish to contend that tropical Africa has not had its share of bad husbandmen over the past fifty to a hundred years, it would be equally foolish to contend that growth is solely a matter of husbandry, and that there is nothing wrong with the economy, society and polity of the region that a supply of good husband men could not put right. In the realm of culture, no less than in that of crops, growth is a com pound of many ingredients. Genes are as much a part of it as growers; breeding no less than tillage. Time and effort, stamina, fitness and versa tility are all involved. Without proper nurture the strongest nation languishes and dies. And not even the easiest environment in the world can compensate for constitutional deficiencies. As has often been pointed out in this study, tropical Africa is not the easiest of environments, and many of its appearances of constitutional strength are deceptive. It is in most respects a difficult environment as difficult for man as it is for animals and plants. What strength it has, whether of physical resource, social cohesion or political stability, is more readily impaired than improved, and has often been undermined by the exertions of invader, enterpriser and agitator. Because it is a difficult environment, it is costly to work with. To do
393

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virtually anything with it takes money; and among people still short of almost every kind of service, still largely untutored in the obligations of stewardship, still inexpert in the art of maintenance and ignorant of most laborsaving skills, money does not go very far. The company, agency or administration interested in developing this part of the world will find no tables spread in the wilderness, no soft options or quick returns. There has hardly been an announced goal yet that did not take a little longer and cost much more to reach than anybody foresaw. When reached, some of the goals have taken a lot of defending. Some have never been reached. Because tropical Africa is a costly environment to work w T ith, it has had trouble in finding the things needed to make it less difficult and more rewarding. The needed things investment capital, long-term loans, welfare and development funds, research organizations and the highly qualified personnel that goes with them are also needed in many other places. Though the world has never lacked men or agencies willing to use their resources where most needed, philanthropy remains a minority movement. The places to get most attention from investors of money and skills have always been those offering the best prospects of steady yields, high market prices, security, congenial working and living conditions, and so on. On these scores, most parts of tropical Africa trail well behind Western and Central Europe, North America and, indeed, most other parts of the free world. In the circumstances, it is surprising that tropical Africa has fared so well. Its showing, whether in the realm of capital formation, research, development or planning, is impressive. CAPITAL FORMATION The sources of tropical African investment capital are private and public, domestic and overseas. Reliable estimates of the capital derived from each of these sources are hard to come by. In addition to the un certainties arising from the use of different national criteria of what is private and public investment, there are those arising from the inadequacy of the published data, domestic and overseas. For the pre-World War II period, the best estimates are undoubtedly those published, in 1938, by S. H. Frankel in his Capital Investment in Africa. These are given, for the major territorial divisions, in Table 60. It will be seen that while private capital almost all of which came from overseas sources contributed well over half of the total traceable in vestment, its relative importance was much greater in some territories (notably the Belgian Congo and Portuguese Africa) than in others (notably the French territories and British East Africa). For the postwar period, no equivalent study exists, and what published

T H E P R I C E OF GROWTH
Table 60

395

PUBLIC AND PRIVATE CAPITAL ENTERING SELECTED TERRITORIES BETWEEN 1870 AND 1936
TERRITORY TOTAL PU BLIC PRIVATE a

(Millions)

(Millions)

(Per Cent)

(Millions) (Per Cent)

British West Africa British East Africa French territories Belgian Congo (inc. Ruanda-Urundi) Portuguese Africa

116.7 98.0 70.3 143.3 62.0

50.9 62.9 43.0 35.8 19.0

44 64 61 25 31

6 5 .8 35.1 27.3 107.5 43.0

56 36 39 75 69

Source: S. H. Frankcl, Capital Investment in Africa: Its Course and Effects, Oxford University Press, London, 1938.

* Includes all non-listed capital.

material there is on the subject continues to be of uneven coverage and reliability. Several attempts have been made to estimate the postwar rate of capital formation. One of the most recent of these by analysts of the United Africa Company is given in Table 61. Total fixed capital invest ment in 1956 in the territories there listed (they are the territories in which the United Africa Company operates) was over $1.6 billion. The average for the past few years is thought to be somewhat less, about $1.4 billion. But even this figure is a high one both in absolute terms and in relation to the incomes in the territories. In relation to the gross domestic product, it is higher than the figure for the industrialized countries of
Table 61

ESTIMATED GROSS FIXED CAPITAL FORMATION, SELECTED TERRITORIES, 1956

EXPEND ITURE ON GROSS FIXED CAPITAL GROSS DOMESTIC TERRITORY PRODUCT TOTAL FORMATION PER CENT OF GROSS DOMESTIC PRODUCT PER CAPITA

(Millions)

(Millions)

British West Africa British East Africa Belgian Congo (exc. Ruanda-Urundi) French territories

$1,960 1,120 1,176 n.a.

$364 308 328 (616a)

19 27 28 n.a.

$ 9.2 15.1 25.5 (22a)

Sources: The Colonial Territories, 1956-57, H.M.S.O., London, 1957; Bulletin de la Banque Centrale du Congo Beige et Ruanda-Urundi (Conseil de Direction des Fonds

de Developpement Economique et Social, Brussels), October 1957. a Average 1954-1955. n.a.: not available

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Western Europe, which have recently been putting about one sixth of their national income into domestic fixed investment. A detailed analysis of the contributions of private and public, domestic and overseas capital to this investment must await the publication of better statistics than are now available for most territories. But at least three things are already apparent. First, in the territories for which there are data the ratios of private to public investment have not changed radically since the war and the implementation of the various development plans. As far as we know, says Gaston Leduc in his working paper, private investment remains much larger than public investment in the Belgian Congo, and probably also in the Portuguese territories and those of British West Africa. The same would also seem to be true of the two Rhodesias and Nyasaland. In the territories of the French Community, however, the ratio of private to public investment has undoubtedly fallen, largely be cause public financing, within and outside the various territorial develop ment plans, has been at an unprecedentedly high rate (about 125 billion C.F.A. francs 1 in French West Africa alone for the period 1947 through 1954). Second, although the contribution of domestic capital to the total internal investment is growing, it is still quite small. Third, in so far as any long-term trend is discernible, it is in the direction of a lower ratio of private to public investment. Among the reasons for this Leduc names the following:
the risks and difficulties inherent in any large tropical enterprise, the high costs, the long delays before such an enterprise becomes self-supporting, political in stability and the cautiousness of prospective investors.

Leduc emphasizes, however, that the role of the private investor is in no danger of being eliminated except as a consequence of political up heavals. PRIVATE INVESTMENT In these days of growing government activity in the investment field, it is well to recall that private enterprise was the principal agency by which tropical Africa was brought into contact with the Western world. Private enterprise was behind virtually every economic and commercial development (other than railroad construction, much of which was publicly financed), and so in large measure responsible for the de velopment of external trade, which is still the mainspring of Africas prosperity. It has also contributed to the fund of material wealth upon which advancement in the spheres of politics, education and health largely rests. While the relative importance of private capital has decreased in the
1 Since 1948 the C.F.A. (colonies frangaises dAfrique) franc has been equivalent to two metropolitan francs.

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postwar years, the actual amount of private investment has increased steadily and in some territories spectacularly. In most territories it shows little sign of leveling off, let alone of declining.
DOMESTIC

The domestic supply of private investment money is small for several reasons. Among the lesser ones, as Leduc reminds us, are the African's understandable disinclination to save for an uncertain tomorrow what he has no difficulty in spending and enjoying today, and the expatriate European's equally understandable disinclination to invest his savings in enterprises that are characteristically slow-growing and in territories whose political future is clouded. The chief reason, no doubt, is the lowness of the average income levels. Misleading as comparisons of per capita income can be, especially when they refer to territories with differing felt needs and at differing stages of cultural sophistication, they are probably worth making, if only to show the order of magnitude of the domestic savings possible in tropical Africa. Figures for some of the territories are given in Table 62. Higher
Table 62

AVERAGE PER CAPITA INCOME, SELECTED TERRITORIES, 1956-1957

APPROXIM ATE TERRITORY AMOUNT

France United Kingdom Belgium Ghana (Gold Coast)a French West Africa b Rhodesia and Nyasaland Malagasy Republic (Madagascar) b Kenya c Belgian Congo Sierra Leone b Gambia b Nigeria Uganda c Tanganyika d Ethiopia

$1,000 980 980 194 133 132 119 78 76 70 56-70 69 57 48 30

Source: United Nations, Economic Survey of Africa Since 1950 , New York, 1959.

a Gross national product at factor cost. b Gross domestic product at market prices. c Net domestic product at factor cost. d Gross domestic product at factor cost.

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though they are than they were even five or ten years ago, these incomes can by no sleight of mind be described as anything but low. Nor, in every case, can they be said to be a measure of the Africans purchase-cmnsaving power, as part of the national (or domestic) product that provides the basis of calculation of these incomes is generated in the non-African sector of the economy. In the case of Nigeria this part is very small (less than 5 per cent), but in the case of the Belgian Congo it is about half (46 per cent in 1956), and in the case of Kenya, about three quarters. Such incomes make it virtually impossible for the average African worker to be a systematic saver. In so far as he manages to save anything, he saves it for such short-range needs as shoes, suits, a bicycle and bride wealth. More often than not, however, he spends all he gets, and does so within a few hours of getting it. It is only the well-above-average African the boss-boy, the teacher, the cocoa farmer, the infirmier, the lawyer and the politician who is able to think of accumulating savings for investment. While there are Africans who have saved and invested modest fortunes, the general run of African savings is small, and by any Western yardstick the aggregate of such savings is small. In the African context it is by no means negligible. According to Leduc, savings bank deposits in French West Africa and Togo at the end of 1954 totaled 697 million francs (C.F.A.), or approximately $3.5 million. At the end of 1957 the figure was slightly less, 674 million francs. Of this amount, not less than 80 per cent, Leduc estimates, belonged to African depositors. In the Belgian Congo in 1950 African savings contributed $14 million to the financing of the governments internal investment, and in 1956, more than $11 million. In most territories, African savers are also making increasing use of the commercial banks. But many Africans are still shy of banks, commercial or otherwise. In some areas not only the more backward bush areas the chief deposi tory of a mans savings continues to be the floor, or roof, of his hut, often to his neighbors gain more than his own. In other areas not only the more advanced ones, either steadily growing amounts of savings are being put into term insurance, mutual loan associations, small businesses (notably cycle repair, tailoring, trucking and general trading), farm co operatives (for the purchase and rental of equipment, etc.) and real estate. Small, too, as is the amount of non-African savings invested domesti cally, it is likewise far from negligible in the African context. According to Leduc, in French West Africa non-African deposits in savings banks amounted to 140 million francs (C.F.A.) at the end of 1954; those in com mercial banks amounted to 95 per cent of the total. In French Equatorial Africa, according to the same authority, 70 per cent of the deposits in savings banks and 99 per cent of the deposits in commercial banks at the end of the same year were owned by non-Africans. Here again, as Leduc points out, it is practically impossible to give meaningful figures for

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non-African savings or to specify precisely the uses to which they are put.
Permanent residents may invest a significant part of their savings locally, especially in real estate, but temporary residents probably send all their savings to the mother country. For many Frenchmen, the goal of a prolonged stay in tropical Africa is the ability to build or purchase a home somewhere between Marseille and Nice.

Much the same tendency to send savings to the homeland is true of na tionals of other countries. At any rate, the south of England is full of former overseas service administrators living, servantless, in the drafty, damp red-brick cottages they dreamed about when they were stationed in the African bush. Nor would it be difficult to point to Asians and Levantines who have been more active, and successful, in the buying and selling of property in Africa than any resident Europeans. In many of the large cities Nairobi among them the ground whereon the European stands is often Asian ground and the house in which he lives Asian-built and Asian-owned. It would be an oversimplification to suppose that all the temporary European residents of tropical Africa are in the habit of exporting their savings or that the primary investment interest of all the permanent Euro pean residents is real estate. Judging from the number of British and continental insurance firms that have opened African offices since the end of World War II, notably in Kenya, the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, and the Belgian Congo, and from the size of their staff, it is quite apparent that many resident Europeans and Asians must be putting a large part of their savings in local pension and superannuation schemes and in life insurance. It is equally apparent, from even a cursory glance around the settler countrysides, that many European farmers have been using a large part of their postwar earnings for development. They have invested in everything from piped water supplies, anti-erosion measures and stock improvement to the modernization of their homes and the re housing of their African employees.
OVERSEAS

The chief source of private investment money has always been the incorporated company. As with individual capital movements, compre hensive data on the capital entering and leaving the territories through the medium of such companies do not exist. Private business secrets, Leduc observes, are as well kept south of the Sahara as anywhere else. To judge from the accusations leveled against them, some of the commercial companies have had good reason for their secrecy.
They have repeatedly been accused of failing to see their mission other than in a strictly commercial light, and of having endeavored, with evident success, to reap the maximum profits in the minimum time. These profits, one hears,

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were not distributed to local shareholders or reinvested locally, but regularly sent back to the mother countries as sizable shares and dividends, or to form more or less hidden reserves; with the inevitable result that the local economies suffered a loss of substance and a continual draining of their available invest ment financing.

As Leduc goes on to say, it is difficult to get to the bottom of such assertions, since the dealings of the incriminated companies are not open to public scrutiny. But not all of the companies are incriminated, and some of the incriminated ones have had little trouble in clearing their names. In the French territories Leduc has been able to show that after World War II a notable amount of corporate savings was reinvested locally. He estimates that from 1947 through 1953
an average of 31 per cent of capital investment came from accumulated re serves 7.2 billion francs (C.F.A.) out of 23.2 billion. Inquiries among 44 corporations doing business in black French Africa, including Madagascar, show that the average profits plowed back into business before constitution of reserves were as large as capital increases financed by other means than the drawing on reserves, that is, for the period 1947 through 1953, about 23 7 = 16 billion francs (C.F.A.). Total corporate savings immediately reinvested or placed in reserves would thus total at least 23 billion francs (C.F.A.).

Even though this figure cannot be compared with other accounting items in the national economy of the territories concerned, because the data are lacking, none can call it insignificant. In the Belgian Congo in 1950 corporate savings contributed nearly $157 million to the territorys internal investment, and in 1956 nearly $200 million more than half of the total internal investment.2 It is not improbable that an inquiry into the capital movements of private corpora tions doing business in some other areas would disclose similar results. The United Africa Company, which for years has operated on a very big scale in many parts of tropical Africa, and on that account has been the object of frequent incriminations, has recently released some figures which, while they may not silence its enemies, go far to explain how it has come to have so many friends. Since its formation in 1929 the Group forming the United Africa Company 3 has reinvested locally $180.6 million of its profits, or more than $6 million a year. Bearing in mind the postwar decline in the value of money, it is probable, as the company contends, that this figure considerably understates the real worth of the investments made in the prewar period. The company also contends that it has helped to increase the domestic supply of investment capital by systematically seeking to complement rather than to supplant indigenous enterprise.
By means of supplies, advice and financial support, the Group has assisted many thousands of African traders to build up successful businesses. In Com 2 See Bulletin cle la Banque Centrale du Congo Beige et Ruanda-Urundi (Brussels), October 1957. 3 Excluding three palm oil companies once part of the company but now inde pendent.

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401

monwealth West Africa 4 alone it has on its books some 6,000 Africans with credit accounts, [selling] about 2 5 million [$70 million] worth of goods an nually. The net amount on trust with African customers at any one time may exceed 2 million [$5.6 million].5

The company has been promoting African business interests in other ways, too. Thus, in west Africa it has handed over to Africans most of its trade in such commodities as cocoa, palm oil, peanuts and rubber. In the same region it has helped to bring into being a number of industrial schemes that otherwise would have remained beyond the Africans grasp. In some instances it has done this by providing the necessary capital; in others, by providing the merchandising experience and managerial skills; in still others, by providing both. A singlet factory in eastern Nigeria offers a good illustration of the companys foster-parent role. It was built by the company with Nigerian money. It is entirely owned by Nigerians, and managed by a company-trained Nigerian staff. It uses a companysupplied fabric and finds a guaranteed market for its finished product in the companys many merchandising outlets. It is in ways such as these, so the United Africa Company believes, that the interests of its shareholders can best be served, for are they not best served by what best serves the African people? Other large private companies with a fine reinvestment and service record are the Union Miniere du Haut-Katanga, the Copperbelt com panies (the Anglo American Corporation and the Rhodesian Selection Trust), the Office dExploitation des Transports Coloniaux (Otraco), and Firestone Plantations Company in Liberia. In the absence of detailed statistics of company capital entering and leaving the region, it is probable that local company registrations provide as useful a measure as any of financial growth. For most of the companies registered in tropical Africa are floated, in part if not in whole, by overseas funds, and all of them add to the investment strength of the territories in which they do business. In British East Africa the nominal capital of new local companies, which was only a little more than $4 million in 1938 and less than $10 million in 1945, rose to nearly $43 million in 1956. In 1956, 98 new companies were incorporated in Nigeria (this figure includes 38 companies which were incorporated overseas and registered in Nigeria). Between them these companies had a nominal capital of over $11 million. In the Belgian Congo new companies have been formed at an average annual rate in recent years of approximately 300. This represents a nominal capital inflow of between $24 million and $28 million a year. During the same period the capital of existing companies in the Belgian Congo has been expanding by upward of $30 million a year.
4 The companys term for Ghana (including Togoland), Sierra Leone, Gambia and Nigeria (including British Cameroons). 5 Statistical and Economic Review (United Africa Company Limited, London), March 1958, p. 43.

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T H E P R I C E OF GROWTH

PUBLIC INVESTMENT In tropical Africa the bulk of public investment capital is derived from two sources: (1 ) domestic savings effected through ordinary government budgeting and through profits, after amortization, etc., of public agencies; and (2) development funds, financed for the most part by metropolitan governments and other interested overseas powers.
DOMESTIC

The low average level of incomes places limits on the amount of public saving that can be done. The budgetary revenues in 1956 of a selected number of territories are given in Table 63. These, too, by contemporary Western standards, can only be termed modest. There are those who argue that these revenues, derived as they are very largely from indirect taxation, are more modest than they need be; that the yield of direct taxes on individuals and corporations could be greatly
Table 63

BUDGETARY REVENUE, SELECTED TERRITORIES, 1956

TERRITORY TOTAL PE R CAPITA

(Millions)

Ghana (inc. Togoland) (Gold Coast)a Kenya a French West Africa French Cameroons Gambia Belgian Congo (inc. Ruanda-Urundi) Sierra Leone Somalia (Italian Somaliland) French Equatorial Africa Liberia 8 Uganda a Nigeria (inc. British Cameroons) b Tanganyika a (French) Togo

$138.0 b *c 98.6 b c 290.6 b* d 47.9 d 4.2 b 227.9 6 25.8 b 14.3 50.1 d 12.8 50.7 b' c 261.2 b' c 60.2 b *c 7.0 1

$29.4 16.0 15.7 14.8 14.0 13.4 12.9 11.0 10.4 10.0 9.0 7.8 6.7 6.4

Sources: The Colonial Territories, 1956-57, H.M.S.O., London, 1957; Bulletin Mensuel de Statistique dOutre-Mer (Paris), 'passim; Bulletin de la Banque Centrale du Congo Beige et Ruanda-Urundi (Brussels), 1957.

a July 1956-June 1957. bIncludes Colonial Development and Welfare funds, and grants-in-aid. c Original estimates. dPrincipal receipts only. e Ordinary and extraordinary revenue. f Including contribution (amounting to more than 50 per cent of total revenue) of Italian government. g 1955. hApril 1956-March 1957. 1 Custom receipts only.

T H E P R I C E OF GROWTH

403

increased without significantly affecting the yield of import and export duties. But, as the anonymous authors of a recent analysis have pointed out, Equitable imposition and cheap collection of direct taxes is hard to achieve in tropical Africa . . . The Governments of Ghana and Eastern Nigeria have confirmed experience elsewhere that taxation of a large num ber of comparatively modest incomes is expensive in relation to the reve nue yield. 6 Further, incomes are difficult to ascertain and evasion is easy, except for the employees of government and large firms, who have the tax deducted at source. There are others who argue that the yield of import and export duties is lower than it need be in some territories. But, as the authors of the same analysis go on to say, there are strict limits to the rates of indirect taxation which it is feasible to impose. Territorial boundaries in Africa are long and the number of customs officials limited. As the Marketing Boards in Ghana, the Gambia and Eastern Nigeria have found, evasion is hard to check. Furthermore, prices and rates of duty cannot be markedly out of line with those that are in operation in neighbouring territories. If they are, the cost of putting the illicit frontier-runners out of business is quite likely to exceed the gains accruing from the higher imposts. Confronted with such an array of hard fiscal facts, some governments have taken, with unconcealed satisfaction, to raiding the reserves of their produce-marketing boards. And, as was shown earlier, most of the boards have been able to accumulate substantial reserves, by keeping the level of prices paid to growers providently low. While research (in the agronomic field concerned) and other activities aimed at directly benefiting producers have usually been the first to profit from such raids, several development projects have done handsomely out of them. Thus, the Ghana Cocoa Marketing Board made available to its government for the 1951-1957 de velopment plan loans in excess of $47 million, representing 14 per cent of the total cost of the plan. Since its setting up in 1948, it has also made substantial grants to the University College (approximately $8.1 mil lion), and health and welfare (including education) projects (approxi mately $6.2 million). In Nigeria, loans made by the regional market ing boards to the federal government up to 1958 exceeded $31 million; and in the Western Region more than $52 million (18 per cent) of the total expenditure of $294 million envisaged under the 1955-1960 development program was scheduled to come from the Regional Marketing Board in the form of loans or grants.
OVERSEAS

Contrary to the widely held belief, most of the metropolitan govern ments have been sinking money into their African territories ever since they assumed administrative responsibility for them. By present stand6 Statistical and Economic Review, March 1958, p. 13.

404

THE

pr ice

of

gro w th

ards, the amount invested was not large, but even at 211.6 million (S. H. Frankels figure for public investment in Belgian, British, French and Portuguese tropical Africa during 1870-1936), it is considerably larger than the amount which found its way back to Europe in the form of salaries, transfers to reserves, interest payments on national debt, pensions of per sonnel, etc. As the administering authorities soon discovered, the pumps of Africa primed slowly. As late as the 1930s public debt charges formed a substantial element of the budget in almost every territory. In 1934 they amounted to nearly half of the public expenditure in the Belgian Congo, and in the four years 1934-1937 the Belgian government granted a total of 640 million francs to cover deficits in the Belgian Congo budget. In 1937 French West Africa received a subvention of 79 million francs a sum almost equal to the entire debt charge of the territory in that year. From 1929 onward British government aid to its African colonies included development grants and interest-free loans as well as grants and loans to meet budget deficits in particular territories. Only in the Portuguese territories of Mozambique and Angola and in Liberia, in none of which had very much basic develop ment been undertaken, did debt charges form a relatively inconsiderable item of the annual budget. But let it be said to the credit of the early primers, smallness of yield seldom discouraged them from pursuing the search for likely pump sites and the supply of priming fluid. It is probably not too much to say that the objective of government priming has been social as much as financial, the benefiting of the governed as much as the governors. Since about 1945, the search for good development projects and the supply of funds with which to get them started have both been stepped up. In the early postwar years specific programs of development were pre pared by each of the colonial powers in consultation with their respective dependencies. Although there were degrees of consultation (on the whole the territorial governments of British and Belgian areas were allowed more of a say in such matters than those of Portuguese and French areas), the aims of the plans varied little from territory to territory. In essence they were designed to:
Increase the knowledge of the natural resources of the country concerned and exploit those resources more effectively; Provide the groundwork for future development in the shape of public utilities and communications; and Improve the health, education and living conditions of their population.7

Table 64, prepared by the United Africa Company, shows the way in which the development funds of selected territories were allocated to these various objectives. Because of variations in the way governments classify expenditures, the table does not warrant our reading significance
7 Ibid., p. 22.

T H E P R I C E OF GROWTH Table 64 GOVERNMENT EXPENDITURE UNDER DEVELOPMENT PLANS, SELECTED TERRITORIES

(Per Cent)
BRITISH W EST AFRICA MAIN CATEGORIES GHANA NIGERIA KENYA UGANDA 1 9 5 5 -6 0 BRITISH EAST AFRICA TANGANYIKA 1 9 5 5 -6 0 FRENCH TER R I TORIES

405

BELGIAN CONGO 1 9 5 0 -5 6

1 9 5 1 5 7 ' 1 9 5 5 - 6 0

1 9 5 4 -5 7

1947-56
100

Total development expenditure Transport and communications Agriculture, forestry and fishing Electricity and water Education Housing (inc. surveys and town planning) Health Commerce and industry Miscellaneous c 1958, p. 22.

100

100

100

100

100

100

31 7 9 15 6 6 3 23

25 9 7 21 3 9 5 21

13 26 16 10 7 4 1 23

14 4 29 6 12 5 11 19

29 19 17 15 8 5 1 6

45 15 4 4 1 5 3 23

46 6 11 6 4 5 2 20

Source: Statistical and Economic Review (United Africa Company Limited, London), March

a Excluding development of new town and harbor at Tema. b Federal and regional.

c Mainly public works.

into small percentage differences. It leaves no doubt, though, about which types of programs have been given the highest priority in each region. It also shows that the priorities have differed from region to region some times between adjacent regions. Thus, whereas in Kenya agriculture, forestry and fishing have had over one fourth of the governments de velopment funds, in Uganda they have had only one twenty-fifth. While the sectors of economic and social life getting most of the funds are those which the governments concerned believe to be the most in need of them, it does not follow that the sectors getting very little have been neglected. In some cases, for instance education in Uganda, they are sectors in which past expenditure has been heavy. In others, for instance agriculture in Ghana and Uganda, they are sectors which have been largely left to pri vate enterprise. In still other cases, for instance housing in French terri tories, they are sectors which, in the view of the administering authorities, do not warrant heavy expenditures until the people have shown them selves able or willing to earn enough to take care of the upkeep. Viewing the table as a whole, two things stand out clearly. The first is the emphasis on the provision of basic services such as transport and

406

T H E P R I C E OF GROWTH

communications. This emphasis has been most marked in the French and Belgian territories, which are large and on the whole sparsely peopled, and where, on that account, almost any new road or telephone system has to be a long one to serve a useful purpose. The second is the large pro vision being made for public utilities, such as electricity and piped water, which hitherto have been numbered among the luxuries of tropical African life. What the table does not show, but what is quite as important, is the recently increased emphasis on productive projects, such as agriculture, fisheries and cooperatives. These, it is hoped, will be able to contribute to the maintenance of the infrastructure and, in time, to pay for extensions to it. These development funds have come from various sources not all of them, as we have seen, external. Indeed, in the case of one or two terri tories by far the larger portion of them has been raised domestically. Commonwealth Territories A first approximation of the relative importance of external and internal sources of development funds to the territories of British (and formerly British) West Africa and British East Africa is contained in Table 65. Ac cording to these figures, the east African territories have recently been re lying on external sources (such as Colonial Development and Welfare grants and loans) for no more than 60 per cent of their development funds and the west African territories have been getting only one third of their funds in this way. As the authors of the United Africa Company analysis point out,
the [Commonwealth] territories have been encouraged to make maximum use of their local reserves for financing the current Development Plans. To this end the United Kingdom Government suggested that colonial Post Office Savings Banks and the Currency Boards should employ in local investments some pro portion of the funds which they had raised. It has also prompted some of the territories to find at least part of their requirements by running down their sterling balances rather than by borrowing on the London market.8

These sterling assets date back, for the most part, to World War II, when about all the United Kingdom could offer the Commonwealth terri tories in exchange for their much needed foodstuffs and raw materials were some sterling-filled safe deposits in the Bank of England. Since the war the sterling balances held by most of those territories have continued to rise, thanks largely to such prudent housekeeping devices as the produce-marketing boards. By paying farmers prices lower than those pre vailing in the open world market, these boards have dampened import demand and permitted the accumulation of sterling holdings which could be used to meet less favourable circumstances which may arise in the fu ture and to finance future development. 9

T H E P R I C E OF GROWTH

407

Table 65

FINANCING OF DEVELOPMENT PLANS OF BRITISH WEST AND BRITISH EAST AFRICA

(Million Pounds)
SOURCES FROM WHICH FINANCED COLONIAL DEVELOPTOTAL PLANNING TERRITORY PERIOD EXPEN D I TURE M EN T AND W E L FA R E FUNDS LOAN FUNDS (INTERNAL AND EX TER N A L) LOCAL R E SOURCES

Total, west Ghana (Gold Coast) Nigeria b Sierra Leone Gambia Total, east Kenya Uganda f Tanganyika g

1951-1957a 1955-1960 1956-1959 1955-1960 1954-1957 1955-1960 1955-1960

424.6 120.4 292.6 10.6 1.0 87.2 27.7 c 35.8 23.7

22.9 3.0 16.5 2.5 0.9 11.3 5.8 d 0.8 4.7

125.1 29.4 90.7 5.0 41.1 11.4 15.5 14.2

276.6 88.0 185.4 3.1 0.1 34.8 10.5 e 19.5 4.8

Sources: Statistical and Economic Review (United Africa Company Limited, Lon don), March 1958, p. 24; The Colonial Territories, 1956-57 , H.M.S.O., London, 1957.

a There was also a two-year consolidation plan, spread over 1957-1959, estimated to cost 18.6 million, exclusive of expenditure on construction of Tema harbor, which was expected to be 6 million in 1957-1958. bFederal plus regional plans. c This figure has since proved to be an overestimate (by approximately 5.8 mil lion); however, nearly 14 million was spent, so it is estimated, on development out side the plan during the 1954-1957 period. d Includes 500,000 free grant, which is not C. D. and W., toward the Swynnerton Plan to intensify the development of African agriculture. e Includes grants by the United States International Cooperation Administration toward the Swynnerton Plan. f Total available capital resources as shown in the table amount to 1 .8 million over the plan value. This margin will be used if necessary to finance new projects of high priority. e Plan being revised.

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T H E P R I C E OF GROWTH

While most of these balances may properly be regarded as domestic funds, a part of them represents assets held in London by banks operating in tropical Africa and consists of deposits originating from undertakings either owned or controlled by United Kingdom residents. Such deposits cannot be regarded as in any sense domestic. Nor, of course, can all of them be regarded as a nest egg for the developer, for part of them be longs to governmental and quasi-governmental agencies for whom a ster ling balance represents a financial reserve, and part to the various terri torial currency boards as backing for the local currency. And, as has been noted, part of the funds accruing to the various marketing boards is ear marked for things other than development. To supplement the domestic sources, the United Kingdom government has since 1940 made available substantial amounts of development money, most of it through the following media: the Colonial Development and Welfare funds, the Colonial Development Corporation and the Common wealth Development Finance Company, Ltd. The Colonial Development and Welfare Act passed in 1940 made avail able up to 5 million a year for ten years for schemes for any purpose likely to promote the development of the resources of any colony [not merely African] or the welfare of its people, together with a further 500,000 a year for research. In 1945 the government passed a further Colonial Development and Welfare Act authorizing the spending of a total of ,120 million on such schemes. In 1950 this amount was increased to 140 million. In 1955 an additional 8 0 million was voted for devel opment work to be carried out in the period 1955-1960. Issues from C. D. and W. funds during the eleven years ended March 31,1957 totaled nearly 137 million. Of this amount, over 3 4 million went into British East African projects, over 5 6 million into British West African projects, and over 6 million into British Central Africa (Northern Rhodesia and Ny asaland) projects. As Table 65 shows, the amounts made available by the C. D. and W. acts are generally small in relation to the cost of the develop ment plans of any one territory. In 1956 the current development plans for African dependencies of the United Kingdom provided for a total expenditure of over 560 million. Of this, only 7 per cent (40.5 million) was being met from grants made under the C. D. and W. acts; the rest came from local revenues (about one third) and loans (about three fifths) secured on these revenues. It is also true that some of the things into which C. D. and W. money was put did very little for either the territory concerned or the welfare of its people and that, as Lord Hailey has ob served, most of the early drafts of the Development Plans were little more than a series of departmental estimates inflated above their normal level by anticipation of the receipt of extra-territorial aid. 10
10 An African Survey: p. 1336.
Revised 1956, Oxford University Press, London, 1957,

T H E P R I C E OF GROWTH

409

At the same time, there is not a British dependency in Africa that cannot point to some major piece of economic or social development made pos sible by C. D. and W. funds. Among such undertakings were the building of the University College, Ibadan, Nigeria, and the Royal Technical College at Nairobi; the drainage and reclamation of the formerly rather unhealthy area around Bathurst, the capital of Gambia; the maintenance of the Desert Locust Control Organisation in east Africa; the construction of rural water supplies in the Northern Region of Nigeria; and the improve ment of African agriculture in Kenya. Hardly less important, these funds have been a spur to the imagination of the administrator long stunted by the rigors of a budget that allowed of few schemes and no dreams and to the appetite of the administered for better living. Without C. D. and W. funds there would still have been development plans in most of the African dependencies, but the chances are they would have been less closely related to the needs and desires of the people being developed, and much more costly. The Colonial Development Corporation came into existence in 1948. The Overseas Resources Development Act of that year authorized the setting up of two separate public corporations, the Colonial Development Corporation (CDC) and the Overseas Food Corporation (OFC). The CDC was given power to borrow up to 100 million (since increased to 150 million) for long-term and 1 0 million for short-term schemes of economic development in colonial territories. It was the intention of the Labor government which sponsored the act that the corporation should supple ment private investment rather than replace it, by assisting in schemes which, although offering reasonable long-term prospects, might prove unattractive to private capital working alone.
It was considered that there was a shortage of risk capital in the United Kingdom relative to the colonies needs. Furthermore, the cost of floating a moderate issue (say, under 5 0 0 ,0 0 0 ) on the London market was such as to deter many private concerns from undertaking projects unless they had suffi cient profits to re-invest. A final argument put forward in favour of a Government corporation was that the financial attractiveness of an investment might not be a true reflection of its value to the community.11

It was also the intention of the government that the corporation should pay its way. This it began to do in 1955, notwithstanding the restrictions on its borrowing power (all loan money has so far come from the United Kingdom Treasury) and on the repayment terms it can impose upon those who borrow from it. On long-term loans, interest payments are postponed for the first seven years; loans and interest are repayable by 33 annuities starting in the eighth year. By the end of 1958 the total capital approved for African projects amounted to more than 5 4 million. The corporations range of interest
11 Statistical and Economic Review , September 1957, pp. 21-22.

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is wide. It has put money in hotels (Kenya), housing (Kenya, Nyasaland, Southern Rhodesia, Nigeria), mining (Kenya, Tanganyika, Uganda), manu facturing (Kenya, Tanganyika, Northern Rhodesia, Nigeria), power (Kenya, the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland), ranching and meat processing (Bechuanaland), forestry (Tanganyika, Nyasaland) and airlines (Central African Airways Corporation). As with all pioneer work of this kind, the maturing period tends to be long (often longer than the sevenyear interest-free period), the yield uncertain and, in some instances, un palatable. More than one African project has had to be written off. At the present time most CDC investments fall into four categories: directly operated projects and investigations; shares in associated companies; debentures and loans; and mortgages. The corporation is also willing to make grants for investigations and research which may or may not lead to anything productive [and] for special sociological purposes connected with projects. 12 The Overseas Food Corporation, which came out of the same 1948 act, was designed to develop new sources of food supply for Great Britain. As far as British Africa is concerned, its main job in the early years was to salvage what it could of the remaining assets of the Tanganyika Ground nut Scheme and turn them to account in experimental work. This work has sought to establish the value of mechanized agriculture in certain types of tropical environment and to test the potentialities of peasant farming.1 3 In March 1955 the corporation turned over its responsibilities to the Tanganyika Agricultural Corporation. The object of the Commonwealth Development Finance Company, Ltd., incorporated in 1953, is to provide or procure financial facilities of all kinds for the development of the natural and other resources of any part of the Commonwealth. Although more of its authorized share capital of 1 5 million is subscribed by private than public agencies, the Bank of England a government institution is its largest single shareholder (with 45 per cent). The policy of the company is to make loans to private schemes only after their promoters have exhausted the normal money market channels and have shown that they can furnish expert manage ment. Other things being equal, it favors schemes which promise to give an early return, such as electricity supply, sugar estates and cement manu facturing. Down to the end of 1959 the company had not done very much for the Commonwealth territories of tropical Africa. The French Community There have been two main agencies through which metropolitan France has dispensed aid to her overseas territories. These are FIDES (Fonds
12 Colonial Development Corporation: London, 1958, p. 8. 13 See Volume I, pp. 173-74.
Report and Accounts, 1957, H.M.S.O.,

T H E P R I C E OF GROWTH

4 11

cTlnvestissement pour le Developpement Economique et Social) and CCFOM (Caisse Centrale de la France dOutre-Mer), now (since 1959) called the Caisse Centrale de Cooperation Economique. Credit Nationale, one of Frances state banks, has also granted medium- and long-term loans to private companies in the overseas territories. The French government has made large investments out of its own budget over the years in the services, such as air navigation, post office and telecom munications, which it has administered directly from France. The administrative and financial machinery of the postwar General Plan for Modernization and Development of the French Overseas Terri tories was set in motion by the law of April 30, 1946. This law created FIDES, which had as its object the financing of public development plans in all French overseas territories. These plans were of two kinds, general and overseas. Plans in the general category were aimed at benefiting all the territories; those in the overseas category were confined to individual territories or groups of territories. The cost of the general plans has been borne by the metropolitan treasury; that of the overseas plans, partly by subventions from the metropolitan treasury and partly by contributions from the territories concerned. To raise their contribution, the overseas territories have generally relied on subventions from CCFOM. At the start, the metropolitan contribution to the overseas plans was 55 per cent, the territories being obliged to find the balance. However, despite the low rate of interest charged, the amortization payments on the CCFOM loans proved too heavy a burden for the limited budgets of the overseas territories. In 1953 the metropolitan contribution, which was derived from annual parliamentary votes, was increased to 75 per cent; in 1956 it was still further increased, to 90 per cent. Unlike the British C. D. and W. grants, those made by FIDES have covered virtually the whole cost of a given overseas development plan; and they have been made to state-controlled and mixed companies as well as to the territorial governments. The designers of the ten-year General Plan of 1946 had two main objectives. The first was to provide the infrastructure, particularly trans portation, needed for subsequent economic and social development. More than half of all development expenditure during the period 1946-1952 went into ports, railways, roads and airfields. Most of the rest went into hospitals and schools, mining and industrial installations (especially hydroelectricity), agriculture and research. The second objective was to promote enough revenue-earning schemes to meet, in time, the heavy operating and maintenance costs of this infrastructure. Although the constitutional relationship of the overseas territories to metropolitan France has changed greatly since 1946, this objective is still being ener getically pursued. Expenditures authorized by FIDES during the first dozen years of its life are summarized in Table 66.

4 12
Tahle 66

T H E P R I C E OF GROWTH

TOTAL APPROPRIATIONS AUTHORIZED BY FIDES IN FRENCH TROPICAL AFRICA, 1947-1958

TERRITORY APPROPRIATIONS PE R CENT

(Millions) Total French West Africa French Equatorial Africa French Cameroons Malagasy Republic (Madagascar) (French) Togo French Somaliland de Presse et dlnformation, New York, 1958. a Made up as follows: General Section grants, $305 million; Overseas Section grants, $940 million; Overseas Section loans, $445 million; CCFOM loan funds, $450 million. $2,140* 984 428 364 300 43 21 100 46 20 17 14 2 1

Source: French Africa: A Decade of Progress, 1948-1958 , French Embassy, Service

The Caisse Centrale de la France dOutre-Mer has been the central financial organization responsible for managing the accounts of FIDES. Its capital has come from an initial grant of approximately $8.4 million and from annual advances from the French Treasury via FIDES. The amount of these advances has varied considerably; in 1954, for instance, it was approximately $56 million; in 1956, only $14 million. As a rule these variations have been more a reflection of the ability of CCFOM to find suitable projects than of the willingness of the Treasury to find funds. CCFOM has been able to advance money, on loans of short, medium or long term, to the territorial governments (usually at one per cent interest plus one per cent service charge) to enable them to make their own con tribution to FIDES, and to state-controlled, mixed or private companies. It has also taken shares in certain kinds of undertakings. Private enter prises being assisted by CCFOM in 1957 included the Societe Alucam, which is producing aluminum in the French Cameroons, and the Societe Fria, which is developing bauxite deposits in the Republic of Guinea. Not the least of CCFOMs functions has been to provide for minor as well as major capital works by creating within the overseas territories subsidiary credit societies for the purpose of financing the needs of small-scale busi ness enterprises. Belgian Africa In contrast to the British territories and those of the French Community, those of Belgium have had to raise, and pay for, almost all of their de velopment funds. For instance, the Belgian Congos Ten Year Plan (1950-

T H E P R I C E OF GROWTH

413

1959) has been financed through its own special budgets, the money for which has been derived from loans by far the larger part floated in Belgium and the Congo and, since 1954, from surpluses in the territorys ordinary budgets.
Exact details are not published but the greater part of the rise in the National Debt of the Congo,* from around 6 0 million [$168 million] to over 2 3 0 mil lion [approximately $650 million] at the end of 1956, is clearly attributable to execution of the Plan. In round figures 79 percent of this sum originated in loans from Belgium or floated within the Congo; 11 percent represents loans from the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development; 8 percent, loans floated in Switzerland; and 2 percent, miscellaneous dollar loans.14 * Excluding the indirect debt which consists of state guarantees of repayment of capital or of interest by public utilities. This amounted to approximately $154 million at the end of 1956.

The amount raised by ordinary budget surpluses between 1954 and 1957 was approximately $75 million. The cost of the plan was originally estimated to be approximately $500 million. Since its inception, however, both actual costs and estimates have doubled. It is almost certain that more than $1 billion will have been spent on the plan by the time all the accounts have been settled. It is only in the Trust Territory of Ruanda-Urundi that development funds have been supplied directly from Belgium. Virtually the entire cost about $90 million of the territorys own Ten Year Plan (19501959) has been underwritten by non-interest-bearing loans from the metropolitan government. In aim and content both plans are quite similar to the develop ment programs of British and French areas, for, in Lord Haileys words, their objective is to create an environment in which private enterprise can develop to the greatest advantage of the community. 15 To this end, about half of the total development expenditure was earmarked for the infrastructure, especially railways, roads and inland waterways. Most of the rest was put into public utilities (e.g., water supply, electricity), health services, research of the widest possible scope, and resettlement schemes (especially in the congested parts of Ruanda-Urundi). While some parts of this comprehensive program have been carried out through the ordinary departmental agencies, others have been put in charge of quasi-governmental, semi-autonomous institutions. Among the more im portant of these have been the Fonds du Bien-Etre Indigene (FBEI), which was set up after World War II in recognition of the war services of the Congolese, and the Institut pour la Recherche Scientifique en Afrique Centrale (IRSAC), established in 1947 to coordinate, promote and prose cute scientific work, both physical and social, in the Belgian Congo and Ruanda-Urundi. In addition to the government funds received by it, the
14 Statistical and Economic Review, March 1958, p. 27. 15 Op. cit., p. 1340.

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FBEI also has received annually a share of the profits of the colonial lottery run in Belgium; and in addition to what it has received from the government, IRSAC also has received annual grants and subsidies from various corporate bodies. Portuguese Africa Although their methods and results may not always have been the same as their neighbors, the Portuguese yield to none of them in their enthusiasm for planned development. They have been operating de velopment plans since the setting up of the Colonial Development Fund in 1938. These plans have been financed with the help of loans from the metropolitan government, local surpluses, and the proceeds of special taxes on imports and exports. The first plan coincided with the war years and could not be realized for lack of capital equipment. Even so, over $7.5 million was spent on such major developments as the construction of a new port and high school at Luanda and the extension of the Malanje and Mogamedes railways in Angola. The second plan, covering the period 1946-1950, encompassed a much wider field, including public health, education, hydroelectricity, agriculture and forests, and cost ap proximately $15 million. In 1952 the government announced its National Development Plan (Plano de Fomento National) costing $500 million, of which approximately $200 million was to be spent in the African prov inces, mainly on transport, hydroelectricity, irrigation and land settle ment by Portuguese and Africans alike, mining and industry, and geo logical survey. This six-year plan came into operation in 1953 and was so energetically pursued that its main objectives had been realized by the end of 1958. A second six-year plan was initiated in 1959. More than half of the approximately $360 million allocated to it is to be used for colonization schemes and the further development of roads and railways. United States Government Agencies The United States government makes available development funds through its International Cooperation Administration and its ExportImport Bank. The ICA, like its alphabetical forerunners ECA, MSA and FOA, exists to provide capital equipment or basic raw materials whose cost can not be met by local and foreign private capital, or by loans from the World Bank and similar organizations; and to carry out programs of teaching, training and exchange of information. Assistance of these kinds began in 1948 as part of Americas contribu tion to the European recovery program. Until 1954 most of the aid to the non-self-governing territories took the form of loans and dollar credits to their administering powers for developmental projects in such fields as transportation and power. Since then, the emphasis has shifted to tech

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nical assistance with varying degrees of cooperation, financial and other wise, from the metropolitan countries. Among the recipients of such types of aid are the railways of the now independent Ghana, the mining industry of Nigeria, the anti-locust campaign of east Africa, and the African small businessmen of Uganda and Tanganyika. From April 1948 through March 1956 the Commonwealth territories of Africa received U. S. aid in currency and kind valued at approximately $67 million. The corresponding figures for French and Belgian territories were $365.5 million 16 and $18.8 million. Similar types of assistance have been made available to the inde pendent territories of tropical Africa. Thus, both Liberia and Ethiopia have had large Point Four programs (as the people of the two countries still prefer to call them) since the early 1950s. The techniques covered by these programs include agriculture, animal husbandry, education, hydrology and hydroelectricity, commerce and industry, mapping and trades training. The operations of the U. S. Export-Import Bank in tropical Africa have not been very large so far. The chief territories to be directly involved in them are Liberia, Ethiopia and Mozambique, to each of which loans have been made. United Nations Agencies The agencies of the United Nations chiefly concerned with the financ ing of development are the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (commonly called the World Bank), the International Mone tary Fund, the International Finance Corporation and the United Nations Technical Assistance Board. The World Banks main purpose is to assist in the reconstruction and development of its member countries by facilitating the investment of capital for productive purposes, and thereby to promote the long-range growth of international trade and the improvement of standards of liv ing. The chief way in which it seeks to achieve this purpose is by mak ing fixed-interest loans carrying the guarantee of the member government concerned. This guarantee is required whether the loan is made to the member government itself, or to a government authority or agency, or to a private enterprise in the member country. The project for which the loan is required must be of sufficient importance to warrant the incurring of a foreign exchange liability to finance it. Before making a loan the bank usually sends a mission of experts to ascertain whether the project is sound and likely to fulfill its sponsors expectations. The bank is also empowered to authorize private persons and organizations to make in vestments in projects which it has passed upon. When invited, it will
16 Including a grant of $297.6 million made to metropolitan France for overseas development.

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advise member countries, and their dependencies, on the planning and execution of programs of economic development. In 1954, for instance, it did this for Nigeria in a highly comprehensive fashion. The published report ran to nearly 700 pages.1 7 The banks funds, which at the beginning of 1959 totaled almost $10 bil lion, are obtained from the contributions of its member countries (68 as of the same time), the sale of its own bonds, and the sale of securities obtained from borrowers in return for earlier loans which it financed. The fields in which the bank has done most of its comparatively small tropical African business are transport (examples are the purchase of equipment by the East African Railways and Harbours, railroad modern ization in certain west African territories of the French Community, road construction in the Belgian Congo, port and road construction in Uganda, port and railroad improvements in the Republic of Sudan), and electrical power (in June 1956 it made a loan of $80 million to the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland toward the financing of the ICariba hydroelectric scheme). In 1955 the bank established in Washington, with the financial help of two American foundations, an Economic Development Institute for the purpose of training government personnel from the less developed mem ber countries in the handling of development problems. Among those attending the first courses were officials from the Belgian Congo, Nigeria and Uganda. The much smaller International Finance Corporation (its authorized capital is only $100 million) was brought into being in July 1956, with the purpose of fostering productive private enterprise and the movement of private capital, particularly in those member countries which still rank as underdeveloped. This purpose it hopes to fulfill by investing in proj ects in association with private investors, and by serving as a clearing house which will bring together investment opportunities, private capital and experience in management. 18 Down to early 1959 the International Finance Corporation had not entered into any tropical African commitments. It was still looking for medium-sized projects, preferably industrial, that were in need of capital and technical and managerial skills, and that promised to become selfsupporting at a comparatively early date. While it did not have to look far for evidences of such need, evidences of such promise were hard to come by.19
17 The Economic Development of Nigeria: Report of a Mission Organized bij the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Johns Hopkins Press,

Baltimore, 1955.
18 Statistical and Economic Review, September 1957, p. 7. 19 Recently, the United Nations has established another agency, headed by Paul G. Hoffman, called the Special United Nations Fund for the Economic Development of Underdeveloped Countries (SUNFED). The purpose of this agency, which is pressing for a working capital of not less than $250 million, is to make large grants-in-aid and

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Unlike that of the World Bank, the contribution of the International Monetary Fund to the development of its member countries is made in directly. Its resources (down to April 1959 the Fund had made available about $4.2 billion) are used to supplement exchange reserves rather than to finance specific development programs. Its aim in so doing is to eliminate foreign exchange restrictions which hamper the growth of world trade, and to promote stability and, ultimately, full convertibility of the currencies which it is supporting. Much of its work may be likened to that of a field casualty station: it consists in administering first aid and giving shots in the arm to ailing economies, leaving to others the removal of any deep-seated troubles which may beset those economies. The United Kingdom, France and Belgium three of the largest sub scribers to the fund have each made considerable use of its resources to supplement their reserves of gold or foreign currencies, and so to alleviate balance-of-payments difficulties into which their African de pendencies had run. Although the United Nations Technical Assistance Board (TAB) is principally concerned with the supplying of skilled personnel to carry out specific development tasks, it does dispense a certain amount of financial aid. The program is financed by the voluntary, and often rather re luctantly given, contributions of the members of the United Nations. In recent years these contributions have averaged about $30 million annually. In addition to providing technicians for field assignments, TAB awards fellowships and scholarships, runs training programs and finances the supplies and equipment necessary to make these programs effective. In 1956 the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations recom mended that to these activities there be added a program designed to accelerate the rate of industrialization of the underdeveloped countries with which the TAB deals. Wherever possible, the TAB works through the existing specialized technical agencies of the United Nations, such as the Food and Agriculture Organization, UNESCO and the World Health Organization. However, many projects are carried out under its aegis. From the inauguration of the expanded program in 1950 down to 1959, United Nations expenditure on technical assistance in tropical Africa amounted to approximately $10 million. The total cost of the programs in which the TAB has assisted would probably be nearer $100 million, for the TAB has always taken the view that its role is to help only those who are willing to help themselves. Among the tasks which it has tackled
long-term loans at low rates of interest to countries that have so far failed to attract the private investor and such existing agencies as the World Bank. Unhappily, it takes more than sunshine to sustain development projects; but as of late 1959 other sources of sustenance were still proving rather elusive. Projects involving the modest sum of $23.7 million had been authorized by the years end; even so, the United Nations [did] not have the funds to carry out the projects at once. (New York Times, Decem ber 7, 1959.)

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in Africa are the training of meteorological observers and the preparing and packing of coffee for export in Ethiopia, the organizing of science teaching in the University of Liberia, the preparation of a five-year edu cation plan in Somalia, the eradication of the desert locust in British East Africa, and the raising of housing standards in Ghana.

RESEARCH AND D EVELO PM EN T If money may be said to be the soil of growth, research is its fertilizer. Adequate supplies of both are indispensable to the success of any de velopment program. Without adequate money it is impossible even to talk of development. Without adequate research it is impossible to tell whether any such program is desirable, let alone able to achieve its an nounced goal. Money may talk, but it has a habit of talking nonsense when it is undisciplined by the knowledge that is born of research. In an environment like that of tropical Africa, fertilizer is an even scarcer commodity than soil. For research costs money money that is wanted for a hundred and one immediate, self-evident needs, and re search, by its very nature, deals with matters that are neither self-evident nor in the habit of disclosing their secrets to the first questioner. Further, in many fields the feeling still lingers that the work dignified by the name of research is often little more than a euphemism for the reducing of mountains of questionable data to molehills of academic inference, and that much of the rest succeeds only in making obscure what every wellinformed government and company official had always supposed was perfectly clear. That the feeling has more than a fleck of substance to it any reader of technical journals dealing with tropical Africa can testify. Even so, in recent years increasingly large amounts of money have been found by governments, educational institutions and corporations for tropical African research. While some of this money appears to have fallen on barren ground, much of it is certainly performing its intended function. The amount of research work being done is impressive. The Directory of Scientific Institutes, Organizations and Services in Africa South of the Sahara published in 1954 by the Scientific Council for Africa South of the Sahara lists 286 public and quasi-public institutions engaged in research in the area covered by this study.2 0 A few of these are re search institutions only by courtesy of the council, since they do little more than maintain an office and serve as a repository for unwanted bric-a-brac. But many are large, handsomely equipped, expertly staffed, and highly productive on a budget that would seem ample to most
20 The number, which has since increased to over 300, takes no account of the con siderable research work being done by large business and industrial corporations. Nor does it include research institutions in the independent territories of Liberia, Ethiopia, etc.

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American graduate schools. More impressive than their number is the scope of their interests. The Directory has 15 entries under the heading of social sciences, 42 under physical sciences, 43 under medical sciences, 161 under natural sciences, in addition to 25 under a general heading. Some of the institutes are highly specialized, dealing with a single field of inquiry. Typical of these are the Institut National pour lEtude Agronomique du Congo Beige (INEAC), the West African Cacao Re search Institute, the Institut de Recherches du Coton et des Textiles Exotiques, the East African Trypanosomiasis Research Organization and the Desert Locust Survey. Others have been given much broader terms of reference, and undertake research work in two or more of the four categories listed in the Directory. Outstanding among these are IRSAC, which operates in the Belgian Congo and Ruanda-Urundi, and the Institut Frangais dAfrique Noire, which operates in the former French West Africa (including Togo). Scarcely less striking than the scope of the research being done is its broad territorial distribution. Thirty-four separate research organizations are listed under the Belgian Congo (including Ruanda-Urundi); 65 undei French West Africa; 16 under French Equatorial Africa; 17 under French Cameroons; 11 under Madagascar; 34 in the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland; 29 in British West Africa (including the then Gold Coast); 59 in British East Africa. Even Portuguese Africa, which has long had the name of being the least progressive of the non-self-governing terri tories, is represented by 20 entries, 7 under Angola and 13 under Mozambique.
Belgian Territories

The range and caliber of the research work done in the Belgian Congo and Ruanda-Urundi have been second to none. First-class facilities now exist for basic and ad hoc research in almost every field. Indeed, the facilities residential, recreational and scientific alike available at such places as Yangambi (near Stanleyville), the territorial headquarters of INEAC, and Lwiro (near Bukavu), the headquarters of IRSAC, are prob ably not surpassed by any similar institutions in the world. Of the many public research institutions in the territory, INEAC is undoubtedly the largest. In the opinion of many it is also the one that has done most to strengthen the territorys economy. In 1958 the general services section alone employed approximately 5,000 people (represent ing a family population of more than 16,000), and the number of European specialists exceeded 400. The scope of INEACs interests is sug gested by the fact that its research center comprises the following divisions: botany, plant physiology, forest economy, plant pathology, agricultural entomology, agrology, agricultural chemistry, climatology,

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genetics, biometry, agricultural technology, rural husbandry, agricultural economy and agricultural sociology. There are, additionally, divisions that deal with the application of the facts disclosed by research to the Congos major cash crops, notably palm oil, rubber, coffee, cocoa and indigenous foodstuffs, and to animal husbandry and fisheries.21 There isnt a farmer, African or European, in the Congo who is not the richer for having used some technique or some strain of seed first tried out in INEACs field stations. Although a comparative late-comer (it was established by arrete royal in 1947), IRSAC has lost no time in making its presence felt. The head quarters plant, consisting of laboratories, library, museum and residences, is at once a thing of splendor and a tool of the greatest utility. Under its roof, Belgian and foreign scientists have been working, since the early 1950s, on fundamental problems in such diverse fields as geophysics, nutri tion, mammalogy, medical zoology, neuropathology and ornithology. Be sides Lwiro, IRSAC has other centers at Astrida (mainly for sociological and demographic research) and Uvira (mainly for hydrobiology, entomol ogy, zoology and botany) in Ruanda-Urundi; at Elisabethville (for medical biology) and Mabali (for plant biology) near Coquilhatville. Most of the other outstanding research organizations in the Belgian Congo fall into the following categories: physical (including mining), medical and veterinary, sociological. In the first category come the Institut Geographique du Congo Beige, the Centre de Recherches Minieres du Congo Beige (Bukavu), Comite Special du Katanga (Elisabethville), Comite National du Kivu (Bukavu), Mission Anti-Erosive (Bukavu), Service Geologique du Congo Beige et du Ruanda-Urundi (Leopoldville) and Service des Mines du Congo Beige (Leopoldville). In the second category come Fonds Reine Elisabeth pour lAssistance Medicale aux Indigenes (Leopoldville), Institut de Medecine Tropicale Princesse Astrid (Leopoldville), and the various centers of the Service Medical Provincial and the Service Veterinaire Provincial. In the third category comes the Centre dEtudes des Problemes Sociaux Indigenes (Elisabethville). Almost all of these organizations have so far derived their financial sup port in large part, or entirely, from public funds raised either in Belgium or locally.
C ommonwealth Territories

The interest of the British in African research goes back a long way. A fund for research into tropical diseases had been set up at the end of the nineteenth century, and almost from the start of the African occupa tion small research units were attached to many territorial departments. But down to the late 1930s the total funds available for research were
21 Vlnstitut National pour VEtude Agronomique du Congo Beige (INEAC): son But; son Programme; ses Realisations, INEAC, Brussels, 1957, pp. 15ff.

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pitifully small, with the result that the work done was patchy, and short term rather than long-term. Many times the findings were simply filed, for lack of funds to apply them. It was not until the passing of the 1940 Colonial Development and Welfare Act that very much attention was given to the logistics of colonial research and to the organization of a research strategy. To ensure the wise employment of the quite large sums which this act and its successors have made available for research, the United Kingdom government relies heavily on the judgment of its Colonial Research Council and such affiliated technical bodies as the Colonial Products Re search Council, the Colonial Geological Surveys, the Anti-Locust Research Centre, the Colonial Social Science Research Council, the Colonial Medi cal Research Committee, the Committee for Colonial Agricultural, Animal Health and Forestry Research, and the Colonial Economic Research Com mittee. Of the funds disbursed on the advice of the Colonial Research Council, the major part has consisted of grants to territorial governments for use by specific departments. In most territories C. D. and W. grants have been supplemented generously by territorial funds, derived either from the ordinary budget or from the surpluses of produce-marketing boards, etc. In the case of Southern Rhodesia, which by virtue of its selfgoverning status has been ineligible for C. D. and W. grants, almost all the money for research has had to be raised domestically. Here and there gov ernment research workers have found valuable allies in the large public corporations, such as the United Africa Company and the Rhodesian Selection Trust; in such bodies as the Tanganyika Sisal Growers Asso ciation; and, increasingly of late years, in the larger centers of higher education. Today, the work being done by the dozens of research agencies scat tered all over Commonwealth tropical Africa is substantial in amount, comprehensive in coverage, and increasingly well coordinated interterritorially. Many of these agencies have already paid for their keep, and now yield dividends of improved health and efficiency, greater produc tivity and security that could not have been otherwise obtained. Deserv ing a high place on any listing of such agencies are the following:
1. In the physical and agricultural fields The West African Cacao Research Institute at Tafo in Ghana The East African Agriculture and Forestry Research Organization at Kikuyu, Kenya The Empire Cotton Growing Corporations Cotton Research Station at Namulonge, near Kampala, Uganda The Tea Research Institute of East Africa at Kericho, Kenya The Tanganyika Sisal Growers Associations Experimental Station at Mlingano, Ngomeni

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T H E P R I C E OF GROWTH The West African Institute for Oil Palm Research near Benin City in Nigeria The Tobacco Research Board of Southern Rhodesia at Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia The meteorological services of Britsh West Africa, British East Africa and the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland

2. In the medical and veterinary fields The East African Trypanosomiasis Research Organization at Nairobi, Kenya The East African Veterinary Research Organization at Kikuyu, Kenya The Makerere College Medical School at Kampala, Uganda The Medical Research Council Laboratories at Bathurst in Gambia and Kampala in Uganda 3. In the social and economic fields The West African Institute of Social and Economic Research at Ibadan, Nigeria The East African Institute of Social Research at Kampala, Uganda The Rhodes-Livingstone Institute at Lusaka, Northern Rhodesia

Less publicized, but in the aggregate no less productive of good, are the generally small research units attached to many territorial depart ments of agriculture, forestry, game, fisheries, geological survey, and medical and veterinary services. Indeed, as far as most of the local in habitants are concerned, the work done by these departments is the only kind that matters, since it is research done, so to speak, on the spot, patently for their benefit. The French Community In keeping with their general approach to the business of developing overseas territories, the French have sought to centralize their research effort. For long possessed of the widest domains of any European state in Africa, but of only modest resources of money and manpower, they took the view that a few large and well-equipped agencies were likely to serve the needs of a given territory or group of territories better than a great number of small, understaffed and widely scattered agencies. They also preferred to let their Paris administrators settle the strategy, if not the tactics, of all major research enterprises. In the earlier days research in their African territories was carried out by missions from the Institut Pasteur in Paris, Lord Hailey reports, and the first local research organizations were the branches of this institute, established at St. Louis in 1896 and Brazzaville in 1910. 22 At the present time the central direction of overseas research is vested
22 Op. cit., p. 1604.

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in the Office de la Recherche Scientifique et Technique dOutre-Mer (ORSTOM) and the Conseil Superieur de la Recherche Scientifique et Technique dOutre-Mer. The latter body, constituted first as a division of the Ministry of Overseas France, but now as part of the General Secre tariat of the French Community, publishes the results achieved and keeps all organizations concerned with overseas research informed of what is being accomplished in each territory. 23 One of ORSTOMs tasks has been to train a corps of research workers capable of furnishing assistance to all of the member states of the French Community. Candidates for these posts (selected from graduates of such centers of higher learning as the Ecole Polytechnique and the Institut Agronomique) are given a two-year training course. The first year is spent at Bondy near Paris. Here basic instruction is given in a wide range of topics that includes ethnology, entomology, geology, pedology, plant physiology, plant breeding, plant diseases and oceanography. The second year is spent on location, either at one of ORSTOMs institutes, such as the Institut dEnseignement et de Recherches Tropicales at Adiopodoume (near Abidjan) in the Republic of the Ivory Coast, or in a field station. Here the students are trained in research techniques under environmental conditions that resemble those they will later have to deal with. The capital cost of the administrative and training centers set up by ORSTOM has been met from FIDES; the current costs have come out of ORSTOMs own funds and those of the territory concerned. Since there were a number of research institutions in French West Africa before 1943, ORSTOM has concentrated most of its African interest on the other terri tories. The most important research centers sponsored by ORSTOM are the Centre de Pedologie in Dakar-Hann (Senegal), the Centre de Geophysique in MBour (Senegal), the Institut de Recherches du Togo in Lome (this specializes in pedology, geophysics, nutrition and sociology), the Institut de Recherches du Cameroun in Yaounde (specializing in entomology, pedology, hydrology, nutrition and geography), the Institut dEtudes Centrafricaines (specializing in entomology, geography, botany, sociology and hydrology) in Brazzaville, Bangui and Pointe Noire; and the Institut de Recherche Scientifique de Madagascar (specializing in pedology, entomology, oceanography and hydrology) in Tananarive. Most of the agronomic, forestry and animal husbandry research has been done under the auspices of the Services de lAgriculture, de lElevage et des Forets of the onetime Ministry of Overseas France. Most of the research work in the field of health (including nutrition, hygiene, sleeping sickness, leprosy and preventive medicine) has likewise been done under the auspices of the Ministry of Overseas France.
23 Scientific Research: A Basis for Economic and Social Progress in Africa, Afri can Affairs (French Embassy, Service de Presse et dlnformation, New York), April 1953, p. 1. Before 1955, ORSTOM was known as ORSOM, the Technique being added to its responsibilities only in that year.

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Outstanding among the institutions supported by the metropolitan government, but not coming under the jurisdiction of ORSTOM, are the Institut Pasteur and the Institut Frangais dAfrique Noire. The Institut Pasteur, from its Paris headquarters and field stations in Africa, has, for over half a century, been carrying out research designed to relieve suffering and improve living conditions. To it belongs much of the credit for the control of sleeping sickness, malaria, rabies, smallpox and plague in French tropical Africa. Besides its Dakar headquarters, the Institut Frangais dAfrique Noire (IFAN) maintains a network of local centers, associated centers and substations throughout the region formerly known as French West Africa. The interests of its large scientific staff range over the whole field of the natural and social sciences, including geography. Understandably, in view of the magnitude of its task and the modesty of its resources, the French government has consistently encouraged the establishment of privately supported research centers. Among the most enterprising and productive of these are the following:
1. The Institut des Fruits et Agrumes Coloniaux, founded in 1941 to promote the growing of better-yielding citrus and other tropical fruits. It main tains four research stations in tropical Africa. 2. The Institut de Recherches pour les Huiles de Palme et les Oleagineux, founded in 1942 for a like purpose. It maintains oil palm research centers in four territories and peanut and karite centers in three. 3. The Institut de Recherches du Coton et des Textiles Exotiques, founded in 1946. It maintains vegetable textile research stations in seven terri tories and an experimental station in one (the Malagasy Republic). 4. The Compagnie Generale des Oleagineux Tropicaux, which for some years now has been carrying out highly productive research in peanut culture on its large holdings in Casamance (Senegal) and Niari (Republic of the Congo).

Portuguese and Spanish Territories For various reasons, that include lack of manpower and money, and perhaps also lack of interest, both Portugal and Spain were late in getting into the field of systematic colonial research. Although their learned societies include in their number some of the most ancient and honored in the world, they did very little until recently to promote the better knowledge of their African possessions. In Portugal, the Junta das MissSes Geograficas e de InvestigagSes Coloniais (later, do Ultramar), established in 1935, was the first publicly expressed recognition of the need for a colonial research organization; but even this council was not empowered at first to do much more than advise the Colonial Ministry. However, it has since come to be supported by annual grants from both the metropolitan and provincial (i.e., colonial) budgets, which have enabled it, among other things, to conduct a number

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of wide-ranging research expeditions and to compile an atlas of the overseas areas. Today, there are also important research organizations in the fields of medicine (notably the postgraduate school of the Institute of Tropical Medicine, which has been doing good work since the turn of the century, and the Trypanosomiasis Combat Mission in Lourengo Marques), the social sciences, including ethnography and languages (the Institute for Overseas Studies in Lisbon, the Society for Mozambique Studies in Lourengo Marques and the Centre for Portuguese Guinea Studies in Bissau), agronomy and plant breeding (notably the Center for the Scien tific Study of Cotton in Lourengo Marques and in Catete, Angola), and the physical sciences (the meteorological services and the geological and mining services of Angola and Mozambique). In Spain the recognition of the need for systematic colonial research came even later. The first Spanish institute for African studies was set up in Madrid in 1945. This institute, which now operates under the auspices of the Direction General de Marruecos y Colonias, is mainly concerned with research in physical and cultural geography. Research in hygiene, tropical diseases, etc., is undertaken in Spain and Spanish Africa by agencies of the same ministry. Other Territories Except for the Republics of Sudan and Guinea, the other territories had next to no research work done within their borders until quite recently. Nor is it difficult to see why this should be so. These territories, consisting of Liberia, Somalia and Ethiopia, are poor in developed skills and other resources; and some of their leaders have been slow to perceive the gains that would accrue to them and their people from research done as it had perforce to be done by outsiders. But the postwar years have seen noteworthy changes of circumstance in all three territories. Their govern ments have had at their disposal much larger budgets (if still very small by contemporary standards); they have been able to send some of their best young men abroad for training in research techniques; and, indirectly or directly, they have received a great deal of outside technical help, especially from the United States and the United Nations. Today, as a result, all three territories can point with some pride to work being done by research agencies in their midst. In Liberia, the Booker Washington Institute at Kakata (now attached to the University of Liberia) is carrying on research in a number of fields, including agronomy and animal husbandry. The Firestone Plantations Company at Harbel operates a research laboratory in which experimental work is being done not only on rubber but also on tropical fruits and livestock. The Liberian Institute of the American Foundation for Tropical Medi

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cine, also located at Harbel, is carrying out investigations into the occur rence and control of malaria, filariasis, river-blindness, bilharziasis and malnutrition. The World Health Organization also has a number of research projects on hand, mainly in malaria, yaws and sleeping sickness. And some of the work undertaken by the Joint Liberian-United States Commission for Economic Development in geology, aerial photography and mapping, agriculture, public health and other fields is in the nature of research. In Somalia, government-supported research work is being done in agri culture (in dry-land farming and the cultivation of cotton, banana and the castor oil plant); medicine and public health (in the control of bilharziasis, etc.); and linguistics (in the problem of using Somali as a written lan guage). Almost the only privately supported research is that being done by the Sinclair Somal Corporation and Mineraria Somala. Their explora tions have called for the geophysical and geological mapping of very large sections of the territory, much of it hitherto almost unknown to the outside world. The United States International Cooperation Administration mission in Somalia has conducted a number of surveys that, in the intellectual con text of the country, may be said to rank as major pieces of research. Among other matters, these surveys have dealt with forest and range manage ment, livestock, mineral deposits, hydrology and fisheries. Somalia also has a number of U. N.-sponsored research projects. The most important of these have to do with malaria and tuberculosis control (WHO) and fundamental education (UNESCO). The story is much the same in Ethiopia, where the government is strug gling to add inches to the lowly economic and social stature of its people by force-feeding techniques. And, thanks in large measure to the en couragement and direct aid of the United States ICA program and the specialized agencies of the United Nations, it is succeeding. Among the fields of inquiry covered by Point Four agreements be tween the U. S. and Ethiopian governments are the following: mapping and survey (including geology, soil, water resources); soil conservation; insect (including locust) control; cattle breeding; pasture management; seed selection and breeding (notably coffee); public health (including disease control); and the educational system of the country. Among those covered by agreements between the specialized agencies of the United Nations and the government are health training, control of epidemics, and fundamental education. The chief agencies in the country engaged in research are the Imperial Ethiopian Mapping and Geography Institute (at Addis Ababa), the Im perial Ethiopian College of Agricultural and Mechanical Arts (near Lake Haramaia), the Central Agricultural Experiment Station (at Bishoftu), the Public Health College and Training Center (at Gondar) and the Uni versity College of Addis Ababa.

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Largely because of its long association with the British Commonwealth, the Republic of Sudan has fared better than the foregoing territories. From 1899 down to the time of its independence (1956), the country re ceived its share of the services made available to all the non-self-governing territories of British Africa. In the matter of research and development it undoubtedly received more than most of the other territories, for in none of the others was there done such a mighty work as that administered by the Sudan Gezira Board, and in none of the others was the medical record of the Sudan surpassed, if indeed equaled. Were it not for the exertions of hydrologist, irrigation engineer, agronomist, plant geneticist, pathologist and the whole Research Division of the Ministry of Agriculture, there could have been no Gezira and no independence, as cotton is the countrys currency. Without the work of the Stack Medical Research Laboratories, the Wellcome Chemical Laboratories, the Kitchener School of Medicine and the School of Hygiene, and the medical services generally, there could have been no well-being and no growth. Nobody knows these things better than the Sudanese leaders. Not the least of their con cerns since 1956 has been to maintain the efficiency and, wherever pos sible, expand the scope of the research activities of their various govern ment departments. Besides the above-named agencies, the following also have important research interests: the Equatoria Projects Board, which has successfully introduced cotton cultivation among the Azande people of the south and is now experimenting with coffee and other cash crops; the University of Khartoum, whose numerous faculties arts, science, agriculture, en gineering, veterinary science, medicine and law are a measure of its research interests; and the Philosophical Society of the Sudan, which, its name notwithstanding, has been as much interested in how the people of the country eat as in how they think. The Republic of Guinea, like the Republic of Sudan and for a similar reason, has had a good deal of research work done within its borders. For years prior to its independence, it played host to the Centre dEtudes des Peches (Conakry), the Centre de Recherches Rizicoles (Koba), the Institut Frangais dAfrique Noire (Conakry), the Institut des Fruits et Agrumes Coloniaux (Kindia), the Institut Pasteur (Kindia), and the Sec tion de Recherche sur le Quinquina et les Cultures de Montagne (Seredou). It profited no less from the developmental work mostly un publicized and invariably undermanned done in the field by various government and private agencies. International Organizations There is much to be said for organizing research internationally, par ticularly in an underdeveloped area like tropical Africa. It saves duplica tion of effort where all effort tends to be difficult and where sustained

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research effort is frequently made impossible by administrative or climatic circumstances. It saves money where money for research tends to be as scarce as wadi water and just about as quick to evaporate. It saves time where time is no longer on the researchers side, as it seldom is in these days when a disease can be carried from the Sudan to the Zambezi over night and an idea can travel even faster. It is, in fact, the only rational approach to those problems that are the product of social change, for social change is not halted by a territorial border. The problems of urbanization are basically the same whether they are encountered in Salisbury, Stanleyville or Asmara, and the ingredients of nationalism are basically the same whether the compound bear a British, Belgian, French, Portuguese, Spanish or Italian label. To give them their due, the colonial powers of tropical Africa have long recognized the desirability of intercolonial and international coopera tion in the scientific field. During the interwar years they held several consultations on problems of agriculture, animal husbandry and public health. During the dark years of World War II they found time to organize an inter-African forestry conference at Abidjan and to develop the scheme of locust control first suggested by the French in 1938. In the early postwar years they held interterritorial conferences on such subjects as nutrition, forestry, transportation and communications, rinderpest and trypanosomiasis. It was not until 1950, however, that the colonial powers put their co operation on a formal, statutory basis by the creation of the Commission for Technical Co-operation in Africa South of the Sahara (Commission de Cooperation Technique en Afrique au Sud du Sahara, or CCTA), an ex ecutive body; and the Scientific Council for Africa South of the Sahara (Conseil Scientifique pour TAfrique au Sud du Sahara, or CSA), which is primarily an advisory body. Since its creation CCTA, which now consists of representatives of the governments of Belgium, the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, France, Ghana, Guinea, Liberia, Portugal, the Union of South Africa and the United Kingdom, has been instrumental in setting up more than two dozen technical bureaus and committees. These include the Inter-African Bureau for Soils and Rural Economy, in Paris; the Tsetse Fly and Tryp anosomiasis Permanent Inter-African Bureau, in Leopoldville; the InterAfrican Bureau for Epizootic Diseases, at Muguga near Nairobi; the InterAfrican Labour Institute, at Brazzaville, Republic of the Congo; the Inter-African Pedological Service, at Yangambi, Belgian Congo; and the Inter-African Committees on Statistics, Social Sciences, Housing and the Mechanisation of Agriculture. It has also set up a Foundation for Mutual Assistance in Africa South of the Sahara and an Inter-African Research Fund. The former of these is designed to collect and disseminate information on offers of and requests for technical assistance in the region, promote the provision of technical assistance by facili

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tating bilateral arrangements between donors and recipients . . . and maintain co-operative relations with the various organisations operating technical as sistance programmes for the benefit of Africa South of the Sahara.

The Research Fund has been set up

to promote joint scientific research and technical projects, in the following categories: Broad surveys, including information and liaison work; Research on problems which involve uniform study by small highly specialized staffs operating over wide areas; Research on problems which affect many countries but which should be investigated initially in one limited area.

Among the first projects sponsored by the fund were the compilation of a climatological atlas of Africa and a study of the role of science in the development of Africa south of the Sahara. The members of the Scientific Council for Africa South of the Sahara are eminent scientists, chosen [by CCTA] in such a manner that the main scientific disciplines important at the present stage of the develop ment of Africa shall be represented. The councils main function is to recommend to CCTA subjects appropriate for discussion by conferences, or for investigation by technical bureaus and committees. A joint Secre tariat, with two seats one in London and the other in Bukavu, Belgian Congo serves the needs of both bodies. Other international organizations engaged in investigating tropical African problems are the International Red Locust Control Organization and the International Organization for Control of the African Migratory Locust; the World Council of Churches, which has been making a special study of areas of rapid social change; such specialized agencies of the United Nations as WHO, FAO and UNESCO, whose Advisory Committee on Arid Zone Research sponsors studies in climate, soil erosion, the water requirements of plants, human physiology and cognate fields; and the International African Institute, which, since 1926, has been energetically promoting the study of African anthropology, ethnography, linguistics and sociology.2 4 Philanthropic Agencies For many years now a number of philanthropic institutions, for the most part American, have interested themselves in problems of African eco nomic and social growth. Since the early 1920s the Phelps-Stokes Fund has made grants to various educational institutions (among them the Booker Washington Institute at Kakata in Liberia), and its survey of African edu cational needs published in 1922 probably did more than any other single document to arouse the interest of American educators in tropical Africa. The Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York
24 The Select Annotated Bibliography of Tropical Africa, published by the Twentieth Century Fund in 1956, was compiled by this institute under the supervision of Professor Daryll Forde, its Director.

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have maintained a steady interest in African social problems and have financed numerous studies in ethnography, sociology and education. The Rockefeller Foundation also undertook much of the yellow fever research done in west Africa in the interwar years. More recently the Ford Founda tion has made a number of grants to African institutions of higher learning, and to American scholars and universities (notably Northwestern Univer sity and Boston University) to further their African interests. Other money-granting agencies to do the same include the Fulbright Program, the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Guggenheim Foundation all of the United States; and the Horniman, Leverhulme and Nuffield Trusts of the United Kingdom. HUSBANDRY There is, needless to say, more to growth than soil and fertilizer. Vital though these are for the nurture of a land and its people, husbandry is a no less indispensable ingredient. Without it the best soil in the world can grow nothing but weeds and all that fertilizer can do is to make the weeds grow faster. Husbandry, whether of an economic, social or political sort, calls for effort, and in tropical Africa effort is irksome and expensive, psychologi cally if not always physically. It calls for skills of hand and eye, of timing and judgment, planning and persuasion skills which are still foreign to most Africans and which many non-Africans lose when they live too long in the land. It also calls for experience, which comes only after the skills have been learned; for faith, which is slow to take root in any environment and in tropical Africa is frequently regarded as a rather poor substitute for fatalism; and for integrity, that hardest of all qualities to nourish and soonest to wither under the brazen skies of selfishness. Which, perhaps, is merely another way of saying that good husbandry is fundamentally a matter of good husbandmen. So far most of the means of growth the capital, the research and the development plans have been manipulated by Europeans and other non-African groups. While there have never been enough means, and some of the manipulators of them have behaved ineptly or worse, the fact remains that it is the non-Africans who are primarily responsible for what has been done with these means and so for the general direction and over seeing of the growth process. To look at any manifestation of growth from a bridge to a ballot box, from a coal mine to a church is to look at the result of non-African husbandry. Increasingly, however, it is the African who is putting himself, or is being put, in charge of the husbandry; who is building the bridges, using the ballot boxes, controlling the coal mine labor ( and thus the coal mine) and carrying out the ministries of the church. With the exception of the white supremacists, this right of the

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African to do his own husbandry and be his own husbandman to be lord of the harvest, in fact is readily conceded. What is not so readily conceded is the ability of the African husband man to take over without damage to the growth process. It is difficult to talk with any European who has worked closely with African executives without being made aware of his doubts of their readiness for responsi bility and his fears for their ability to resist the seduction of the ever greater responsibilities they are facing. Granted, some of these doubts and fears may have their roots in regret at the passing of the controls from his own hands, while others may spring from remorse at not having made better use of his hands. But, on the whole, those most plagued by doubts and fears are those who have worked hardest to prepare the African for such responsibilities the district officer who has been striving to get his African assistants to put equity before self-interest; the business manager who has struggled to develop in his African subordinates the gift of fore sight and efficiency; the educator who has been seeking to raise the sights of his students above the tables of the market place; the missionary who has labored to furnish his converts with inner resources for their moral warfare. It is not that anybody who knows the educated African questions his ability to grow things to grow anything, for that matter but rather that, at the present point of his intellectual development, he lacks the pa tience to stay with slow-growing stock, and the conviction that the things he has been taught to grow are necessarily better than the things he sees growing in other mens fields. In other words, so the argument runs, he is still a man of little faith, and husbandry is no job for those of little faith. Africans themselves have these doubts and fears. Many African leaders-to-be, especially those who have lived abroad, express them pub licly, and many existing leaders express them privately. Comments such as the following, culled in the course of a recent tour of tropical Africa, are made too often, and by people too well informed, to be dismissed as the sought-after echoes of European opinion:
I do not see a rosy future for our country especially with our present leadership. Many of our leaders have no real qualifications. But most of us dont care enough about the future to worry about leadership. Life is easy, our people say; why should we worry? Everybody wants to become a conspicuous consumer. Veiy few people would be willing to curb their desire for furniture, fancy foodstuffs and clothes in favor of higher taxes for schools and hospitals. Very few of our newly qualified doctors are interested in becoming general practitioners in the bush where they are most sorely needed. They nearly all want to become high-priced specialists. I do not want to see our link with the Commonwealth severed. The British have done us good. Any complaints we have today are against our own people, especially our politicians.

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Western democracy needs to be modified to meet African needs. What we probably need most is a strong man who will tell us what to do and see that we do it. We need him soon if we are to survive the birth pains of nationhood. Independence sounded pretty good when we first heard about it. Now it is within our grasp, it has got us scared. We dont have enough of any skill to go it alone.

It would look from these reflections as if the greenness of a pasture bears something of an inverse ratio to the distance at which the pasture is viewed. The husbandry problems of tropical Africa will, we may take it, be resolved eventually. Whether or not the way in which they are resolved will flatter those who found the capital and did the research and develop ment is another question one that will be taken up in the concluding chapter.

CHAPTER

24

The Shape of Things

Th hpresent-day
traveler to tropical Africa is likely to return home with a feeling of great frustration, especially if he went there for those new and newsworthy generalizations it is every travelers joy and pain to bring to birth. Tropical Africa has always been an unaccommodating place for the generalize^ the number of things that apply to the whole of it has always been small, and in recent years their number has been getting smaller. It can no longer be characterized as dark if indeed it was ever as dark as our ignorance of it. Its rivers have been explored, its peaks scaled and its contours traced, in enough detail at least to prevent any wide-awake traveler from getting lost. Its rocks and soils are slowly giving up their secrets and its peoples are the subject of a very considerable anthropological literature. It cannot all be called dangerous, for while parts unquestionably are uncongenial to both Africans and nonAfricans, in plenty of others it is possible to live a lifetime without so much as seeing a poisonous snake or being bitten by a mosquito. It cannot all be called difficult, for whether we are thinking of the business of making a living, of keeping cool or warm, of getting about, or of getting on with ones neighbors, there are many localities where these things present no greater problem than they do in Connecticut or California. Why tropical Africa is such an unaccommodating place for the generalizer is not hard to see. To begin with, it is not really a place, except in the sense that it has definable limits. Rather is it a mosaic of places, the component pieces of which have so far eluded the generalizers grasp. The political map may show 40 or so clean-cut pieces, but there is nothing all-of-a-piece about the lives lived by the people in any one of them. To talk of the Belgian Congo, or of Ethiopia or Ghana, as though its peoples shared a common heritage, life, outlook and goals is as unrealistic as to suppose that all those who live behind Soviet-controlled frontiers share anything besides the Iron Curtain. The real places, as distinguished from those that have been con trived for political purposes, are those compounded of earth, air and water, cattle and crops, language and tradition, feelings and beliefs. Within the bounds of every major political unit, there are enough varia tions in some or all of these place components to produce enough differ entiations of land, life and livelihood to disconcert the most incorrigible
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generalizer. Around the slopes of the Ruwenzori Mountains there are as many kinds of climate as there are between Florida and Maine, and a correspondingly large number of kinds of vegetation. In Kenya there are no fewer than 70 different ethnic groups; in the four British East African territories of Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika and Zanzibar, at least 200. The fact that the great majority of the people who live within the borders of tropical Africa have dark skins, crinkly hair and thick lips, and live primitively and, by American standards, inadequately in a pesti lential environment has unfortunately made it hard for us to appreciate the order of magnitude of less palpable differences. Tropical Africa being not one place but many, and the many all differ ent, makes generalization difficult enough. What makes it more difficult is the differing rate of change to which these places are subject, as a result of which many of the differences between place and place are becoming sharper. Until the turn of the century, or thereabouts, the amplitude of economic, social and political differences was seldom great. There were wealthy ones and poor ones, but few very wealthy or very poor. There were rulers and ruled, masters and servants, but the divide between them was low and could often be crossed without much trouble. Now, however, large plantations and farmsteads adjoin minute shambas in many parts of the region. Stately homes not all of them belonging to Europeans or Asians rise from the ashes, so to speak, of mud-and-thatch hovels. Chain department stores with upward of 50 selling sections flourish where once stood the one-room diika and the one-man market stall. There are other differentiations, too: men with votes and men without them; men with Western learning and illiterate men; men of the tribe and detribalized men; men who can go anywhere and men who can go nowhere with out a passbook. There is a further obstacle or so it frequently seems to be in the path of the Western generalizer, namely, the difficulty of becoming im munized to the virus of suggestibility in an environment highly favorable to its growth. The yonder cloud of evidence that is shaped like a camel to one looks uncommonly like a weasel to another and a whale to a third, especially to those who are looking for weasels and whales. And it is always possible to find an African Polonius willing to concur in the opinions of an American or European Iiamlet, because in many com munities courtesy requires that a man be told what his informant thinks he would like to be told. For that matter, it is always possible to find an African Hamlet willing to persuade an American or European Polonius that he is seeing what the African would like him to see. The Shaping Clouds The truth is, of course, that in these days most African clouds bigger than a mans hand are continually changing their shape, thus compound-

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ing the difficulties of the generalized task. This is not to say that they are as incapable of classification as some people suppose, or that they are all without form and void. Even he who looks at them through the dark ened glass of prejudice and ignorance cannot fail to see that certain things are taking shape. First, and most fundamental, of these is the desire for a better life. By now most Africans know that it is not necessary for their children to be damned into the world with disease, or for themselves to be subject all their lives to its debilitating and incapacitating effects. They know, by looking at the Europeans and Asians about them, that there is no very good reason why they should go on forever being inadequately housed, clothed and fed. They see that some of their own kin have already done better for themselves; and there is no spur like the spur of a kinsmans suc cess. They know that there are people in the outside world who share their desire and are set on helping them realize it. This desire for better ment can be sensed almost everywhere the traveler goes. He meets it in the bush in the Africans increasing interest in money-making crops, co operatives and all-weather roads; in the villages, in his increasing support of literacy campaigns, clean water supplies and community development generally; and in the towns and mining compounds, in his increasing appreciation of the uses of in-service training and recreational facilities of all kinds. But it is not only indigenous Africans les noirs who have these rising expectations. Many Europeans and Asians who live in tropical Africa have them also. They have them because as farmers they seek to prosper in the land of their birth or adoption, as merchants they are inter ested in developing larger markets for their goods, as miners and in dustrialists they see in tropical Africa one of the largest sources of natural wealth in the world (wealth that can be turned to the Africans account as to their own), and as administrators they see a chance to do a new thing to educate Africans in the art of running schools, churches, businesses and governments. Second, and related, is the determination of more and more Africans to have a greater share not only in the equity of their country but in its management, local and regional no less than territorial. Without the latter, the former in the view of these Africans cannot be obtained, or, if obtained, preserved. Unless they have control of the legislative and fiscal machinery of their country, what assurance can there be that their increased share in the equity will not be spirited away from them in taxes and duties, or that the export of mining and manufacturing dividends will be kept within bounds? There are other arguments, too: that it is the divine right of every people to run its affairs in its own way; that self-government, no matter how bad, is more ennobling than non-self-government, no matter how efficient; that self-government with danger is infinitely better, as one

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west African newspaper used to put it, than subservience with tran quillity; and that there can be no peace in the world, and no prospect of any, so long as men arrogate to themselves the right to govern without the consent of the governed. Third, and likewise related, is the disposition of more and more Africans to do their own thinking and deciding about the kind of world they want to live in. This is expressing itself in many ways. Frequently it takes the form of skepticism concerning the suitability of Western political forms in countries still largely illiterate. Some political leaders, notably in Ghana, and in the Republics of Guinea and Sudan, have gone so far as to speak of the advantages of authoritarianism, and have begun to practice it, curbing, deporting and imprisoning those who do not stay close enough to heel. Where the leaders still lay claim to being democratic, they are, as a rule, speaking not of negative or parliamentary democracy but of positive democracy a democracy in which the government represents the true will of the people, whether or not the people themselves con sciously apprehend it. As Oliver Woods reminds us in a recent article, Of such are the peoples democracies, and indeed the fascist states of the period between the wars. From the western viewpoint, such a democracy does not qualify for the name at all. 1 Frequently, too, it takes the form of skepticism concerning the pro priety of Western standards of efficiency and integrity in a cultural en vironment where traditionally the race has been to the canny rather than the swift, and the battle to the smart in action rather than the strong in character, and where corruption has had no meaning because every ren dered service has had its reward. And almost everywhere there is skepti cism concerning the value of being too closely identified with the West. Neutralism has its supporters in every independent territory, as also does the idea that it is impossible for a country to be really autonomous while its peoples cling to other peoples morals, language and religion. Nor is it just a matter of reluctance to go along with Western ways. It is also, for many, a matter of finding some non-Western ways better suited to fthe African mind and situation: W preferring Islam, with its greater concessions to human frailty and its colorblindness, to Christian ity, with its call to discipline, its complex theology and confessional dif ferences, to say nothing of its identification with the ruling classes; of being more at home, and healthier, in a loose-fitting mantle than in a business suit; of remaining convinced that there are values in the old social order its family organization, initiation rites, its judicial procedures and its arts that are not surpassed, if indeed they are matched, in the white mans world. And how drab the white mans world can look alongside the Africans!
1 "Is Africa Going Too Far, Too Fast? Optima (Anglo American Corporation, Johannesburg), September 1959, p. 115.

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On this point Elspeth Huxley feels as strongly as many Africans. In comparing the Ashanti of the turn of the century with the Ashanti of the early 1950s, she has written:
How dull life has become, how monotonous, how anaemic, how inert! Im patience with British rule is due, I am sure, as much to this as to anything. It is called a revolt against imperialism, but in truth I think it is, in part at least, a revolt against ennui, and that when the British Empire finally crumbles we might write as its epitaph: We bored them to death. 2

How far this revolt against the West will go none can say, but there are many who share Elspeth Huxleys point of view on this also.
A revulsion to more natural ways? Perhaps the end of British rule [she was writing only of the four British West African territories! will see not a tidy, democratic, bourgeois state run by an imitation parliament, full of things we so much enjoy adult suffrage, housing committees, sewerage schemes, welfare clinics, reform schools and womens institutes but reversion to an older, harsher, more haphazard and satyric order, expressing the passions of Saturday night rather than the intentions of Sunday morning.3

And, fourth, in keeping with this growing desire of Africans to run their own show in their own way, is the determination to see that their less ad vanced neighbors get a chance to do the same. The wine of freedom is strong and quickly goes to the head. Most African leaders have developed a palate for it in recent years, and are commending its virtues to all and sundry. Some are doing more: they are giving away the recipe for it to anyone who asks. If there was one thing more than another that united the independent states of Africa at the Accra conference of 1958, it was the determination to render all possible assistance to the remaining dependent peoples of Africa in their struggle for independence. Judging from the latest turn of events in the Belgian Congo, Nyasaland, Tangan yika and elsewhere, it would look as though the recipe were in con siderable demand. The Haze Important as is this shaping and reshaping process, its dimensions should not be exaggerated. Most Africans are still caught in the old tribal web and cherish its security too well to exchange it for the laby rinthine ways of the white mans mind. Most of them, too, still live in unawareness of the world of cause and effect; for these, a shower of rain is still the work of the rain maker, and disease the result of bewitchment. What is going on is more truly a ferment, than a revolution, of rising expectations a ferment, moreover, that has barely begun in many areas. In some, such as the Turkana country of Kenya and the Karamojong
2 The Four Guineas: A Journey Through West Africa, Chatto & Windus, London, 1954, p. 127. 8 Ibid.

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country of Uganda, the traveler is tempted to wonder whether it has be gun at all, the people show so little curiosity about what is happening around them or concern about what is not happening to them. Where the ferment has begun, the expectations to which it has given rise are generally modest in scale and utilitarian in kind. Frequently they consist only of such things as a sewing machine, a bicycle, an umbrella, a second pair of trousers and a pocketful of cash. The ideological expecta tions produced by the ferment are usually still more modest. Some Afri cans appear to have none at all. A medical missionary in the Belgian Congo, speaking recently of his Lokele inftrmiers, said: There are very few of them, even the brightest, who have ideas about anything beyond their daily work. They never talk about their country, the administration, or the kind of world they want. They are apparently content with things as they are. An Ethiopian schoolmaster, questioned on the subject of expectations, spoke of being willing to wait for the future. Many Africans, in so far as they are waiting for anything, are waiting for the past, albeit refurbished and sanitized. They see more hope in traditionalism than in modernism; they find the consolations of sorcery, witch doctoring and juju greater than those of the social center, the mis sion church and the clinic. For them the highest and only loyalty is loyalty to family, kin and tribe. As the Times of London put it in an editorial (October 17,1957), published on the occasion of the appearance of Lord Haileys An African Survey: Revised 1956 ,
The tribe is still the strongest entity in Africa. It is stronger than the indi vidual, it is stronger than the nation, it is stronger than the race. The only points at which it is yielding are where urbanization is taking over. It may even be that the tribe is getting stronger rather than weaker.

We of the West, sired by democracy out of industrial progress and raised on a diet of advertising in a climate of emulation, find it difficult to believe that all Africans are not as we are. But isnt it time to concede the possibility of our thoughts not always being their thoughts, or our desires their desires? It is a supportable possibility. Just because a European builds a better house for Africans than the one in common use, it does not follow they will beat a pathway to its door. Often they do, but in some places they are more likely to stay away from it until somebody thinks of putting a high fence around it, thereby insuring the privacy they ap preciate more than plumbing. Because a government builds a beautiful school it does not follow that the African will send his children to it. Usually he does; but even after forty years of friendly pushing the Tanganyika government has difficulty in getting more than a few Masai to send their children to school. Because we are willing to work in factory, mine or marshalling yard day after day, week after week, year after year, it does not follow that the African is willing to do the same. Lately, members of the African elite have affirmed that there are very

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real differences between their way of looking at the world and ours. Some have gone so far as to speak of a distinctive African personality or negritude, characterized by esteem for the natural vitality of man rather than for the appurtenances he acquires for what he is spiritually rather than for what he can do materially.
Hurray for those who have never invented anything, Hurray for those who have never explored anything, Hurray for those who have never conquered anything, But who, in awe, give themselves up to the essence of things.

Could otherness be proclaimed less equivocally? True, Aime Cesaire, the writer of these lines, is not an African negro (he comes from Martinique), but his views on negritude are held in the highest regard by many of his African contemporaries, for the concept is, paradoxically, his invention. It is also time to question whether all the peoples of tropical Africa are as we are in their comprehension of what it takes to become a free nation. No doubt it takes nationalism, of which there is no shortage in the emergent states. No doubt it takes political leadership, social resilience and the ability to make friends of other nations of all of which there are signs. But it also takes the right of self-determination, as the United Nations is continually insisting. The opening words of an article debated by the Social Commission of the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations in the fall of 1955 read: All peoples and all nations shall have the right of self-determination, namely, the right freely to determine their political, economic, social and cultural status. But if self-determination means anything in tropical Africa, it means freedom for each of the 600-odd groups to be autonomous. These groups have as much identity as the eighteenth-century Americans and the twentieth-century Jews, and as much right to the appellation of peoples. Yet this fact is seldom recog nized in the words, let alone the deeds, of any leader whose country has newly come to autonomy. Even before Ghana gained its independence, Dr. Nkrumah let it clearly be understood that the principle of selfdetermination must not be carried too far. On more than one recent oc casion the leaders of the Republic of Sudan have made it equally clear that attempts by the Negro peoples living in the pagan south to rid themselves of the hegemony of the non-Negro peoples living in the Moslem north would likewise meet with armed resistance as, indeed, they have done. The still more recently instated champions of selfgovernment in the Belgian Congo and elsewhere have spoken in much the same tenor. They promise freedom from external rule, but not free dom for all the peoples in their countries to determine how they shall govern themselves, or be governed. If the plans of the dominant political parties come to pass, some Congolese peoples will get a lot less freedom than others after June 30, 1960.

440

T H E S HA PE OF THINGS

Just as it takes self-determinism to become a free nation, so it takes resources to remain one. Here, too, we could wish for a greater compre hension of what is involved. Nations need food as well as freedom; lumber and livestock no less than leaders; durable soils, water supplies and economic minerals more than spellbinders. Some of the newly inde pendent states and those about to be independent, such as Nigeria, can make a good showing on most of these scores; some, like Somalia, cannot. While the former may come in time to support the full paraphernalia of power, the latter have next to no chance of doing so. An ordinary revenue of less than $18 million (most of it furnished, up to now, by the Italian and British administrations) is not enough to provide Somalia with an adequate school system, let alone with an army, air force, ambassadorial, consular and civil services, trade commissions and the like. But no emergent country yet has enough revenues or, what amounts to the same thing, enough developed resources whether mines or mills, commerce or capital, skilled labor or management to be able to main tain itself in the estate to which its European founders were accustomed and which many of its leaders consider to be their charter right. The acco lade of independence confers many precious gifts, but few of them can be traded for cash and used to erase poverty. If the experience of the younger Asian nations is any guide, even freedom, that most precious gift of all, sometimes means little more than the power to decide how you would cut your cake if you had one. For the discarded governments are seldom disposed to maintain the flow of funds and skills at pre-independence levels, and there are few investors in their lands, or elsewhere in the free world, who care to put money into countries whose leaders are un schooled in the handling of large enterprises, public or private, and who show a tendency to conduct their affairs in the manner of dictators. It would look, therefore, as though most of the peoples of tropical Africa will have to settle for something less than self-rule and riches. If they dont there will be no peace for them, or for the rest of Africa. If they do, there may not be too much peace either, because it is always possible to change one master for a worse. Some people believe they have already done this; some, in Nigeria, the Cameroons, Somalia and else where, fear they may be doing it in the not too distant future. None of this should be taken to imply that the answer to the problems raised by the shapelessness of tropical Africa its plethora of instances and dearth of generalities, its embarrassment of social riches and lack of economic and political experience, its wealth of peoples and its poverty of nations lies in attempting to find a master mold, let alone in attempt ing to mold it in the image of Europe or North America. Nor should it be taken to imply that we should ignore the differences that divide African from African and African from Asian, and both from European, as though

T H E S HA P E OF THINGS

441

they were of no more concern than the differences between one shapeless cloud and the next. Rather the implication is that this quite fantastic diversity should be seen for what it is: at once an enrichment of the color, form and substance of African life, a hindrance to the early satisfaction of the demand for sovereignty, whether political or economic, and a chal lenge to statesmanship, understanding and humility. With statesmanship indigenous and alien it should not prove im possible to bring into being cohesive, viable states capable of keeping their sanity and integrity in the face of flattery, browbeating and intrigue. With understanding, it ought to be possible to appreciate the desire, and the need, of the 600-odd peoples of tropical Africa to retain something of their individuality their sense of being valued for what they are, and not merely for what they can do. With humility, it might even be possible for those who go to tropical Africa, whatever their purpose, and those who live there, whatever their status, to keep the right look in their eyes, with out which all words, skills and benefactions are of little worth. There is certainly nothing novel about this formula; indeed, it is as old as the prophet Micah. But has there ever been a truer touchstone, whether for men or for nations, than to do justly, love mercy and walk humbly with ones God?

Epilogue
The day for Africa is yet to come.
David Livingstone, writing from Bambarre, near Lake Tanganyika, to his son Thomas in 1869

We live and learn, I trust, and the greatest of all lessons in Africa is wisdom to adapt the how to the when.
Daniel Crawford, writing from Lake Mweru in 1893

When minds are the same, that which is far off will come.
Swahili proverb

Selected Territorial Data

SOURCES
United Nations publications, as follows:
Yearbook of International Trade Statistics, 1 9 5 8 ; D em ographic Yearbook , 1 9 5 8 ; Statistical Yearbook , 1 9 5 9 ; Econom ic Survey of Africa Since 1 9 5 0 (1959); also T h e Statesm ans YearBook , 1 9 5 9 , Macmillan & Co., Ltd., London, 1959, and various territorial publications.

NOTES
Information here given is the latest obtainable in the summer of 1960; it is for the most part more recent than that given in the body of the book, which is based on sources available at the end of 1959 or early 1960. All figures are approximate. 1958 and 1959 figures are, in most cases, provisional. Dollars are U. S. dollars if not otherwise specified. Exports: Figures are f.o.b. Leading exports: Items are arranged alphabetically. Imports: Figures are c.i.f. Because of their similarity from territory to territory, import lists have been omitted. As a rule, the leading imports fall into one or more of the following categories: beverages and foodstuffs, metal ware and machinery, petroleum products, textiles and clothing, transport equipment. S = special trade. (Special imports are the combined total of imports directly for domestic consumption and withdrawals from bonded warehouse, or free zone, for domestic consumption or transformation. Special exports comprise exports of national merchandise, i.e., goods wholly or partly produced or manufactured in the country, together with exports of nationalized goods, i.e., special imports which are later exported without transformation.) G general trade. (General imports are the combined total of imports directly for domestic consumption and imports into bonded warehouse or free zone. General exports are the combined total of national exports and re-exports, i.e., exports of nationalized goods plus goods which, after importation, move from bonded warehouse, or free zone, without having been transformed.) Motor vehicles: Figures are for passenger and commercial vehicles in use. Schools and enrollments: Figures include kindergarten, primary, secondary, teacher-training and higher types of education.

445

446
Political status Capital Area Population Per capita income External trade (S)

S E L E C T E D T E R R I T O R I A L DATA

ANGOLA
Overseas province of Portugal Luanda 481.000 square miles 4.5 million (1958 estimate); non-African population: 140,000 (1955), of whom 110,000 were Europeans Under $100 (1955-1957 average) Exports: $128.3 million (1958) Imports: $130.0 million (1958) Leading exports: coffee, diamonds, fish (inc. meal), maize, sisal 34,100 (1958) Escudo ( = 100 centavos): 28.9 escudos = $1 U. S. 3,124 million escudos (1956) 2,580 million escudos (1956) 1,870; 92,500 (1957) Portuguese

Motor vehicles Currency unit Revenue Expenditure Schools and enrollments Official language

BECHUANALAND
Political status Capital Area Population Per capita income External trade (G) British protectorate Mafeking in Cape Province of South Africa serves as administrative headquarters 275.000 square miles 334.000 (1958 estimate) Under $100 (1955-1957 average) Exports: $6.75 million (1957) Imports: $7.64 million (1957) Leading exports: asbestos, butter and butter fat, carcasses, cattle, sorghum Not available South African pound: pound par value same as British

Motor vehicles Currency unit Revenue Expenditure Schools and enrollments Official language

1 .4 5 million (1957-1958) 1 .6 6 million (1957-1958) 190; 29,500 (1957) English

SE L E C T E D T E R R ITO R IA L D ATA

447

BELGIAN CONGO
Political status Belgian colony until June 30, 1960, when it became the independent Republic of the Congo. Katanga Province declared its total independence from the Congo on July 11, 1960. Leopoldville 905.000 square miles 13.6 million (1958); non-African population: 116,000, of whom approximately 87,000 were Belgians $76 (1957) Exports: $404.1 million (1958) Imports: $359.7 million (1958) Leading exports: cobalt, coffee, copper, cotton, diamonds, palm kernels and palm oil, rubber 58.000 (1958) Congolese franc, interchangeable with Belgian franc 12,471 million francs (1958) 12,438 million francs (1958) 30,520 (1957); 1,700,000 (1959) French and Flemish

Capital Area Population Per capita income External trade (S) (including RuandaUrundi) Motor vehicles Currency unit Revenue Expenditure Schools and enrollments Official languages

BRITISH CAMEROONS
Political status United Nations Trust Territory. The northern part is attached to the provinces of Bornu, Benue and Adamawa in the Northern Region of Nigeria; the southern part is administered separately as the Southern Cameroons under the Federal Govern ment of Nigeria. In U. N.-supervised plebiscites to be held before the end of March 1961, both parts will choose union with either Nigeria or the Republic of Cameroon. Lagos 34,000 square miles 1.6 million (1958 estimate) Nigeria as a whole: $69 (1956) Exports: 5 .3 5 million (1957) Imports: 2 .3 7 million (1957) Leading exports: bananas, cocoa, palm kernels, rubber Not available (included with Nigeria) West African Currency Board pound: same as British pound par value

Capital Area Population Per capita income External trade (G)

Motor vehicles Currency unit

44$
Revenue Expenditure Schools and enrollments Official language

SE L E C T E D TER R ITO R IA L DATA

B r i t i s h c a m e r o o n s ( continued)

1 .0 7 million (1958-1959 estimate) 1 .2 8 million (1958-1959 estimate) 475; 57,000 (1957) English

BRITISH SOMALILAND (SOMALILAND PROTECTORATE)

Political status British protectorate until June 26, 1960, when it became independent; five days later it became part of the new Republic of Somalia Hargeisa 68.000 square miles 650.000 (1958); non-African population: mately 1,000 Under $100 (1955-1957 average) Exports: $3.9 million (1957) Imports: $11.3 million (1957) Leading exports: hides and skins, livestock 700 (1958) East African shilling: 20 shillings^ 1 East African 9 9 6 ,3 0 0 (1957-1958) 1 .6 0 million (1957-1958) 40; 2,250 (1957) English and Arabic approxi

Capital Area Population Per capita income External trade (G)

Motor vehicles Currency unit Revenue Expenditure Schools and enrollments Official languages

CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC (formerly Ubangi-Shari)

Political status Autonomous state in the French Community from December 1, 1958 until August 13, 1960, when it became an independent state within the Com munity. Has joined with neighboring states in Union of Central African Republics. UbangiShari was an overseas territory of France and part of French Equatorial Africa. Bangui 238,000 square miles 1.2 million (1958); non-African population: approxi mately 5,000 (mostly French) Under $100 (1955-1957 average)

Capital Area Population Per capita income

S E L E C T E D T E R R I T O R I A L DATA External trade (S)

449

Exports: $14.8 million (1958) Imports: $20.6 million (1958) Leading exports: coffee, cotton, diamonds, wood Not available (included under French Equatorial Africa) Franc C .F.A .* 1,792 million francs C.F.A. (1958) Not available (included under French Equatorial Africa) French

Motor vehicles Currency unit Budget Schools and enrollments Official language

CHAD, REPUBLIC OF (formerly Chad)

Political status Autonomous state in the French Community from November 26, 1958 until August 11, 1960, when it became an independent state within the Com munity. Has joined with neighboring states in Union of Central African Republics. Formerly it was an overseas territory of France and part of French Equatorial Africa. Fort Lamy 495,500 square miles 2.6 million (1958); non-African population: approxi mately 4,000 (mostly French) Under $100 (1955-1957 average) Exports: $26 million (1958) Imports: $34 million (1958) Leading exports: cotton, fish, livestock, peanuts Not available (included under French Equatorial Africa) Franc C.F.A. 2,519 million francs C.F.A. (1958) Not available (included under French Equatorial Africa) French

Capital Area Population Per capita income External trade (S)

Motor vehicles Currency unit Budget Schools and enrollments Official language

COMMONWEALTH EAST AFRICA

Constituent territories Kenya, Tanganyika, Uganda, Zanzibar (including Pemba), and, until it became part of the new Republic of Somalia in mid-1960, British Somali land (Somaliland Protectorate). Services common to the first three are administered by the East Africa High Commission, but neither political fed eration nor fusion of the existing governments is involved.

* One franc C.F.A. (colonies frangaises cTAfrique) two metropolitan French francs.

450

S E L E C T E D T E R R I T O R I A L DATA

COMMONWEALTH WEST AFRICA

Constituent territories British Cameroons, Gambia, Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone

COMORO ARCHIPELAGO
Political status Capital Area Population Per capita income External trade (S) Overseas territory of France, and so part of the French Republic Dzaoudzi 838 square miles 182,000 (1958) $180 (1955-1957 average) Exports: Imports: Leading plants, $2.7 million (1957) $2.9 million (1957) exports: cocoa, coffee, copra, perfume sisal, vanilla

Motor vehicles Currency unit Budget Schools and enrollments Official language

Not available Franc C.F.A. 314 million francs C.F.A. (1958) 39; 2,900 (1958) French

CONGO, REPUBLIC OF (THE) (formerly Middle Congo)

Political status Autonomous state in the French Community from November 28, 1958 until August 15, 1960, when it became an independent state (now called Repub lic of Congo) within the Community. Has joined with neighboring states in Union of Central Afri can Republics. Middle Congo was an overseas territory of France and part of French Equatorial Africa. Brazzaville. Pointe Noire is expected to replace Brazzaville eventually. 132.000 square miles 780.000 (1958); non-African population: mately 10,000 (mostly French) Under $100 (1955-1957 average) Exports: $15.6 million Imports: $44.0 million Leading exports: lead oil, peanuts, tobacco, (1958) (1958) ore, palm kernels and palm wood approxi

Capital Area Population Per capita income External trade (S)

Motor vehicles

Not available (included under French Equatorial Africa)

S E L E C T E D T E R R I T O R I A L DATA Currency unit Budget Schools and enrollments Official language Franc C.F.A. 2,397 million francs C.F.A. (1958)

451

Not available (included under French Equatorial Africa) French

COUNCIL OF THE ENTENTE

Constituent territories Republic of Dahomey, Republic of the Ivory Coast, Republic of the Niger, Republic of the Upper Volta (q.v.). These states were at one time part of French West Africa.

DAHOMEY, REPUBLIC OF (formerly Dahomey)

Political status Autonomous state in the French Community from December 4, 1958 until August 1, 1960, when it became an independent state within the Commu nity. Has joined with neighboring states in Coun cil of the Entente. Formerly it was an overseas territory of France and part of French West Africa. Porto Novo 44,500 square miles 1.75 million (1959); non-African population: approxi mately 3,000 (mostly French) Under $100 (1955-1957 average) Exports: $13.0 million (1958) Imports: $17.3 million (1958) Leading exports: palm kernels and palm oil, peanuts Not available (included under French West Africa) Franc C.F.A. 3,534 million francs C.F.A. (1958) Not available (included under French West Africa) French

Capital Area Population Per capita income External trade (S)

Motor vehicles Currency unit Budget Schools and enrollments Official language

ETHIOPIA AND ERITREA, FEDERATION OF

Political status Independent state. Eritrea became an autonomous unit within the Federation, under the Ethiopian Crown, in 1952. Addis Ababa (Federation); Asmara (Eritrea) 457,000 square miles (Ethiopia, 409,000 square miles; Eritrea, 48,000 square miles)

Capital Area

452
Population Per capita income External trade (G)

S E L E C T E D T E R R I T O R I A L DATA

ETHIOPIA AND ERITREA, FEDERATION OF

(continued)

Estimates vary from under 12 million to 21.6 million (U. N. estimate in 1958). $30 (1957) Exports: $57.8 million (1958) Imports: $79.3 million (1958) Leading exports: coffee, hides and skins (sheep and goats), oilseeds, pulses 19,800 (1958) Ethiopian dollar (divided into 100 cents): one Ethio pian dollars approximately 40 cents U. S. $ Ethiopian 115.01 million (1955-1956) $ Ethiopian 130.41 million (1955-1956) Excluding mission and Ethiopian Church schools and enrollments: 610; 141,000 (1956) Amharic and English

Motor vehicles Currency unit Revenue Expenditure Schools and enrollments Official languages

FRENCH CAMEROONS
Political status French-administered United Nations Trust Territory until January 1, 1960, when it became the inde pendent Republic of Cameroon Yaounde 167,000 square miles 3.2 million (1958 estimate); non-African population: 16,000 (1956 estimate) $142 (1956) Exports: $106.1 million (1958) Imports: $102.1 million (1958) Leading exports: bananas, cocoa, coffee, cotton, pea nuts, rubber, wood 25,900 (1958) Franc C.F.A. Balanced at 11,671 million francs C.F.A. (1956) 2,600; 306,000 (1958) French

Capital Area Population Per capita income External trade (S)

Motor vehicles Currency unit Budget Schools and enrollments Official language

S E L E C T E D T E R R I T O R I A L DATA

453

FRENCH EQUATORIAL AFRICA

Constituent territories Four overseas territories of France which in 1958 be came autonomous states, and in 1960 independent states, within the French Community. The four, with their new names, are: Chad (Republic of Chad), Gabon (Gabon Republic), Middle Congo (Republic of Congo), Ubangi-Shari (Central Afri can Republic). Three of these states have formed the Union of Central African Republics, to which the fourth, the Gabon Republic, is geographically and economically linked. $126 (1956) 25,500 (1958) 1,310; 205,000 (1957)

Per capita income Motor vehicles Schools and enrollments

FRENCH SOMALILAND
Political status Capital Area Population Per capita income External trade (S) Overseas territory of France, and so part of the French Republic Djibouti 8.500 square miles 69,000 (1958); non-African population, excluding Arabs: approximately 3,000 (mostly French) Under $100 (1955-1957 average) Exports: $10.2 million (1957) Imports: $10.2 million (1957) Leading exports: hides and salt. The territory also does an important transit trade with Ethiopia, most of whose trade passes through the port of Djibouti. 1.500 (1956) Djibouti franc ( = 2.3 metropolitan French francs) 1,123 million Djibouti francs (1959) 22; 2,500 (1957) French

Motor vehicles Currency unit Budget Schools and enrollments Official language

454

S E L E C T E D T E R R I T O R I A L DATA

FRENCH WEST AFRICA

Constituent territories Eight overseas territories of France which in 1958, with one exception (French Guinea), became au tonomous states, and in 1960 independent states, within the French Community; French Guinea opted for independence outside the Community. The eight, with their new names, are: Dahomey (Republic of Dahomey), French Guinea (Republic of Guinea), French Sudan (Sudanese Republic), Ivory Coast (Republic of the Ivory Coast), Mauri tania (Islamic Republic of Mauritania), Niger (Re public of the Niger), Senegal (Republic of Senegal), Upper Volta (Republic of the Upper Volta). The Sudanese Republic and the Republic of Senegal have combined in the Mali Federation. The four following have combined in the Council of the Entente: Republic of Dahomey, Republic of the Ivory Coast, Republic of the Niger, Republic of the Upper Volta. $133 (1956) 80,900 (1957) 3,000; 448,000 (1957)

Per capita income Motor vehicles Schools and enrollments

GABON REPUBLIC (formerly Gabon)

Political status Autonomous state in the French Community from November 28, 1958 until August 17, 1960, when it became an independent state within the Com munity. Geographically and economically linked to neighboring states in Union of Central African Republics. Formerly it was an overseas territory of France and part of French Equatorial Africa. Libreville 103,000 square miles 417,000 (1958); non-African population: mately 4,000 (mostly French) Under $100 (1955-1957 average) Exports: $33.6 million (1958) Imports: $31.0 million (1958) Leading exports: cocoa, gold, petroleum, wood Not available (included under French Equatorial Africa) Franc C.F.A. 1,826 million francs C.F.A. (1958) Not available (included under French Equatorial Africa) French approxi

Capital Area Population Per capita income External trade (S)

Motor vehicles Currency unit Budget Schools and enrollments Official language

S E L E C T E D T E R R I T O R I A L DATA

455

GAMBIA
Political status Capital Area Population Per capita income External trade (G) British colony and protectorate Bathurst 4.000 square miles 289.000 (1958 estimate) $56-$70 (1957) Exports: $12.7 million (1958) Imports: $10.9 million (1958) Leading exports: palm kernels, peanuts 1,100 (1958) West African Currency Board pound: same as British pound -1.69 million (1958) 1.81 million (1958) 57; 6,600 (1957) English par value

Motor vehicles Currency unit Revenue Expenditure Schools and enrollments Official language

GHANA
Political status Self-governing dominion of the British Common wealth from March 6, 1957 until July 1, 1960, when it became a republic (while maintaining its Commonwealth tie). Ghana is composed of the territories formerly constituting the Gold Coast and Togoland under United Kingdom administra tion. Accra 92.000 square miles 4.8 million (1958 estimate*); non-African population: approximately 7,000 (mostly Europeans) $194 (1957) Exports: $263.1 million (1958) Imports: $236.9 million (1958) Leading exports: bauxite, cocoa, diamonds, gold, manganese, wood (logs, sawn timber) 30,800 (1958) Ghana pound (issued since July 14, 1958). West African Currency Board pound remains legal ten der. Both are interchangeable at par with British pound. 4 8 .5 million (1958-1959)

Capital Area Population Per capita income External trade (G)

Motor vehicles Currency unit

Revenue

* The provisional results of the 1960 census put the population at 6.7 million.

456
ghana

S E L E C T E D T E R R I T O R I A L DATA

(continued)
Jo 47.0 million (1958-1959) 5,050; 634,000 (1958) English

Expenditure Schools and enrollments Official language

GUINEA, REPUBLIC OF (formerly French Guinea)

Political status Independent state since October 2, 1958. French Guinea was an overseas territory of France and part of French West Africa. Conakry 95,000 square miles 2.5 million (1958); non-African population: approxi mately 7,500, of whom 5,000 or so were French Under $100 (1955-1957 average) Exports: Imports: Leading coffee, $29.1 million (1956) $37.7 million (1956) exports: bananas, bauxite (and alumina), diamonds, iron ore, palm kernels

Capital Area Population Per capita income External trade (S)

Motor vehicles Currency unit Budget Schools and enrollments Official language

Not available (included under French West Africa) Franc C.F.A. until early 1960; thereafter Guinea franc of the same par value $6,328 million francs C.F.A. (1958) Not available (included under French West Africa) French

IVORY COAST, REPUBLIC OF THE (formerly the Ivory Coast)

Political status Autonomous state in the French Community from December 4, 1958 until August 7, 1960, when it became an independent state within the Com munity. Has joined with neighboring states in Council of the Entente. Formerly it was an over seas territory of France and part of French West Africa. Abidjan Area Population Per capita income External trade (S) 124,500 square miles 3.1 million (1958); non-African population: approxi mately 20,000 (mostly French) Under $100 (1955-1957 average) Exports: $125.8 million (1958) Imports: $91.2 million (1958) Leading exports: bananas, cocoa, coffee, wood

S E L E C T E D T E R R I T O R I A L DATA Motor vehicles Currency unit Budget Schools and enrollments Official language

457

Not available (included under French West Africa) Franc C.F.A. 11,786 million francs C.F.A. Not available (included under French West Africa) French

KENYA
Political status Capital Area Population British colony and protectorate Nairobi 225.000 square miles 6.35 million (1958 estimate); non-African population: approximately 270,900, of whom 64,700 were Europeans, 165,000 Indians, Pakistanis and Goans, and 35,500 Arabs $78 (1957) Exports: $87.50 million (1957) Imports: $201.60 million (1957) Leading exports: coffee, hides and skins, sisal, sodium carbonate, tea, wattle extract 64,800 (1958) Shilling (East African Currency Board): 20 shillings = 1 sterling 4 0 .0 6 million (1958-1959) 4 0 .3 2 million (1958-1959) 4,200; 564,500 (1957) English. (Swahili is widely employed in government and commerce.)

Per capita income External trade (G)

Motor vehicles Currency unit Revenue Expenditure Schools and enrollments Official language

LIBERIA
Political status Capital Area Population Per capita income External trade (S) Free and Independent llcpublic (since 1847) Monrovia 44.000 square miles 1.25 million (1956 estimate); non-African popula tion: approximately 1,000 Under $100 (1955-1957 average) Exports: $40.3 million (1958) Imports: $27.8 million (1958) Leading exports: diamonds, iron ore, palm kernels, rubber

458
L ib e ria

S E L E C T E D T E R R I T O R I A L DATA
( continued)

Motor vehicles Currency unit

Not available U. S. dollar (since 1942). There is also a Liberian coinage (of various denominations from *2 cent to 50 cents) in silver and copper. $20.1 million (1957 estimate) $19.2 million (1957 estimate) 610; 55,500 (1956) English

Revenue Expenditure Schools and enrollments Official language

MALAGASY REPUBLIC (formerly Madagascar)

Political status Autonomous state in the French Community from October 21, 1958 until March 27, 1960, when it became an independent state within the Com munity. Madagascar was an overseas territory of France. Tananarive 228,000 square miles 5.2 million (1958); non-African population: approxi mately 25,000 (mostly French) $119 (1956) Exports: $81.0 million (1958) Imports: $106.2 million (1958) Leading exports: cloves, coffee, rice, sugar, tobacco, vanilla 34,600 (1958) Franc C.F.A. General: 14,571 million francs C.F.A. (1958) Provincial: 13,381 million francs C.F.A. (1958) 2,680; 345,500 (1957) French

Capital Area Population Per capita income External trade (S)

Motor vehicles Currency unit Budget Schools and enrollments Official language

MALI FEDERATION
Constituent territories Political status Republic of Senegal and Sudanese Republic (q.v.) Independent state in the French Community since June 20, 1960

S E L E C T E D T E R R I T O R I A L DATA

459

MAURITANIA, ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF (formerly Mauritania)

Political status Autonomous state in the French Community since November 28, 1958; due to proclaim itself an independent state within the Community on No vember 28, 1960. Formerly it was an overseas territory of France and part of French West x\frica. Nouakchott (under construction). Formerly the capi tal was St. Louis (Senegal). 419.000 square miles 640.000 (1958); non-African population: mately 1,600 (mostly French) Under $100 (1955-1957 average) Exports: see under Senegal Imports: see under Senegal Leading exports: fish, gum arabic, livestock (cattle, sheep), salt Not available (included under French West Africa) Franc C.F.A. 1,491 million francs C.F.A. (1958) Not available (included under French West Africa) French. (National language: Arabic) approxi

Capital Area Population Per capita income External trade (S)

Motor vehicles Currency unit Budget Schools and enrollments Official language

MOZAMBIQUE
Political status Capital Area Population Overseas province of Portugal Lourengo Marques 302,000 square miles 6.2 million (1958); non-African population: approxi mately 118,000 (1955), of whom 66,000 were Europeans Under $100 (1955-1957 average) Exports: $70.0 million (1958) Imports: $114.9 million (1958) Leading exports: cashew nuts, copra, cotton, sisal, sugar, tea 24,100 (1956) Escudo (= 1 0 0 centavos); 1,000 escudos = 1 conto; 28.9 escudos = $ l U .S. 2.53 million contos (1957) 2,880; 371,500 (1957) Portuguese

Per capita income External trade (S)

Motor vehicles Currency unit Budget Schools and enrollments Official language

460
Political status

S E L E C T E D T E R R I T O R I A L DATA

NIGER, REPUBLIC OF THE (formerly Niger)

Autonomous state in the French Community from December 19, 1958 until August 3, 1960, when it became an independent state within the Com munity. Has joined with neighboring states in Council of the Entente. Formerly it was an over seas territory of France and part of French West Africa. Niamey 459,000 square miles 2.5 million (1958); non-African population: approxi mately 3,000 (mostly French) Under $100 (1955-1957 average) Exports: $15.2 million (1958) Imports: $8.8 million (1958) Leading exports: gum arabic, livestock, peanuts, skins and hides Not available (included under French West Africa) Franc C.F.A. 3,613 million francs C.F.A. (1958) Not available (included under French West Africa) French

Capital Area Population Per capita income External trade

Motor vehicles Currency unit Budget Schools and enrollments Official language

NIGERIA, FEDERATION OF
Political status British colony and protectorate, due to become an independent country within the Commonwealth on October 1, 1960 Lagos 339,000 square miles, excluding British Cameroons 34.6 million (1958 estimate); non-African population: 10,000 (1956 estimate) $69 (1956), including British Cameroons Exports: $380.0 million (1958), inc. Brit. Cameroons Imports: $467.8 million (1958), inc. Brit. Cameroons Leading exports: cocoa, palm kernels and palm oil, peanuts and peanut oil, tin, wood 42,400 (1958), includin Cameroons registrations in British par v alue

Capital Area Population Per capita income External trade (G)

Motor vehicles Currency unit Revenue Expenditure

West African Currency Board pound: same as British pound

7 2 .0 1 million (approved estimate 1958-1959) 6 4 .2 4 million (approved estimate 1958-1959)

S E L E C T E D T E R R I T O R I A L DATA Schools and enrollments Official language

461

16,400; 2,526,000 (1957). These figures include schools and enrollments in British Cameroons. English

NORTHERN RHODESIA
Political status Capital Area Population Per capita income External trade British protectorate, one of the three territories form ing the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland Lusaka 288.000 square miles 2.3 million (1958); non-African population: approxi mately 80,000, of whom 72,000 were Europeans Federation as a whole: $135 (1958) Since 1953 this has been computed on a Federationwide basis, and no figures have been issued for the in dividual territories. 39.000 (1958) Rhodesian sterling pound, interchangeable at par with

Motor vehicles Currency unit Revenue Expenditure Schools and enrollments Official language

1 5 .1 million (1958-1959) 1 5 .0 million (1958-1959) African only: 1,500 (1956); 244,750 (1958) English

NYASALAND
Political status Capital Area Population Per capita income External trade British protectorate, one of the three territories form ing the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland Zomba 45,000 square miles 2.7 million (1958); non-African population: approxi mately 20,000, of whom 8,500 were Europeans Probably less than $50; Federation as a whole: $135 (1958) Since 1953 this has been computed on a Federationwide basis, and no figures have been issued for the individual territories. 9,200 (1958) Rhodesian sterling pound, interchangeable at par with

Motor vehicles Currency unit Revenue Expenditure

5 .3 6 million (1958-1959) 7 .2 8 million (1958-1959)

462
Schools and enrollments Official language

S E L E C T E D T E R R I T O R I A L DATA

n y a s a l a n d ( continued)

African only: 3,300 (1956); 270,000 (1958) English

PORTUGUESE GUINEA
Political status Capital Area Population Per capita income External trade (S) Overseas province of Portugal Bissau 14,000 square miles 559,000 (1958); non-African population: about 7,500, of whom about 2,500 were Europeans Probably less than $50 Exports: $6.5 million (1957) Imports: $8.0 million (1957) Leading exports: hides and skins, palm oil, rice, seeds 440 (1953) Escudo ( = 100 centavos): 28.9 escudos = $ l U .S . 131.0 million escudos (1956) 135.1 million escudos (1956) 170; 11,500 (1957) Portuguese

Motor vehicles Currency unit Revenue Expenditure Schools and enrollments Official language

RHODESIA AND NYASALAND, FEDERATION OF

Political status The Federation, formed in 1953, consists of the selfgoverning colony of Southern Rhodesia and the protectorates of Northern Rhodesia and Nyasa land, all of which retain their pre-Federation con stitutional status. The Federation is also known as the Central African Federation. Salisbury 483,500 square miles 7.8 million (1958); non-African population: approxi mately 325,000, of whom 290,000 were Europeans $135 (1958) Exports: $380.2 million (1958) Imports: $441.4 million (1958) Leading exports: chrome ore, clothing, cobalt, cop per, gold, lead, maize, meat, tea, tobacco, zinc 141,600 (1958) Rhodesian pound, interchanging at par with sterling

Capital Area Population Per capita income External trade (G)

Motor vehicles Currency unit

S E L E C T E D T E R R I T O R I A L DATA Revenue Expenditure Schools and enrollments Official language 5 1 .4 million (1958-1959)

463

7 3 .2 million, including 2 1 .9 million from loan funds (1958-1959) 7,600; 815,000 (1954-1957) English

RUANDA-URUNDI
Political status Belgian-administered United Nations Trust Terri tory (for economic purposes it has been treated as part of the Belgian Congo). The territory is ex pected to become independent in 1961 or 1962. Usumbura 21.000 square miles 4.7 million (1958); non-African population: 10,500, of whom more than 7,000 were Europeans Under $100 (1955-1957 average) Exports: $48.29 million (1957) Imports: $50.72 million (1957) Leading exports: coffee, cotton, palm products, pyrethrum, tin 4,700 (1958) Congolese franc, interchangeable with Belgian franc 1,024 million francs (1958) 1,018 million francs (1958) 2,900; 246,000 (1957) French and Flemish

Capital Area Population Per capita income External trade (S)

Motor vehicles Currency unit Revenue Expenditure Schools and enrollments Official languages

SAO TOME AND PRINCIPE

Political status Capital Area Population Overseas province of Portugal Sao Tome 372 square miles 62.000 (1958 estimate); non-African population: ap proximately 5,500, of whom 1,200 were Euro peans Under $100 (1955-1957 average) Exports: $6.0 million (1956) Imports: $4.6 million (1956) Leading exports: cinchona, cocoa, coffee, copra, palm oil 700 (1957)

Per capita income External trade (S)

Motor vehicles

4,64
sa o to m e

SELECTED
a n d p rin cip e

T E R R IT O R IA L D ATA

(< continued)

Currency unit Revenue Expenditure Schools and enrollments Official language

Escudo ( = 100 centavos); 28.9 escudos = $1 U .S. 71.9 million escudos (1957) 66.9 million escudos (1957) 23; 2,900 (1957) Portuguese

SENEGAL, REPUBLIC OF (formerly Senegal)

Political status Autonomous state in the French Community from November 25, 1958 until June 20, 1960, when the Mali Federation (in which it had joined with the Sudanese Republic) became an independent state within the Community. The government of the Mali Federation exercises authority over a wide field, including justice, security, education, transport and economic policy. Senegal was for merly an overseas territory of France and part of French West Africa. Dakar 76,000 square miles 2.3 million (1958); non-African population: approxi mately 50,000 (mostly French) Under $100 (1955-1957 average) Exports: $115.2 million (1958)* Imports: $175.0 million (1958)* Leading exports: peanuts and peanut oil, phosphates Not available (included under French West Africa) Franc C.F.A. 13,876 million francs C.F.A. (1958) Not available (included under French West Africa)

Capital Area Population Per capita income External trade (S)

Motor vehicles Currency unit Budget Schools and enrollments Official language

French * These figures are for the three republics: the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, the Sudanese Republic and the Republic of Senegal; since almost all of their external trade passes through the port of Dakar, separate figures for the three republics are not available.

SIERRA LEONE
Political status British colony and protectorate, due to become an independent state within the British Common wealth on April 27, 196.1 Freetown

Capital

S E L E C T E D T E R R I T O R I A L DATA Area Population Per capita income External trade (G) 28,000 square miles

465

2.3 million (1958 estimate); non-African population: about 3,000 $70 (1957) Exports: $56.9 million (1958) Imports: $67.0 million (1958) Leading exports: chrome ore, cocoa, coffee, dia monds, iron ore, kola nuts, palm kernels, piassava 4,800 (1956) West African Currency Roard pound, interchange able at par with sterling 1 0 .3 8 million (1958) 1 1 .4 4 million (1958) 530; 69,000 (1957) English

Motor vehicles Currency unit Revenue Expenditure Schools and enrollments Official language

SOMALIA (formerly Italian Somaliland)

Political status Italian-administered United Nations Trust Territory until July 1, 1960, when, with Rritish Somaliland, it became the independent Republic of Somalia Mogadishu 178,000 square miles 1.3 million (1958); non-African population, exclud ing Arabs: approximately 5,000 (mostly Italians) Under $100 (1955-1957 average) Exports: $13.4 million (1958) Imports: $14.2 million (1958) Leading exports: bananas, charcoal, cotton, fish, hides and skins 5,000 (1958) Somalo, which has been linked with the Italian lira, but equated in value with the East African shil ling: 7.2 somali = $1 U. S. 101.1 million somali (1957) 170; 16,500 (1957) Somali (spoken only) and Italian. Arabic is the lan guage most generally used among the educated Somalis.

Capital Area Population Per capita income External trade (S)

Motor vehicles Currency unit

Rudget Schools and enrollments Official languages

466
Political status

S E L E C T E D T E R R I T O R I A L DATA

SOUTHERN RHODESIA
Self-governing Rritish colony, one of the three terri tories forming the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. External (including intra-Federation) affairs are handled by the Federal Government. Salisbury 150,000 square miles 2.8 million (1958); non-African population: approxi mately 225,000, of whom 210,000 were Europeans Federation as a whole: $135 (1958) Since 1953 this has been computed on a Federationwide basis, and no figures have been issued for the individual territories. 93,400 (1958) Rhodesian pound, sterling interchangeable at par with

Capital Area Population Per capita income External trade

Motor vehicles Currency unit Revenue Expenditure Schools and enrollments Official language

1 9 .1 3 million (1958-1959) 2 5 .8 5 million (1958-1959), including 6 .1 9 mil lion expenditure from loan funds African only (1958): 2,600; 430,000 English

SPANISH GUINEA [Rio Muni, Fernando Po, Corisco, Elobey, Annobon]

Political status Capital Area Population Per capita income External trade Spanish colony Santa Isabel (on the island of Fernando Po) 11.000 square miles 214.000 (1958); non-African population: mately 5,000 (mostly Spanish) Under $100 (1955-1957 average) Exports: not available Imports: not available Leading exports: cocoa, coffee, vegetables and fruits, wood Not available Spanish peseta Not available 135; 21,750 (1957) Spanish approxi

Motor vehicles Currency unit Rudget Schools and enrollments Official language

SELECTED

TE R R ITO R IA L DATA

467

SUDAN, REPUBLIC OF (formerly Anglo-Egyptian Sudan)

Political status Independent state since January 1, 1956 (formerly administered by Great Britain and Egypt as a con dominium) Khartoum 967,500 square miles 11.0 million (1958 estimate); non-Sudanese popula tion (mainly Arabs, Egyptians): 437,000 (1956) Under $100 (1955-1957 average) Exports: $133.6 million (1958) Imports: $182.7 million (1958) Leading exports: cattle, cotton and cottonseed, dura (millet), gum arabic, peanuts, sesame 24,300 (1958) Sudanese pound ( = 1 .0 2 5 U. K.) S . 45.59 million (1957-1958) S . 40.38 million (1957-1958) 2,460; 321,000 (1958) Arabic. (English is also used.)

Capital Area Population Per capita income External trade (S)

Motor vehicles Currency unit Revenue Expenditure Schools and enrollments Official language

SUDANESE REPUBLIC (formerly French Sudan)

Political status Autonomous state in the French Community from November 24, 1958 until June 20, 1960, when the Mali Federation (in which it had joined with the Republic of Senegal) became an independent state within the Community. The government of the Mali Federation legislates over a wide field, including justice, security, education, transport and economic policy. French Sudan was an over seas territory of France and part of French West Africa. Bamako 464,500 square miles 3.7 million (1958); non-African population: proximately 8,000 (mostly French) Under $100 (1955-1957 average) Exports: see under Senegal Imports: see under Senegal Leading exports: cotton, fish, gum arabic, karite , livestock (cattle, sheep and goats), rice, skins Not available (included under French West Africa) Franc C.F.A. ap

Capital Area Population Per capita income External trade (S)

Motor vehicles Currency unit

468
Budget Schools and enrollments Official language

S E L E C T E D T E R R I T O R I A L DATA

su d an ese re p u b lic

(< continued)
5,818 million francs C.F.A. (1958) Not available (included under French West Africa) French

TANGANYIKA
Political status Capital Area Population British-administered United Nations Trust Territory, expected to attain internal self-government in 1960 Dar-es-Salaam 361,500 square miles 8.9 million (1958); non-African population: 127,000, of whom approximately 21,000 were Europeans and 77,000 Indians, Pakistanis and Goans $48 (1957) Exports: $114.93 million (1957) Imports: $109.97 million (1957) Leading exports: cashew nuts, coffee, cotton, dia monds, hides and skins, lead ore, oilseeds (inc. nuts and kernels), sisal 29,000 (1958) Shilling (East African Currency Board): lings = 1 sterling 2 4 .1 1 million (1958-1959) 2 5 .3 0 million (1958-1959) 3,250; 438,000 (1958) English. (Swahili is widely employed in government and commerce.) 20 shil

Per capita income External trade (S)

Motor vehicles Currency unit Revenue Expenditure Schools and enrollments Official language

TOGO (formerly French Togoland)

Political status United Nations Trust Territory administered by France as an autonomous republic within the French Community until April 27, 1960, when it became the independent Republic of Togo Lome 22,000 square miles 1.1 million (1958 estimate); non-African population: 1,300 (1956) Under $100 (1955-1957 average)

Capital Area Population Per capita income

S E L E C T E D T E R R I T O R I A L DATA External trade (S)

469

Exports: $15.0 million (1958) Imports: $18.0 million (1958) Leading exports: cocoa, coffee, copra, cotton, manioc, palm kernels and palm oil, peanuts 2,900 (1957) Franc C.F.A. 3,194 million francs C.F.A. (1958) 3,187 million francs C.F.A. (1958) 490; 72,500 (1957) French

Motor vehicles Currency unit Revenue Expenditure Schools and enrollments Official language

UGANDA
Political status Area Population British protectorate Entebbe (administrative); Kampala (commercial) 94,000 square miles 5.8 million (1958 estimate); non-African population: 67,600 (1958), of whom 9,000 were Europeans and 56,600 Indians and Goans $57 (1957) Exports: Imports: Leading stuffs, $131.13 million (1957) $80.83 million (1957) exports: coffee, copper, cotton, feeding tea 20 shil

Per capita income External trade (G)

Motor vehicles Currency unit Revenue Expenditure Schools and enrollments Official language

28,900 (1958) Shilling (East African Currency Board): lings = 1 sterling 1 9 .9 0 million (1958-1959) 2 0 .6 3 million (1958-1959) 4,850; 468,500 (1957) English. (Luganda is widely employed in govern ment and commerce.)

UNION OF CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLICS

Constituent territories Central African Republic, Republic of Chad, Repub lic of Congo (q.v.). The Gabon Republic is geo graphically and economically linked to the Union. All of these states were at one time part of French Equatorial Africa.

470

S E L E C T E D T E R R I T O R I A L DATA

UPPER VOLTA, REPUBLIC OF THE (formerly Upper Volta)

Political status Autonomous state (also known as Voltaic Republic) in the French Community from December 11, 1958 until August 5, 1960, when it became an independent state within the Community. Has joined with neighboring states in Council of the Entente. Formerly it was an overseas territory of France and part of French West Africa. Ouagadougou 106,000 square miles 3.7 million (1958); non-African population: (mostly French) Under $100 (1955-1957 average) Exports: $4.4 million (1958) Imports: $7.2 million (1958) Leading exports: fish, karite, livestock, peanuts Not available (included under French West Africa) Franc C.F.A. 4,081 million francs C.F.A. Not available (included under French West Africa) French 3,700

Capital Area Population Per capita income External trade (S)

Motor vehicles Currency unit Budget Schools and enrollments Official language

ZANZIBAR (including Pemba)

Political status Capital Area Population Per capita income External trade (G) British-protected sultanate. The Sultan rules with the advice of the British Resident. Zanzibar Island of Zanzibar, 640 square miles; island of Pemba, 380 square miles 300.000 (1958) $98-$126 (1957) Exports: $14.2 million (1958) Imports: $14.6 million (1958) Leading exports: cloves, coconut oil, copra 2.000 (1958) Shilling (East African Currency Board): lings = 1 sterling 2 .6 3 million (1958) 3 .1 8 million (1958) 95; 18,000 (1957) English. (Swahili is the language most generally spoken.) 20 shil

Motor vehicles Currency unit Revenue Expenditure Schools and enrollments Official language

List of Working Papers

David E. Apter Nancy Gouinlock Berg Kenneth Bradley George W. Carpenter R. J. Harrison Church James S. Coleman L. Gray Cowan Frank Debenham Hubert Deschamps Walter Deshler St. Clair and Elizabeth Drake Eugene P. Dvorin F . Grevisse Alfred and Grace G. Harris George R. Horner D. Hobart Houghton Sir Bernard A. Keen Hibberd V. B. Kline, Jr. Gaston Leduc The Ideological Struggle for Africa Social Service Activities for Women in Tropical Africa British Colonial Policy in Africa Urban Social Integration and the Church in Africa Industry in Tropical Africa Nationalism in Tropical Africa Africanization The Water Resources of Tropical Africa L Economie de Madagascar Some Problems of Indigenous Settlement in Semi-arid East Africa The Media of Mass Communication in Tropical Africa The Political Development of the Central Afri can Federation Problemes du Travail au Congo Beige, au Ka tanga notamment Wataita Today: Some Aspects of Modem Con ditions among a Hill People in Kenya Colony Motivating Forces among the Modem Rain Forest Peoples of West Africa Men of Two Worlds: Labor in Africa An Essay on Migrant

East African Agriculture Transportation in Tropical Africa Le Developpement Economique de lAfrique Noire: Problemes actuels et solutions pos sibles L Economie du Congo Beige et du RuandaUrundi The Drift to the Towns in Africa The Diseases of Tropical Africa The Climates of Tropical Africa Processus de Changements Sociaux en Afrique Noire

Jacques Lefebvre Jacques J. Maquet Jacques M. May, M.D. Peveril Meigs Paul Mercier

471

472

LI S T OF WORKING P A P E R S Population and Land Resources in Nigeria The Adaptation of Indigenous African Eco nomic, Political and Social Systems to Suit Modern Needs and Conditions French Policy in West Africa and Its Imple mentation The Mineral Resources and Industry of Tropi cal Africa Art in Tropical Africa Food and Life in Africa Land Use Possibilities in Ethiopia The Role and Status of African Women Portuguese Colonial Policy in Angola Survey of African Education The Ethiopian Highlands

N. C. Mitchel, W. B. Morgan, R. M. Prothero Eduardo C. Mondlane

William Dawson Moreland, Jr. Thomas G. Murdock Margaret Nairn B. S. Platt Tor Fr. Rasmussen Rebecca Reyher Cecil W. Scott Ruth C. Sloan Helmer Smeds (with contribution by Kurt Roselius) Hugh Tracey Glenn T. Trewartha and Wilbur Zelinsky Kimani Waiyaki A. T. de B. Wilmot Alvin D. Zalinger

Indigenous Music in Central and Southern Africa The Population of Tropical Africa The Future of Kenya The New African Intelligentsia A Study of African Students in the United States

Index

A
Abidjan (Ivory Coast), i 42, 448 Aborigines Rights Protection Society, n 288 Abraham, Peter, i 64; n 65 Accra (Ghana), i 42, 451; ii 135; confer ence (1958), n 437 Achimota College, n 57, 121 Action Group (Nigeria), n 242, 282, 289, 291, 294, 296 Addis Ababa (Ethiopia), i 100, 221, 256 Aden Airways, i 488 Advertising, i 562-63; n 147, 152 Afforestation, i 217-21 Africa Bureau (U. K.), n 282 African Communities League, n 280 African International Highway, i 49In. African Land Utilisation and Settlement Board, i 175 African Loans Fund, i 277 African Morning Post (Accra), n 284 African Newspapers Co., Ltd., n 146 African Orthodox Church, i i 280 African Star (newspaper), i i 290 Africanization, n 353-59, 382-84 Afro-Asian Conference (Bandung, 1955), n 285 Age and social status, n 11 Aggrey, J. E. K., n 57, 205 Agricultural Productivity Committee (Uganda), i 220, 220n. Agricultural Technical School (Ethiopia), n 129 Agriculture, 1 125-26; capitalization, 1 15456; cash crop farming, i 137-39; coop eratives, n 211-12; European, in Africa, I 144-62; food gathering, i 11-12; gov ernment expenditure, i i 405; industrial crops, i 378-86; and labor, i 160-62, 162n., 572-73, 575-76; land tenure, i 24-28; maps, i 134, 135; mixed farm ing, i 15-16, 132-33, 150-51; pastoralism, i 16-18, 127-33, 148-50; primitive, i 12-20, 21, 26; productivity, i 572-73; rational farming, i 139-44; research work, i 156-58; i i 421-22, 424; scien tific practices, i 156-58; settlement, i 158-62, 164-93; specialty-crop farm ing, i 152-54; subsistence crop farm ing, i 133-36; among Teita, i i 73-74;

trends, i 154-62; wartime changes, i 146-47; see also individual countries Ahaggar Mountains, i 73, 244 Ahmed, Sayed Ismail, El Azhari, n 289 Air flow, maps of, i 41 Air Force Cadet Training Center (Ethi opia), i i 129 Air France, i 488 Air Madagascar, i 488 Airways, i 484-90; maps, i 486-87 Aiyetoro (Apostle Community), i 275; i i 205-06 Akan (people), n 388 Akpan, Ntieyong U., i i 341 Akweti Weavers Society, n 210 Albert, Lake, I 234, 235, 249, 277, 286, 445 Albert Nile (river), i 234, 235, 444 Albertville (Belg. Congo), i 259 Alienated land, I 159n.; in Kenya, i i 273 Alitalia (air service), i 488 Allard, R., I 117n. Alliance High School (Kenya) n 59, 363 Aloba, Abiodun, ii 143-44, 147-48, 147n. Alucam, Societe, n 412 Aluminium Ltd., i 394 Aluminum, i 328-30 American Foundation for Tropical Medi cine, i i 425 American Geographical Society, i 196n. Amharic (language), n 127-28, 452 Amharic people, i 140, 592 Amu, Ephraim, n 389 Ancestor worship, n 19-21, 32n. Anchau Corridor, i 186 Anchau Rural Development and Settle ment Scheme, i 185 Anderson, L. K., I 57n. Anderson, R. Earle, i 338n.; n 333, 333n. Anglo American Corp., i 292; n 401 Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, see Sudan, Republic of Ango Ango (Belg. Congo), i 454 Angola: Africanization, n 358; agricul ture, i 13Sn., 148, 151, 168, 180-81, 183; airways, i 485; area, i 89; n 446; capital goods, I 517; civil service, i 579; climate & weather, i 53, 57, 59; currency unit, n 446; death rate, n 167; development plans, n 414; dia monds, i 343-44; education, n 108, 113-15, 134, 446; finance, n 404, 414, 446; fishing, i 268, 270, 276, 287-88; forests, i 67, 69-70; government, n 318, 331, 358; health, n 38, 45, 48-49, 51, 167, 171; hydroelectricity, i 254, 25960; income, per capita, ii 446; indus try, i 379, 381-82, 385, 392, 510-11; labor, i 576, 579, 585, 587, 591, 596; lumber, i 207-08; migration, i 585; minerals, I 291-92, 295-96, 300, 30607, 310-12, 314, 316, 321, 324, 326,

473

474

IN D E X Assinie Canal, i 437 Association Agricole Indigene, i 177 Aswan (Egypt), i 234, 234n. Auas Mountains, i 35 Aubreville, Andre, i 54, 63, 65-68, 66n., 71, 196, 196n., 201-02, 205n., 223 Australia, trade with tropical Africa, i 543-44 Automobiles, see Motor vehicles Aviation, i 484-90; labor, i 578; maps, i 486-87 Awash (river), i 253, 256; valley of, i 355 Awgu Division (project), n 188-89, 206 Awka Carvers Union, n 210 Awolowo, Obafemi, n 242, 289, 295-96 Azande (people), i 270, 380; n 220, 427 Azikiwe, Nnamdi, n 242, 279-80, 279n., 284, 288-89, 295, 298, 301, 341

Angola (continued) 337, 341, 343-44, 347, 349, 351-52, 354-57, 359, 364, 508-09; motor vehi cles, i 466; i i 446; newspapers, i i 142, 144; petroleum, i 364; political divi sions, ii 313, 331; political status, ii 446; population, i 89; n 446; popu lation characteristics, i 92-93, 95, 98, 104-06, 109-11, 116-17; ports, i 449, 453-55; Portuguese policy toward, ii 267; race factor, i 591; radio, n 151, 153; railroads, i 413, 421-22, 424, 43233; research agencies, n 419, 425; roads, i 468, 470, 473, 478; settlement, i 168, 180-85; textiles, i 516; trade, ex ternal, i 207-08, 276, 288, 292, 399, 454-55, 498-501, 503-04, 506, 508-11, 517, 522, 524-27, 538-40; ii 446; trade, internal, i 552,562; water power, 1 25354, 259-60; water regions, i 240; water ways, i 439-40 Angola, Bank of, i 591 Animal husbandry, see Pastoralism Animism, see Spiritism Ankobra (river), i 334, 437 Ankole (people), i 16 Annobon, see Spanish Guinea Ansar (religious faction), n 296 Anti-Locust Research Centre (U. K.), n 421 Antimony, i 326 Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society (U. K.), n 281 Antongil Bay, i 36 Apostle Community (Aiyetoro), i 275; i i 205-06 Apter, David E., i i 471 Arabic (language), i i 125, 127, 128, 133, 448, 459, 465, 467 Arabs, i 95-97, 554; n 151, 245, 246; see also Asians Arden-Clarke, Sir Charles, i i 276 Area: by country, I 89; n 446-70; of tropical Africa, i 29, 89 Arochuku Embroideresses (craft society),
h

B
BCK (Compagnie du Chemin de Fer du Bas-Congo au Katanga), i 419-21, 419n.; i i 201 Babinga (people), i 11, 21, 27 Baganda, see Ganda Baggara (people), i 241 Bahr-el-Azraq (river), see Blue Nile Bahr-el-Ghazal (river), i 38, 231, 232, 444 Bahr-el-Jebel (river), see Mountain Nile Bahr-el-Jebel swamp, i 230, 231, 232 Bahr-el-Zeraf (river), i 248 Ba-ila (people), i i 20 Bakuba (people), i 266 Balance of payments, i 546-51 Balangida, Lake, i 232 Baldwin, K. D. S., i 170n. Ballenden, B. G., n 197n. Bamangwato Reserve, i 317 Bamoco Syndicate, i 316 Bananas, i 15, 188, 504-05 Banda, Hastings, i i 289 Bandung conference (1955), i i 285 Bangwaketse Reserve, i 327 Bangweulu, Lake, i 232, 271, 272, 446-47 Bangweulu Flats, i 231 Bani (river), i 443 Bank deposits, n 398; and development financing, n 406, 408 Bank of Angola, i 591 Bank of England, i i 406, 410 Bank of Monrovia, i 338 Banks, n 398-99; see also International Bank Bantu (people), i 8, 85-87, 136; n 73, 234, 389 Banyambo (people), i 11 Barclay, Arthur, n 279 Barite, i 347 Barker, W. E., n 250n.

210

Arsenic, i 326 Arts, i 22-23; n 26-33, 376, 385-92 Asbestos, i 345-46 Ashanti (people), n 220, 226, 241, 304, 373, 437 Ashigga (party), ii 296 Asia, and African nationalism, n 285-86 Asians: in business, n 399; in govern ment, east Africa, n 244-49; in labor force, i 597-98; newspapers for, n 15051; population, i 95-97; standard of liv ing, i 554-55 Asmara (Eritrea), i 100 Assab (Eritrea), i 462

INDEX Barkhuus, Arne, i 113n. Barrows, H. K., i 251 Barth, Henry, i 378 Bascom, William, n 275n. Basutoland, administration of, n 249-50 Bata shoe factory, i 398 Bataka Party, n 290 Bates, M. Searle, n 114n. Bathurst (Gambia), i 450; n 167, 455 Batten, T. R., n 188n., 303-04, 310, 339n. Baudouin, King, n 232, 339 Bauer, P. T., i 534n. Baule (people), n 28 Bauxite, i 328-30; map, i 318 Bechard, Paul, i 374-75; n 259-60 Bechuanaland: Africanization, n 356; agriculture, i 148; area, i 89; n 446; British policy toward, i i 249-50; cli mate & weather, I 57; coal, i 363; cur rency unit, i i 446; education, n 124, 446; finance, n 410, 446; forests, i 70; government, n 249-50, 312, 356; in come, per capita, n 446; labor, i 581, 584, 599; language, official, n 446; lumber, i 208; migration i 581, 584; minerals, i 300, 305, 308, 313, 317, 325, 327, 336-37, 340, 345-47, 350-52, 355-56, 363, 509; political status, i i 446; population, I 89; i i 446; popula tion characteristics, i 92-93, 97n., 98, 101, 108, 110-13, 117, 119, 122; radio, i i 153, 156; railroads, i 422-25; trade, i 504, 506, 509-10, 513; n 446; water regions, i 230 Beer, C. W., i 189n. Beira (Mozambique), i 304, 425-26, 457 Beira Railway Co., i 426, 457 Belgian Africa, see Belgian Congo; Ruanda-Urundi Belgian Congo: Africanization, n 35758; agriculture, I 27, 137-38, 138n., 141, 145, 147-49, 147n., 151, 155-57, 159, 161, 168, 177-80; area, i 89; n 447; art, n 391-92; balance of pay ments, i 546, 548-49, 548n., 551; Bel gian policy toward, n 228-32; capital goods, i 517; civil service, i 579-80; climate & weather, i 42, 48, 51, 53, 5758; coal, i 362-63; currency unit, n 447; development plans, i 220, 258, 284, 418, 420-21, 477-78; n 193-94, 197201, 405, 412-14, 416; diamonds, i 34244; education, i i 98-99, 116-17, 134, 137-38, 447; elite in, n 391; finance, i i 394-402, 404-05, 412-14, 416, 447; fishing, i 265, 270, 284, 287; forests, i 67, 69-70, 202, 220, 222; government, i i 231-32, 307, 309, 320-21, 323, 33539, 357-58, 439; health, n 36, 39-42,

475

39n., 45, 47-51, 161-63, 166, 168, 17072, 179; hydro electricity, i 254-56, 25859; income, per capita, n 397, 447; in dependence, ii 231-32, 447; industry, i 376-77, 379, 382-87, 392, 510; labor, i 161, 572n., 575-80, 582-84, 586, 588, 589, 596, 602, 602n.; languages, offi cial, i i 447; lumber, i 207-08, 211-12, 386-87; migration, i 582, 584, 586; minerals, i 290-92, 295-96, 300-02, 305-07, 309, 310-16, 318-19, 322-28, 330, 334, 336-37, 340-44, 346-59, 36164, 368, 508-09; motion pictures, n 158; motor vehicles, i 466, 478; n 447; nationalism, n 279, 299; news papers, i i 142, 145, 148-49; petroleum, i 364; political divisions, n 321-22; po litical status, ii 447; population, i 89; n 447; population characteristics, I 9293, 101, 104-06, 108, 110-11, 113-14, 116-17, 119-20; ports, i 453-54; radio, ii 151, 153, 155; railroads, i 413, 418-22, 420n., 432-33; research agen cies, i i 419-20; roads, i 468-69, 473, 477-78, 482; settlement, i 168, 177-80; social change, n 55, 60-61, 82-88, 90; Ten Year Plan, i 220, 258, 284, 418, 420-21, 477-78; n 412-13; textiles, i 516; trade, i 207-08, 211-12, 278-79, 287, 324, 377, 454, 457, 459, 498-501, 504, 506, 508-11, 513, 517, 519-20, 522-28, 538, 546, 548-49, 548n., 551; i i 447; trade unionism, n 215; water power, i 254-56, 258-59; water regions, i 240; waterways, i 435, 441, 446, 491 Belgium: and Africanization, n 357-58; colonial government, n 307-09, 32023, 335-39; colonial policy, i 186-87; n 228-33; Commission of Inquiry (1904), ii 336; development plans, n 412-14; educational policy, ii 115-18; research work, n 419-20, 428; Ten Year Plan (1950-59), i 220, 258, 284, 286, 418, 420-21, 477-78; n 412-13; trade with tropical Africa, i 302, 324, 327-28, 340-41, 523, 543 Bemba (people), i 10, 13, 20, 133 Benguela (Angola), i 276, 287, 454 Benguela current, i 30, 40, 53, 243, 269 Benguela Highlands, I 92, 93 Benguela Railway Co., i 182, 420, 429, 454, 478 Beni Mwana Councils, ii 78-79 Benin Shoemakers (craft society), ii 210 Benue (river), i 38, 438 Berbera (Br. Somaliland), i 461 Berg, Nancy Gouinlock, n 199-201, 200n., 471 Beryllium, i 325

476

I N DE X

Bethencourt, Jean de, n 253 ber, i 212, 219-20; marketing, I 534; Bethlehem Steel Corp., i 299-300 nationalism, n 300-01; newspapers, n Bikita Minerals (Pvt.) Ltd., i 330 150; population characteristics, I 95, Bilharziasis, ii 37-38, 170 119; ports, I 458-60; radio, n 155; re Bimbia (river), i 439 search agencies, n 419, 422; roads, Birim valley, i 344 i 464, 467, 481-82, 491n.; social change, n 55; trade, external, i 458-60, Birth rates, i 113-15, 117 Bismuth, i 326-27 498-501, 529-30, 534, 536, 540, 548; trade, internal, i 568; trade unionism, Bissau (Port. Guinea), i 452 Bitumen, i 347-48 n 217; see also East Africa; individual Blackwell, Basil, n 23n. countries Blixen, Karen, i 33n. British Petroleum Co., i 366 Bloc Democratique Senegalais (BDS), British Somaliland (Somaliland Protec torate): Africanization, n 356; area, i i 296 i 89; ii 448; British policy toward, n Blood, as food, i 19, 20 249; currency unit, n 448; education, Blue Nile (river), i 38, 444 ii 124, 448; fishing, i 281; government, Blyden, Edward W., i i 279 ii 312-13, 356; government revenue Boaventura, Francisco, i 182 and expenditure, n 448; income, per Boma (Belg. Congo), i 454 capita, ii 448; labor, i 599; languages, Bongo (people), i 103 Booker Washington Institute, n 126, 425, official, i i 448; lumber, i 208; minerals, i 310, 313, 325, 341, 351, 357-58; mo 429 tor vehicles, i 466; u 448; political sta Boskop race, i 84 tus, n 249, 313, 448; population, i 89, Boy Scout movement, n 184, 191, 196 Bradley, Kenneth, n 97, 106, 175, 182n., 95; ii 448; ports, i 449, 461; radio, i i 153; roads, i 484; trade, i 461, 498-501, 185n., 234-35, 238, 242, 244-45, 248, 503-04, 506, 509, 513, 538-39; n 448; 251, 253, 471 Brazzaville (Congo), i 441 water regions, i 242; water supply, Brazzaville Conference (1944), n 256 i 247 Bride wealth, i 17, 113; n 6, 68-69, 87-88 British South Africa Co., i 422 British Broadcasting Service, Colonial British Togoland, n 243-44, 287-88; see Service of, i i 107n. also Ghana British Cameroons: agriculture, i 137-38, British West Africa: Africanization, i i 155, 188; airways, i 485; area, i 89; 354; British policy toward, i i 238-44; i i 447; British policy toward, n 243civil service, i 580; development plans, 44; climate & weather, i 43, 56; cur i i 406-08; elite in, n 367; Europeaniza rency unit, i i 447; finance, n 401n., tion, i i 367; finance, n 395-96, 405-08; 402, 448; fishing, i 270; government, government, i i 312, 343, 345, 354; i i 249; health, n 38; income, per capita, labor, i 580, 596; minerals, i 340; na i i 447; motor vehicles, i 466; i i 447; tionalism, ii 278, 280, 291-92, 296; nationalism, n 274, 278, 280-89, 292, newspapers, n 142-45, 147; political 296; political parties, n 296; political parties, n 296; research agencies, ii status, n 447; population, I 89; n 447; 419, 422; social change, n 55; see also radio, n 153; roads, i 472, 476-77; West Africa; individual countries schools and enrollments, i i 448; settle Brock, John F., n 44 ment, i 188; trade, i 499, 501, 505; Broken Hill region, i 255, 290, 300, 312, i i 447; waterways, i 438 321-22, 324, 327, 338, 340, 354 British Central Africa, n 238, 249-53; see Brookfield, H. C , i 458n. also Central Africa; individual coun Brotherhood of Congolese Veterans, n 86 Brown, A., n 169n. tries Browne, Stanley G., n 8n., 168n., 176n. British East Africa: agriculture, i 138, 141, 154, 157, 163; balance of pay Buchanan, K. M., i 61n., 103n., 320n., 362n., 438n. ments, i 548; British policy toward, Budget: revenue, by country, n 402; rev ii 238, 244-49; civil service, i 579-80; cooperatives, i i 207, 212; development enue and expenditure, by country, i i plans, i i 406, 408; education, i i 123, 446-70 138; finance, n 394-95, 401, 405-08, Buganda, n 327; see also Uganda 418; forests, i 217, 219-20; govern Bugisu Cooperative Union, Ltd., i 534, ment, i i 340; health, n 45, 51; industry, 579 i 382; labor, i 574, 579-80, 589; lum Buisseret. A., i 259n.: ii 116n.

I N DE X Bulawayo (S. Rhod.), i 389, 422; n 14849 Bulu (people), i 12; n 54, 66, 66n., 70, 72 Bunche, Ralph J., i i 280 Burchell, W. J., I 18-19 Bush-fallowing, i 12-15, 20 Bushmen, i 11, 20-21, 49, 83, 84, 243; i i 12, 62 Busia, Kofi, n 367-68, 368n. Butter, i 146 Bwamba (people), I 11 Bwana Mkubwa copper outcrop, i 290

477

G
CFL, see Compagnie des Chemins de Fer du Congo Superieur aux Grands Lacs Africains CSA, see Scientific Council for Africa South of the Sahara Cacheu (river), i 437 Cadmium, i 327 Caetano, Marcelo, ji 113, 267n. Caisse Centrale de Cooperation Eco nomique, i i 411 Caisse Centrale de la France dOutreMer (CCFOM), i 415; n 411-12 Calico Printers Association of Manches ter, i 381 Cameron, I. D., n 345n. Cameron, V. L., i 233 Cameroon (river system), i 439 Cameroon, Republic of, see French Cam eroons Cameroon Highlands, i 37, 58, 76, 415, 438-39 Cameroons, see British Cameroons; French Cameroons Cameroons-Congo forest, i 66, 67 Cameroons Development Corporation, i 188 Cameroons Development Corporation Workers Union, n 274, 296 Cameroons Mountain, i 37, 59 Cameroons National Federation, i i 296 Canada, trade with tropical Africa, i 307, 328, 543, 545 Canary current, i 30 Cape Colored people, i 84 Cape-to-Cairo Railway/' i 420, 422, 422n., 433 Capital goods, i 512, 516-18 Capital investment, i 546-51; n 394-418 Cappelle, Jean, n 256n. Carnegie Corp. of New York, ii 104, 179, 244, 429-30 Carothers, J. C., i 83; n 37n., 42n., 44, 47n, 49

Carpenter, George W., n 201-04, 231n., 276, 471 Carter, Douglas B., i 50-52 Casamance (river), i 436-37; basin of, i 69 Cattle keeping, see Pastoralism Catumbela (river), i 253, 259 Cela colonization project, i 181-83 Census taking, i 87-90 Center for the Scientific Study of Cotton, ii 425 Central Africa: physiography, i 34-35; population, i 92; railroads, i 422-26, 432; roads, I 478-81; swamp lands, i 232; see also British Central Africa; individual countries Central Africa Party (Fed. of Rhod. and Nyas.), i i 302 Central Africa Railway, i 425 Central African Airways, i 485, 490; i i 410 Central African Broadcasting Station (Lusaka), n 154 Central African Examiner (Salisbury), i i 149 Central African Federation, see Rhodesia and Nyasaland, Federation of Central African Republic ( formerly Ubangi-Shari): area, n 448; budget, ii 449; currency unit, n 449; education, ii 139, 449; forests, i 67, 69; income, per capita, i i 448; industry, i 379; lan guage, official, ii 449; lumber, i 211; minerals, i 321, 337, 344, 347, 361; political status, ii 448; population, n 448; population characteristics, i 108, 117; roads, I 468, 477; trade, I 211; ii 449; waterways, I 441-42 Central Agricultural Experiment Station (Ethiopia), n 426 Central Congo forest, i 66, 67 Central Line, i 322, 349, 419n., 420, 427, 429, 445, 459 Central Railway, i 415 Centre dEtudes des Peches (Guinea), i i 427 Centre dEtudes des Problemes Sociaux Indigenes (Belg. Congo), n 420 Centre de Geophysique (Senegal), ii 423 Centre de Pedologie (Senegal), n 423 Centre de Recherches Minieres du Congo Beige, i i 420 Centre de Recherches Rizicoles (Guinea), i i 427 Centre for Portuguese Guinea Studies, i i 425 Centro de Investigacao Cientifica Algodoeira Lourengo Marques (CICA), I 157 Century Storage, i 249

478

INDEX Cocoa, i 137, 138, 504-05; marketing of, in Ghana, i 532; n 211 Coconut oil exports, i 505 Code du Travail dOutre-Mer (1952), i 603; i i 216, 216n., 259 Coffee, i 138, 145, 504-05; marketing union, i i 207, 212 Cohen, Sir Andrew, i 567n.; i i 145, 185n., 190 Coka Dam Scheme, i 256 Coleman, James S., n 243-44, 273-74, 276-80, 283, 284n., 285, 287-89, 288n., 291, 292n., 293, 298, 471 College of West Africa (Liberia), n 12526 Colleges and universities, n 112, 117, 121-23, 126, 129, 133, 135-36, 283 Collier, William, i 290, 290n. Colombo Conference of Asian Prime Min isters (1954), i i 285 Colonial Development and Welfare Act (U. K.), i i 408, 421; funds, n 55, 152, 186, 236, 250, 402n., 406, 408-09, 411, 421 Colonial Development Corporation (CDC) (U. K!), i 170, 219-20, 219n., 383; i i 408-10 Colonial Development Fund (Portugual), i i 414 Colonial Economic Research Committee (U. K.), i i 421 Colonial Geological Surveys (U. K.), i i 421 Colonial Medical Research Committee (U. K.), ii 421 Colonial Office (U. K.), i i 119, 171, 190, 240-41, 250, 250n., 323-24, 327, 342, 354 Colonial Products Research Council (U. K.), i i 421 Colonial Research Council (U. K.), n 421 Colonial Social Science Research Council (U. K.), i i 421 Colonial Times (Kenya), n 150 Colonialism: and manufacturing, i 399400; policies of European powers, i i 223-69 Columbite, i 308-10; map, i 302 Comilog, i 308 Comite dAmenagement de la Vallee du Niari, i 187 Comite National du Kivu, n 420 Comite Special du Katanga, i 290; n 420 Commerce, see Trade Commission for Technical Cooperation in Africa South of the Sahara (Commis sion de Cooperation Technique en Afrique au Sud du Sahara, CCTA), i 285n.; n 428-29

Cesaire, Aime, n 439 Chad, Lake, i 38, .232, 271-72; basin of, i 447 Chad, Republic of: agriculture, i 17; area, n 449; budget, i i 449; currency unit, i i 449; government, n 328; in come, per capita, n 449; language, offi cial, i i 449; minerals, i 355; political parties, i i 296; political status, n 449; population, n 449; population charac teristics, i 93, 98, 101, 108, 117; rail roads, i 421; roads, i 468, 477; schools and enrollments, n 449; trade, i 513; i i 449 Cliagga (people), i 140-41, 576n.; n 5, 73, 207, 212, 226, 304 Change, social, n 53-91 Chari (river), i 38, 447 Check-weirs, i 246 Chemicals, imports of, i 512 Cheminots (Federation des Cheminots Africains), n 216 Chieftaincy, i 11; i i 13, 13n.; elites atti tudes toward, n 373-74 Children: education of, n 14-16; in family life, i i 4-8; per cent of popula tion, i 110-11; ratio to women, I 116-18 Chilwa, Lake, i 280 Chinese population, i 97; see also Asians Chinyanga (language), I 290n. Chopi (people), i i 33 Christianity: and community develop ment, i i 202-06; and education, i i 95, 97-98; and nationalism, n 275-76; and slave trade, i i 224; and social change, ii 55, 64, 70, 76-77, 80 Chromite, i 303-05; map, i 304 Chronicle (Bulawayo), n 148-49 Church, R. J. Harrison, i 329n, 377, 395, 400-01; i i 471 Cinchona bark, i 382 Cities: beginning of, i 24; community de velopment in, i i 195-201; number of, i 98; population, i 97-101; ports, i 44762; social change in, n 82-88; see also individual cities Citrus fruits, I 138 Civil service, i 579-81; n 354-58 Clans, i i 9-10 Clay production, i 348-49 Clement, Pierre, n 82 Clifford, Sir Hugh., n 277 Climate and weather, i 39-59; maps, i 41, 46, 50, 52, 55; see also individual coun tries Clitoridectomy, n 17, 76, 98 Cloves, i 383, 505 Coal, i 361-64 Cobalt, i 301-03; map, i 302

INDEX Committee for Colonial Agricultural, Ani mal Health and Forestry Research (U. K.), n 421 Common law, n 327n. Commonwealth Development Finance Co., Ltd., i t 408, 410 Commonwealth East Africa, see British East Africa Commonwealth West Africa, see British West Africa Communal ownership, I 24-25 Communications: government expendi ture, i i 405; media, n 140-58 Communism, n 283-84, 381-82, 381n. Community development, n 184-207 Community life, n 9-14 Comoro Archipelago, i 87; selected data, i i 450 Compagnie des Chemins de Fer du Congo Superieur aux Grands Lacs Afri cans (CFL), i 418-19, 419n., 421, 442, 446 Compagnie des Transports Aeriens Inter continental (TAI), i 488 Compagnie du Chemin de Fer du BasCongo au Katanga (BCK), i 419-21, 419n.; n 201 Compagnie Francaise du Haut et BasCongo, i 442 Compagnie Generale des Oleagineux Tropicaux, i 156, 375; n 424 Compagnie Generale de Transports en Afrique, i 442 Compagnie Miniere de Conakry, i 299 Compagnie Miniere de lOgooue (Comilog), i 308 Compagnie Miniere des Grands Lacs Africains, i 326, 336 Compagnie Miniere du Congo Frangais, i 291, 324 Companhia de Diamantes de Angola, i 344 Companhia de Mozambique, i 338 Companhia do Uranio de Mozambique, i 359 Conakry (Guinea), i 299, 328, 448 Confederation Africaine des Travailleurs Croyants (CATC), n 216, 282 Confederation Generale du Travail (CGT), ii 216, 282, 284 Congo (river), i 36, 40, 228, 252, 269, 439, 441-43; estuary of, i 453-54; val ley of, i 57, 76, 232; n 7; see also Congo basin Congo, Belgian, see Belgian Congo Congo, Republic of the (formerly Middle Congo): agriculture, i 27, 142, 178, 187-88; area, n 450; budget, n 451; civil service, i 581; climate & weather,

479

i 56; c u r r e n c y u n i t , n 451; fis h i n g , i 276; f o r e s t s , I 67, 202; h e a l t h , n i76; h y d r o e l e c t r i c i t y , i 258; i n c o m e , p e r c a p i t a , i i 450; l a b o r , i 575-76, 581; l a n g u a g e , o f f i c i a l , n 451; l u m b e r , i 211, 386; m i n e r a l s , i 290-92, 310, 312, 317, 321-22, 324, 337, 341, 348-49, 358, 364; p e t r o l e u m , i 364; p o l i t i c a l s t a t u s , i i 450; population, n 450; population characteristics, I 93, 98, 108, 117; ports, i 449, 453; railroads, i 409, 413, 421; research, n 424; settlement, i 178, 187-88; trade, i 211, 453; n 450; trans portation, i 409; water power, i 253, 258; waterways, i 441-42 Congo basin: agriculture, i 26; climate & weather, i 43, 46, 56; forests, I 66; health, n 35, 45, 48; labor, i 576; petro leum, i 364; physiography, i 31-32, 36; population characteristics, i 92, 119; railroads, i 418-22, 432; roads, i 467, 477-78; water power, i 251-52; water ways, i 441-43 Congo Basin Treaties, i 543 Congo-Cuanza (river system), i 34 Congo Free State, n 307, 336; see also Belgian Congo Congo-Ocean Railway, i 308, 409, 421, 453 Congress of Peoples Aeainst Imperialism (U. K.), i i 282 Congresses, n 292-94 Conombo, Joseph, n 315 Conseil Scientifique pour FAfrique au Sud du Sahara (Scientific Council for Africa South of the Sahara), i 285n.; ii 180n., 265, 418, 428-29 Conseil Superieur de la Recherche Scientifique et Technique dOutre-Mer, ii 423 Consumer societies, i 560-62; n 212 Consumers, i 552-54 Convention of St. Germain-en-Laye (1919), i 543 Convention Peoples Party (CPP) (Ghana), n 219, 241, 276, 288, 294, 296-98, 342, 378 Converse, Charles D., i 192 Cooper, B. K., n 345n. Co-operative Central Bank (Ghana), ii 2 1 1 Co-operative Societies Ordinance (1946), ii 209 Cooperative Union, Ltd. (U. K.), i 561n.; i i 61n. Cooperatives, i 560-62, 579; n 61, 207-13 Copper, i 313-18; map, i 314 Copperbelt region: companies, private, ii 401; forests, i 219; health, n 170;

480

INDEX
333, 338; nationalism, 11 272; political status, 11 451; population, 11 451; popu lation characteristics, 1 103, 108; ports, I 448-49; trade, 1 449; 11 451; trade unionism, 11 216; waterways, 1 438 Daily Chronicle (Kenya), 11 150-51 Daily Graphic (Accra), 11 143, 291 Daily Mail (Freetown), 11 143, 291 Daily Times (Lagos), 11 143, 291 Dairy products, 1 19, 20, 146, 150, 151; marketing of, 11 209-10 Dakar (Senegal), 1 98, 276, 414, 448, 600; II 148, 259 Damongo Settlement, 1 169-70 Dams: hydroelectric projects, 1 256-63; subsand, 1 245, 246 Danakil Desert, 1 33, 58, 332 Danakil Salt Plain, 1 332, 351, 355, 358 Dancing, 11 27, 33 Dande (river), 1 253, 255, 352 Danquah, J. B., 11 295, 388 DArboussier, M., 11 295 DArcy-Shell Exploration Co., 1 365-66 Dar-es-Salaam (Tanganyika), 1 172, 459;

Copperbelt region (continued) hydroelectricity, 1 261; labor, 1 583, 588, 593-94, 593n., 596, 599, 601; 11 217; minerals, 1 292, 313-15, 328, 338, 360, 368; newspapers, 11 145; popula tion, 1 93; railroads, 1 423-24; see also Northern Rhodesia Copra, 1 138, 505 Coriolis effect, 1 42 Corisco, see Spanish Guinea Corporate capital, 11 399-401 Correa, A. A. Mendes, 11 266n. Corundum, 1 349-50 Costes Canal, 1 443 Cote dIvoire, La , 11 150 Cotonou (Dahomey), 1 450 Cotton, 1 137, 138, 145, 504-05; Gezira Board scheme, 1 188-90; manufactur ing of, 1 378-81; marketing of, 11 207; see also Textiles Cotton Industries Board (S. Rhod.), 1 380 Council of the Entente, 11 451 Council on African Affairs (U. S.), 11 280 Countries of tropical Africa, see Political divisions Courrier dAfrique, Le (Leopoldville), 11 149 Courts, see Judiciary Coussey Commission, 11 294 Covilham, Pedro de, 11 62 Cowan, L. Gray, 1 596; 11 354-59, 369, 471 Crafts, 1 22-23, 394-96; societies, 11 210 Crawford, Daniel, 1 23, 23n.; 11 34, 443 Credit: short-term, 1 563-65; societies,

11 120
Davis, Sir Edmund, 1 290 Death rates, 1 113-15, 119, 120; 11 33-34, 167 Debenham, Frank, 1 230, 232n., 237, 24142, 251; 11 471 Deficiency diseases, 11 41-45; map, 11 43 De Freitas, Afonso H. I. F., 11 349-50 De Gaulle, Charles, 11 256-57, 261-62, 315 Delafosse, M., 11 lOn. Delavignette, Robert, 1 14n,, 145n.; 11 345-46 Demography, 1 106-15 De Murville, Maurice, 11 316n. Dengue, 11 50 Deschamps, Hubert, 1 441; 11 327, 471 Desert Locust Control Organisation, 11 409 Desert Locust Survey, 11 419 Deserts, 1 57-58, 72-73, 243-45; maps, 1 55, 62; see also individual deserts Desfosses, Pierre Romain, 11 391-92 Deshler, Walter, 1 19, 101; 11 471 Development: community, 11 184-207; plans, 11 402-18; and research, 11 41830; see also individual countries Devonshire, Duke of, 1 159n. Diamonds, 1 342-45; map, 1 342; smug gling, 1 345n. Diatomite, 1 350 Dicko, Hammadoun, 11 315 Didessa valley, 1 312 Diego-Suarez (Malagasy Rep.), 1 36, 456

11 210
Credit Nationale, 11 411 Creech-Jones, Arthur, 11 233, 235 Creoles, 11 240, 245, 274, 287 Cromer, Lord, n 132 Crop cultivation, see Agriculture Croqueville, Jean, 1 112n. Cross (river), 1 13, 438 Crystal Mountains, 1 36 Cuanza (river), 1 253, 260, 440 Cumming, Sir Duncan, 1 4 3 In. Cunene (river), 1 253, 259, 440 Currency unit, by country, 11 446-70

D
DETA, DTA ( Divisao de Exploragao dos Transportes Aeros), 1 485 Dahlak Islands, 1 365 Dahomey, Republic of: agriculture, 1 12; area, 11 451; budget, 11 451; climate & weather, 1 57; crafts, 1 395; currency unit, 11 451; government, 11 328; in come, per capita, 11 451; language, offi cial, 11 451; minerals, 1 300, 305, 321,

INDEX
Diet, 1 18-20, 129; 11 178-79; deficiencies in, 11 41-45, 173, 177-79; map, 11 43 Dilamba (river), 1 439 Dinka (people), 1 103n., 231, 270; 11 62, 227 Diop, Cheikh Anta, 11 388 Diop, David, 11 388 Diseases: of animals, 1 127-28; of hu mans, 11 33-51, 60, 159-82; maps, 11 37, 39, 41, 43, 45, 49, 50 Distribution systems, 1 556-62 Divorce, 11 7, 69, 87-88 Djibouti (Fr. Somaliland), 1 461 Doctors, 11 160-61, 162 Dodose (people), 1 19, 20 Dogon (people), 11 28 Dominion Party (Fed. of Rhod. and Nyas.), 11 302 Dorobo (people), 1 11 Douala (Fr. Cameroons), 1 255, 258, 452 Dow-Smith, G. T., 1 482n. Drainage basins, map of, 1 229 Drake, St. Clair and Elizabeth, 11 151, 151n., 156, 471 Dry season, 1 46-49; map, 1 47 Du Bois, W. E. Burghardt, 11 280 Duffy, James, 11 349n. Dumbutshena, Enoch, 11 370 Dutch East India Co., 1 160 Duvigneaud, P., 1 63 Dvorin, Eugene P., 11 250, 471 Dynamism, 11 23, 23n. Dysentery, 11 46-47

481

E
ELW A (radio station), 11 153, 156 Eala (Belg. Congo), 1 53, 56 Earnings, see Income; Wages East Africa: physiography, 1 32-34; pop ulation, 1 92-93; ports, 1 458-60; rail roads, 1 427-30, 432, 481-82; swamp lands, 1 232; see also British East Africa; individual countries East Africa High Commission, 1 279, 544; 11 449 East Africa Royal Commission, 1 163-64, 163n., 166, 564n. East African Agriculture and Forestry Research Organization (EAAFRO), 1 157-58, 222 ; 111 421 East African Agriculture Research Insti tute, 1 157 East African Airways, 1 485 East African Central Legislative Assem bly, 1 317 East African Cooperative Trading Society, 1 562 East African Institute of Social Research, 1 585n.; 11 422

East African Power and Lighting Co., Ltd., 1 262 East African Railways and Harbours, 1 167, 427-28, 445-46, 492; 11 138-39, 201, 416, 577 East African Standard (Nairobi), 11 14849 East African Trypanosomiasis Research Organization, 11 419, 422 East African Veterinary Research Organi zation, 11 422 Eastern Highlands, 1 34, 59, 218 Eastern Mountains forest, 1 66, 67 Eboue, Felix, 1 581; 11 346 Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA), 1 425n. Economic Development Institute (U. S.), 11 416 Education, 11 93-94, 107-08; of adults, 11 133-40; agencies, 11 95-99; agri cultural, 1 143-44; Belgian policy & schools, 11 115-18; British policy & schools, 11 118-24; changes in, 11 59-60; and elite, 11 362-64; financing of, 11 103-06; French policy & schools, 11 108-12; and government, 11 96-97, 104, 108-33, 405; history of, 11 95-96; lit eracy training, 11 139-40; mass com munications media, 11 140-58; in met ropolitan countries, 11 283; mission schools, 11 96-98, 112-13, 115, 123-25, 127; and nationalism, 11 274-75; and occupational status, Stanleyville, 11 84; Portuguese policy & schools, 11 112-15; private schools, n 97-99, 112; prob lems, 11 99-107; by radio, 11 154-55; among rain forest peoples, 11 68; schools & enrollments, by country, 11 446-70; Spanish policy & schools, 1 124-25; in Stanleyville, 11 83-84; among Teita, 11 75-77; in tribal society, 11 1418; and United Nations, 11 105, 132, 139; vocational training, 1 590-91; 11 136-39; see also individual countries Edward, Lake, 1 234, 235, 277, 286 Egbe Omo Oduduwa (society), 11 296 Egcrton, F. C. C., 11 318n., 331 Ejuanema, Mt., 1 329 El Molo (tribe), 11 62 Electricity: government expenditure, i i 405; hydroelectric power, 1 251-63, 316 Elgon, Mt., 1 59 Elisabethville (Belg. Congo), 1 327, 368, 594n.; 11 148, 198-99, 198n. Elite, 11 361-92 Elobey, see Spanish Guinea Empire Cotton Growing Corp., 11 421 Employees, see Labor

482

INDEX
Ethiopian College of Egineering, n 129 Ethiopian Highlands, 1 33, 42, 59, 72, 86, 105, 239 Ethiopian Orthodox Church, 11 127-29 Ethnic groups, see Peoples Eurafricans, 11 257n. European Highlands, 1 33, 48, 59, 168 European Payments Union, 1 545 European powers, colonial policies of, 11 223-69 Europeanization, 1 115; 11 367-69 Europeans in tropical Africa: agricul ture, 1 126, 144-62; labor, 1 594-97; newspapers for, 11 148-50; population, 1 93-95, 98, 100; Portuguese settlement schemes, 1 180-84; standard of liv ing, 1 554-55 Evapotranspiration, 1 49-51 Evolues, 11 67 Ewe (people), 11 9-10, 22 Expenditure, government, 1 546-51; 11 402-18, 446-70; on education, 11 10304, 405 Export-Import Bank (U. S.), 1 476; 11 415 Exports: by commodity, 1 504-05; com position of, 1 497-511; by country, 1 498-99, 504-05, 524-25, 526; 11 44670; destination of, 1 520; duties, 1 54143; food, 1 377, 502-08; industrial crops, 1 382; lumber, 1 207-13, 387; minerals, 1 292, 298-300, 302, 304-07, 309, 328, 331, 334, 346, 359, 508-09; per cent of worlds, by value, 1 497; primary products, 1 502-09; quantum of, 1 526-27; secondary products, 1 50911; textiles, 1 510; unit value indexes, I 524-25; see also trade under indi vidual countries; Trade Eyasi, Lake, 1 232

Empresa do Cobre de Angola, 1 316, 324 Empresa Mineira do Alto Ligonha, 1 310, 325, 331, 338 Endeley, E. M. L., 11 274, 289, 296 Entebbe (Uganda), 11 191-92, 192n. Enwonwa, Ben, 11 392 Epstein, A. L., 11 364-65 Equatoria Projects Board, 1 380; 11 427 Equatorial forest, 1 66-67, 200-02, 215, 226 Eritrea: area, 11 451; climate & weather, 1 54; hydroelectricity, 1 254; Italian policy toward, 11 262-64; minerals, I 305, 308, 325, 328, 336-37, 350, 35355, 365, 509; motor vehicles, 1 466; newspapers, 11 142; political status, II 263n., 451; population characteris tics, 1 92-93, 95, 97; ports, 1 449, 462; radio, 11 153; railroads, 1 431-32; roads, I 483-84; trade, 1 462, 498-501, 504, 509; water power, 1 254 Eritrean Railway, 1 431 Erosion, 1 76, 78, 129, 136 Escravos (river), 1 438 Essor du Congo, V , 11 148 Ethics, concern with, 11 22-23, 384-85 Ethiopia, 11 451-52; agriculture, 1 138n., 140, 143-44; airways, 1 488; area, 1 89; II 451; balance of payments, 1 546-47; capital goods, 1 517; climate & weather, I 42; development plans, 11 415; edu cation, 11 95, 104, 107, 126-30, 134; finance, 11 397, 415, 418; forests, 1 66, 221, 221n.; government, 11 319, 33334, 352-53; health, 11 38, 48, 160, 165; hydroelectricity, 1 254, 256; independ ence restored, 11 263n.; industry, 1 379; and Italy, 11 262-63; labor, 1 578, 59697; lumber, 1 208, 212; minerals, 1 289, 291, 296, 300, 303, 305, 308, 311-13, 317, 325-26, 328, 332, 336-37, 341, 345-51, 353-56, 358-59, 364-65, 509; motor vehicles, 1 466; newspapers, II 142; petroleum, 1 364-65; political divisions, 11 326, 334; political status, 11 451; population, 1 89; population characteristics, 1 93, 95, 97, 122; race factor, 1 592; radio, 11 153; railroads, 1 413, 431-32; research agencies, 11 418n., 425-26; roads, 1 468, 483-84; so cial change, 11 60-62; trade, external, 1 208, 461, 498-501, 503-04, 506, 509, 517, 524-27, 546-47; trade, internal, 1 552; trade unionism, 11 214; water power, 1 253-54, 256; water regions, 1 242 Ethiopia and Eritrea, Federation of: se lected data, 11 451-52; see also Ethi opia; Eritrea Ethiopian Air Lines, 1 488, 578, 597

F
FERDES (Fonds dEquipement Rural et de Developpement Economique et So cial), 11 55 FIDES (Fonds dInvestissement pour lc Developpement Economique et So cial), 1 156, 415; 11 186, 330, 410-12, 423 FORE AMI (Fonds Reinc Elisabeth pour TAssistance Medical e aux Indigenes), II 186, 420 Fabian Colonial Bureau, 11 282 Factories, growth of, 1 373-75 Fagg, William, 11 27, 29-30 Faidherbe, Governor, 11 255 Family life, 11 4-8, 58-59, 374-75 Fang (people), 1 582; 11 66 Fanti (people), 1 84, 267, 275; 11 220, 387 Farming, see Agriculture

INDEX Farming Settlement Scheme (Tan ganyika), 1 173-74 Federal Broadcasting Corp. (Rhodesian), 11 154 Federation des Cheminots Africains, 11 216 Federation of African Societies of North ern Rhodesia, 11 293n. Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, see Rhodesia and Nyasaland, Federa tion of Feldspar, 1 350 Fernando Po: Africanization, 11 358; agriculture, 1 145; government, 11 318, 358; labor, 1 585; newspapers, 11 144; population characteristics, 1 107-08; see also Spanish Guinea FerreFs law, 1 42 Fertility, and population trend, 1 116-19,

483
1

213-24; maps, 1 62, 199; problems of exploitation, 1 204-07; uses of, 1 19598; water supply in rain forest, 1 22630; wood production, 207-13, 386-88; see also individual countries Forminiere, 1 478; 11 201 Fortes, Meyer, 11 23 Foundation for Mutual Assistance in Africa South of the Sahara, 11 428 Foundations, philanthropic, 11 429-30 Four ah Bay College, 11 60, 122n. Franc, C.F.A., 11 396n. France: and Africanization, 11 356-57; colonial government, 11 314-17, 327-30, 345-49; colonial policy, 11 253-62; con stitution of 1946, 11 256-58; develop ment plans, 11 410-12; educational policy, 11 108-12; research work, 11 42224, 428; trade with tropical Africa, 120 329, 346, 377, 521-23, 543; see also 1 Fertilizer minerals, 1 356-59 French Community Filariasis, 11 40-41 Franco-Ethiopian Railway, 1 431, 461 Finance, I 546-51; 11 394-418; sec also Frank el, S. H., 11 394-95, 404 individual countries Frazer, Sir James, 11 23-24 Finkelstein, Lawrence S., 11 131n., 264 Free Council of Democratic German Firestone Plantations Co., 1 153-54, 160Youth, 11 284 61, 372, 384, 475, 597, 599; 11 125, Freetown (Sierra Leone), 1 56, 450 140, 158, 194-95, 401, 425 Freight, by air, 1 490 Firms, size of, in marketing, 1 528-30 French Cameroons: Africanization, 11 Fishing and fisheries, 1 265-88; 11 405; see 359; agriculture, 1 12, 137, 138n., 155; also individual countries area, 1 89; 11 452; budget, 11 452; capi Fluorspar, 1 350-51 tal goods, 1 517; climate & weather, Fodeba, Keita, 11 388 1 42, 56-57; currency unit, 11 452; de Foggara, defined, 1 73n. velopment, 11 412; education, 11 108, Folk tales, 11 32 110, 452; finance, 11 402, 412; forests, Fonds dEquipement Rural et de De I 67, 200-02, 206; government, 11 315, veloppement Economique et Social 328, 347, 359; health, 11 38, 171; hy (FERDES), 11 55 droelectricity, 1 254, 258; income, per Fonds dInvestissement pour le De capita, 11 452; industry, 1 329n., 384veloppement Economique et Social, 85, 387; lumber, 1 207-08, 211-12, 387; see FIDES minerals, 1 300, 308, 310-12, 320, 326, Fonds du Bien-Etre Indigene (FB EI), 332-33, 336-37, 345, 353, 361, 364-65, 11 55, 413-14 509; motor vehicles, 1 466; 11 452; na Fonds du Roi, 11 55 tionalism, 11 280, 296-97; newspapers, Fonds Reine Elisabeth pour lAssistance II 142; petroleum, 1 365; political par Medicale aux Indigenes, see FOREAMI ties, 11 296-98; political status, 11 452; population, 1 89; 11 452; population Food: exports, 1 502-08; gathering of, 1 11-12; imports, 1 512-14; processing, characteristics, 1 92, 98, 101-02, 1091 375-78; taboos, 11 44-45; see also Diet 11, 116-17, 122; ports, 1 449, 452-53; radio, 11 153; railroads, 415, 432; re Food and Agriculture Organization search agencies, 11 419; roads, 1 476-77; (FAO), 1 125n., 137, 209n., 265; 11 42, social change, 11 60, 65-66; trade, 1 179, 417, 429 207-08, 211-12, 387, 452-53, 498-501, Forcados (river), 1 438 503-04, 506, 509, 517; 11 452; water Force Ouvriere, 11 216, 282 power, 1 253-54, 258; waterways, 1 438 Ford Foundation, 11 104, 430 Forde, C. Daryll, 1 13, 85n , 379n., 429n. French Community: Africanization in, Foreign Operations Administration 11 356-57; agriculture, 1 138, 156, 168; airways, 1 488; development plans, 11 (FOA), 1 425n. 410-12, 416; finance, 11 396, 412, 416; Forests: commercial timbers, 1 198-204; fishing, 1 276, 287; formation, 11 261distribution of, 1 61-71; management of,

484

I N DE X

French Community (continued) education, 11 108-10, 454; elite in, 11 62; General Secretariat of, 1 156, 300n.; 367, 386, 388; Eurafricans, 11 257n.; 11 423; government, 11 314, 316-17, Europeanization, 11 367; finance, 11 330, 347, 356-57; health, 1 179; indus 396-98, 402, 404, 412; French policy try, 1 378-79; marketing, 1 534; min toward, 11 259-60; government, 11 315erals, 1 332, 337-38; population charac 16, 328, 330, 346, 357, 359; health, 11 47-48, 167; hydroelectricity, 1 254; teristics, 1 93, 95; ports, 1 448-50; rail income, per capita, 11 397, 454; indus roads, 1 414-15; republics, 1 5-6; re try, 1 377, 387; infant mortality rates, search agencies, 11 422-24; roads, 1 474, 11 167; lumber, 1 207-08, 387; minerals, 477; settlement, 1 168; social change, 1 336, 343, 357, 509; motor vehicles, 11 60; trade, 1 448-50, 530-31, 534, I 466; 11 454; nationalism, 11 280, 296, 542; see also France; individual coun 298; newspapers, 11 142; political divi tries sions, n 328, 454; political parties, 11 French Equatorial Africa: Africaniza 296, 298; population, 1 89, 105; radio, tion, 11 357; agriculture, 1 177-78; II 153; railroads, 1 432; research agen area, 1 89; development plans, 11 412; cies, 11 419, 423-24; trade, 1 207-08, diamonds, 1 343; education, 11 108-10, 377, 387, 498-501, 503-04, 509; trade 453; finance, 11 398, 402, 412; forests, unionism, 11 213, 216; water power, 1 1 214n.; government, 11 315-16, 328, 254; see also West Africa; individual 330, 346, 357; health, 11 38, 40-41, 45, 47, 51; hydroelectricity, 1 254; income, countries Front pour TAction Civique du Tchad, per capita, 11 453; industry, 1 386-87; labor, 1 585; lumber, 1 207-08, 386-87; 11 296 migration, 1 585; minerals, 1 291, 322Fuels: mineral, 1 361-66, 512; wood, 23, 336-37, 343, 508-09; motor vehi I 197, 208-09, 256 cles, 1 466; 11 453; newspapers, 11 142; Fulani (people), 1 16, 20, 85, 103, 130; political divisions, 11 328, 453; popula II 42, 171, 242 tion, 1 89; population characteristics, G I 105, 110-11; radio, 11 151, 153; rail roads, 1 421, 432; research agencies, GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs II 419; roads, 1 464; settlement, 1 177and Trade), 1 544 78; trade, 1 207-08, 387, 498-502, 504, Ga (people), 1 267 506, 508-09; water power, 1 254; see Gabon (river), 1 439 also individual countries Gabon Republic: airways, 1 488; area, French Guinea, see Guinea, Republic of 11 454; budget, 11 454; climate & French overseas territories, see French weather, 1 56, 58; currency unit, 11 454; Community fishing, 1 276; forests, 1 67, 202; gov French Socialist Party (SFIO), Senegalese ernment, 11 328; income, per capita, section of, 11 288, 291-92, 296 11 454; industry, 1 386; labor, 1 582; French Somaliland: area, 1 89; n 453; language, official, 11 454; lumber, 1 211, budget, n 453; currency unit, n 453; 386; migration, 1 582; minerals, 1 296, development plans, 11 412; education, 300, 308, 337, 358, 364-65; petroleum, 11 108, 453; finance, 11 412; fishing, 1 365; political status, 11 454; popula 1 281; income, per capita, 11 453; lum tion, 11 454; population characteristics, ber, 1 208; minerals, 1 354; motor vehi I 92, 98, 108, 114, 116-17; ports, 1 449, cles, 1 466; 11 453; political status, 11 453; roads, 1 468; trade, 1 211, 453; 453; population, 1 89; 11 453; popula II 454 tion characteristics, 1 97, 122; ports, Gailey & Roberts organization, 1 529 1 449, 461; radio, 11 153; railroads, Galla (people), 1 93, 266 1 431; roads, 1 484; trade, 1 461, 498- Gambia: airways, 1 485; area, 1 89; 11 501; 11 453; water regions, 1 242; water 455; British policy toward, 11 239; cur supply, 1 247 rency unit, 11 455; death rate, 11 167; French Sudan, see Sudanese Republic development plans, 11 407, 409; fi French Togoland, see Togo nance, 11 397, 401n., 402-03, 407, 409, French Union, 11 256; see also France; 455; government, 11 312; health, 11 166French Community 67; income, per capita, 11 397, 455; infant mortality rates, 11 167; language, French West Africa: Africanization, 11 official, 11 455; lumber, 1 208; minerals, 357, 359; agriculture, 1 137; area, 1 89; 1 332-33, 365, 509; motor vehicles, development, 11 412; diamonds, 1 343;

IN D E X 1 466; 11 455; newspapers, 11 142; petroleum, 1 365; political status, 11 455; population, 1 89; 11 455; popula tion characteristics, 1 95, 103; ports, I 449-50; radio, 11 153; roads, 1 468, 474; schools and enrollments, 11 455; trade, 1 450, 497-501, 503-04, 509, 513, 533; 11 455; waterways, 1 436 Gambia (river), 1 436 Gambia Minerals Ltd., 1 333 Ganda (sing. Baganda) (people), 1 132; II 140, 145, 226, 245, 288, 304, 327 Gandhi (Mahatma Gandhi), 11 285 Garbell, Maurice A., 1 41 Gardiner, R. K., n 209n. Garnets, 1 349-50 Garnier, B. J., 1 51 Garoua (Fr. Cameroons), 1 453 Garvey, Marcus, 11 280, 280n. Geba (river), 1 437 Geez (language), 11 127 General Agreement 011 Tariffs and Trade (GATT), 1 544 Geomines (Compagnie Gcologique et Miniere des Ingenieurs et Industriels Beiges), 1 291, 309, 319, 331, 478; 11 201
George, Lake, 1 234, 235, 271, 277, 278, 286, 288 German East Africa, 1 291 German Togoland, 1 414 Germanium, 1 327 Germany, trade with tropical Africa, 1 298, 346, 522 Gezira, the, 1 38; see also Sudan Gezira Board Ghana (formerly Gold Coast): Africani zation, 11 354-56, 383; agriculture, 1 137-38, 141, 169-70; airways, 1 485; area, 1 89; 11 455; balance of payments, 1 546-48; British policy toward, 11 24044; chieftancy, 11 373; civil service, 1 579-80; cooperatives, 11 211; crafts, I 395-96; currency unit, 11 455; death rate, 11 167; development plans, 11 405, 407, 415; diamonds, 1 343-44; educa tion, 11 106n., 107, 109, 115, 120-23, 126, 134-36, 139, 455; elite in, 11 368, 368n., 369, 371-83; Europeanization, II 368, 368n.; finance, 11 397, 401n., 402-03, 405, 407, 415, 418, 455-56; fishing, 1 267-68, 273-75, 286-87; for ests, 1 66, 201-02; government, 11 24042, 306, 311-13, 315, 342-43, 354-56, 436, 439; health, 11 37, 44n., 48, 16667, 171; hydroelectricity, 1 262-63, 263n.; income, per capita, 11 397, 455; industry, 1 386, 389, 392, 394, 513-14; infant mortality rates, 11 167; labor,

485
1 575, 577-80, 585, 587, 596; language, official, 11 456; lumber, 1 207-08, 21011, 386; marketing, 1 532, 534n.; mi gration, 1 585; minerals, 1 291-92, 296,

305-07, 328-29, 334-36, 340, 343-44, 365, 508-09; motion pictures, 11 15758; motor vehicles, 1 466; 11 455; na tionalism, 11 282, 288-89, 293, 295-96, 298; newspapers, 11 142-46, 148; petro leum, 1 365; political divisions, 11 329; political parties, 11 294, 295-97, 298; political status, 11 244, 455; population, 1 89, 117; 11 455; population character istics, 1 97, 103, 105, 108, 110-11, 11617, 120; ports, 1 449-51; race factor, 1 592; 11 369; radio, 11 153, 155; rail roads, 1 406, 413, 416-17, 432; research agencies, 11 419, 428; roads, 1 464n., 468, 470, 475, 491; settlement, 1 169; social change, 11 60, 65; trade, external, 1 207-08, 210, 287, 292, 306-07, 409, 450-51, 498-501, 503-04, 506, 508-09, 511, 513, 521, 524-27, 529, 530, 53234, 538-39, 541-42, 544, 546-48; 11 455; trade, internal, 1 552-53, 556-58, 561, 564; trade unionism, 11 213, 217, 219, 220; transportation, 1 406, 409, 411; water power, 1 253, 262-63, 263n.; water supply, 1 247; waterways, 1 437 Ghana Cocoa Marketing Board, 1 530, 534n.; 11 403 Ghana Congress Party, 11 296-97 Ghana Co-operative Marketing Associa tion, Ltd., 11 210 Ghana Trades Union Congress, 11 217 Ghedem Mountain, 1 308 Ghee, 11 209-10 Gibbs, Sir Alexander, & Partners, 1 492, 492n. Gillman, Theodore, 11 177-78 Giriama (people), 11 227 Giuba (Juba) (river), 1 253, 440-41 Glesinger, Egon, 1 223-24 Goan Voice (Kenya), 11 150 Goans, 1 97, 554; 11 246 Goats and sheep, number of, 1 128 God, belief in, 11 21-23 Gold Coast, see Ghana Gold production, 1 334-40; map, 1 335 Gonja Development Co., 1 169 Gonorrhea, 11 171 Goodrich, B. F., Co., 1 161 Gordon Memorial College, 11 132-33 Goree (Senegal), 11 253-54, 347, 348 Gourou, Pierre, 1 136 Government, 11 303-06; administrative, 11 320-53; and Africanization, 11 353-59; central, 11 320-35; chieftancy, 11 13, 13n., 373-74; civil service jobs, 1 579-

486

INDEX
Guinea Highlands, I 58 Gujerati (language), n 150 Gulf Oil Co., i 365 Gulf Oil Corp. of the Gold Coast, I 365 Gulliver, P. H., i 585n. Gunther, John, i 592 Gurrey, P., i i 32 Gypsum, i 351

Government (continued) 81; colonial policies, ii 223-69; and de velopment, i i 184-207, 402-30; and education, n 96-97, 104, 108-33; and elite, i i 376-79; and finance, n 394418; investment, 402-18; legislative, n 307-20; local, n 335-53; among rain forest peoples, n 67; research work, ii 418-30; and social change, n 60-61; among Teita, n 77-80; see also indi vidual countries Government School of Pharmacy (Ni geria), i i 138 Graduates General Congress (Sudan), ii 292, 296 Graphite, i 346-47 Grasslands, i 70-72, 128 Gray, Robert F., i 86n. Grazing, controlled, i 131-32 Great Britain, see United Kingdom Great Dyke, i 296, 304, 313, 332 Great Escarpment, i 35 Great North Road, i 469 Great Scarcies (river), i 437 Greenway, P. J., i 126n. Grevisse, F., i 599; n 198-99, 471 Griffiths, James, n 215 Groundnut Scheme (Tanganyika), i 17173, 460, 545; n 236, 410 Groundnuts, see Peanuts Gueye, Lamine, n 288, 291-92, 314 Guija settlement scheme, i 183-84 Guinea, French, see Guinea, Republic of Guinea, Gulf of, i 42, 283 Guinea, Portuguese, see Portuguese Guinea Guinea, Republic of (formerly French Guinea): agriculture, i 138; area, i 89; i i 456; climate & weather, i 46, 56-57; crafts, i 395; currency unit, n 456; de velopment plans, i i 412; finance, n 412, 456; forests, i 66, 69, 200; government, i i 316, 328, 330, 436; hydroelectricity, i 258; income, per capita, n 456; labor, i 586n., 596-97; language, official, n 456; migration, i 586n.; minerals, i 292, 296-98, 328-29, 338, 344, 347; physiography, i 37; political parties, ii 298; political status, n 456; popula tion, i 89; i i 456; ports, i 448-49; rail roads, i 414-15; research agencies, ii 425, 427-28; roads, i 468, 472, 474-75; social change, n 60; trade, i 292; n 456; trade unionism, n 216; water power, i 253, 258; waterways, i 437 Guinea, Spanish, see Spanish Guinea Guinea coast, I 36-37, 42, 46, 268; n 35 Guinea current, I 437 Guinea forest, i 66-67, 200-02, 226

H
Haden-Guest, Stephen, i 68n. Haile Selassie, i 144; n 127-28, 279, 319n., 333-34 Haile Selassie Secondary School, n 127, 129 Hailey, Lord, i 490; n 269, 305, 311, 311n., 317n., 319, 323, 342-43, 345, 353, 408, 413, 422, 438 Haines, C. Grove, n 226n., 276n., 286n. Halcrow, Sir William, & Partners, i 250 Half-Hamites, i 85 Hamilton, J. A. de C., i lOOn. Hamites, i 8, 84-85, 86, 105 Hance, William A., i 87, 87n., 455n. Hancock, Sir Keith, i 28, 28n. Harar Plateau, i 33 Harar Teacher Training School, n 129 Harbors, types of, i 449 Ilarmattan, i 53, 54 Harris, Alfred and Grace G., n 72-73, 7578, 76n., 80-81, 89, 471 Hausa (people), i 85, 103, 378, 394; n 242, 296 Hayford, Joseph Casely, u 292 Health, n 33-34, 159-60; death rates, n 166-67; diseases, n 33-51, 60, 159-82; government expenditure, n 405; medi cal facilities, n 160-65; and United Nations, n 44, 49, 164, 165, 168, 175, 426; see also individual countries Herero (people), n 22 Ilerskovits, M. J., i 8n., 22, 22n., 24n.; i i 298 Higher Institute of Law and Economics (Somalia), n 130-31 Highways, see Roads Hima (people), i 26, 132 Hodgkin, Thomas, n 216n., 218, 219n., 221, 255n., 256, 273-74, 280, 291n., 295-97, 385-87, 386n., 389n, Hoffman, Paul G., n 416n. Hoggar Road, i 467 Hogs, see Pigs Holt Line, i 451 Hookworm disease, n 40 Homer, George R., n 54, 66-67, 69-72. 71n., 82, 471 Hospitals, i i 160-62 Hottentots, i 84, 84n.

INDEX
Houghton, D. Hobart, 1 582, 587; it 471 Houphouet-Boigny, Felix, 11 284, 288-89, 295-96, 298, 301, 315-17 Housing: changes in, 11 57-58; in Elisa bethville, 11 198-99; government ex penditure, 11 405; in tribal society, 1 20-

487
by country, 11 397, 446-70; taxation of,

11 403

India: and African nationalism, 11 28586; trade with tropical Africa, 1 346 Indian Ocean, 1 42-43, 280; waterways on coast, 1 440-41 Indians, see Asians 21 Industry: and community development, Hoyle, A. C., 1 63 11 194-95, 200-01; government expendi Hoyt, Elizabeth, 11 102n. ture, 11 405; and labor, 1 578-79; prog Hughes-Rice, T., 1 175 ress, 1 371-401; secondary, 1 388-92; Huila Plateau, 1 422 see also Manufacturing; individual Huileries du Congo Beige, 11 201 countries Hurst, H. E., 1 234, 235n., 249, 249n. Infant mortality rates, 1 114, 119; 11 33Huxley, Elspeth, 1 121n., 166n., 171; 34, 167 11 91, 91n., 437 Inhamissa settlement scheme, 1 183, 184 Hyde-Clark, Meredyth, 1 585n. Initiation rites, 11 16-18 Hydroelectric power, 1 251-63, 316; map, Inkisi (river), 1 258 I 257 Insecticide production, 1 385 Hydrologic equation, 1 226, 226n. Institut de Medecine Tropicale Princesse Hygiene, 11 176-77; see also Health Astrid, 11 420 Institut dEnseignement et de Recherches I Tropicales (Ivory Coast), 11 423 IFAN (Institut Frangais dAfrique Noire), Institut de Recherche Scientifique de II 419, 424, 427 Madagascar, 11 423 INEAC (Institut National pour FEtude Institut de Recherches du Cameroun, Agronomique du Congo Beige), 1 156, 11 423 222; 11 419-20, 420n. Institut de Recherches du Coton et des IRSAC (Institut pour la Recherche Scien Textiles Exotiques, 1 156; 11 419, 424 tifique en Afrique Centrale), 1 157; 11 Institut de Recherches du Togo, 11 423 413-14, 419-20 Institut de Recherches pour les Huiles de Ibadan (Nigeria), 1 24, 98 Palme et les Oleagineux, 1 156; 11 424 Ibo (people), 1 27, 266, 592; 11 242, 274, Institut des Fruits et Agrumes Coloniaux, 295, 296 I 156; 11 424, 427 Institut dEtudes Centrafricaines, 11 423 Ibo Union, 11 301 Institut Frangais dAfrique Noire (IFAN), I jaw (people), 1 275 II 419, 424, 427 Ila (people), 1 266 Institut Geographique du Congo Beige, Illiteracy, 11 139-40 11 420 Ilmenite, 1 332-34 Institut National pour FEtude Agrono Imperial Chemical Industries Ltd., 1 333 mique du Congo Beige, see INEAC Imperial Ethiopian College of Agricul Institut Pasteur, 11 422, 424, 427 tural and Mechanical Arts, 1 597; 11 Institut pour la Recherche Scientifique 129, 426 en Afrique Centrale, see IRSAC Imperial Ethiopian Mapping and Geog Institute for Overseas Studies (Lisbon), raphy Institute, 1 597; 11 426 11 425 Imports: capacity, 1 526-27, 528; capital Institute of Extra-Mural Studies (Ghana), goods, 1 512, 516-18; composition of, 11 135-36, 13Gn., 218, 220 1 511-12; by country, 1 500-01, 524-25, Institute of Tropical Medicine, 11 425 526; 11 446-70; duties, 1 539-41, 542; Intelligentsia, see Elite food, 1 512-14; origin of, 1 519; per Inter-African Bureau for Epizootic Dis cent of worlds, by value, 1 497; tex eases, 1 127; 11 428 tiles, 1 512, 514-16; unit value indexes, 1 524-25; see also trade under indi Inter-African Bureau for Soils and Rural vidual countries; Trade Economy, 11 428 Incest, 11 6-7 Inter-African Committees on Statistics, Incomati (river), 1 253, 260, 440; valley Social Sciences, Housing and the of, 1 76, 181, 184-85 Mechanisation of Agriculture, 11 428 Income: cash, 1 552; of farmers, 1 138; Inter-African Labour Institute, 11 428 government, see Revenue; per capita, Inter-Airican Pedological Service, 11 428

488

INDEX
Jeanes School, 1 567; 11 136-37 Jebel Aulia Dam, 1 234 Jehovahs Witnesses, 11 279 Jelliffe, D. B., 11 34n. Jinja (Uganda), 1 255, 381 John Holt Line, Ltd., 1 451 Johnson, Rev. Samuel, 11 388 Joint Liberian-United States Commission for Economic Development, 11 426 Jones, A. G., 1 278n. Jonglei Cut, 1 249 Jos Plateau, 1 37, 58, 311, 320, 324, 360 Juba (Giuba) (river), 1 253, 440-41 Judd, H. O., 11 209n. Judiciary: Belgian, 11 321-23; British, 11 325, 343-45; Ethiopian, 11 334; French, 11 348; Liberian, 11 332; Portuguese, n 332, 350-51; among Teita, 11 78-79 Junta das Missoes Geograficas e de In vestigates do Ultramar, 1 157; 11 424

Inter-African Research Fund, 11 428 International African Institute, it 82, 82n., 84n., 22In., 366n., 429 International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (World Bank), 1 174n., 417, 425n., 475, 483, 547; 11 236, 413-17, 417n. International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), 11 184, 217, 219 International Cooperation Administration (ICA), 1 144, 596-97; 11 126, 129, 407, 414, 426 International Federation of Democratic Women, 11 284 International Federation of Workers Edu cational Associations, 11 134n., 220n. International Finance Corporation (IFC), 11 415, 416 International Monetary Fund, 1 546; 11 415, 417 International Organization for Control of the African Migratory Locust, 11 429 International Red Locust Control Organi zation, 11 429 International Students Union, 11 284 Investment capital, 1 546-51; 11 394-418 Iron ore, 1 297-301; map, 1 297 Irrigation, 1 176-77 Islam, and nationalism, 11 276, 436 Isohyet, defined, 1 236n. Italian Somaliland, see Somalia Italy: colonial policy, 11 262; educational policy, 11 130; and Ethiopia, 11 262-63; trade with tropical Africa, 1 522 Itayemi, Phebean, 11 32 Ivory Coast, Republic of the: area, 11 456; budget, 11 457; climate & weather, I 56-57; currency unit, 11 457; educa tion, 11 109; forests, 1 64, 66, 201-02; government, 11 328; health, 11 51; in come, per capita, 11 456; industry, 1 379, 510; language, official, 11 457; lumber, 1 211; minerals, 1 308, 347-48; nationalism, 11 288, 296, 298; political parties, 11 296, 298; political status, II 456; population, 11 456; ports, 1 44849; railroads, 1 413; research agencies, 11 423; roads, 1 468, 472; social change, 11 62; trade, external, 1 211, 448, 510; 11 456; trade, internal, 1 552; water ways, 1 437

K
Kabou clinic, 11 163 Kabre (people), 1 15 Kachira, Lake (Uganda), 1 271 Kafue (river), 1 253, 261-62 Kafue Flats, 1 232 Kafue Valley Regional Development As sociation, 1 425n. Kagame, Abbe Alexis, 11 388 Kagera (river), 1 234, 445 Kagera Mines Ltd., 1 320 Kagwa, Apolo, 11 387 Kaiser Engineers and Contractors, Inc., 1 263 Kalahari Desert, 1 11, 32, 34, 40, 49, 73, 83, 203, 241, 242; n 12, 62 Kamasia (people), 1 16 Kamba (people), 1 175; 11 73 Kamba Land Unit, 1 132 Kambui Hills, 1 304-05 Kamerun, 1 415 Kamerun National Congress, 11 296 Kampala (Uganda), 11 148, 390 Kano (Nigeria), 1 45, 100, 395 Kaolack (Senegal), 1 436 Kara (people), 1 15 Karamojong (people), 1 20 Kariba Gorge, 1 253, 259n., 261-62 Karoo system, 1 296 Kasai (river), 1 344, 421, 442; valley of, 1 57 Kasai Highlands, 1 58 Kasavubu, Joseph, 11 298 Kasitu Valley Union, 11 209 Katanga: development, 11 201, 231; edu cation, 11 98, 137-38; forests, 1 70; hy droelectricity, 1 255; independence, 11 447; labor, 1 161, 577, 583, 587-88,

J
Jackson, I. C., 11 188, 190 Jamia (cultural society), 11 296 Japan, trade with tropical Africa, 1 522, 543, 545-46 Jay, B. Alwyn, 1 205n. Jeanes, Anna T., 11 136

INDEX
596, 599; minerals, 1 290-92, 295, 300, 302, 313-16, 319, 323-24, 340-41, 34849, 351, 355, 363, 368; newspapers, 11 145; population characteristics, 1 11516, 119-20; railroads, 1 419-21, 420n., 429, 433; see also Belgian Congo Katilungu, Lawrence, 11 216 Kazembe (people), 1 266 Keay, R. W. J., 1 63 Keen, Sir Rernard A., 1 173, 196, 222; 11 471 Kekana, Job, 11 392 Kenya: agriculture, 1 125, 132, 138n., 140-42, 145-49, 148n., 151, 155, 157, 159, 168, 175; airways, 1 485, 489; area, 1 89; 11 457; balance of payments, I 548; Rritish policy toward, 11 246-47; climate & weather, 1 57; cooperatives, II 210; currency unit, 11 457; develop ment, 11 201, 405, 407, 409-10; educa tion, 11 59-60, 98, 102, 123, 136-37, 457; finance, 11 397-98, 405, 407, 40910, 457; fishing, 1 265, 269, 277, 279, 281; forests, 1 66-67, 197, 203, 219-20; government, 11 246-47, 312, 344; grass lands, 1 72; health, 11 38-41, 45, 48, 50, 161-62, 168, 171; hydroelectricity, I 254, 262; income, per capita, 1 397; II 457; industry, 1 378, 381, 383, 385, 388-89, 510; labor, 1 162, 575-76, 578, 584, 589, 595-96, 598-600; language, official, 11 457; lumber, 1 207-08, 21213; Mau Mau, 1 563n.; 11 62-63, 90, 101-02, 146, 218, 247, 292n., 363, 36869; migration, 1 584; minerals, 1 305, 310-12, 316, 321, 323, 325-26, 328, 331-32, 334, 336, 338, 340, 346-56, 361, 364-65, 509; motion pictures, 11 158; motor vehicles, 1 466; 11 457; na tionalism, 11 273-74, 278, 288, 291, 292-93, 300; newspapers, 11 142, 14546, 148-50; petroleum, 1 365; physi ography, 1 33; political divisions, 11 326; political status, 11 457; population, 1 89; 11 457; population characteristics, 1 92-93, 95, 105-06, 111, 115, 117, 119; ports, 1 449, 458-59; radio, 11 151, 153; railroads, 1 413, 427-29, 432; roads, 1 468-69, 481-82, 491n.; settlement, 1 168, 175; social change, 11 59-60, 6264, 72, 90; Teita people, 11 72-82; tele vision, 11 141; trade, external, 1 207-08, 212, 458-59, 502, 504, 506, 509-11, 513, 523-27, 538, 542, 544, 548; 11 457; trade, internal, 1 561, 563n., 567; trade unionism, 11 213-14, 217-18; water power, 1 253-54, 262; water re gions, 1 238, 242; water supply, 1 247; waterways, 1 440-41

489

Kenya, Mt., 1 59 Kenya African Union (KAU), 11 282, 29293 Kenya and Uganda Railway and Har bours, 11 138-39 Kenya Daily Mail, 11 150 Kenya Federation of Labour, 11 274 Kenya Highlands, 1 128n., 159 Kenya-Uganda Line, 1 427-29, 434, 445, 577 Kenya Weekly News, 11 150 Kenyatta, Jomo, 11 284, 289, 292-93, 302, 368 Khartoum (Sudan), 1 100, 430 Khartoum Technical Institute, 11 133 Khatmiyya (religious faction), 11 296 Kibwanga, Mwenze, 11 392 Kiga (people), 1 175 Kikuyu (people), 1 86, 141, 142, 266; 11 5, 33, 63, 73, 98, 101, 102, 119, 226, 274, 287, 290-93, 363 Kikuyu Central Association, 11 287, 29192 Kikuyu Independent Schools, n 98, 102 Kilimanjaro, Mt., 1 59, 201 Kilimanjaro Native Co-operative Union, Ltd., 1 579; 11 207, 211 Kilindini (Kenya), 1 458-59 Kilo-Moto, Societe des Mines dOr de, 1 336, 478; 11 98 Kimbanguism (movement), 11 90 Kimble, David and Helen, 11 134n., 220n. Kingsway Stores, 1 529; 11 138 Kipsigis (people), 1 141; 11 63 Kirk Mountains, 1 352, 353 Kitawala (movement), 11 90, 279 Kitchen, Helen, 11 144n. Kitchener, Horatio Herbert, 11 132 Kitchener School of Medicine, 11 427 Kitimba Falls, 1 259 Kivu, Lake, 1 228, 271, 445 Kiwele, Joseph, 11 389 Kline, Hibberd V. B., Jr., 1 433, 435, 468, 472, 486-87; 11 471 Kofi, Vincent, 11 392 Koni Falls, 1 255 Konkoure (river), 1 253, 258, 328 Kouilou (river), 1 253, 258, 439 Kpe (people), 11 11 Kpelle (people), 11 22 Kribi (Fr. Cameroons), 1 258, 452-53 Kru (people), 1 84 Kuczynski, R. R., 1 115, 115n. Kumasi College of Technology, 11 123 Kwashiorkor, 11 44, 44n. Kyanite, 1 351-52 Kyedye (people), 1 270 Kyoga, Lake, 1 232, 234-35, 249, 445

490 L

IN D E X

Leubuscher, Charlotte, i 398 Levantines, i 97, 97n., 554; n, 234, 399; Labor: African, i 571-94; and agricul see also Asians ture, i 160-62, 162n., 572-73, 575-76; Lever Brothers Ltd., i 126, 145, 154, Asian, i 597-98; civil service, i 579-81; 376; see also United Africa Group in commerce, i 579; European, i 594Leys, i 151; defined, i 149n. 97; in industry, i 578-79; manpower Liberia: agriculture, i 153, 161; area, I resources, i 571-78; migrant workers, 89; ii 457; balance of payments, I 547; i 581-88; in mining, i 576-77, 595n.; capital goods, i 517; climate & weather, problems of, i 588-94; productivity fac i 56, 58; currency unit, n 458; de tor, i 396n., 588-91; race factor, i 591velopment, ii 194-95, 415; diamonds, 94; in Stanleyville, n 84-85; and trade i 344; education, ii 104, 125-26, 139, unionism, n 213-21, 282; in transpor 458; finance, n 402, 404, 415, 458; fish tation services, i 577-78; in tribal so ing, i 275; forests, i 66; government, ciety, i 9-18; turnover of, i 160, 397-98, ii 318-19, 332-33, 351-52; health, n 34; 586-88; i i 194-95; wages, i 598-603; income, per capita, n 457; industry, see also individual countries i 384, 514; labor, i 161, 596-97, 599; Ladell, W. S. S., i 45 language, official, n 458; lumber, i 209; Lagos (Nigeria), i 45, 438, 451; n 47, 60, minerals, i 296-99, 323, 336, 338, 344, i20, 167, 170 508-09; newspapers, n 142; political Lake Victoria Fisheries Service, i 279 status, i i 457; population, i 89; n 457; Lakes, i 232-36, 444-47; fishing, i 271-72, ports, i 449, 452; race factor, i 592; 277-80; see also individual lakes radio, n 152-53, 156; railroads, i 418; Laki Islands, i 93, 140, 378 research agencies, n 418n., 425-26, Lamal, Frere, S.J., i 112n. 428; roads, i 468, 472, 475-76; social Lamine Gueye Law (1950), n 258 change, n 60; trade, i 452, 497-501, Land: in farms, size of unit, i 152, 154503-04, 506-09, 513, 517, 523, 538, 56; need for, i 163-64; settlement on, 547; ii 457; trade unionism, ii 214; i 155-56, 158-62, 163-93; tenure, i 24transportation, i 411; waterways, i 437 28 Liberia College, n 125-26 Languages and dialects: in Ethiopia, n Liberia Mining Co. Ltd., i 161, 418, 597; 128; in French West Africa, n 108; ii 125-26 official languages, by country, n 446Liberian Amcrican-Swedish Minerals 70; written, n 96 Co., i 299, 452 Larrat, R., i 128, 128n. Liberian Frontier Force, i 596 Laubach, Frank, i 56; n 105, 105n., 126, Libreville (Gabon), i 202, 211, 276, 453 140 Liebenow, J. Gus, n 209, 292, 341n., Lauer, W., i 47 365n. Law, customary, i 25, 26 Limpopo (river), i 35, 70, 184, 440; valley Laws, Robert, i 129n. of, i 76, 181, 183-85, 426 Lawson, Rowena, i 274n. Linyanti (river), i 34 Laye, Camara, n 90, 386 Lirvei-n-Kano Hills, i 309, 319, 360 Lead, i 321-23; map, i 321 Literacy training, n 139-40 Leaders, see Elite Literature, n 387-88 League of Nations, i 543, 545; n 268 Lithium, i 330-31 Lebombo Mountains, i 345 Little Scarcies (river), i 334, 437 Lebon, J. H. G., i 252n. Livestock, sec Pastoralism; Pigs; Sheep Leduc, Gaston, n 396-401, 471 Livingstone, David, i 265; n 57, 160, 443 Lefebvre, Jacques, n 471 Lobi (people), n 62 Legislative institutions, n 307-20 Lobito (Angola), i 454-55 Lele (people), i 266, 270 Lobito Railway, i 307 Lennox-Boyd, Alan, n 247 Local Government and Community De Leopold II, i i 115 velopment Training Centre (Uganda), Leopoldville (Belg. Congo), i 98, 255, ii 191 258, 379, 441, 586, 594n.; n 58, 149, Logone (river), I 228, 447 150, 198, 200-0.1, 200n., 287, 338 Loi-cadre (1956), n 315, 316, 330 Leprosy, n 38-39, 168; map, n 39 Lokele (people), i 267, 270; n 28, 33, 438 Letchford, Peter, i i 205n. Letourneau, Jean, i i 258 Lomaland, n 17, 34 Letourneau, R. G., Inc., i 465 Lotuko (people), I 270; n 16

IN D E X Lourenco Marques (Mozambique), 1 260, 282, 410, 426, 456-57 Lovanium University, 11 116-17, 161 Lozi (people), 1 266, 267, 270 Luala valley paysannat, 1 179-80 Lualaba (river), 1 255, 315-16, 419, 442; valley of, 1 232, 364 Luanda (Angola), 1 255, 276, 379, 410, 455; 11 414 Luapula (people), 1 269 Luchazi (people), 1 270 Luena (people), 1 267, 270 Lufira (river), 1 255, 291, 316 Luganda (language), 11 145, 469 Lugard, Lord, 1 490; n 108, 237 Lukuga (river), 1 233 Lukuka Falls, 1 255 Lukuledi (river), 1 440 Lull, Raymond, 11 95 Lumber, 1 207-13, 386-88 Lumumba, Patrice, 11 298 Lunga Plain, 1 231, 232 Luo (people), 11 274 Lury, Canon E. E., 11 390 Luvua (river), 1 291 Lyttelton, Oliver, 11 247 Lyttleton constitution, 11 246-47

491

M
MacDonald, G., 11 34n. Macina irrigation system, 1 176 McKay, Vernon, 11 286 Macleod constitutional proposals (1960), 11 312n. Macuse (river), 1 440 Madagascar, see Malagasy Republic Madingou scheme, 1 178 Magadi, Lake, 1 232, 355 Magic, 11 23-25 Magnesium, 1 331-32 Mail: by air, 1 490; services, 1 442 Maize, 1 138, 505; map, 1 135 Makerere College, 11 56, 62, 101, 161, 363, 391, 422 Makonde plateau, 1 247-48 Makonde Water Corp., 1 248 Malagarasi (river), 1 253; valley of, 1 187 Malagarasi swamp, 1 232 Malagasy rain forest, 1 66, 68 Malagasy Republic (formerly Madagas car): agriculture, 1 138, 138n.; air ways, 1 488-89; area, 1 89; 11 458; cli mate & weather, 1 40, 46, 54, 56-57, 59; coal, 1 363; currency unit, 11 458; death rate, 11 167; development plans, 11 412; education, 11 108-10, 458; fi nance, 11 397, 400, 412, 458; fishing, 1 268-69, 281; forests, 1 64, 66, 68-69,

71, 200; government, 11 315, 328, 330, 347; health, 11 167; hydro electricity, I 254; income, per capita, 11 458; in dustry, 1 382-83; infant mortality rates, II 167; labor, 1 596; language, official, 11 458; lumber, 1 209; minerals, 1 29192, 300-01, 305, 308, 310, 313, 325, 334, 336-38, 346-49, 353, 356-59, 361, 363, 365, 509; motor vehicles, 1 466; 11 458; newspapers, 11 142; petroleum, 1 365; physiography, 1 35-36; political divisions, 11 313, 328-30; political sta tus, 11 458; population, 1 89; 11 458; population characteristics, 1 93, 95, 97, 102, 105-06, 109, 111, 114, 119, 122; ports, 1 449, 456; radio, 11 153; rail roads, 1 413, 427, 432; research agen cies, 11 419, 424; roads, 1 468, 481, 491; trade, 1 209, 456, 498-501, 505-06, 509; 11 458; water power, 1 254; water ways, 1 441 Malaria, 11 35-36, 168 Malcolm, D. W., 1 16n., 105n. Malgache negroes, 1 86-87 Mali Federation, 11 317, 458; see also Senegal, Republic of; Sudanese Re public Malinowski, Bronislaw, 11 4, 369 Malnutrition, 11 41-45, 177 Malthus, Thomas R., 1 401, 401n. Manganese, 1 305-08; map, 1 306 Manioc: in diet, 1 20; producing areas map, 1 134 Manufacturing: cooperatives, 11 209-10; exports, 1 509-11; factory growth, 1 373-75; indigenous crafts, 1 22-23, 39496; industrial crops, 1 378-86; and labor, 1 578-79; primary processing, 1 375-78; problems, 1 396-401; secondary industry, 1 388-92; veneers & plywoods, I 387-88 Manyara, Lake, 1 232 Maquet, Jacques J., 11 82, 84n., 471 Marealle, Tom, 11 301 Marett, R. R., 11 23n. Margai, Sir Milton, 11 289, 297 Marketing organization, 1 527-37, 560-62; II 211; and development funds, 11 403, 406 Markets, 1 556-58 Marriage, 11 5-8, 9; marital status, 1 11113; among rain forest peoples, 11 6869; in Stanleyville, 11 87-88; unmarried persons, 1 112 Martineau, A., 1 481 Marzorati, A. F. G., 11 337n. Masai (people), 1 16, 17, 19-21, 85, 131, 553; 11 42, 64, 73, 119, 227, 438 Massawa (Eritrea), 1 462

492

IN D E X

Matadi (Belg. Congo), i 453-54 Mitchell, Sir Philip, i 8, 9n., 13, 22n., 104n.; i i 36, 226 Mau Mau, i 563n.; n 62-63, 90, 101-02, 146, 218, 247, 292n., 363, 368-69 Mitchell Cotts & Go. Ltd., i 529 Mauritania, Islamic Republic of: govern Mlanje Mountain, i 219, 301 ment, i i 328; minerals, i 317-18; politi Mlingano Sisal Experiment Station, I 146 cal status, ii 459; selected data, n 459 Moa (river), i 437 Mauritanian Road, i 467 Mobil Exploration Nigeria, Inc., I 366 May, Jacques M., n 35-36, 39-40, 47, Mobil International Oil Co., i 366 165, 171, 178, 471 Mobuku Hydro-Electric Scheme, i 303 Mboya, Tom, n 216, 247, 274 Mogamedes (Angola), i 259, 276, 287, Meat: consumption, i 19-20; exports, i 455 504-05 Mogamedes Railway, i 455 Medical Research Council Laboratories Moffett, J. P., i 219n., 540n, 543n. (Gambia; Uganda), n 422 Mogadishu (Somalia), i 461 Medicine: facilities, n 160-65; research Mohammedan schools, n 95 Moisture regions, map of, I 52 work, ii 422 Mokwa Settlement, i 170-71 Medicine men, n 24 Molybdenum, i 312-13 Meigs, Peveril, i 39, 54-55; n 471 Mombasa (Kenya), i 100, 281, 459n.; Mellacoree (river), i 437 ii 74, 148 Mellanby, Kenneth, i i 122 Mondlane, Eduardo C., n 472 Mendes Correa, A. A., n 266n. Mono (river), i 438 Mendonga, F. A., i 63 Monrovia (Liberia), i 161, 299, 418, 452, Menelik II, Emperor, i 221; n 127 596 Meningitis, n 50-51, 169 Monrovia, Bank of, i 338 Merchandise, see Trade Mercier, Paul, i i 471 Monteiro, Armindo, n 267-68, 267n. Moore, Henry, n 28 Mercury, i 327-28 Merina (people), i 87 Moreland, William Dawson, Jr., i 530; ii 254, 259, 348, 472 Meru, Mt., I 201 Messina Development Co., Ltd., i 317 Morgan, W. B., n 472 Messing, Simon, n 334n. Mortality rates, see Death rates Metalkat (Societe Mctallurgiquc du Moru (people), i 103 Katanga), i 324 Moslem Association Party (Ghana), i i 296-97 Metals, see Minerals Mica, i 352-53 Mossamedes (Angola), see Mogamedes Michel, Louis, i 87, 87n. Motion pictures, i i 157-58 Middle Congo, see Congo, Republic of Motor vehicles, i 465-66, 594n.; by country, i i 446-70 the Midlands, i 59, 303-04, 326 Mountain Nile (Bahr-el-Jebel) (river), i Migration, i 107-08, 119-20, 581-88; and 38, 228, 234, 249 disease, n 172; map, i 584; in tribal Moussa, P., i 300n. society, i 26-28 Movement for Colonial Freedom (U. K.), Milk, i 19, 20, 150, 151; marketing of, ii 282, 285 209-10 Movene (river), i 253, 260 Minerals, i 289-369; maps, i 297, 302, Mozambique: Africanization, n 358; ag 304, 306, 314, 318, 321, 335, 342; sec riculture, i 142, 157, 168, 180-85; air also individual minerals and countries ways, i 485; area, i 89; n 459; balance Minerals Research and Development of payments, i 548; capital goods, i Corp. (Somalia), i 308 517; civil service, i 579; climate & Mineraria Somala, i 366; n 426 weather, i 40, 46, 54, 57, 59; coal, i Mining, i 289-369; and labor, i 576-77, 362-63; currency unit, n 459; death 595n. rate, n 167; development plans, i i 415; Misrair (air service), i 488 education, i i 94, 108, 113-15, 459; fi Mission Anti-Erosive (MAE), i 157; ii nance, i i 404, 415, 459; fishing, i 281420 82; forests, i 66-67, 70, 203; govern Mission stations, n 202-03; schools at, n ment, i i 318, 331, 358; health, n 40, 96-98, 112-27 passim 45, 48, 51, 167; hydroelectricity, i 25960; income, per capita, n 459; indus Mitchel, N. C., n 472 try, i 380-82, 511; labor, i 576, 579, Mitchell, J. Clyde, n 364-65, 365n.

IN D E X 584-85, 585n.; language, official, n 459; lumber, i 207, 209, 212; migra tion, i 167, 584-85, 585n.; minerals, i 301, 305, 308, 310-12, 318, 321, 323, 325-26, 328, 330-31, 333-34, 336, 338, 340, 345-47, 349-50, 353-54, 356, 359, 362-63, 365, 509; motor vehicles, i 466; i i 459; newspapers, n 142, 144; petro leum, i 365; political divisions, n 313, 331; political status, n 459; population, i 89; i i 459; population characteristics, i 92-93, 97-98, 101, 104-05, 110-12, 117, 119-20; ports, i 449, 456-58; Por tuguese policy toward, n 267; radio, i i 151-53; railroads, i 413, 422-26, 432; research agencies, n 419, 425; roads, i 468, 470, 473, 480-81; settlement, i 167n., 168, 180-85; textiles, i 516; trade, external, i 207, 209, 212, 282, 420, 456-58, 498-502, 505-06, 509-11, 517, 538, 54In., 546, 548; ii 459; trade, internal, i 562; water power, i 253, 259-60; water regions, i 240; water supply, i 250; waterways, i 440, 446 Mozambique (city), i 457-58 Mozambique Channel, i 282 Mtwara (Tanganyika), i 459-60 Mulago Hospital, n 162 Mulattoes, n 257n. Mulira, E. M. K., n 148 Mungo (river), i 439 Muni (river), i 439 Murdock, Thomas G., i 295, 300-01, 30809, 312, 335, 338, 359-60, 369; n 472 Music, ii 27, 28, 31, 32-33, 376, 389-90 Mussolini, Benito, ti 127 Mutesa II, i i 145n Mweru, Lake, i 232, 265 Mweru Wantipa, Lake, i 232

493

N
Nacala (Mozambique), i 458 Nairn, Bryce J. M., i 541n. Nairn, Margaret, n 472 Nairobi (Kenya), i 59, 98, 281, 410, 586, 594n., 598n.; n 120, 148 Nakivali, Lake, i 271 Namib Desert, i 35, 40, 49, 53-54, 58, 73, 242, 243 Nandi (people), i 266 Napoleonic Code, n 72, 348 Natal, i 67, 160 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, n 280 National Congress of British West Africa, ii 291-92 National Council of Nigeria and the Cam eroons (NCNC), ii 242, 282, 285, 29192, 295-97

National Democratic Partv (Ghana), i i 296 National Equal Rights League of De mocracy Congress of America, i i 280 National Iron Ore Co. Ltd., i 299 National Liberation Party (Ghana), n 296, 297 National Model Schools (Somalia), n 131 National Race Congress of America, i i 280 Nationalism, n 271-302; see also indi vidual countries Natron, Lake, i 232 Ndebele (people), i 266, 270 Negro World , n 280, 280n. Negroes, i 84-87, 84n.; American, and nationalism, n 280-81 Nehru, Jawaharlal, n 285 Netherlands, trade with tropical Africa, i 298, 522 New Zealand, trade with tropical Africa, i 543 Newlyn, W. T., i 530n. Newspapers, n 141-51; and nationalism, i i 289-91 Ngami, Lake, i 232n. Nhonoli, A. M. M., i 114n.; n 177 Niari (river), i 439; valley of, i 178, 187, 258, 317, 322, 324, 421; n 176 Nickel, i 313 Nicol, Davidson, n 386 Niger (river), i 32, 38, 176, 228, 269, 438, 443; basin of, i 443; delta of, i 92, 176, 232, 275, 365-66, 438; valley of, i 76, 176, 358, 414 Niger, Office du, i 176-77, 530 Niger, Republic of the: crafts, i 395; government, ii 328; minerals, i 321, 358; political status, i 6; n 460; se lected data, ii 460 Niger Agricultural Project, I 170 Niger-Benue valley, I 37 Nigeria: Africanization, n 354, 356, 359, 383; agriculture, I 13-15, 27, 130, 13738, 170, 185-86, 188; airways, i 48588; area, i 89; n 460; British policy toward, ii 237, 242-44; civil service, i 579-80; climate & weather, i 45, 51, 56-58; coal, i 362-63; cooperatives, ii 209-10; crafts, i 395-96; currency unit, i i 460; death rate, n 167; development, i i 188-90, 205, 405, 407, 409-10, 41516; education, i 4; n 104, 106, 108, 115, 120-23, 126, 461; elite in, n 369, 373-83; finance, n 397-98, 401-03, 401n., 405, 407, 409-10, 415-16, 460; fishing, i 270, 275, 284, 287; forests, i 65-66, 67n., 197, 202, 214-16; gov ernment, i i 242-43, 311-13, 339-40, 354, 356, 359, 440; health, n 37-39,

494

IN D E X
i 89; i i 461; balance of payments, t 548; British policy toward, i i 250-53; capital goods, i 517; climate & weather, i 42, 59; coal, i 363; currency unit, n 461; development, n 408, 410; elite in, ii 364; finance, n 396, 408, 410, 461; fishing, i 269-70; forests, i 69-70, 203, 217-19; government, n 252, 312, 314, 344, 356; health, n 40, 45, 47-48, 5051, 168, 170; hydroelectricity, i 25455, 261-62; labor, i 575-77, 584-85, 586n., 591, 593, 595-96, 598; language, official, i i 461; lumber, i 207-08, 21213; migration, i 584-85, 586n.; min erals, i 291-92, 295, 300-03, 306-07, 310-15, 321-25, 327-28, 336, 338-40, 347, 349, 352-56, 360, 363, 508-09; motion pictures, n 158; motor vehicles, i 466; i i 461; nationalism, n 278-79, 293, 295; newspapers, n 142, 145; physiography, i 31; political divisions, i i 313; political parties, i i 295; political status, i i 461; population, I 89; n 461; population characteristics, i 92-93, 95, 97-98, 105-06, 110-11, 114, 117, 119, 122; race factor, I 591, 593; radio, n 153-55; railroads, i 420, 422-25, 43233; roads, i 469-70, 473, 478-80; schools and enrollments, n 461; settle ment, i 168; social change, n 55; trade, external, i 207, 212-13, 280, 457, 497503, 505, 507-09, 517, 541, 543-44, 548; ii 461; trade, internal, i 553, 56162; trade unionism, n 214, 217; water power, i 254-55, 261-62; water regions, i 231, 239-40; waterways, i 440n., 44647; see also Rhodesia and Nyasaland, Federation of Northern Rhodesia African Mineworkers Trade Union, n 214, 217 Northern Rhodesia African National Con gress (NRANC), i i 293, 293n., 295

Nigeria (continued) 42, 45, 47-48, 60, 160, 166-67, 170, 179; hydroelectricity, i 254; ideologi cal issues, i i 380-81; income, per cap ita, i i 397, 460; industry, i 376-78, 380, 384-86, 389, 392; infant mortality rates, i i 167; labor, i 573n., 577-80, 586n., 587, 596; language, official, n 461; lumber, i 207, 209-11, 386; migration, i 586n.; minerals, i 292, 296, 301, 309, 311, 319-20, 322, 324, 336, 338, 340, 358-66, 509; motion pictures, n 158; motor vehicles, I 465-66; n 460; na tionalism, i i 274, 282, 288-89, 291-92, 294-98, 301; newspapers, n 142-46; petroleum, i 365-66; physiography, i 37; political divisions, n 329; political parties, n 294-98; political status, n 243, 356, 460; population, i 89; i i 460; population characteristics, i 97, 101, 103, 105, 108, 110-11, 116-17; ports, i 449, 451-52; race factor, i 592; n 369; radio, n 151-53, 155-56; railroads, i 413, 417, 432; roads, i 468, 472, 477, 491; settlement, i 170, 185-86, 188; so cial change, n 59-60; television, n 140; trade, external, i 207, 209-10, 287, 40809, 451-52, 498-503, 505, 509, 521, 524-27, 529, 533, 538-39, 542; n 460; trade, internal, i 552-53, 556-58, 561, 564; trade unionism, n 213-14, 217, 219; transportation, i 408-09, 411; water power, i 254; water regions, i 236-37; water supply, i 247; water ways, i 438 Nigerian Broadcasting Corp., n 152 Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology, i i 123 Nigerian forest, i 66, 67, 201 Nigerian Kingsway Shops, n 138 Nigerian National Democratic Party, i i 291 Nile (river), i 225, 228n., 234-35, 234n., 243-44, 252-53, 269, 444; basin of, i 38, 444; valley of, i 72, 76, 100, 248, 339, 412; n 12 Nilotic Negroes, i 85, 582, 592 Nkomo, Joshua, n 294 Nkrumah, Kwame, i 141; n 240-41, 276, 280-81, 284, 288-89, 289n., 295, 298, 371, 378, 439 Northcott, C. H., i 574n. Northern News (Ndola), n 149 Northern Peoples Congress (Nigeria), n 294, 296-97 Northern Railway, i 415 Northern Rhodesia: Africanization, i i 356; agriculture, 1 13, 132-33, 138, 14546, 151, 159, 168; airways, i 485; area,

Northern Rhodesia Chamber of Mines Yearbook, i 594n.

Northern Rhodesia Mine Workers Union, i 593; i i 217 Nsamizi Training Centre, i 567 Nuba (people), I 242 Nuer (people), i 231, 270 Nunez (river), i 437 Nupe (people), n 11 Nutrition, see Diet Nyamisigeri, Lake, i 286 Nyanza Textile Industries Ltd., i 381 Nyasa, Lake, i 219, 233, 250, 265, 271, 277, 280, 286, 446 Nyasaland: Africanization, n 356; agri culture, i 138, 142, 145-46, 159; air ways, i 485; area, i 89; i i 461; balance

IN D E X of payments, i 548; British policy to ward, i i 250-53; coal, i 363; coopera tives, i i 209-10; currency unit, n 461; death rate, n 167; development plans, i i 408, 410; finance, n 396, 408, 410, 461; fishing, i 269, 277, 280, 286; for ests, i 66, 70, 203, 217-19; government, i i 252-53, 312, 314, 356; grasslands, i 72; health, n 39-40, 47-48, 167, 171, 174; hydroelectricity, i 254, 262; in come, per capita, n 461; industry, i 383; infant mortality rates, i i 167; la bor, i 572, 576, 584, 589, 591, 598; language, official, n 462; lumber, i 20708, 212-13; migration, i 167, 584; min erals, i 301, 3(38, 310, 313, 321, 330, 333-34, 339, 341-42, 346-53, 355-56, 358, 360-61; motor vehicles, I 466; n 461; nationalism, n 279, 293; political status, i i 461; population, i 89; n 461; population characteristics, i 92, 104, 106-08, 110-12, 116-17, 119; race fac tor, i 591; radio, ii 153; railroads, i 424-26, 432; roads, i 478-80; schools and enrollments, n 462; settlement, i 167n.; social change, n 55; trade, ex ternal, i 207, 212-13, 280, 457, 498503, 505-06, 541, 543-44, 548; n 461; trade, internal, i 561; transportation, i 406, 409-10; water power, i 254, 262; water regions, i 240; water supply, i 129n., 247, 250; waterways, i 446; see also Rhodesia and Nyasaland, Federa tion of Nyasaland African Congress (NAC), i i 293 Nyasaland Railways, i 425, 440, 446, 480 Nyasaland Transportation Co., i 410 Nyerere, Julius, ii 248 Nyika Plateau, i 219 Nyong (river), i 439

495

Oil (petroleum) production, i 364-66 Oils, vegetable, i 383; see also Palm prod ucts Okavango (river), i 34 Okavango, Lake, i 232 Okavango swamp, i 230, 232n. Olin Mathieson Chemical Corp., i 329 Olympio, Sylvanus, n 298 Omdurman (Sudan), i 100, 395 Organic Law (Portuguese, 1955), n 33031 Organization for European Economic Co operation (OEEC), i 518-20 Organizations, voluntary, n 183-221 Osmania (language), n 131 Otraco (Office dExploitation des Trans ports Coloniaux) i 418, 442, 445, 45354; i i 200-01, 401 Ottawa Agreement (1932), i 544 Oueme (river), i 438 Overseas Food Corporation (OFC), i 171, 173-75, 429-30, 460, 545; n 409-10 Overseas Resources Development Act (U. K., 1948), ii 409 Ovimbundu (people), i 266, 270 Owen Falls Dam, i 249, 261; hydroelec tric project, i 255, 261; n 236 Owiredu, P. A., n 388n. Ownership, see Property, attitude toward Oyo Leatherworkers, n 210

p, Q
Painting, n 26-27 Palm Line, n 138 Palm products, i 137, 138, 147; exports, i 376-77, 504-05; Lever Bros, opera tions, i 126, 145; processing, i 376-77 Pan-Africa (journal), n 285 Pan-African Congresses, n 280 Pangani (river), i 253 Parent, M., i 117n. Paris-Dakar (newspaper), n 148-49 Parrinder, E. G., n 23n., 24n. Parti Democratique de la Cote dIvoire, ii 288 Parties, political, n 291, 294-98 Pastoralism, i 16-18, 19-20, 21, 26, 12733, 148-50 Paton, Alan, i 35 Paver brothers, n 146 Payments, balance of, i 546-51 Paysannat schemes, i 177-80; n 193-94 Peanuts, i 137, 138; exports, i 377, 50405; processing, i 377; Tanganyika Groundnut Scheme, i 171-74 Pechiney group, i 258, 260, 329 Pedler, F. J., i 267, 268n., 274n., 472, 472n., 532-33, 553n. Pellagra, n 44

o
OEEC (Organization for European Eco nomic Cooperation), i 518-20 ORSTOM (Office de la Recherche Scien tifique et Technique dOutre-Mer), i 156; i i 423-24, 423n. Observer (Kenya), n 150 Occupational status, in Stanleyville, n 8485 Ocean shipping, i 447-62; see also Trade Office de la Recherche Scientifique et Technique dOutre-Mer (ORSTOM), i 156; i i 423-24, 423n. Office dExploitation des Transports Coloniaux, see Otraco Office du Niger, i 176-77, 530 Ogooue (river), i 439

496

IN D E X Port Harcourt (Nigeria), i 451 Port Sudan (Sudan), i 430-31, 462 Porto Novo (Dahomey), i 438 Ports, i 447-62; map, i 449; see also indi vidual countries Portugal: and Africanization, n 358; co lonial government, n 317-18, 330-32, 349-51; colonial policy, i 180-85; ii 264-69; development plans, n 414; ed ucational policy, ii 112-15; research work, i i 424-25; trade with tropical Africa, i 282, 399, 511, 523, 540-41, 541n., 543, 546 Portuguese Africa: finance, n 395; trade, i 519-20; see also Angola; Mozam bique; Portuguese Guinea; Sao Tome and Principe Portuguese Guinea: Africanization, i i 358; area, i 89; n 462; climate & weather, I 56; currency unit, n 462; education, i i 114, 462; government, i i 358; government revenue and expendi ture, i i 462; language, official, n 462; lumber, i 209; motor vehicles, i 466; i i 462; newspapers, ii 144; political status, ii 462; population, i 89; n 462; population characteristics, i 103, 10812, 117; ports, I 449, 452; Portuguese policy toward, n 267; radio, i i 153; roads, i 468, 476; trade, i 452, 498501, 511; ii 462; waterways, i 437 Portuguese National Union, n 268 Potash production, i 358 Pourquoi Pas (Leopoldville), n 150 Power, hydroelectric, see Hydroelectric power Prazo system, i 104 Precipitation, see Rainfall Press, see Newspapers Presse du Cameroon, La, n 150 Prince Leopold mine, i 291, 315-16, 32324, 327 Principe, see Sao Tome and Principe Processing, primary, i 375-88 Progress of Womens Clubs, n 137 Property, attitude toward, i 24-28; n 10, 384 Prothero, R. M., ii 472 Public Health College and Training Cen ter (Ethiopia), n 129, 426 Pugh, J. C., i 61n., 320n., 362n., 438n. Pygmies, i 8, 83-84, 581; i i 12, 64, 158 Pyrethrum production, i 385 Pyrite, i 353-54 Q fever, n 48, 49 Queen Elizabeth Nurses Hostel, n 162 Quinine production, i 382 Quintanilha, A., i 157

Pemba, see Zanzibar and Pemba Pendleton, R. L., i 161n. People of God (movement), n 90 Peoples, tropical African, i 5, 82-87; i i 12-13, 300-01, 439 Peoples Educational Association (Ghana), ii 136 Percival, D. A., i 88n. Pereira, Duarte Pacheco, I 37n. Perham, Margery, i i 263, 352-53 Petillon, Leo, n 230 Petroleum production, i 364-66 Phelps-Stokes Fund, n 429 Philanthropic agencies, n 429-30 Phillips, T. K. E., i i 389 Philosophical Society of the Sudan, n 427 Phosphate production, i 357-58 Physiography of tropical Africa, i 29-39 Pichi-Sermolli, R. E. G., i 63 Pick, Hella, i i 315-16 Pigs, i 128, 149 Pinet-Laprade, Governor, n 255 Plague, i i 48 Plantations, i 145, 153-54, 188, 575-76 Platinum, i 341-42 Platt, B. S, i 19-20; n 174, 178-79, 472 Plow, spread of, i 13n. Plywood manufacturing, i 387 Pneumonia, n 47, 171 Point Four programs, i 597; n 259, 415, 426; see also International Cooperation Administration Pointe Noire (Congo), i 211, 258, 276, 348, 453 Poliomyelitis, n 171 Political associations, i i 291-98 Political divisions, i 5-6; n 446-70; maps of: internal divisions, n 313, 322, 326, 329; major divisions, n 308 Politics, and nationalism, n 271-302 Pollett, J. D., i 298n., 305n. Polygamy, i 113; n 7-8, 69, 70, 98, 257, 375 Pongo (river), i 437 Pons, V. P., ii 82 Population: Africans, i 90-93; age com position, i 110-11; agricultural, i 125n.; Asians, i 95-97; by country, i 89; n 446-70; density, i 89, 90, 91; ethnic groups, i 82-87; n 300-01; Europeans, i 93-95, 93n.; extra-tribal, n 61, 337; geographical distribution, i 87-106; lo calizing factors, i 101-06; maps, i 94, 96, 99, 118; marital status, i 111-13; sex ratio, i 107-10; trends, i 115-23; urban, i 97-101, 106; vital statistics, i 113-15; see also individual countries Port Gentil (Gabon), i 202, 211, 365, 453

IN D E X

497

R
Race factor: in labor, i 591-94; in trade unionism, n 215-16 Racial constitution of population, i 82-87 Racial prejudice, i i 369-71 Radcliffe-Brown, A. R., n 20 Radio broadcasting, i i 151-56 Radioactive minerals, i 359-60 Railroads, i 412-34; and labor, i 577-78; map, i 413; traffic, i 432; see also indi vidual countries Railway African Union of Kenya, n 214 Rain forests, i 61-68, 198-203, 205, 22630; social change among inhabitants, i i 65-72 Rainfall, i 40, 46-54; maps, i 50, 257 Rand (gold fields), i 585n. Rare-earth production, i 360-61 Rasmussen, Tor Fr., n 472 Rassemblement Democratique Africain (RDA), ii 283-84, 293, 295-97 Rattray, R. S., n 32 Red Cross, n 196, 201 Red Sea, i 30, 461-62 Regibat (people), i 73 Reincarnation, belief in, i i 20n. Relapsing fevers, n 49-50, 168 Religion: and art, n 30, 389-92; and elite, i i 380; and nationalism, n 275-76, 279, 281; in tribal society, n 18-25; see also Christianity Republic Steel Corp., i 298 Research work, ii 418-30 Revenue: budgetary, i i 402; and ex penditure, by country, n 446-70; from tariffs, i 538-43; see also Capital invest ment Revue (river), i 253, 260, 380 Revue Falls, i 330 Reyher, Rebecca, n 100, 472 Rhodes, Cecil John, i 290, 420, 422; n 59, 252 Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, n 422 Rhodesia and Nyasaland, Federation of: Africanization, ii 356; agriculture, I 13, 132-33, 138, 142-43, 145-48, 151, 155, 158-59, 168, 192; airways, i 485, 489; area, i 89; i i 462; balance of payments, i 546-51, 548n.; British policy toward, i i 250-53; c a p ita l g o o d s, i 516-17; c li m a te & w e a th e r, i 42, 46, 57, 59; c o a l, i 362-63; cooperatives, n 209-10, 212; currency unit, n 462; death rate, n 167; development, i i 201, 408, 410; diamonds, i 345; education, i i 122, 463; elite in, i i 364, 369-70; finance, i i 396-97, 399, 408, 410, 416, 463; fish ing, i 269-70, 277, 280, 284-86; forests,

i 66, 69-70, 197, 203, 217-19; forma tion of, i 5n.; i i 250-51; government, i i 250-53, 312-14, 344, 356; grasslands, i 72; health, i i 39-40, 45, 47-48, 50-51, 161, 167-68, 170-71, 173-74; hydro electricity, i 254-55, 261-62; income, per capita, n 462; industry, i 378, 380, 383, 385-86, 388-93, 510, 514; infant mortality rates, n 167; labor, i 572, 575-78, 584-85, 586n., 587-89, 591, 593, 595-96, 598, 599; language, offi cial, i i 463; lumber, i 207-08, 212-13, 386; migration, i 167, 584-85, 586n.; minerals, i 291-92, 295-99, 300-04, 306-08, 310-16, 320-28, 330-36, 33842, 345-56, 358, 360-63, 508-09; mo tion pictures, n 158; motor vehicles, i 465-66, 479; n 462; nationalism, n 272, 278-79, 293-95, 302; newspapers, ii 142, 145-49; physiography, i 31, 34; political divisions, ii 313, 462; politi cal parties, i i 295; population, i 89; i i 462; population characteristics, i 9293, 95, 97-98, 104-08, 110-12, 114, 116-17, 119, 122; race factor, i 591, 593; i i 369-70; radio, n 151-55; rail roads, i 413, 420, 422-26, 432-33; re search agencies, n 419, 421-22, 428; roads, i 468-70, 473, 478-80, 491n.; Roman law, n 327n.; settlement, I 167n., 168, 192; social change, n 55, 59-60; television, i i 141; textiles, I 516; trade, external, i 207-08, 212-13, 280, 304, 332, 346, 380, 457, 497-503, 50511, 513-17, 521, 524-27, 524n., 53538, 541, 543-44, 546-51, 548n.; n 462; trade, internal, i 552-53, 561-62, 564; trade unionism, n 213-14, 217; trans portation, i 406, 409-10; water power, i 254-55, 261-62; n 416; water regions, i 231, 239-40; water supply, i 129n., 247, 250; waterways, i 440n., 446-47; see also Northern Rhodesia; Nyasa land; Southern Rhodesia Rhodesia Broken Hill Development Co., i 312 Rhodesia Copper Co., i 290 Rhodesia Copper Ventures Ltd., i 317 Rhodesia Herald (Salisbury), n 148-49 Rhodesia Railways, i 422-25, 422n., 434, 460, 469, 479, 492 Rhodesian Anglo American group (mines), i 315, 315n. Rhodesian Farmer Year Rook, i 589 Rhodesian Iron and Steel Commission, i 299n. Rhodesian Iron and Steel Co. (Pvt.), Ltd., i 299n., 393

498

IN D E X Rubber, i 147, 384, 504; see also Fire stone Plantations Co. Rudin, H. R., n 225n. Rudolf, Lake, i 233, 266, 279 Rufiji (river), i 253, 440; valley of, i 192 Rukwa, Lake, i 232, 279 Rural areas, community development in, ii 188-95 Rutile, i 332-33 Ruvu (river), i 253 Ruvuma (river), i 440 Ruwenzori Mountains, i 34, 59, 303 Ruzizi (river), i 228, 259; valley of, i 187

Rhodesian Plough and Machinery Co., i 389 Rhodesian Printing and Publishing Co., i i 149 Rhodesian Selection Trust Group, i 292, 302-03; i i 55, 401, 421 Rhodesian Wattle Co., Ltd., i 218, 385 Rhokana Corp., i 302, 360; n 197n. Richards, Audrey I., i 10n., 14 Richards, P. W., i 64 Rickettsial diseases, i i 48-49; map, i i 49 Rift Valley, i 34, 42, 59, 76, 93, 95, 148, 197, 233, 323, 355, 364 Rio Muni, n 144, 318; see also Spanish Guinea Rio Tinto Corp., i 313 Rivers, i 225-30, 253, 434-47; fishing, i 269-71; maps, i 229, 435; see also indi vidual rivers Roads, i 463-84; map, i 468; see also in dividual countries Roan Antelope mine, i 290, 314, 315 Robinson, James H., n 106 Rockefeller Foundation, n 104, 429-30 Rolland, Pierre, i 84 Roselius, Kurt, i 93; n 472 Rosevear, D. R., i 197n., 204n., 210n., 214n, 215-16 Rowan, D. C., i 530n. Royal Technical College (Kenya), n 123, 409 Ruanda (people), n 388 Ruanda-Urundi: agriculture, i 27, 138n., 142, 186-87; area, i 89; n 463; bal ance of payments, i 548-49; Belgian policy toward, i 186-87, ii 232-33; capital goods, i 517; climate & weather, i 59; currency unit, n 463; develop ment, ii 200, 413-14; education, n 116, 463; finance, n 395, 402, 413, 463; fish ing, i 284, 286-87; forests, i 67, 217, 220-21; government, i i 309, 323, 33637; health, i i 45, 48, 50, 170, 174; hy droelectricity, i 258; income, per cap ita, i i 463; industry, i 385; labor, i 572, 584, 586; languages, official, n 463; migration, i 584, 586; minerals, i 30910, 319, 325-26, 331, 336, 348, 350, 353, 357, 361, 509; motor vehicles, i 466; i i 463; physiography, i 34; po litical status, i i 463; population, i 89; i i 463; population characteristics, i 92, 101, 105, 110-11, 115-17, 122; radio, ii 153; research agencies, n 419-20; roads, I 477-78; settlement, i 186-87; Ten Year Plan, i 286, n 413; trade, i 278-79, 287, 499, 501, 504, 509, 511, 517, 525, 548-49; n 463; water power, i 258

s
SFIO, Senegalese section of, n 288, 29192, 296 Sabena Airways, i 485 Sabi valley, i 192, 299, 317, 358, 362 Sahara (desert), i 38-39, 49, 58, 73, 85, 242-44, 467 Sahel irrigation system, i 176 St. Faiths Mission Farm, i 143 St. Germain-en-Laye, Convention of (1919), i 543 St. Louis (Senegal), i 276, 287, 436; n 253-54, 347, 348 St.-Luc schools, ii 391-92 Salazar, Antonio de Oliveira, i 181; n 268 Salisbury (S. Rhod.), i 98, 389, 410, 586, 594n; i i 120, 148, 149, 370 Saloum (river), i 436 Salt production, i 354-55 Samachar (newspaper), i i 151 Samburu (people), i 16 Sanaga (river), i 253, 255, 258, 439 Sande (cult school), n 17 Sansanding Dam, i 176 Sao Tome and Principe: agriculture, I 145; area, I 89; n 463; currency unit, i i 464; death rate, n 167; education, i i 114, 464; government revenue and expenditure, i i 464; hydroelectricity, i 254; income, per capita, i i 463; lan guage, official, i i 464; motor vehicles, i 466; i i 463; political status, n 463; population, I 89; i i 463; population characteristics, I 120; radio, n 153; trade, i 498-501; n 463; water power, i 254 Sarbah, J. M., n 387 Sarmento Rodrigues, Manuel, i i 265-66 Sarraut, Albert, n 109, llln . Sartre, Jean-Paul, i i 388-89 Sauer, Carl O., i 378n. Savanna regions, i 68, 236-39; map, i 62; vegetation of, i 128 Save (river), i 35

INDEX

499

Savings, n 397-99; reinvestment of cor porate, i i 400, 403 Sayre, Leslie C., i 566n. Schapera, I., i 581, 581n. Schimper, A. F. W., I 61 Schistosomiasis, see Bilharziasis Schmalenbach, Werner, n 30n., 32 Schokalskaja, S. J., i 77 School of Building Technology (Ethi opia), ii 129 School of Hygiene (Sudan), i i 427 School of Islamic Discipline (Somalia), ii 130 Schools, see Education Scientific Council for Africa South of the Sahara (CSA), i 285n.; n 180n., 265, 418, 428-29 Scott, Cecil W., i 399, 422; n 265, 350, 472 Scott, Richenda, i 379n. Sculpture, n 26, 28, 30, 31, 33 Sea fishing, i 267-69, 273-76, 281-82 Secondary industry, i 388-92 Section de Recherche sur le Quinquina et les Cultures de Montague, n 427 Segy, Ladislas, n 31 Sekyi, W. E. G., n 288 Selenium, i 328 Self-government, ii 376-78, 439-40; see also Government; Nationalism Semites, i 86 Semliki (river), i 235 Senegal (river), i 414, 436; valley of, i 76 Senegal, Republic of: agriculture, I 145; area, n 464; budget, n 464; currency unit, i i 464; fishing, i 276; French policy toward, i i 254-56; government, i i 317, 328, 347-48, 359; health, n 50; income, per capita, n 464; industry, i 377, 379; labor, i 578, 596, 600; lan guage, official, ii 464; Mali Federation, i i 317, 464; minerals, i 332-34, 358, 366; nationalism, n 272, 278, 288, 29192, 296, 298; newspapers, n 148; pe troleum, i 366; political parties, n 296, 298; political status, n 464; popula tion, ii 464; population characteristics, i 93, 95; ports, i 449; research, n 424; roads, i 468; trade, external, i 377; n 464; trade, internal, i 556; trade union ism, i i 216 Senghor, Leopold-Sedar, n 296, 298, 315, 317, 386, 388, 392 Service des Mines du Congo Beige, n 420 Service Geologique du Congo Beige et du Ruanda-Urundi, n 420 Service Medical Provincial (Belg. Congo), i i 420 Service Veterinaire Provincial (Belg. Congo), i i 420

Services de lAgriculture, de lElevage et des Forets (France), I 156; n 423 Sese Islands, i 234 Settlement, on land, i 155-56, 158-62, 163-93 Sex ratio, i 107-10 Sexual attitudes, n 4-8, 14-18, 385 Sheep, i 128, 148-49 Shell-British Petroleum Development Co. of Nigeria Ltd., i 365 Sherbro (river), i 437 Shilluk (people), i 17, 85, 231, 266; ii 226 Shipping, i 447-62; see also Trade Shire (river), i 233, 250, 251n., 253, 262, 280, 440, 446n.; valley of, i 233, 250 Shire Highlands, i 92, 104 Shops, i 558-60 Sickness, see Diseases Sierra Leone: agriculture, i 28, 137; air ways, i 485; area, I 89, n 465; British policy toward, n 240; climate & weather, i 56, 58; crafts, i 395; cur rency unit, i i 465; development plans, i i 407; diamonds, i 343-45; education, i i 60, 465; finance, n 397, 401n., 402, 407, 465; fishing, i 275, 287; forests, i 66; government, n 240, 312; health, i i 42, 45, 48, 167; income, per capita, i i 397, 465; infant mortality rates, n 167; language, official, n 465; lumber, i 209; minerals, i 292, 296-98, 303-05, 308, 310-13, 321, 323, 325-26, 330, 334, 336, 339-41, 343-46, 349-51, 354, 356, 364, 508-09; motor vehicles, i 466; ii 465; nationalism, n 274, 287, 289, 294, 297; newspapers, n 142-43; physi ography, i 37; political parties, n 289, 294, 297; political status, n 313, 464; population, i 89; n 465; population characteristics, i 95, 101, 103, 110-11, 114, 117; ports, i 449-50; radio, n 153; railroads, i 415-16, 432; roads, i 468, 472, 475, 475n.; social change, n 60; trade, external, i 292, 298, 305, 450, 498-501, 503, 505-06, 508-09, 513, 521, 533; i i 465; trade, internal, I 561; waterways, i 437 Sierra Leone (river), i 437 Sierra Leone Chrome Mines Ltd., i 305 Sierra Leone Development Co., Ltd., i 415 Sierra Leone Organisation Society, n 297 Sierra Leone Peoples Party (SLPP), n 289, 294, 297 Sierra Leone Selection Trust, i 344 Silberman, Leo, n 352 Silver, i 340-41; map, i 335 Sinclair Petroleum Co., i 364 Sinclair Somal Corp., i 366; n 426

500

IN D E X 264, 465; population, i 89; n 465; pop ulation characteristics, i 93, 122; ports, i 449, 460-61; radio, n 152-53; re search agencies, n 425-26; roads, I 484; social change, n 60; trade, external, I 207, 209, 460-61, 498-501, 503, 50506, 509, 517, 546; n 465; trade, in ternal, i 552, 562; water power, I 253; water regions, I 242; water supply, I 247 Somaliland, British, see British Somali land Somaliland, French, see French Somali land Somaliland, Italian, see Somalia Somaliland Desert, i 49 Somaliland Protectorate, see British So maliland Sorbonne conference (1956), n 386n. Sorcerers, n 24-25 Sorghum, i 138, 504 Sotuba Canal, i 443 Sousa Monteiro, Jose Firmo de, I 184 South Africa, see Union of South Africa South Africa Act (1909), n 250 South African Railways and Harbours Administration, i 422n. Southern Province Line, i 427, 429, 460 Southern Rhodesia: Africanization, n 356; agriculture, i 132, 138, 142-43, 145-48, 151, 155, 158-59, 168, 192; airways, i 485, 489; area, i 89; n 466; balance of payments, i 547-48; British policy toward, n 250-53; capital goods, i 516-17; climate & weather, i 46, 57, 59; coal, i 362; currency unit, i i 466; development, n 201, 410; diamonds, i 345; education, n 122, 466; elite in, i i 369-70; finance, i i 396, 410, 466; fishing, i 269-70, 284-85; forests, i 70, 197, 203, 217-19; government, n 25152,312-13, 356; grasslands, i 72; health, i i 40, 45, 50-51, 161, 170, 173; hydroelectricity, i 261; industry, i 380, 383, 385-86, 389; labor, i 575-76, 578, 584-85, 586n., 587-89, 591, 593, 59596, 598; language, official, n 466; lum ber, i 207-08, 212-13; migration, i 584-85, 586n.; minerals, i 291-92, 29699, 303-04, 308, 310-11, 313, 316, 32023, 325-27, 330-32, 334-36, 340-41, 345-47, 349-51, 353-56, 358, 360, 362, 508-09; motion pictures, n 158; motor vehicles, i 465-66, 479; n 466; na tionalism, i i 272, 278, 294; newspapers, i 142, 145-48; physiography, i 31, 34; political status, n 466; population, i 89; ii 466; population characteristics, i 9293, 95, 97, 105-06, 110-11, 114, 116-

Sisal, i 146, 152, 381-82, 504-05; grow ers associations, i 157; n 421 Sissoko, Fily Dabo, n 314-15 Skinner, W. S., i 57n. Slave trade, i 7, 403; n 59, 223-24, 225n.; in Ethiopia, n 334 Sleeping sickness and tsetse fly, i 102, 127, 165, 185; i i 36-37, 60, 60n., 166, 170, 176; map, ii 37 Sloan, Ruth C., i i 125, 472 Smallpox, i i 50, 168, 169, 170 Smeds, Helmer, i 93; n 472 Smith, Edwin K., n 5n., 6n., 14n., 19n., 20n., 21n., 22n., 23n., 32, 32n. Smuggling of diamonds, i 345n. Sobat (river), i 248, 444; valley of, i 237 Sobelair, i 485 Social change, n 53-91; see also indi vidual countries Social status: and age, n 11; of elite, i i 369-72 Socialism, n 380-81 Societe Alucam, i i 412 Societe des Chemins de Fer Vicinaux du Congo (Vicicongo), I 419 Societe des Mines dEtain du RuandaUrundi, i 325-26 Societe des Mines dOr de Kilo-Moto, i 336, 478; n 98 Societe Fria, n 412 Societe Generale de Belgique, n 231 Societe Metallurgique du Katanga (Metalkat), i 324 Society for Mozambique Studies, i i 425 Soda ash production, i 355 Sogefor, i 478 Soils, i 73-79; map, i 77 Solanke, Ladipo, n 284 Solar radiation, i 43-44 Somali (language), n 131, 426, 465 Somali (people), i 266, 582; n 42, 130-32, 220, 249, 264 Somali Youth League, n 131 Somalia (formerly Italian Somaliland): airways, i 488; area, i 89; ii 465; bal ance of payments, i 546; capital goods, i 517; currency unit, n 465; death rate, i i 167; education, n 124, 130-32, 139, 465; finance, n 402, 418, 465; fishing, i 265, 270, 281; government, n 440; health, n 165; income, per capita, i i 465; industry, i 381, 388, 392; Italian policy toward, n 262-64; languages, official, i i 465; lumber, i 207, 209; min erals, i 301, 308, 321, 325, 328, 341, 356, 361, 366, 509; motor vehicles, i 466; ii 465; nationalism, n 299; news papers, i i 142; petroleum, I 366; politi cal divisions, i i 326; political status, i i

INDEX

501

17, 119, 122; race factor, 1 591, 593; 11 369-70; radio, it 151-53, 155; railroads, I 420, 422-25, 432-33; research agen cies, 11 421; roads, 1 470, 478-80; Ro man law, 11 327n.; settlement, 1 168, 192; social change, 11 60; trade, exter nal, 1 207, 212-13, 304, 332, 346, 380, 457, 498-501, 503, 505, 508-09, 517, 544, 547-48; trade, internal, 1 553, 562; water power, 1 261; water regions, 1 239-40; see also Rhodesia and Ny asaland, Federation of Southern Rhodesia African National Con gress (SRANC), 11 294 Southern Rhodesia National Affairs Asso ciation, 11 370 Southwest Africa, 1 31, 35, 53, 57, 510 Sowande, Fela, 11 389 Soybeans, 1 144 Spain: and Africanization, 11 358; colo nial government, 11 318; colonial pol icy, 11 269; educational policy, 11 124; research work, 11 425 Spanish Africa, see Spanish Guinea Spanish Guinea: area, 1 89; 11 466; cli mate & weather, 1 56; currency unit, II 466; education, 11 124, 466; exports, leading, 11 466; forests, 1 67, 202; gov ernment, 11 318; health, 11 167; income, per capita, 11 466; labor, 1 585; lan guage, official, 11 466; newspapers, 11 142; political status, 11 466; population, 1 89; 11 466; ports, 1 449; radio, 11 153; Spanish policy, 11 269; timber industry, 1 209; see also Fernando Po Spanish Sahara, 1 73 Speke, John Ilanning, 11 62-63 Spiritism, ti 14-15, 19-21 Stack Medical Research Laboratories, 11 427 Stamp, L. Dudley, 1 51n., 76, 78, 226n. Standard Vacuum Oil Co., 1 366 Standards of living, 1 18-24 Stanley, H. M., 11 62, 83 Stanley Falls, 1 36, 252, 418 Stanley Pool, 1 36, 418 Stanleyville (Belg. Congo), 1 255, 259; social change in, 11 82-88 Stieglers Gorge, 1 192 Stinetorf, Louise A., 1 87; 11 17-18 Stopford, R. W., 11 276 Stores, 1 558-60 Story-telling, 11 31-32 Strikes, labor, 11 219 Students, see Education Sudan, French, see Sudanese Republic Sudan, Republic of (formerly AngloEgyptian Sudan): Africanization, 11 355-56, 359; agriculture, 1 17, 127,

128n., 138, 188-90; airways, 1 488; area, 1 89; 11 467; balance of payments, 1 546, 548; capital goods, 1 517; civil service, 1 580; climate & weather, 1 42, 57; crafts, 1 395; currency unit, 11 467; deserts, 1 243; education, 11 115, 13233, 467; finance, 11 416, 467; fish ing, 1 270, 281; forests, 1 221; govern ment, 11 306, 312-13, 317, 320, 33435, 359, 436, 439; health, 11 39, 41-42, 45, 47-48, 51, 162, 165, 168-69, 17172; income, per capita, 11 467; inde pendence, 11 334; industry, 1 380-81, 392; labor, 1 580, 582, 584, 586, 59697; language, official, 11 467; lumber, 1 209, 212; migration, 1 582, 584, 586; minerals, 1 301, 308, 310, 318, 336, 339, 345, 354-55, 366, 509; motor ve hicles, 1 466; 11 467; nationalism, 11 292, 296; newspapers, 11 142; petro leum, 1 366; physiography, 1 31; politi cal divisions, 11 322, 335; political par ties, 11 294, 296; political status, 11 467; population, 1 89; 11 467; population characteristics, 1 93, 98, 101, 119, 122; ports, 1 449, 462; race factor, 1 592; radio, 11 153; railroads,, 1 413, 430-32; research agencies, 11 425, 427; roads, 1 467-68, 469n., 483; settlement, 1 18890; social change, 11 60, 62-63; trade, 1 462, 497-502, 505, 509, 517, 521, 524-27, 546, 548; 11 467; trade union ism, 11 213, 217, 219; transportation, I 409; water regions, 1 230-31, 237, 241-43; water supply, 1 247 Sudan Airways, 1 488 Sudan Gezira Board, 1 188-90, 189n., 192; 11 427 Sudan Government Workers Trade Union Federation, 11 217 Sudan Interior Mission in Liberia, 11 153 Sudan Political Service, 11 334 Sudan Railways, 1 430-31, 444, 483 Sudanese National Unionist Party, 11 296 Sudanese Republic (formerly French Su dan): agriculture, 1 131, 176-77; area, II 467; budget, 11 468; crafts, 1 39596; currency unit, 11 467; government, 11 328; income, per capita, 11 467; irri gation, 1 176-77; language, official, 11 468; Mali Federation, 11 317, 467; min erals, 1 308, 338; political status, 11 467; population, 11 467; settlement, 1 176-77; social change, 11 63; trade, 1 556; 11 467 Sudd region, 1 231, 231n., 248, 249, 272 Sugar, 1 138, 505 Suk (people), 1 16 Sukulu Mines Ltd., 1 310

502
101

INDEX

Sukuma (people), i 26, 105, 186; n 27, Sula Mountains, i 323 Sulfur deposits, i 355 Sumbwa (people), n 101 Sunday Mail (Salisbury), n 149 Sunday News (Bulawayo), n 149 Swahili (language), I, 8; n 118, 137, 145, 457, 468, 470 Swamps, i 230-32, 239-40 Swaziland: administration of, n 249-50; trade with tropical Africa, i 511 Swift, Jonathan, i 81 Swynnerton, R. J. M., i 140n. Swynnerton Plan, n 407n. Swynnerton Report, I 140 Symetain Co., I 319; n 201 Syndicat Agricole Africain (Ivory Coast), ii 296 Syphilis, n 171

T
TAI (Compagnie des Transports Aeriens Intercontinentaux), i 488 TANU (Tanganyika African National Union), i i 248, 293-94 TUFMAC (The Uganda Fish Marketing Corp.), i 278, 278n. Taboos on food, n 44-45 Takoradi (Ghana), i 210, 329, 450, 451 Talc production, i 355 Tamatave (Malagasy Rep.), i 456 Tana (river), i 228, 253, 262, 440 Tananarive (Malagasy Rep.), i 100 Tananarive-Cote Est Railway, i 427 Tanezrouft, i 39, 73, 467 Tanezrouft Road, i 467 Tanga (Tanganyika), i 459 Tanga Line, i 427, 429 Tanganyika: Africanization, n 356; agri culture, i 26, 138, 138n., 145-46, 14849, 155, 157, 159, 165, 171-74, 186, 192; airways, i 485, 489; area, i 89; ii 468; British policy toward, n 24749; climate & weather, i 57-59; coal, i 363-64; cooperatives, n 210; currency unit, i i 468; development plans, n 405, 407, 410, 415; diamonds, i 343, 345; education, n 101, 104, 123, 438, 468; finance, n 397, 402, 405, 407, 410, 415, 468; fishing, i 269, 272, 277, 279, 281; forests, i 66-67, 70-71, 201, 203-04, 219; government, n 247-49, 311, 344, 356; grasslands, i 72; health, n 36, 4041, 45, 47-48, 50, 168, 170-71, 177, 179; hydroelectricity, I 254; income, per capita, n 397, 486; industry, i 38183, 385-86, 392; labor, i 575, 584-85, 596, 598; language, official, n 468;

lumber, i 207, 209, 212-13; migration, i 584-85; minerals, i 292, 295-96, 301, 303, 305, 308, 310-11, 313, 316, 31920, 322, 325-28, 330-32, 334, 336, 339, 341-58, 360-61, 363-64, 366, 509; mo tor vehicles, i 466; n 468; nationalism, ii 272, 278, 293-94, 300-01; news papers, i i 142, 145; petroleum, I 366; physiography, i 31, 33; political divi sions, i i 326; political status, n 468; population, i 89; n 468; population characteristics, I 93, 95, 105, 111, 114, 117, 119, 122; ports, i 449, 459-60; radio, n 153; railroads, I 406, 413, 424, 427, 429-30, 432; roads, i 468-69, 48182, 491; settlement, i 165, 171-74, 18687, 192; trade, external, I 207, 209, 212-13, 279, 292, 459-60, 503, 505-06, 509-11, 521, 523-27, 538-40, 542-46; i i 468; trade, internal, I 588, 561; transportation, i 406; water power, I 253-54; water regions, I 239; water supply, i 247, 250; waterways, i 440, 445-47 Tanganyika, Lake, i 32-33, 233, 271, 277, 279, 446 Tanganyika African Association, n 293n. Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), ii 248, 293-94 Tanganyika Agricultural Corp. (TAC), i 173-74, 243, 460; n 410 Tanganyika Concessions, Ltd., i 290, 419 Tanganyika Groundnut Scheme, i 171-73, 460, 545; ii 236, 410 Tanganyika Sisal Growers Association, n 421 Tano (river), i 437 Tantalite, 308-10; map, I 302 Tariffs, i 538-43 Taxes, n 402-03; on cattle, I 130; tariffs, i 538-43 Taylor, John V., n 56n. Tea, i 145; exports, i 146, 504-05 Tea Research Institute of East Africa, n 421 Technical Assistance Board (TAB), ii 415, 417 Teita (sing. Mteita) (people), n 89, 101, 372; social change among, n 72-82 Teixeira, Gabriel, n 268-69 Television, n 140-41 Tema (Ghana), i 450, 451 Temperature, i 44-46 Territories of tropical Africa, see Political divisions Tetclaff, Eileen M., i 68n. Textiles: exports, I 510; imports, i 512, 514-16; production, i 378-80 Theatre Africain, n 388

INDEX

503

Thomson, A. G., 1 464n. Thornthwaite, C. Warren, 1 51 Tibesti Mountains, 1 244 Tick control, 1 127 Tikar (people), 1 270 Timber, 1 207-13, 386-88 Timbuktu (Sudanese Rep.), 1 100; 11 95 Tin, 1 318-21; map, 1 318 Titanium, 1 332-34 Tobacco, 1 138, 145, 146-47; exports, I 504 Tobacco Research Board (S. Rliod.), II 422 Tobias, P. V., 1 83 Togo (formerly French Togoland): agri culture, 1 15-16; area, 1 89; 11 468; cur rency unit, 11 469; development, 11 412; education, 11 108, 110, 469; finance, 11 398, 401n., 402, 412, 469; government, 11 315, 328, 346; health, 11 45; income, per capita, 11 468; language, official, 11 469; lumber, 1 208; minerals, 1 300, 305, 358; motor vehicles, 1 466; 11 469; newspapers, 11 142; political parties, 11 298; political status, 11 287-88, 468; population, 1 89; 11 468; population characteristics, 1 103, 109, 111-12, 11617; ports, 1 449; radio, 11 152-53; rail roads, 1 432; research agencies, 11 419, 423; roads, 1 468; social change, 11 60; trade, 1 498-501, 503-04; 11 469; water ways, 1 438 Togoland, British, 11 243-44, 287-88; see also Ghana Togoland Congress, 11 296 Toich land, 1 231 Tonga (people), 1 266 Tools, in tribal society, 1 20-22 Tooth, G., 11 37 Totemism, 11 6, 10 Toure, Sekou, 11 298, 301 Toussaint L/Ouverture, Dominique Fran cois, 11 279 Towns, see Cities Tracey, Hugh, 11 27-28, 31, 33, 389-90, 472 Trade: and advertising, 1 562-63; agree ments, 1 543-44; balance of payments, 1 546-51; consumers, 1 552-54; credit, 1 563-65; direction of, 1 518-23; dis tribution systems, 1 527-37, 556-62; ex ternal, 1 496-51; fiscal legislation, 1 537-46; government expenditure, 11 405; internal, 1 551-65; and labor, 1 579; merchandise, 1 555-56; problems, 1 565-69; regulation, 1 530-34; ship ping, 1 447-62; tariffs, 1 538-43; terms of, 1 523-27, 528; in tribal society, 1 23; volume of, 1 528; 11 446-70; see also Exports; Imports; individual countries

Trade unionism, 11 213-21, 282 Trades Union Congress (U. K.), 11 217, 282 Trans World Airlines, 1 488 Trans-Zambesia Railway, 1 425-26, 426n., 440 Transportation: airways, 1 484-90; de velopment, 1 404-12; government ex penditure, 11 405; and labor, 1 577-78; maps, 1 413, 435, 449; ports, 1 447-62; railroads, 1 412-34; roads, 1 463-84; trends, 1 490-93; in tribal society, 1 23; waterways, 1 434-47 Transports Aeriens du Gabon, 1 488 Transvaal, 1 317, 425, 426, 456, 581 Trees: commercial species, 1 198-204; as property, 1 25; see also Forests Trewartha, Glenn T., 1 88, 97, 102-03, 104n., 109, 112, 572n., 573, 573n., 586n.; 11 472; maps after, 1 91, 94, 96, 99, 118, 584 Tribalism: bonds, 11 87-88; and elite, 11 377 Tribes, 11 12-14; see also Peoples; indi vidual tribes Tropical Africa, defined, 1 4 Tropical Shelterwood System, 1 215 Troup, L. G., 1 149n. True Whig Party (Liberia), 11 319 Trust territories, 11 243-44 Trypanosomiasis, see Sleeping sickness Trypanosomiasis Combat Mission (Portu gal), 11 425 Tsetse fly, see Sleeping sickness Tsetse Fly and Trypanosomiasis Perma nent Inter-African Bureau, 11 428 Tuareg (people), 1 85 Tuberculosis, 11 39-40, 170-71 Tubman, William V. S., 11 126, 332 Tubman School of Teacher Training, 11 126 Tungsten, 310-11; map, 1 304 Turkana (people), 1 16, 266 Tusi, Tutsi (people), 1 16, 16n., 17, 220; 11 33, 158 Tutuola, Amos, 11 388 Twining, Lord, 11 247, 247n. Typhoid, 11 47 Typhus, 11 48-49; map, 11 49

u
UAT (Union Aeromaritime de Transport), 1 488 Ubangi-Shari, see Central African Re public Uele basin, 1 344 Uganda: Africanization, 11 356; agricul ture, 1 26-27, 131-32, 137-38, 149, 157, 175; airways, 1 485, 489; area, 1 89; 11

504

I N DE X Union Democratique Tchadienne, n 296 Union des Populations du Cameroun (UPC), i i 297 Union Miniere du Haut-Katanga, i 11516, 290-92, 315-16, 324, 429, 587, 599; i i 98, 137-38, 201, 231, 401 Union of Central African Republics, i i 469 Union of South Africa: airways, I 485; and Bechuanaland, n 250; education, ii 115; migration, i 142, 584-85; news papers, i i 149; physiography, i 35; re search agencies, n 428; roads, i 469; Roman law, n 327n.; and Southern Rhodesia, n 251; trade with tropical Africa, i 203, 212, 276, 282, 332, 380, 510, 538, 543-44 Unions, trade, n 213-21, 282 United Africa Co. Ltd., i 376, 407, 408n., 451, 529n.; n 138, 395, 400-01, 401n., 404, 406, 421 United Africa Group, i 529, 531; see also United Africa Co. Ltd. United Federal Party (Fed. of Rhod. and Nyas.), i i 302 United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC), i i 293-96 United Kingdom: and Africanization, n 354-56; Atomic Energy Authority, i 360; colonial government, n 310-14, 323-27, 339-45; colonial policy, i i 23353; development plans, n 406-10; edu cational policy, i i 118-24; Overseas Food Corporation, i 171; research work, i i 420-22, 428; trade with tropi cal Africa, i 146, 203, 207, 210, 212, 298, 304, 307, 346, 496-97, 510, 521, 523, 540, 544 United Nations: Advisory Council, i i 131n.; and African elite, i i 382; and African nationalism, n 286; Childrens Fund, i i 164, 175; development funds, i i 415-18, 416n.; Economic and Social Council, i i 186-87, 193n., 417, 439; and education, n 105, 132, 139; FAO, i 125n., 137, 209n., 265; n 42, 179, 417, 429; and health, n 44, 49, 164, 165, 168, 175, 426; and industrializa tion, i 374; International Bank, i 174n., 417, 425n., 475, 483, 547; i i 236, 41317, 417n.; IFC, n 415, 416; Interna tional Monetary Fund, i 546; n 415, 417; research work, i i 426, 429; and Ruanda-Urundi, n 232-33; SUNFED, i i 416n.; and self-determination, n 439; and Somaliland, ii 263-64; TAB, n 415, 417; trust territories, n 243-44; Trus teeship Council, i 206n.; n 130, 134, 163, 232-33, 263-64, 286; UNESCO,

Uganda (continued) 469; balance of payments, i 548; Brit ish policy toward, n 245; civil service, i 580; climate & weather, i 49, 58; co operatives, i i 207; currency unit, i i 469; development, i i 190-92, 191n., 405, 407, 415-16; education, i i 101, 121-22, 139-40, 469; finance, n 397, 402, 405, 407, 410, 415-16, 469; fish ing, i 271-72, 277-79, 284-86; forests, i 66, 70, 220; government, n 245, 31113, 324-27, 356; grasslands, I 72; health, n 36, 40-41, 44-45, 47-48, 60, 162, 165, 171, 174; hydroelectricity, I 254, 261; income, per capita, i 397; n 469; industry, i 381, 385, 511; labor, i 575, 577, 580, 584-86, 596, 598, 601; language, official, n 469; lumber, i 209, 212; migration, i 584-86; minerals, I 292, 296, 301, 303, 309-11, 313, 317, 319-20, 323, 325-27, 330-31, 334, 336, 339-40, 341, 346, 350, 354-58, 366, 509; motor vehicles, i 466; n 469; na tionalism, i i 274, 278, 288, 290, 293, 300; newspapers, n 142, 145, 148; pe troleum, i 366; political divisions, i i 325-26; political status, n 469; popu lation, i 89; i i 469; population charac teristics, i 93, 95, 101, 105, 108, 111, 117, 119; radio, n 153; railroads, I 413, 427-29, 432; roads, i 468-69, 469n., 473, 481-82, 491; settlement, i 17576; social change, n 60-63; trade, ex ternal, i 209, 278, 285, 502, 506, 50911, 521, 523-27, 539, 541-42, 544, 548; i i 469; trade, internal, i 552, 558, 561, 564-67, 567n., 569; water power, i 254, 261; water regions, i 239; waterways, i 445 Uganda African Farmers Union, n 290 Uganda Credit and Savings Bank, i 565 Uganda Development Corp., Ltd., i 278, 381; i i 325 Uganda Electricity Board, i 261; n 325 Uganda Fish Marketing Corp., The (TUFMAC), i 278, 278n. Uganda National Congress (UNC), n 145, 282, 293 Ukara (island), i 15, 93 Ulcers, ii 47 Uluguru Mountains, i 303, 327, 350, 360 Umma Party (Sudan), n 296 Umsweswe valley, i 332 Umvukwe Range, i 296 Unga (people), i 231 Unilever Ltd., i 375-76; see also Lever Brothers Ltd. Union Aeromaritime de Transport (UAT), i 488

INDEX

505

82, 82n., 83, 84n., 105, 132, 139, 220, 221n., 366n., 417, 429; WHO, 11 44, 49, 164, 164n., 165, 168, 168n., 175, 417, 426, 429 United States: and African nationalism, 11 279-81; development funds, 11 41415; ECA, 1 425n.; Export-Import Bank, 1 476; 11 414-15; FOA, 1 425n.; ICA, I 144, 596-97; 11 126, 129, 407, 414, 426; investment capital, 1 425n.; re search work, 11 425-26, 429-30; trade with tropical Africa, 1 298, 302, 30405, 307-09, 346, 497, 521-23, 543, 545 United States Steel Corp., 1 308 Universal Negro Improvement Associa tion, 11 280 Universities and colleges, 11 112, 117, 121-23, 126, 129, 133, 135-36, 283 University College, Ibadan, 11 179, 409 University College of Addis Ababa, 11 426 University College of Ghana, 11 135-36, 136n., 218, 220, 403 University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, 11 122-23 University of Dakar, 11 109, 111-12 University of Delhi, 11 285 University of Khartoum, 11 133, 427 University of Liberia, 11 126, 418, 425 University of London, 11 122, 133 Upper Volta, Republic of the: govern ment, 11 328; minerals, 1 308, 333; po litical status, 11 470; selected data, II 470 Uranium, 1 359-60 Urban areas: community development in, 11 195-201; social changes in, 11 8288; see also Cities Urundi, see Ruanda-Urundi Uruwira Minerals Ltd., 1 322, 429 Usines Textiles de Leopoldville (Utexleo), 1 379
11

Victoria, Lake, 1 15, 93, 234-35, 235n., 249, 271, 277, 279, 445 Victoria Falls, 1 34 Victoria Nile (river), 1 234, 235, 249, 261, 269n. Villages, 11 10-11 Vitamin deficiencies, 11 42, 43 Vogt, W., 1 129n. Voix dAfrique Noire, La , 11 283 Volontaires, Les, 11 201 Volta (river), 1 253, 262-63, 263n., 269, 329-30, 394, 437 Voltaic Republic, see Upper Volta, Re public of the Voluntary organizations, 11 183-221 Voters, 11 60; in Southern Rhodesia, 11 252 Vouri (river), 1 439 Vridi Canal, 1 437

w
Wages, 1 589-603; 11 85 WaGosha (people), 1 270 Waiyaki, Kimani, 11 98, 102, 472 Walker, A. J., 11 168 Walker, H. O., 1 235n. Wallace-Johnson, I. T. A., 11 284 Walvis Bay, 1 53 WaMakonde (people), 1 247-48 Wankie coal field, 1 315, 362 Wankie Colliery Co., 1 349 Ward, W. E. F , 11 119 Warner, Esther, 1 9n., 372, 372n; 11 17n., 34 Waruliiu (chief), 11 57 Watchtower movement, 11 279 Water: conservation measures, 1 245-51; government expenditure, 11 405; power, 1 251-63; resources, 1 165, 225-44; see also individual countries Waterways: lakes, 1 232-36, 444-47; riv ers, 1 225-30, 253, 434-37; see also in dividual countries Wattle bark production, 1 385-86 Watu wa Mungu (People of God), 11 90 Weather, see Climate and weather Welensky, Sir Roy, 1 425n., 479n.; 11 253 Welfare societies, 11 210 Wellcome Chemical Laboratories, 11 427 Wellington, John H., 1 31n., 32, 36n. West Africa: physiography, 1 37-38; pop ulation, 1 90-92; ports, 1 449-52; rail roads, 1 414-18, 432; roads, 1 464-65, 474-77; swamp lands, 1 232; see also British West Africa; French West Af rica; individual countries West African Airways Corp., 1 485 West African Cacao Research Institute, 1 141; 11 419, 421

V
Vai (language), 11 388 Vambe, Lawrence, 11 148 Van der Post, Laurens, 1 30, 32n., 590 Van Dongen, I. S., 1 455n. Van Hemelrijck, 11 339n. Van Riel, J., 1 117n. Vanadium, 1 312 Vegetable oils, 1 383; see also Palm prod ucts Vegetation, 1 60-73; map, 1 62 Veneer manufacturing, 1 387 Venereal diseases, 11 47-48, 171 Vermiculite, 1 356 Vicicongo (Societe des Chemins de Fer Vicinaux du Congo), 1 419

56

INDEX

West African Institute for Oil Palm Re search, i i 422 West African Institute of Social and Eco nomic Research, n 422 West African Press, n 143 West African Students Union, n 282, 282n., 284-85 West African Youth League, n 284 Westerman, D., n 4n., 6n., 10, 10n., 12, 20n., 21n., 22n. Wheat, i 146 Wheel, use of, I 253 White Nile (river), i 38, 228, 234, 24849, 444; valley of, i 103, 272 White Paper (1923), i 159 Wigny, Pierre, n 117n. Williams, Grenfell, n 107n. Williams, Robert, i 290, 419-20 Williamson, J. T., i 345 Wilmot, A. T. de B., n 365-66, 37.1, 38385, 472 Wilson, Charles Morrow, n 280 Wilson, Godfrey and Monica, i 23n. Wind, i 54 Witch doctors, n 24-25 Witches, ii 23-25 Wolof (people), i 84; n 226 Women: cooperatives among, n 209; ed ucation of, ii 100-01, 110, 137; per cent of population, i 111; ratio to chil dren, i 116-18; ratio to men, i 107-10; i i 199; riots in Nigeria (1929), n 342; in tribal society, I 9-10; n 8; unmar ried, i 112; work of, I 10, 270, 557; i i 58 Women's Institute, n 201 Wood production, i 207-13, 386-88; see also Forests Woodrow Wilson Foundation, n 131, 264n. Woodruff, H. W., i 536n. Woods, Oliver, n 436 Woodson, Carter G., n 280 Workers, see Labor World Bank, see International Bank World Council of Churches, n 429 World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), i i 217, 284 World Health Organization (WHO), i i 44, 49, 164, 164n., 165, 168, 168n., 175, 417, 426, 429

Worm infections, n 40-41, 45; map, n 41 Wright, John K., i 68n.

X, Y, Z
Xydias, N., n 82, 82n., 221n., 366 Yako (people), n 7n. Yao (people), i 266 Yaws, i i 45-46, 168; map, n 46 Yellow fever, n 49, 169; map, n 50 Yoruba (people), i 84, 275, 378, 592; i i 22, 28, 226, 236, 242, 274, 295-96 Yugoslavia, trade with tropical Africa, i 510 Zalinger, Alvin D., n 362, 372-82, 472 Zambesia River Transport, i 440n. Zambezi (river), i 70, 270, 440, 440n.; valley of, i 76, 104, 253, 315, 363 Zambezi-Cunene (river system), i 34 Zanzibar and Pemba: agriculture, I 138; airways, i 485; area, i 89; n 470; Brit ish policy toward, n 245-46; currency unit, i i 470; death rate, n 167; fishing, i 281-82, 286; government, n 245-46; government revenue & expenditure, n 470; health, n 167; income, per capita, i i 470; industry, i 383; infant mortality rates, n 167; labor, i 584, 598; lan guage, official, i i 470; lumber, i 209; migration, I 584; minerals, i 366; mo tor vehicles, i 466; n 470; nationalism, i i 300; newspapers, i i 142, 150-51; pe troleum, i 366; political status, n 470; population, i 89; n 470; population characteristics, i 92, 95, 97, 109, 111, 119; ports, I 460; radio, n 153; roads, i 468; schools and enrollments, n 470; slave trade, i 403; trade, external, i 100, 209, 498-501, 503, 505-06, 53839; i i 470; trade, internal, i 561 Zelinsky, Wilbur, i 88, 97, 102-03, 104n., 109, 112, 572n., 573, 573n., 586n; i i 472; maps after, i 91, 94, 96, 99, 118, 584 Zimutu Reserve, i 132 Zinc, 323-25; map, i 321 Zirconium, i 334 Zomba (Nyasaland), i 255-56 Zomba Mountains, i 219, 348 Zwai, Lake, i 93, 140, 378