Music Music and Singing Music>> The West Coast of Africa looking today much as
it did 100 years ago. At that time, the old evils of the slave trade had become
a distant though disgraceful memory. But there now opened a new chapter of
confrontation along these tropical shores. In past years, Europeans had come
here for profitable business. Now they wanted more, much more. Old trading
posts, like this one, had long been the scene of a partnership between maritime
traders from Europe and local Africans.By the 1880s, that old partnership was
being swept away in a dramatic change,the outcome of a new European drive for
overseas empire. Industrialized countries led by France and Britain had begun to
invade the black continent,each hoping for new sources of raw materials for its
factories, new markets for its manufacturers, and new positions of advantage
against its rivals. This was called the scramble for Africa. By 1914, only two
countries remained outside European possession, Liberia in the west and Ethiopia
in the east. Britain had seized the lion's share of control: Egypt and the Sudan
in the north, the immense wealth of South Africa, valuable colonies like
Rhodesia and Kenya, and richly populated territories such as Nigeria and the
Gold Coast. France had invaded Algeria in the 1830s. Now after new wars of
conquest, she added more colonies to her empire south of the Sahara, including
the island of Madagascar.Little Portugal carved out of two vast colonies, Angola
and Mozambique, while the imperial Germany took the Cameroons and southwest
Africa, and on the East Coast Tanganyika. The vast Congo basin fell to King
Leopold of the Belgians.Italy and Spain completed the enclosure. The fate of the
continent was utterly changed. Between the colonizing powers themselves, the
carve-up was peaceful.But their rivalry was intense. In 1884, a congress of the
competing governments met in Berlin to settle their disputes. Germany's Iron
Chancellor of Bismarck was there. And active behind the scenes was the ambitious
Belgian king. He spoke for them all when he said, "I am determined to get my
share of this magnificent African cake. Any power that could occupy African soil
could effectively claim it."Music Now the task was to stake out frontiers in
utterly uncharted land. Said the French prime minister, "We have embarked on a
gigantic steeplechase into the unknown." The British Prime Minister Lord
Salisbury was to say of this period,"We've been engaged in drawing lines on maps
where no man's foot has ever trod.We've been giving away mountains and rivers
and lakes to each other, only hindered by the small impediment that we never
knew exactly where we were."Music The great game was to get hold of places and
positions of advantage over rivals,no matter what irrational frontiers might
result. One of the most absurd cases was the magnificent Gambia River. Britain
had long held Bathurst, Banjul today,and was determined to keep this river route
to the interior. But France,invading from the West Coast, enclosed all the
territories surrounding the Gambia River in her new colony of Senegal. So the
French was naturally eager to obtain the Gambia River. They offered Britain in
exchange the much larger and richer Ivory Coast. But the British Parliament
insisted on keeping the Gambia,thus dividing the peoples of the region. And the
result and is a country that is 300 miles long but never more than 30 miles
wide.Conversations Indistinct What the African inhabitants might think of this
colonial carve-up was never asked. The European idea in the words of one British
governor was to seize African territory and then as much as possible rule the
country as if there were no inhabitants.Conversations Indistinct
In fact, European contempt for Africans now reached new depths. And no wonder;
for how otherwise and by asserting that Africans were helpless children, lazy
savages could Christian Europe justify taking their countries away from them?
Singing The helpless children meanwhile sang their own version of a famous hymn,
"Onward, Christian soldiers. On to heathen lands. Prayer book in your pockets.
Rifles in your hands. Take the happy tidings where trade can be done; spread the
peaceful gospel with a Gatling gun.Music The European invasions were widely
resisted. Conquest was never easy. And sometimes as these old drawings and
photographs testify, conquests led to a ruthless killing that later generations
would prefer to forget.Drums Resistance took many shapes. In French West
Africa, a focal point was found in Muslim loyalties. Many heroes, still
unforgotten, came on that scene. Some, like the Senegalese religious leader
Amadou Bamba, offered the way of peace but was still sent into exile. Others,
like the fierce warrior leader Samori, fought off
French attack after attack and was crushed and exiled only after years of war.
Death took many, strong or weak. With the skulls of earlier wars displayed in
their capital, Kumasi, the powerful Ashanti nation ruled over most of modern
Ghana. Led by their kings who had the title of Asantehene, they had long
defended their country against Britain. But now they desperately wanted a
peaceful settlement. In 1895, fearing a disastrous war with Britain, King
Prempeh made a strong bid for peace from his palace here at Kumasi. He offered
the British the right to establish in Ashanti a chartered company with all the
concessions, the privilege that such a company could possibly desire. But it
wasn't enough, for the British now wanted territorial possession as well as
privilege.Gunfire The Ashanti nation had already fought long, hard battles
against the British.But this time, in 1896, they decided to surrender.
Gunfire In a ceremony of deliberate humiliation, the king was made to kiss the
British commander's boot, and then sent into exile. But it wasn't the end of the
story.The British now blundered. A new British governor, Sir Frederick Hodgson,
decided that he had to get possession of the sacred golden stool, symbol of the
Ashanti Nation's soul. Arriving at the British fort here in Kumasi, he ordered
the assembled chiefs to hand the stool over. Worse still, he demanded the right
to sit on it, something that no person had ever been allowed to do, not even the
king himself.Gunfire To Hodgson's final insult, the Ashanti replied with war.
This little fort at Kumasi is what the British had built, just in case, and now
they sorely needed it. The few dozen British inmates of the fort were besieged
for months, and had to eat rats to stay alive. Hodgson's act of folly had
exacted a bitter price.Efforts to send in relief from the coast were repeatedly
frustrated by Ashanti resistance, until finally, the governor and his wife got
away to the coast, and the absurd but tragic affair could be closed. This ended
war between Britain and Ashanti, and a year later, in 1901, the British quietly
annexed the country,which became part of the colony of the Gold Coast. All over
Africa, the new military technology of automatic guns gave easy victories to the
invaders.Singing Background Singing Countless resisters died, many thousands at
the single battle of Omdurman, in Britain's conquest of the Sudan. Meanwhile, in
another part of the Sudan, the French were also scoring victories. For the most
part, public opinion rejoiced, for were these not victories over an inferior
species, a kind of joke humanity? There were some critics, but not many, and
their voice was ignored or silenced. What really mattered was to do down one's
European rivals:if you were British, to get the better of the French in West
Africa, or of the Germans in East Africa, while orphans like little Uganda were
left on the protective doorstep of Father John Bull. Even before 1900, there
came a new source of conflict: settlers from Europe, French in the far north,
Dutch, and then British in the far south, and some Germans. Other settlers were
attracted to the good farming land of the east, to Tanganyika, northern and
southern Rhodesia, and the British territories of Uganda and Kenya. Once again,
nobody asked permission. An early French governor had laid down the Golden Rule:
"Wherever good water and fertile land are found," he said, "settlers must be
installed without questioning whose land it may be." The settlers, not
surprisingly, agreed. The next step in East Africa was to build a railway from
the coast to the interior. The line was completed in 1901, and millions of acres
of good farming land in Kenya were opened to white ownership and settlement for
the buying price of next to nothing. These white strangers, oddly enough, were
at first welcomed by the African inhabitants. But the welcome didn't last for
long, for they soon discovered that colonial government wanted them to give
things, above all their land, and their labor. These colonial demands provoked a
repeated resistance. And against that resistance, the colonial government, with
white settlers arriving in ever larger numbers from Britain, waged a war with
little mercy, and of course with rifles and machine guns against spears and
arrows.Drums This beating down of a sometimes violent and desperate African
protest was called pacification, or less politely, hammering. A British officer
then fighting in Kenya kept a sadly instructive diary.
>> "Marched into Fort Hall, and the expedition comes to an end. To my mind, the
people of the Embu have not been sufficiently hammered, and I should like to go
back at once and have another go at them. During the first phase of our
expedition against the Iriani, we killed 797 niggers, and during the second
phase, against the Embu, we killed about 250.">> There was, in fact, much more
of the same thing. In a sixth campaign against the Kenya Nandi, for example,
British troops reported killing 1117 people,besides seizing all their
livestock. In 1906, a junior British minister in London cabled this protest: "
Surely it cannot be necessary to go on killing these defenseless people on such
an enormous scale." The minister's name was Winston Churchill, but on that
occasion, his intervention had no effect.Music By 1915, about four million acres
of African farming land in central Kenya had been given to about one thousand
British settlers. By the 1920s, about half of the able-bodied men of Kenya's two
largest founding peoples, the Kikuyu and the Luhya, were working as laborers for
British newcomers. How was that done? The answer, once again, was something new
in Kenya: taxation. To cultivate these splendid acres, it was necessary to make
Africans pay taxes in cash. Having no money economy of their own, Africans could
pay tax in cash only if they went to work for a European wage. An old Masai
recalls those early days. The Masai proved particularly good at dodging the
payment of the new taxes, so the colonial government thought it should send some
of these apparently idle warriors to school, so as to turn them, if possible,
into tax collectors among their own people. Small boys were seized for this
purpose. On the other side of the continent, in northern Nigeria, the colonial
scene was very different. With no white settlers, life was peaceful. Things
continued much as before. The British had conquered this huge region far from
the sea for no real reason other than to keep it from the French, so the British
were content with a supervision which allowed them to take a back seat. Under
the direction of Lord Lugard, this was called indirect rule. This was the
residence of the British official who governed the northern Nigerian province of
Kano. Indirect rule meant ruling through local kings, in this case the local
emir, who, after defeat, accepted British over lordship on condition that
nothing was done to modernize or democratize the conquered system. Indirect rule
was cheap and highly effective.Local kings and princes kept the peace and law
and order, in their own interest as well as in that of the British. Both sides,
at the top, had much to gain. So kings like this one, the Emir of Katsina, were
able to stay in power and even add to their personal privileges. They were able
to call on their own local retainers to govern the everyday affairs of the
country.Music In this way, the native governing class, as the doctrine said, was
to remain a real living force, as well as being a curious and interesting
pageantry.Chanting>> The ceremonies are the same as a thousand years ago. There
were kings in northern Nigeria when Richard Lionheart set out on crusade.
Today, he and all the emirs of northern Nigeria play their part as subjects of
the king of England, but their subjects still show their loyalty as in the days
when Katsina was warring with her neighbors.Horn Katsina still keeps her way of
life, still resists new influences from the world
outside.>> In short, no modernization of any kind, and therefore, big problems
for the future. I talked to Nigerian Professor Obaro Ikime.
>> For the larger part of Nigeria, British rule did not mean anything, for many
years. In other words, although at the centers of administration there was a
change which could be seen by the people and felt by the people. In the outlying
areas, life went on as if the British did not exist. If you take a look at one
particular area, the north, for example, the seat of the emir, and the seats of
the district heads, may have felt the immediate impact of the British presence,
but the villages were ordered and run just as before, with one important
difference, though, taxation, that the people had to pay tax to a new power. The
British built up a corps of Africans, who became known as native administrators,
developed some commitment to the system. The salaries were comfortable. They had
power, which they used to enrich themselves at the expense of their followers
and their subjects. Consequently, the British were able to succeed largely by
developing a corps of people who became partners with them.
>> British officers, headed by a resident, are there in every emirate to advise
and assist the emir and his ministers in their day-to-day work. And each month,
the resident presides at a full meeting with the emir's council. There may be
words from Nigeria's governor in Lagos, or from the colonial office in London.
Or the council may discuss the repatriation of pilgrims from Mecca. The dignity
of the past, the traditions of Katsina are present in the council chamber.
>> Here once more, this time behind polite words, was the essence of colonial
paternalism.Music In the French colonies along the coast, the scene was both the
same and different. Dakar, capital of Senegal, actually the little suburb of
Rufisque, a charmingly nostalgic place. Senegal was France's oldest colony in
tropical Africa, and one where the French presence, like that of the British in
northern Nigeria, could easily be absorbed. Generally, the French ran their
colonies on much the same system as the British. But there was one important
difference. The British thought that their Africans could never become anything
but Africans,and certainly not British. The French idea, on the contrary, was
that in the end, at some distant time, all their Africans would become black
Frenchmen. The culture and the language of France were offered as the eventual
supreme blessings. This idea was called assimilation. Originally, this was a
generous idea, but colonial rule reduced it to little or nothing. Yet in four
municipalities of coastal Senegal, assimilation did take effect. This
picturesque island of Goree, just off the port of Dakar, was one. Here you could
go to school, and even become a French citizen. But you belonged to a tiny
minority. By 1926, only 48,000 Senegalese had become assimilated, out of a total
of one and a half million. The Senegalese historian Professor Cheikh Anta Diop
explains. One man from Goree Island who did make it, and carved out for himself
a brilliant career, was Blaise Diagne. Of humble origins, Diagne became the
first black man to be elected to the French national parliament in Paris. He
campaigned for black rights, and began to win concessions. That was in 1914.
Music During the First World War, an embattled France called for tens of
thousands of African troops, as Flanders swallowed its victims. Blaise Diagne
agreed to be France's recruiting sergeant, and his African reputation vanished
in the slaughter. France had long relied on African mercenaries, even as far
back as the Crimean War, but now it was different, in scale and in suffering.
More than 200,000 African troops, mostly conscripts, were sent to France, and at
least 170,000 were thrown into the Holocaust of the trenches.
Music Thousands never came home. Others returned with an experience that
survivors have still not forgotten. Shoulder to shoulder, white men and black
men, equal in the trenches. Were they now to become equal in the colonies? Only
the monuments suggested that. With the coming of peace in 1918, the victorious
colonial systems looked more strongly entrenched than ever before, though
military rule now gave way to civilian government. This led to a far more
thorough system of tax collection, to pay for the government. The linchpin of
the British system as the District Officer.>> I'm the District Officer in this
particular area. The native authority treasurer sends his figures to me for
checking against last year's. When it's decided what the tax is to be this
year, I go up to tell the chiefs and people what they're to pay, and why. That's
my wife. I spend so much time doing the rounds that if she didn't come, we
wouldn't see much of each other. We take our beds and everything else, as the
rest huts where we spend the nights have no furniture. You know, we're very
ordinary people, but the pagans still find us a bit of a puzzle with our fuss
and bother. That's the local chief. We ask news of
the crops and the children.Music It's like sitting in a shop window. We come
here every year, and follow the same ritual, but they always behave as though it
was the first time. Peace is all very well, but it is dull, and they love a bit
of variety.>> Many colonial officials were good, practical, hardworking people
devoted to their ideals. They were sure that the strong paternal arm of colonial
rule must be a blessing for Africans, and would have to be continued for
centuries. They firmly believed that if left to themselves, Africans would
simply go on living as before, and that, they thought, would be a thoroughly bad
thing. An old film tells the story as the colonial officials saw it.
>> Background Music This simple life under the hot African sky was once a life
of fear and uncertainty. British rule has brought peace. The enterprise of
European officials and settlers, and of Indian traders, has opened up the
country. But there is still a long battle to be fought with ignorance, poverty,
and disease. In these lands, where there are so many changes to be made, much
can be achieved by money, and the initiative of the white man.
>> In the more favored colonies, those were the hopes of the 1920s, and in some
respects they were fulfilled. There came the founding of the first modern
hospitals, veterinary services, and other benefits of Western life. But all the
money to pay for these good things had to come from Africans, so there now began
a drive for the export of crops to yield cash. The cash crop era got into its
stride. Groundnuts, as here in Senegal, were a crop that brought cash to farmers
and to colonial purchasing companies. But the cash crops' success also brought
problems. So long as their crops were bought, African growers could be
reasonably content. But in 1929, there began the huge and long disaster of the
world Depression, and prices collapsed. Food production for local people,
already badly hit because of land taken for cash crops, became a subject of
major crisis. What is true of the French Empire was just as true of all the
others. Here in the Gold Coast, the big cash crop was cocoa, providing the bulk
of the colony's exports. The crop was grown and harvested entirely by African
farmers, who had to sell it to British and other foreign buying companies. These
companies banded together so as to pay the farmers an artificially low price.
The farmers of Ghana, then the Gold Coast, nonetheless worked so well that they
became the world's biggest producers of cocoa, and so of chocolate, which
Africans didn't eat. But the gains were far from equally shared. The Ghanaian
historian, Professor Adu Boahen.>> There's no doubt at all that the farmers were
being cheated. The prices that were being paid for the cocoa bore no
relationship to the prices that we had to pay for the imported goods. We had no
say in the pricing of our own commodities.We had no say in what we paid for what
was imported. This was in fact one of the greatest indictments against the
colonial economic policies, the fact that so much emphasis was placed on a
single cash crop. And we had to import rice. We had to import oil, palm oil, and
so on, you know, to feed ourselves, because so much emphasis and so much
attention was paid to this single cash crop, cocoa.
The colonial governors were just concerned with obtaining raw materials to feed
their factories abroad.>> The raw materials were produced by the skill and
enterprise of hard-working African men and women, yet the advertisements in
Europe, deeply racist by this time, presented an insultingly different picture.
At the same time, African businessmen found that the trading positions they had
established in earlier times were now swept away.>> There's no doubt at all that
before the colonial period, Africans were playing a far more important and
dominant role in the economy than during the colonial period, with many of them
running their own import/export business. In the 1920s and 1930s, all these
African merchant princes eventually disappeared from the field, because the dice
were so much loaded against them under the colonial system. The banks were
discriminating against them in the granting of loans. The export trade firms and
particularly the inaudible firms were undercutting them. And they just could not
stand the challenge, and therefore many of them simply ran out of business. And
the children of these great merchant princes now became the employees of the
great African capitalist companies like UEC, UTC, SUA and so on.
>> Colonial trading companies, British, French, Belgian, Portuguese, monopolized
wholesale business with the full backing of their colonial governments. What
King Leopold had called "this magnificent African cake" was beginning to yield
its riches. Often those were painful days, but they have to be recalled by
anyone who wishes to understand the problems of Africa now. The turmoil of today
in the Congo, or Zaire, has its roots in the infamous Congo Free State of King
Leopold. Here the emphasis was on the growing of rubber, and the methods used to
extract it were no better than a reign of terror. Local people were forced to
collect rubber under the most cruel conditions, as these old photographs show.
If the rubber they collected was poor, or small in quantity, men, and sometimes
women too, could expect to lose a hand or foot in punishment. Terrible things
were done. An official British fact-finding commission reported, "The daily
agony of an entire people unrolled itself in all its repulsive, terrifying
details." Public opinion in Europe grew horrified. Gradually, the agonies were
reduced. Yet huge damage had been done, moral as well as physical, and was going
to cast a dark and violent shadow over the future of the Congo. Forced labor by
the 1920s was practiced on a wide scale in most of the colonies. All early roads
and railways were built by forced labor. Much was achieved, but the cost in life
and health was sometimes catastrophic. This spectacular railway in French
Equatorial Africa was built by 125,000 Africans to link the coast with
Brazzaville, the inland capital. Beyond doubt, a great feat of engineering, but
before a single passenger could travel on it, nearly 14,000 Africans were to die
in building it. Travel in comfort came at a price. By the 1920s, the colonial
railway map was complete. These lines had one central purpose: to ensure the
export of minerals and other wealth, most of all from Southern Africa. European
mining activity for gold, copper, zinc, diamonds transformed Southern Africa,
thanks again to African labor, acquired by the usual procedure of administrative
force and taxation. Conditions were hard to bear. Some 30,000 Africans died in
Southern Rhodesian mines between 1904 and 1933, mostly of disease. And wages at
the end of that period were lower than they'd been at the start. This labor
system was called chibaro. Very old men can still remember it. Gold mining
boomed. In those years of chibaro, the Southern Rhodesian mining industry
produced gold worth 87 million pounds sterling, at the cost of 20 dead African
miners each week, on average, for 30 years. Just as in the bigger mines of South
Africa, living conditions for miners were appalling. Safety provisions were
primitive. Discipline was often brutal, healthcare almost nonexistent. Prison
labor was used whenever available, and that was often, and child labor too.
After 1930, the whole labor system in large regions had come to depend on people
having to abandon their villages and go far away to work in colonial mines or on
plantations. This was called migrant labor, a huge upheaval which soon began to
destroy the old stabilities of rural Africa. An official British committee in
1935 reported that the old order of society was being completely undermined by
migrant labor. The years ahead were going to confirm it. But it was in the
Portuguese colonies, especially Angola and Mozambique, that forced labor was at
its worst. Here in Mozambique, and by brutal methods, African farmers were
forced to grow cotton and to sell it at prices fixed by the colonial government,
prices kept so low that the farmers used to say of the cotton that they were
forced to grow, that cotton was the mother of poverty.
Singing The raw cotton was sent to textile factories in Portugal, and returned
in the form of shirts for Africans to buy. All the profits were Portuguese. The
more the farmers learned to hate cotton, the more they were forced to grow it,
on pain of severe punishment.Singing The farmers in this old film had no legal
means of protest, but they could express their anger by singing anti-colonial
songs in their own language. There seemed, then, no way out, no hope ahead. And
before long, the same disaster struck here as elsewhere. Food crops
disappeared, and once-prosperous areas were hit by famine.
Music In spite of African suffering, settlers arrived in growing numbers. Some
were political exiles from the Portuguese dictatorship. Many were poor people,
hoping for a better life. Sent out to be farmers, most preferred the easier life
of the towns. They opened shops and businesses, and aimed at the success which
had eluded them at home. This actually suited the official colonial doctrine.
The Portuguese dictator, Marcelo Caetano, laid it down in plain words:"The
blacks are to be organized and enclosed," he said, "in an economy directed by
whites."Music Mass resistance was to develop later, but already even the poorest
and least educated Africans could see that colonial rule had much more to take
than to give. Whatever good may have come from colonial rule, has to be
measured,unfortunately, against the essential aims of each of the colonial
systems. These aims were frankly stated: They were to extract wealth. We've
looked at some of the ways in which wealth was extracted, by the use of forced
or cheap labor, by the seizure of land, by the incessant pressure on growing
crops for export,rather than crops for local food needs, and always, by the
deliberate treatment of Africans as inferior beings. Whatever appearances might
suggest, Africans in fact were no longer prepared to accept their permanently
inferior status. All over the continent, the first signs of a new political
dissent had already begun to appear. In the 1920s, for example, was the protest
action of Harry Thuku in Kenya. At the same time, with Casely Hayford and his
companions in British West Africa. And perhaps above all, with Herbert
Macaulay, often called the father of Nigerian nationalism. But their demands
were small.>> Some of these inaudible were completely taken in by the British
system, which they thought was a good thing, and that we should become part of
that good thing. The real pressure was for the British to become a bit more
liberal.>> During the 1930s, and notably with the rise to prominence of the
firey but very effective Nigerian nationalist, Nnamdi Azikiwe, much stronger and
more far-reaching demands began to be made. Men like Azikiwe used the press
where this was possible, as it was in British West Africa. They now sought a
mass audience. Politics moved out of polite drawing rooms into the clamor of the
streets.>> So the resistance movement took many forms and it was not confined
only to the elite, as some people tend to think. In fact it was also evident in
the rural area, and even among the ordinary farmers and the ordinary workers.
>> One form of mass resistance took shape in a big cocoa hold-up, in the Gold
Coast, when farmers demanded fairer prices. Once again, the press could be used
to good effect.>> But unfortunately, in the 1930s there was never any
coordination between the protests of the rural folk and the farmers, and the
protests being organized by the elite. And this is why the resistance movement
was not very successful.>> But now, in 1935, came a new and savage challenge to
African hopes of progress: another colonial invasion, Fascist Italy's brutal
assault on Ethiopia,then called Abyssinia.>> No power on earth now seems able to
hold up Italy's sweeping advance across Abyssinia's rain-swept mountains. Now
Dessie has been captured. From there a direct road leads to Addis Ababa, so
perhaps it's only a question of time as to when the victorious Italian troops
will march into the capital, and the emperor will have to sue for peace.
>> With the colonial powers sounding quite pleased about this invasion, Italy's
armies pushed on, against afar weaker adversary, explosions and bombed and
shelled their way to success. But Africans were outraged.
>> For the first time, the blacks all over the world, not even Africa alone, but
the blacks all over the world felt that they have been attacked. You know,
Ethiopia and Liberia, were the only two countries in Africa that were able to
maintain their sovereign existence during the period of the scramble and the
occupation of the continent by the imperial powers. And Ethiopia therefore
became the symbol of hope, not only for Africa but for all the black people all
over. Ethiopia was looked upon as the symbol of the revival and the regaining of
the independence and sovereignty of Africa. And therefore when this invasion
took place, it meant the complete snuffing out of this last beam of hope.
>> Italy's troops entered Addis Ababa, capital of a now subjected Ethiopia, and
still there came no more than verbal protest from outside powers. Yet Ethiopia's
defeat, painfully confirmed when her people laid down their arms, sent out a
call for action to Africans everywhere.>> Indeed for some of us, 1935 now is
being considered as the more appropriate date for the beginning of the modern
nationalist period of African history,rather than 1939, or even 1945. Because we
believe that, but for the breakout of the, outbreak of the Second World War, in
1939, probably the struggle for independence would have begun from 1935, as a
result of the indignation, as a result of the anger, as a result of the
emotions, as a result of the strong feelings of anti-imperialism that were
aroused by the Italian invasion of Ethiopia.>> Those feelings were aroused above
all among the few who could win a modern education at schools like this one:
Achimota in the Gold Coast, where Kwame Nkrumah, future leader of the country's
independence movement had been a student. Young people began to read whatever
anti-colonial newspapers they could find. Even in the midst of discouraging
years, hope flourished afresh. A new generation of educated Africans, some of
them trained here at Achimota, was reaching maturity. And then came the
tremendous upheavals of the Second World War, surging with revolutionary force
through the entire colonial world. By 1945, as we shall see in our next
program, the scene was set for great dramas in a struggle for independence.
Music