(African music: drums, marimba, vocals)
♪ Africa ♪
(dramatic music)
The west coast of Africa, looking today
much as it did a hundred 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 two vast colonies, Angola and Mozambique,
while imperial Germany took the Cameroons
in 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, 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 were 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 was, and is, a country that is 300 miles long,
but never more than 30 miles wide.
(voices, waves breaking)
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.
In fact, European contempt for Africans
now reached new depths, and no wonder,
for how otherwise than 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, into heathen lands,
prayerbooks in your pockets, rifles in your hands.
Take the happy tidings where trade can be done,
spread the peaceful Gospel with the Gatling gun."
The European invasions were widely resisted.
Conquest was never easy, and sometimes,
as these old drawings and photographs testify,
conquest led to a ruthless killing that
later generations would prefer to forget.
(drum)
(call to prayer)
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 were 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'd 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.
(African 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.
(narrator) 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:
(male voice) "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."
(narrator) 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.
(silent movie music fades in and out)
(narrator) 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:
(narrator) 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.
(narrator) 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 overlordship.
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.
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)
(newsreel voice-over) 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)
(hoofbeats)
Katsina still keeps her way of life,
still resists new influences from the world outside.
(narrator) 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 centres of administration
there was a change which could be
seen by the people and felt by the people.
In the upland 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,
and 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, of their subjects.
Consequently, the British were able to succeed
largely by developing a corps of people who became partners with them.
(newsreel voice-over) 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.
(narrator) Here once more, this time behind polite words,
was the essence of colonial paternalism.
(European accordion 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.
(narrator) 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.
(military 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.
(narrator) 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.
(military music)
Thousands never came home.
Others returned with an experience that survivors have still not forgotten.
(narrator) 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.
♪ Africa ♪
With the coming of peace in 1918,
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 was the District Officer.
(newsreel voice-over) 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.
Y'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.
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 a row.
(narrator) 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:
(male voice) 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.
(narrator) 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.
(narrator) 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,
y'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.
(narrator) 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 places 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 [unclear] 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.
(narrator) 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.
(clank, crash)
Forced labor by the 1920s was practised 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.
(sound of train)
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.
(loud machinery)
(narrator) 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 non-existent.
Prison labor was used whenever available, and that was often,
and child labor too.
(heavy machinery)
(narrator) 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.
(call-and-response 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)
(narrator) 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)
(narrator) 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."
(rattling of wheels)
(narrator) 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 [unclear]
were completey taken in by the British system,
which they thought was a good thing,
and they wished to become part of that good thing.
The real pressure was for the British to become a bit more liberal.
(narrator) During the 1930s, and notably
with the rise to prominence of the firy
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.
(narrator) 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.
(narrator) 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.
(newsreel voice-over) No power on earth now seems able
to hold up Italy's sweeping advance across Abyssinia's rainswept 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.
(narrator) With the colonial powers sounding
quite pleased about this invasion,
Italy's armies pushed on, against a far weaker adversary,
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.
(narrator) 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.
(narrator) 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)
♪ Africa ♪