AFRICA Episode 6 The Magnificent African Cake Written Presented by Basil Davidson Executive Produ

PART 6: A very well documented series on African History from way before, during and after Slavery trade and colonial period to contemporary times. This Documentary is the work of the British author and Africanist Basil Davidson :https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basil_Davidson . I upload and share this for education purposes only with people who are interested in African and African History as a Whole. I these series you will learn that Africans had their own civilizations, kingdoms, trades, and values way before the invasion of the western world.
Enjoy !

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