AFRICA A Voyage of Discovery in HD: The Magnificent African Cake - Episode 6/8 - Scramble for Africa

(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 ♪

♪ 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 ♪