Measures of Central Tendency: Mean, Median and Mode
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1. The Decolonization of Africa
(Eventually) Choosing Masculine Black Nationalisms as the Continent’s Future
Léopold Sédar Senghor (L)
Mamadou Dia (R)
2. Met Museum (New York), December 2012
Colonial Ideologies
of Indirect Rule
live on in contemporary
manifestations
Continue to affect
Western views of
Africa
3. Failures of Colonial ideology of Indirect rule
Asli Hassan Abade
Second African Female Pilot
(Somalia)
4. Melody Millicent Danquah
First (known) African female pilot
(1937-2016)
Flew for the Ghana Air Force
Can’t envision Africans as modern,
mobile, complex, diverse, and with
multiple identities
Picture of Senghor & Dia (his prime minister, premier) after the Mali Federation broke up and Senegal became independent.
The reminder of the European ideology of Indirect Rule
To each tradition-bound tribe their art style. This is enshrined in western museums through the collecting practices of Europeans.
The colonial state is a racist and racialized authoritarian, imperial state: not surprising that what would come after it is
Colonialism has crises of its ideology (meaning that its ideology was exposed as being ineffectual and not corresponding with reality) and its way of dealing with the people in its states: they don’t represent reality, but they do have a lasting impact on western views.
The development of a wide variety of associations and identities during the 1920s and 1930s that were outside of what the Colonial state had imagined: professional, urban, cultural, labor, colony-wide, intellectual, educational, neighborhood, religious, musical, artistic, dance, literary. These identities develop at the same time as tribal identities and intersect and crosscut them.
Much urban unrest arises in a rural continent. Many people in Africa begin to challenge the roles assigned to them simply by being themselves and doing their own thing.
Conjuncture of diverse forms of mobilization of people about Around new identities that they were developing in the colonial period.
Gold Coast/Ghana
Volume of trade increases during the colonial era, continuing from pre-colonial period.
Terms of trade decline, primarily with declining prices of African commodities: and foreign depression of African wages (unfree, unmarket forms of labor)
Terms of trade are based on relative changes in African export prices and import prices of goods from the exterior.
From: “An Economic Rationale for the African Scramble: The Commercial Transition and the Commodity Price Boom of 1845-1885” (2015)
Falling commodity prices for the African states cause the colonial states to pare back on their infrastructural developments.
Crises for the colonial state and the colonial rulers.
Effort to treat the people of Africa as tribes: but they become farmers, workers, townspeople, citizens.
“Pagans” become Christians and Muslims.
Educated elite begins to undercut the indirect rule system of chiefly and uneducated intermediaries.
Crisis: diverse forms of mobilization of Africa’s people versus the impossibility of colonial ideology and the loss of imperial self-confidence. This produces a crisis in colonial policy and a rethinking of colonialism for a more reformist sense, one that is more socially interventive.
Falling wages for workers, significant levels of unemployment.
Widespread disillusionment and resentment with the colonial order: formation of self-help associations that generate grass-roots solutions to problems but are outsie of the colonial state and articulate grievances against it.
African farmers often had little control over the prices they were paid for their produce or the prices of the commodities imported to be purchased with the funds derived therefrom.
In Africa a small number of companies come to control the imports and exports of the various colonies; the states themselves being most interested in the revenue raised, and it is more efficient and easier to work with fewer rather than more companies.
But colonial administrators conceive of Marketing Boards as a way of protecting farmers from the fluctuating costs of produce while raising money for the colonial states: marketing boards created generally during the 1930s, and expanded during the second world war.
Marketing boards also were instruments of greater intervention into the farming sector, as states identified irrational or harmful practices that they sought to change.
But through the marketing boards, farmers become important contributors to state finances, and never enjoy the high prices paid by the market.
Farmers are paid a low fixed rate even during many years when world prices were rising, financing the colonial state.
Ghana: Cocoa holdups: this means a producers’ strike or boycott by wealthy farmers of cocoa sales to the marketing board.
Also meant that producers were not supposed to purchase European commodities from the marketers who purchased cocoa.
Enforced discipline over the smaller producers to do this as well.
Force and intimidation used to keep people in line.
The purpose was to increase the prices paid for cocoa, but unfortunately the prices tended to decline over the period, which made the hold ups largely ineffectual.
Colonialism helps spread Islam: people moving about, migrant labor.
Religion that ties various people together.
Capacity to absorb and adapt: African practices tend to be additive.
Seeming Paradox: European, Christian Colonialism spreads Islam, because Islam had not been very deeply implanted in Africa before the twentieth century.
Changes in communications and trade, increase mobility, labor migration, urban growth, commercialization of agriculture. This brings people into contact with others whose beliefs were not necessarily the same: many people migrate into the cities where Islam is more important, and begin to take it back to the countrysides of Africa during the 1920s and 1930s. This accelerates during and after WWII. It is especially important in French West Africa, but also along the eastern Coast of Africa, which is primarily in British colonies.
Throws different kinds of people together.
Organizing beyond the tribe & local administrators, who are very leery.
Growth of Independent Churches, Zionists
Between 1935 and 1950 numerous strikes enveloped ports, mines, railways, and commercial centers in Africa. These were the lifelines of financing the colonial state.
Strikes and protests of the 1930s were due to the hardships suffered by the people of Africa during the Depression and the limited economic benefits from recovery since 1935.
Labor organization and actions that are operating well beyond ethnic locations.
Northern Rhodesian copper mine strike of 1935. Very extensive. Workers in the city, but colonial administration sees them as villagers temporarily earning money to meet fixed needs. They also thought of them as single males, but in fact many women came into the urban areas.
Mombasa and Dar es Salaam in 1939.
Railway and mines in the Gold Coast in the late 1930s.
On the Copperbelt again in 1940.
The strike wave continues during WWII: Kenya, Nigeria, Gold Coast, Rhodesias, South Africa.
Because the workforce was less differentiated, the strikes ended to become mass actions.
Metropolitan government saw that more services were needed and that colonial development should take place to provide housing and the like.
French Africa has a weaker wage labor sector, and the strike wave came late. December 1945: FWA, two-month long strike movement begins in Senegal.
Strikes in FWA come later: 1947-8: the entire railway system of FWA was shut down by a very well organized strike, lasting five months.
Similar unrest around British empire: Africa, Caribbean, South Asia.
All of this unrest led to increasing awareness in Britain and France that criticism of empire was linked to declining economic conditions in the colonies.
The strike wave is also an embarrassment. This leads to a rethinking of whether investments ought to be made in the colonies (beyond the infrastructure to export commodities and pay for colonial administration through taxation) to improve conditions of life and labor for African peoples as a way to shore up colonial rule and imperial prestige.
Social engineers coin the term “stabilization” as a way of separating out certain workers who would remain in the city and urban, maintaining a dichotomy between rural and urban rather than relying on cyclical migration of villagers to the city on a temporary basis.
Hive rural from urban areas.
Attempts to redirect the labor militancy: less of an urban mass and more of a labor union.
Treat Africans not as temporary laborers, but as organized labor with rights, and rights to live in the city and support families.
More than 1 million African troops served in WWII in various theaters inside and outside of Africa, about half for Britain.
Some 50,000 killed, so not a large proportion of the one million, but a significant absolute number.
Nazis and Japanese are fought by the allies because of their racism and discrimination and their conquest or colonization of other European nations, threatening the Allied powers. So after the war both racism and colonial occupation are not favorably seen by the international community.
conquest and racism come to have an ugly name. It is no longer avant guard, or fashionable, to hold colonies. Challenge to European powers that colonize Africa.
Changing international climate.
The is the international climate in which decolonization and African nationalism take place.
Mitigated for farmers by the problem of the Marketing Boards.
Colonial governments receive additional revenue and run positive balances, expanding their public spending in a variety of ways.
Northern Rhodesia revenues, due to rising production and prices of copper—surpluses that are turned in to reserves.
But this was temporary: changing commodity prices still had a huge impact on African colonies, and the colonies were still oriented toward single product exports of various kinds.
Rationale for Colonization: ending slavery, civilizing the natives
Post-War Rationalization: Create development and uplift, as a reform to the imperial system
Development: Generally focused on infrastructure investments, making export agriculture & mining easier, creating export growth revenues.
New Paternalism: From Ending Slavery and Civilizing the Native, to bringing “development” and teaching how to build a modern economy.
New investment in colonies, beginning the mid-1930s
Supposed to represent a kind of New Deal for the tropical colonies.
Goal is “Freedom from Want,” n.ot “Freedom.” The spending is increased, but it is not astronomical.
After the War: Colonial reforms necessary to revive colonies economically and to avoid the worst abuses of colonization.
Reforms are largely implemented to protect empire and keep the colonies, but in the new environment of development and the Marshall Plan for Europe, there must be reforms in the colonies for both economic and political reasons.
Social spending that is infrastructural: CDW Act of 1940: spending for housing, water, schools, social projects.
From a stance of surveillance and general repression of political movements among the people of Africa.
Political Reforms: lessening of Colonial authoritarianism. Still an unelected governor, but movement toward electoral politics for legislative and local offices.
Expansion of electorate from very small minorities of Africans to universal suffrage between 1945 and 1955.
Series of elections with different purposes, bringing more Africans into the political process and spurring the formation of political parties. This is at first to stabilize the empire: to retain it. But it begins to shade into other alternatives, as the African Political Imagination is unleashed.
Settlers and metropolitan interests in government begin to fall away in political influence as the African electorate grows after the war.
African political activity and political theory, and ideas about the political future, were multiple. Different types of nationalism were only one of the options that people were considering.
Different forms of collective mobilization and affinity being worked out, and now finding electoral expression.
The post-war politics is vast and open, goes different directions.
Generally, Reforms:
Africans pushing for reforms for equality
Colonial powers making reforms to keep their empire in the new international context
Over time—Reform to Self Determination & Independence: The Atlantic Charter of Aug 1941 (Roosevelt & Churchill): Self-Determination a principle of the War
Africans call for more thorough reforms, then forms of self-determination, then finally, independence
But the politics varies by colony, and especially between French and British Africa
Reform and Independence are political forms without ideological content
But colonization takes place in an ideological context: that of European racism and paternalism
Nationalism was the idea that there were nations, and nations had a race and a racial other
How to create a nationalism in a linguistically plural society: a racial nationalism, race can unite (but not all Africans are defined as black).
Nationalism in Africa was the idea that individual colonies should become independent and that the indigenous people of Africa, defined as black, should rule them. “Africa for Africans,” and “Africans” defined as “Black.”
African nationalism was deeply influenced by the idea of a racially black nation that arose especially from the Americas. It typically excluded anyone who could be portrayed as foreign: Indian Africans, European Africans, even people such as Tutsi in Rwanda were interpreted as not being black and therefore not of the nation.
African nationalism was very exclusionary and often argued for the disenfranchisement of immigrants to Africa, and to others who weren’t immigrants to the continent but interpreted as such.
In North Africa, much nationalism was couched as Arab nationalism. So the ideologies of nationalism in Africa were very exclusionary, even if largely peaceful up to the point of independence. It was after independence that problems arose with exclusionary nationalism.
Combination of colonial reforms and African political agitation generates the process of decolonization.
Africans and Asians want to become independent countries or at least have the same standards of living.
And for the European countries colonization is both out of fashion (the repression of revolts is criticized internationally) and expensive.
In 1961 there are two main areas of conflict in Africa: what are they? Algeria and Congo. Portuguese colonies.
French Model: Change the political status of the colonies to integrate them more closely into France.
Empire no longer an empire per se, but a new union of French territories. Invest more in the Union.
African deputies elected to the French Parliament from early in the 20th century, but expanded after WWII.
These are instrumental in getting rid of things like forced labor and in passing a law that Africans in the colonies are citizens of France.
1946 Constitution of the 4th French Republic: Africans are Citizens of France
From 1946: economic reforms, allowing workers the right to form unions and bargain with their employers.
What this eventually means is that those workers begin to claim the same rights and wages as workers in France. Very quickly they strike for better wages and working conditions, which they win. Very quickly, for both Britain and France, the colonies become very expensive after the war.
British--Colonial Development and Welfare Acts, from 1940.
Politics: Africans would never become British citizens, nor help govern Britain.
They would become politicians in their own colonies.
Emphasis on greater institutions of self-governance in the colonies themselves, leading eventually to independence at some distant moment.
Self-governance to self-determination.
More elections for advisory legislatures (Legislative Councils, in the colonies themselves only) and the like.
There are some revolts: Algeria and Madagascar for the French; Indian agitations for independence and Mau Mau in Kenya.
Brutally repressed, at great cost and large military interventions.
Full-scale colonial revolts are expensive to repress, and it takes money to keep unwilling colonies in the empire.
Because European powers are planning slow evolution to political self-autonomy, they are savage in the repression of revolts.
Eventually, from about 1956, France and Britain come to the decision to dump their colonies.
In France, the dumping starts in 1956, with the Loi Cadre, which creates territorial governments for each colony and makes them financially responsible for the colony (no money coming to the colony from Europe). Some African leaders do not wish to be independent, but want to be in Union with France.
Decolonization was a process of territorialization, of creating separate countries from colonies. National elites sometimes talk about third-world unity and African Unity, but in reality they want to be in control of their respective colonies, which become nations. Decolonization supported by both US and Soviet Union.
Territorialization vs. Pan Africanism
France comes to this decision in about 1956. One of the ideas is to hand administration and financing of the colonies over to national elites who will then have to run finances and governments without tapping into European funds.
Especially in Anglophone Africa, connections with American and British Black activists and nationalists
It is a particularly strong idea in the English-speaking Atlantic.
Common Goals
Unity
emancipation of persons of African descent
Different Expressions
fighting racism
economic equality of Africans
promoting knowledge of Africa
increased representation of Africans
demanding independence
idea of political unity
Several Varieties:
Relies on a sense of what Africa and Africans are, racially defined—an argument about racial unity. It was a powerful argument and one still important today as certain elements of it lay behind most nationalist movements: i.e. that Africans are black people; if you aren’t black, you can’t be African.
African Americans and Caribbeans: argued in various ways that educated African Americans would be a vanguard leading Africa out of its wilderness because of their racial consciousness and their Christianity and civilization.
Senghor and Césaire: idea of négritude posited a contribution of Africans to world civilization, where the inspiration and philosophical leadership lay from within the continent. Here the direction of civilization was quite opposite to that of most African American thinking about Africa.
Marcus Garvey/Populist: Spread via African and African-American sailors in African ports, and sent secret agents to various parts of Africa. Garvey never went to Africa himself.
Mass movement
Economic improvement
That African colonies would become independent nation states was something that emerged mostly after 1955 (university students generally the earliest and strongest voices for political independence as independent countries)
National parties were parties with colony-wide organization and support; their policies with respect to centralization and decentralization varied, however.
Nationalist parties were those calling for independence to an “African,” read black, nation—typically they were exclusionary, particularly of groups that had benefitted more than blacks during the colonial period.
Challenge: to harness a variety of interests of emerging associations of various sorts: regions, labor unions, ethnic associations, voluntary associations in the cities, into a broad-based push for independence.
The next challenge: to hold these diverse coalitions and their varying interests together as the colony came to independence and the actual form of government and its policies had to be figured out.
Role of women: men shown here, but the role of women in nationalist parties is hidden and important: organization.
Nation states come of different kinds:
A federal state with a weaker central government and regional powers.
A strong central government that treats all of the parts of the country in a similar fashion, with relatively weak local authorities.
There is considerable debate in the process of decolonization after WWII as to which was the best form for each colony to become a country.
Regions of colonies with strong precolonial identities or strong economic and religious identities often wanted a federated system, in which they exercised a good deal of autonomy.
May of the newly educated elites, however, wanted strong central states and the revenues and power that keeping the gate would give them.
Central states: run headlong into the fact of African diversity: regional, economic, ethnic, religious.
Nationalisms: how plural is their vision?
Post-Colonial states were gatekeeping states: holding containers that control the exits and entries.
Main source of revenues is imports and exports, plus sundry other sources.
Drop direct taxation. Popular measure.
State decided who could leave for education and what kinds of institutions they would study in.
State decided who could engage in internal and external commerce.
People in the states try to build economic and social networks inside the territory which were beyond the state’s reach.
The privileged position is sitting in control of the state’s borders.
External aid,
In other words the late colonies are contentious places where various groups are vying for power and where nationalist ideologies and programs are often exclusionary.
The nationalist elites that brings the countries to independence feels very threatened. They begin to shut down political space, just as the colonial powers had opened it after the war. End power of unions, organized labor.
Outlaw parties. Biafra in Nigeria. Imprisoning of political opposition.
One-party states. Rise of authoritarian governments, modeling the authoritarianism of the colonial states.
