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British Decolonization in Africa. British West Africa was home to some of the continent’s earliest nationalist movements. Beginning in the 1920s, the Western-educated African elite began to organize and call for reform of abuses perpetrated by colonial powers. Only after World War II, however, did the idea of political independence enter the ...
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Narrator: In the 1950s and 60s, many colonised countries that were part of the British Empire gained their independence. Ghana was one of the first African countries to do this. It had been part ...
- Overview
- The formation of African independence movements
There thus developed a general feeling among the intelligentsia that the colonies were being deliberately exploited by ever more firmly entrenched European political and economic systems and that there had developed a new, wider, and mobilizable public to appeal to for support. In 1946 politicians in French West Africa organized a federation-wide political association, the African Democratic Rally (RDA). The RDA and its members in the French National Assembly aligned themselves with the French Communist Party, the only effective opposition to the governments of the Fourth Republic. The result, during 1948–50, was the virtual suppression of the RDA in Africa by the colonial administrations.
In British West Africa the tensions were greatest in the Gold Coast. In 1947 the established politicians brought in Kwame Nkrumah, who had studied in the United States and Britain and had been active in the Pan-African movement, to organize a nationalist party with mass support. In 1948 European trading houses were boycotted, and some rioting took place in the larger towns. An official inquiry concluded that the underlying problem was political frustration and that African participation in government should be increased until the colony became self-governing. In 1951, therefore, a new constitution was introduced in which the legislative council gave way to an assembly dominated by African elected members, to which African ministers were responsible for the conduct of much government business. By this time Nkrumah had organized his own mass political party, able to win any general election, and during the following years he negotiated with the British a series of concessions that resulted in 1957 in the Gold Coast becoming the independent state of Ghana.
Once the British had accepted the principle of cooperating with nationalist politicians, their other western African colonies began to follow the example set by the Gold Coast. But Nkrumah had been greatly aided by the high price for cocoa in the 1950s (which meant that by 1960 Ghana’s trade was worth $630 million a year and that government revenue, at more than $280 million, was broadly adequate to give the people what they wanted in the way of modernizing programs) and by the comparatively high level and generally wide spread of education in a sizable yet compact territory that was without too serious ethnic divisions. The other colonies were not so well placed.
The small size of The Gambia was the principal factor contributing to the delay of its independence until 1965. Sierra Leone was a densely populated country that was appreciably poorer than Ghana (its GNP per capita, at about $70, being approximately one-third of Ghana’s) and in which there was a wide disparity in levels of education and wealth between the Creoles—the descendants of liberated slaves who lived in and around Freetown—and the rest of the people. When independence was achieved in 1961, these deeply rooted problems had been papered over rather than solved.
Nigeria presented the greatest challenge to British and African policymakers alike. In the south two nationalist parties emerged, the Action Group (AG), supported primarily by the Yoruba of the west, and the National Convention of Nigerian Citizens (NCNC), whose prime support came from the Igbo of the east. These parties expected the whole country quickly to follow the Ghanaian pattern of constitutional change. But any elective central assembly was bound to be dominated by the north, which had some 57 percent of the population and whose economic and social development had lagged far behind. The north’s political leaders—most of whom were conservative Muslim aristocrats closely allied with the British through indirect rule—were not at all eager to see their traditional paramountcy invaded by aggressive and better-educated leaders from the south.
The first political expedient was to convert Nigeria into a federation of three regions. In 1957 this allowed the east and the west to achieve internal self-government without waiting for the north, but it left open the questions of how politics were to be conducted at the centre and how Nigerian independence was to be secured. At this juncture it occurred to the northern leaders that by allying themselves to one of the southern parties they might maintain their local monopoly of power and gain prestige in the country as a whole by asking for its independence. The problem of central politics was thus resolved when the northern leaders entered a coalition federal government with the NCNC, and in 1960 Nigeria became independent.
There thus developed a general feeling among the intelligentsia that the colonies were being deliberately exploited by ever more firmly entrenched European political and economic systems and that there had developed a new, wider, and mobilizable public to appeal to for support. In 1946 politicians in French West Africa organized a federation-wide political association, the African Democratic Rally (RDA). The RDA and its members in the French National Assembly aligned themselves with the French Communist Party, the only effective opposition to the governments of the Fourth Republic. The result, during 1948–50, was the virtual suppression of the RDA in Africa by the colonial administrations.
In British West Africa the tensions were greatest in the Gold Coast. In 1947 the established politicians brought in Kwame Nkrumah, who had studied in the United States and Britain and had been active in the Pan-African movement, to organize a nationalist party with mass support. In 1948 European trading houses were boycotted, and some rioting took place in the larger towns. An official inquiry concluded that the underlying problem was political frustration and that African participation in government should be increased until the colony became self-governing. In 1951, therefore, a new constitution was introduced in which the legislative council gave way to an assembly dominated by African elected members, to which African ministers were responsible for the conduct of much government business. By this time Nkrumah had organized his own mass political party, able to win any general election, and during the following years he negotiated with the British a series of concessions that resulted in 1957 in the Gold Coast becoming the independent state of Ghana.
Once the British had accepted the principle of cooperating with nationalist politicians, their other western African colonies began to follow the example set by the Gold Coast. But Nkrumah had been greatly aided by the high price for cocoa in the 1950s (which meant that by 1960 Ghana’s trade was worth $630 million a year and that government revenue, at more than $280 million, was broadly adequate to give the people what they wanted in the way of modernizing programs) and by the comparatively high level and generally wide spread of education in a sizable yet compact territory that was without too serious ethnic divisions. The other colonies were not so well placed.
The small size of The Gambia was the principal factor contributing to the delay of its independence until 1965. Sierra Leone was a densely populated country that was appreciably poorer than Ghana (its GNP per capita, at about $70, being approximately one-third of Ghana’s) and in which there was a wide disparity in levels of education and wealth between the Creoles—the descendants of liberated slaves who lived in and around Freetown—and the rest of the people. When independence was achieved in 1961, these deeply rooted problems had been papered over rather than solved.
Nigeria presented the greatest challenge to British and African policymakers alike. In the south two nationalist parties emerged, the Action Group (AG), supported primarily by the Yoruba of the west, and the National Convention of Nigerian Citizens (NCNC), whose prime support came from the Igbo of the east. These parties expected the whole country quickly to follow the Ghanaian pattern of constitutional change. But any elective central assembly was bound to be dominated by the north, which had some 57 percent of the population and whose economic and social development had lagged far behind. The north’s political leaders—most of whom were conservative Muslim aristocrats closely allied with the British through indirect rule—were not at all eager to see their traditional paramountcy invaded by aggressive and better-educated leaders from the south.
The first political expedient was to convert Nigeria into a federation of three regions. In 1957 this allowed the east and the west to achieve internal self-government without waiting for the north, but it left open the questions of how politics were to be conducted at the centre and how Nigerian independence was to be secured. At this juncture it occurred to the northern leaders that by allying themselves to one of the southern parties they might maintain their local monopoly of power and gain prestige in the country as a whole by asking for its independence. The problem of central politics was thus resolved when the northern leaders entered a coalition federal government with the NCNC, and in 1960 Nigeria became independent.
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Feb 6, 2020 · On Dec. 14, 1960, the new African bloc in the U.N. led the effort to pass Resolution 1514, the Declaration of the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples. The resolution ...
Ghana is situated on the coast of the Gulf of Guinea in western Africa. The country is bordered to the northwest and north by Burkina Faso, to the east by Togo, to the south by the Atlantic Ocean, and to the west by Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast). The Volta Basin, a vast saucer-shaped plateau averaging from 990 to 1,980 feet (300 to 600 meters ...
African Independence Movements and Apartheid: African Independence Movements in Ghana and Kenya. Students will explain why and how Ghana and Kenya gained their independence in the mid-late 1900s. Preview Resource Add a Copy of Resource to my Google Drive.
