A Perspective on Tropical Africa in the 1960s

Abstract

It is no parody to say that many Western observers in 1960, the author included, viewed the achievement of independence primarily in terms of a transfer of power from a benevolently minded colonial power to an educated and nationally minded elite. The members of the elite, we assumed, were committed to the rapid development of their country, were anxious to rule through the constitutional system transplanted in their country by their colonial rulers, and intended to remain in a close and dependent relationship with those rulers. It was expected that the influence of the nationalist leaders would no longer be ranged against the government but rather would be mobilized in its support. Independence would therefore lead to a more effective and more popular pursuit of government policies as they had already been conceived. This was the perspective also of many African leaders when they themselves first came to power. President Nyerere of Tanzania, who was to develop more subtle and perceptive views in the several years after 1959, initially urged that the primary role of the nationalist party was to win popular support for the policies of the government, a government which at the time was still very much dominated by British officials. This, the typical liberal perspect ~n 1960, has proven hopelessly inadequate: the elites were not as united, as secure, or as idealistic as we assumed; a close continuing involvement with the erstwhile imperial power proved more complex and its advantages more dubious than we expected. Anyone who persists in viewing developments in independent Africa primarily in terms of democratic and modernizing elites being helped and aided by benevolent Western powers must long ago have lost all capacity to judge events shrewdly and must surely also have passed from an initial naive optimism to an equally shallow pes-