The Fortunes of Africa: A 5,000 Year History of Wealth, Greed and Endeavour

by Martin Meredith

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  After a protracted internal struggle within the army, Nasser emerged in sole control of the government. Under a new constitution, he ruled as president wielding massive powers. To snuff out any sign of opposition, he made extensive use of a repressive security and intelligence apparatus. More than 3,000 political prisoners were held in prisons and concentration camps.

  He became ever more ambitious, determined to modernise Egypt’s economy through industrial programmes and to turn Egypt into a regional power. He championed the cause of Arab unity and African liberation, rejected an offer to join a Western defence pact, and advocated a ‘non-aligned’ course in foreign policy to avoid entanglements in the Cold War.

  Western governments were increasingly alienated by Nasser’s stance. Britain and the United States regarded his form of neutralism as little more than a cloak for anti-Western hostility. When Nasser asked for Western help to procure weapons for Egypt’s poorly equipped army to deal with Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip, he was turned down. Nasser’s response was to sign a deal with the Soviet bloc for fighter aircraft, bombers and tanks, producing shockwaves in London and Washington.

  Determined to ‘cut Nasser down to size’, the United States and Britain withdrew their support for Nasser’s grand scheme to construct a new dam at Aswan. The aim of the Aswan High Dam was to regulate the flow of the Nile throughout the year, release a million acres for reclamation, provide a source of irrigation and generate electricity. At three miles long, it was to be one of the largest engineering projects in the world, requiring foreign funds and expertise. Both Britain and the United States had initially been willing to participate in the scheme, but now they spurned it.

  Nasser’s swift reaction stunned the world. Addressing a crowd in the main square in Alexandria on 26 July 1956, at a rally to mark the fourth anniversary of Farouk’s abdication, Nasser announced the nationalisation of the Suez Canal Company, an Egyptian-registered company owned by British and French shareholders with a concession that still had thirteen more years to run. ‘Today, in the name of the people, I am taking over the company,’ declared Nasser. ‘Tonight, our Egyptian canal will be run by Egyptians. Egyptians!’

  Revenues that had previously gone to the Suez Canal Company would be used to finance the building of the High Dam, he said. But he also promised full compensation to shareholders – including the British government, which had a 44 per cent holding in the company – and insisted that there would be no interference with normal traffic.

  The Suez Canal, linking Europe with Middle East oilfields and with Asia, was the world’s most important waterway, used by 12,000 ships a year from forty-five nations. Under Egyptian management, the flow of traffic continued much as before, even increasing from an average of forty-two ships a day to forty-five. But politicians in Britain and France were apoplectic about the affront to European interests. Britain relied on the Suez route for more than half of its oil supplies; Prime Minister Anthony Eden declared that Britain could not tolerate having Nasser’s ‘thumb on her windpipe’. While negotiations with Egypt were underway, Eden together with the French engaged in a secret conspiracy to invade Egypt in collusion with Israel and seize the canal. Their overall aim was to destroy Nasser’s regime.

  On 29 October 1956, Israeli forces crossed into Sinai and raced towards the canal. On the pretext of separating the two combatants, Britain and France launched their own invasion. But the folly of this exercise in imperial bullying was quickly evident. Nasser promptly sank forty-seven ships in the canal, blocking all traffic and cutting the main artery for Europe’s oil supplies, thereby bringing about the nightmare scenario that the Anglo-French plot was designed to prevent.

  Moreover, the Americans were furious at being deceived about the conspiracy. They regarded Nasser as a menace but saw no reason for war, adamant that the dispute should have been settled by negotiation. At the United Nations, the United States put forward a resolution demanding withdrawal and refused to help Britain cope with a sterling crisis precipitated by the Suez debacle. Britain and France were forced into a humiliating retreat.

  The Suez invasion propelled Nasser to a pinnacle of prestige and influence. He was acclaimed as a latter-day Saladin, the architect of Western defeat. A Nasser cult took hold, both in Egypt and in the rest of the Arab world. The Suez crisis also enabled Nasser to sweep away layers of foreign influence in Egypt’s commercial, academic and social life. All British and French banks and companies were sequestrated, a total of 15,000 enterprises. In October 1958, he concluded a deal with the Soviet Union enabling the Aswan Dam project to proceed.

  Suez marked the end of Britain’s imperial ambitions. Facing a rising tide of nationalism in its African colonies, the British government began to reconsider the merits of colonial rule there.

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  THE NATIONALIST URGE

  In official reports, British administrators regularly referred to the Gold Coast as a ‘model’ colony. It had advantages of wealth and attainment unrivalled in tropical Africa. As the world’s leading producer of cocoa for forty years, it possessed a large and prosperous farming community. Its education system was the most advanced of any African colony. For several decades, thriving middle-class families had been able to send their sons to long-established secondary schools and many had subsequently gone on for further education to the universities, medical schools and Inns of Court of Britain. Returning home as doctors, lawyers and teachers, they eventually formed the largest reservoir of trained personnel to be found in any African colony. The level of political sophistication was unusually high even for west Africa. The Gold Coast was relatively homogeneous, seemingly free of ethnic and religious tension; half of the population was of Akan origin and spoke related dialects. A new constitution in 1946, the most advanced yet devised by Britain for its African colonies, allowing a role for the African elite alongside British officials and chiefs, was expected to satisfy demands for political representation for several decades to come. The governor, Sir Alan Burns, was able to express in 1946 ‘great confidence in these extremely sensible people’.

  The pace of change envisaged by British officials, however, left the middle-class elite – the intelligentsia, as they were called locally – disgruntled. In August 1947, they launched a political party, the United Gold Coast Convention, to press demands for greater influence over government policy. Its leaders were conservative men – lawyers, businessmen and other professional figures – with a high regard for constitutional methods. As their long-term aim, they wanted self-government ‘in the shortest possible time’, but were hopeful merely that self-government might be attained in their lifetime.

  Six months later, Accra was struck by the worst riots the capital had ever seen. A newly arrived governor, Sir Gerald Creasy, was quick to detect what he called a communist conspiracy, claiming that the Convention’s leaders were involved. A commission of inquiry, however, found no convincing evidence of communist subversion but pointed instead to profound economic and political grievances and recommended swift political advancement as the solution. In consultation with a committee of distinguished Africans, British officials duly drew up a new constitutional plan, offering the Gold Coast ‘semi-responsible government’. It opened the way for a general election, a national assembly with an African majority and a new executive council, consisting largely of African ministers who would run internal affairs. The new system of government was regarded as being in the nature of an ‘experiment’, one that could be carefully controlled and monitored, and delayed and halted if something went wrong.

  When devising this plan, British officials expected to find themselves collaborating with the group of professional men who led the Convention, confident that they would make admirable partners in the new venture. But the Convention was soon upstaged by a radical breakaway faction calling not for ‘Self-Government in the shortest possible time’, but for ‘Self-Government Now!’

  Its leader, Kwame Nkrumah, was an itinerant student and po
litical activist who had lived abroad in the United States and Britain for twelve years and who had returned to the Gold Coast in December 1947, at the age of thirty-eight, to work as a full-time organiser for the Convention. Frustrated by the limited ambitions of the Convention’s leaders, he launched his own party, the Convention People’s Party (CPP) in June 1949, building it into a modern political machine, organising youth groups, using flags, banners and slogans and setting up newspapers which vilified the colonial authorities at every opportunity. In fiery speeches across the country, he promised that ‘Self-Government Now’ would solve all the grievances and hardships inflicted by colonial rule and bring a new world of opportunity and prosperity. His flamboyant manner and winning smile earned him the nickname of ‘Showboy’. His radical message attracted trade unionists, ex-servicemen, clerks, petty traders and primary school teachers. To the young, to the homeless ‘veranda boys’ who slept on the verandas of the wealthy, he became an idol, a political magician whose campaign performances generated a sense of excitement, of hope, of expectation. To those without money, without position, without property, Nkrumah’s call of ‘FreeDom’ was an offer of salvation. ‘Seek ye first the political kingdom,’ Nkrumah told them, ‘and all else will follow.’

  By the end of 1949, Nkrumah felt strong enough to challenge the government outright. He denounced the new constitutional plan as ‘bogus and fraudulent’ and embarked on a campaign of ‘Positive Action’ – strikes, boycotts, agitation and propaganda – intended to force Britain to agree to immediate self-government. As violence broke out, the government declared a state of emergency and ordered the arrest of Nkrumah and other CPP leaders. In court, Nkrumah was sentenced on three counts to a total of three years’ imprisonment.

  But instead of hampering the CPP, the imprisonment of its leaders turned them into heroes, galvanising popular support in the run-up to the election. At his headquarters at Christiansborg Castle, a seventeenth-century slaving fort from where British governors had ruled the Gold Coast for fifty years, the governor, Sir Charles Arden-Clarke, noticed ‘a great wave of enthusiasm’ spreading through the CPP. In the election held in February 1951, the CPP won by a landslide. Of thirty-eight popularly contested seats, the CPP won thirty-four, the Convention, three. Though still in prison, Nkrumah was able to stand as a candidate for an Accra constituency and won a similarly overwhelming victory.

  Rather than try to frustrate the result, Arden-Clarke decided to release Nkrumah from prison. The next day, he was invited to Christiansborg Castle and asked to form a government, making the leap from convict to prime minister in less than a day. ‘As I walked down the steps,’ he recalled, ‘it was as if the whole thing had been a dream, that I was stepping down from the clouds and that I would soon wake up and find myself squatting on the prison floor eating a bowl of maize porridge.’

  It was to become a familiar experience for British governors in Africa to have to come to terms with nationalist politicians whom they had previously regarded as extremist agitators. But at the time, Nkrumah’s election victory sent a shockwave across Africa, inspiring awe in some quarters, alarm in others. British officials still assumed they would be able to control the pace of advancement in the Gold Coast. But once the nationalist urge had taken hold, their role there became little more than a ‘holding exercise’. One senior official involved in the Gold Coast experiment later described the process as ‘like laying down a track in front of an oncoming express’.

  Once in office, Nkrumah constantly pressed for faster change and more power. Despite strong misgivings, believing that a longer ‘period of probation’ was needed, the British government granted a new constitution in 1954, providing for full internal self-government under an all-African cabinet. After winning the 1954 election, Nkrumah planned to move rapidly on to independence, but faced a growing challenge from Asante, the central region of the Gold Coast. With the blessing of the Asantehene and the paramount chiefs of the Asanteman Council, an opposition party, the National Liberation Movement (NLM), demanded a federal constitution prior to independence that gave Asante a substantial measure of local autonomy. It portrayed Nkrumah’s government as corrupt, dictatorial and bent on undermining the culture and customs of the Asante people. As the NLM and Nkrumah’s CPP struggled for supremacy, violent disturbances broke out. Alarmed by the disorder, the British government refused to set a date for independence and insisted on holding another election. At the polls in July 1956, Nkrumah’s CPP won 72 of 104 seats, though only 57 per cent of the vote. Satisfied with the result, Britain finally pronounced a date for independence: 6 March 1957.

  It was a date that marked the beginning of a new era for Africa. The advent of independence for Ghana, as the new state was called, was seen as a portent, watched and admired around the world. No other event in Africa had previously attracted such attention. Independent Ghana stood out as a symbol of freedom that other colonies wished to attain. No other African state was launched with so much promise for the future. Ghana embarked on independence as one of the richest tropical countries in the world, with an efficient civil service, an impartial judiciary and a prosperous middle class. Its parliament was well established, with able politicians in government and in opposition. Nkrumah, himself, then only forty-seven years old, was regarded as a leader of outstanding ability, popularly elected, with six years of experience of running a government. Ghana’s economic prospects were equally propitious. As the world’s leading producer of cocoa, it had built up huge foreign currency reserves during the 1950s cocoa boom. Other economic resources included gold, timber and bauxite. Accra, according to the description of 6 March 1957 in one British newspaper, looked the happiest place on earth.

  Britain’s other territories in west Africa – Nigeria, Sierra Leone and even the tiny sliver of land known as the Gambia – followed in Ghana’s footsteps, making their way up the independence ladder. The timetable there was determined not by any British reluctance to set them free but by local complications on the ground.

  Nigeria, the most populous country in Africa containing as many as 300 ethno-linguistic groups, faced the greatest difficulties. A colonial construct, it was beset by intense and complex rivalries between its three regions, each of which was dominated by a major ethnic group with its own political party. Although amalgamating northern and southern Nigeria in 1914, the British had continued to treat the North as a distinct and separate entity. Comprising three-quarters of Nigeria’s territory with more than half of its population, it was largely Muslim and Hausa-speaking, accustomed to a feudal system of government run by the Fulani ruling class. Few traces of the modern world – in education or economic life – had been allowed to intrude. By 1950 there was only one northern university graduate – a Zaria Fulani convert to Christianity. Both Hausa and Fulani looked disdainfully on the peoples of the South. Southerners who migrated to the North were obliged to live in segregated housing and to educate their children in separate schools. After travelling to Lagos for the first time in 1949, the principal northern leader, the Sardauna of Sokoto, recalled: ‘The whole place was alien to our ideas and we found the members of the other regions might well belong to another world as far as we were concerned.’

  Southern Nigeria was divided into two regions. The Western region, which included Lagos, the capital, was dominated by the Yoruba, who traditionally had been organised into a number of states ruled by kingly chiefs. Because of their early contact with Europeans and long experience of city life, the Yoruba had progressed far in education, commerce and administration and absorbed a high degree of modern skills. In the Eastern region, on the other side of Niger River, the Igbo, occupying the poorest, most densely populated part of Nigeria, had become the best educated population, swarming out of their homeland to find work elsewhere as clerks, artisans, traders and labourers, forming sizeable minority groups in towns across the country. Their presence there created ethnic tensions both in the North and among the Yoruba in the West. Unlike the Hausa-Fulani and the Yoruba,
the Igbo possessed no political kingdom or central authority but functioned on the basis of autonomous village societies, accustomed to a high degree of individual assertion and achievement.

  In addition, there was a myriad of ethnic minority groups, each with its own language, occupying distinct territories, amounting in total to a third of the population. In the North, the Hausa-Fulani constituted only about half of the population. In the West, the Yoruba constituted about two-thirds; and in the East, the Igbo, about two-thirds. In each region, minority groups resented the domination of the three major ethnic groups and the neglect and discrimination they suffered as minorities and harboured ambitions to obtain their own separate states within Nigeria and the resources that would go with them. Some non-Muslim minorities in the North had been engaged in struggles to overthrow their feudal Muslim overlords: Tiv resistance exploded in riots in 1960. In the West, the Edo-speaking people of Benin province yearned to restore the old autonomy of the kingdom of Benin, once renowned for its artistic achievement. In the East, the Ibibio and Efik hankered for the former glory of the Calabar commercial empire.

  Nigerian politicians themselves did not attempt to minimise the differences that divided them. In 1948, a prominent northern leader, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, who was destined to become the first federal prime minister, told the Legislative Council: ‘Since 1914 the British Government has been trying to make Nigeria into one country, but the Nigerian people themselves are historically different in their backgrounds, in their religious beliefs and customs and do not show themselves any sign of willingness to unite . . . Nigerian unity is only a British invention.’ In a book published in 1947, the Yoruba leader, Obafemi Awolowo, who dominated Western Nigerian politics for more than thirty years, wrote: ‘Nigeria is not a nation. It is a mere geographical expression. There are no “Nigerians” in the same sense that there are “English”, “Welsh”, or “French”. The word “Nigerian” is merely a distinctive appellation to distinguish those who live within the boundaries of Nigeria and those who do not.’