AFRICA SINCE 1940: THE PAST OF THE PRESENT – F. COOPER - SECOND EDITION 2019
1.INTRODUCTION
In 1994, black South Africans, for the first time, voted in the presidential election. African political movements had
been banned for more than 30 years and Nelson Mandela had been prisoned for 27 years. The same year, a plane
carrying Rwanda’s president, returning from peace discussions in Tanzania, was shot down. The government was
dominated by the Hutu people, a tribe rival to the Tutsi. A significant number of Tutsi had fled from periodic
massacres; now a group of Tutsi exiles was invading Rwanda. The Tanzanian discussions were an attempt to
resolve the conflict. But the plane crash inaugurated mass killings of Tutsi, attempting to eliminate the entire Tutsi
population. When it ended, some months later, around 800.000 Tutsi had died, as had numerous Hutu who were
opposed to the genocide, which ended only because the Hutu army was unable to fend off the invading forces,
which moved to take control of the entire territory. This produced a wave of Hutu refugees into neighbouring
Zaire (later renamed Democratic Republic of the Congo or DRC).
25 years later, South Africa has manged to keep regular elections ever since; the powerful apparatus of racial
discrimination has been dismantled. Yet South Africa remains one of the most unequal countries in the world, the
lowest social class is entirely black. Rwanda has, since 1994, been a peaceful country. International tribunals have
attempted to bring those responsible for the genocide to justice. The Rwandan stability is remarkable given that
the families of victims and perpetrators live side by side. Because of the strong memory of the genocide, the
world has tended to overlook the president Kagame’s clinging to power. The internal order has not been
replicated in the regional context. The Rwandan government has intervened repeatedly in Zaire, claiming to
defend itself against raids by exiled Hutu militias. Access to Congo’s mineral wealth has been seen as the
motivation behind Rwanda’s sponsorship of militia activity. The trajectories of both South Africa and Rwanda
reveal the ambiguity of Africa’s situation: both regimes have been politically stable, but neither has been a model
democracy.
Trajectories
The violence in Rwanda was not a spontaneous outburst of ancient hatred, it was rather prepared by a modern
government. Cultural difference was relatively small: Hutu and Tutsi speak the same language, most are Christian.
Physical features are also the same. Militias, unable to distinguish Hutu from Tutsi, demanded people to carry
with them identification cards that listed their ethnic group. Prior to the mass killings, elite Hutu organized a
propaganda campaign against Tutsi, because many Hutu still had to be convinced that there was a Tutsi
conspiracy against them. In reality, there was a Tutsi threat. In the 60s and early 70s, there were pogroms against
Tutsi that caused thousands of them to flee to Uganda. Some of the Tutsi refugees became allies of the Ugandan
rebel leader Museveni, as he worked to take over the state. The Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA), trained in Uganda,
attacked Rwanda in the 90s. In 1994, President Habyarimana took his fatal flight aimed at resolving the conflict.
Perhaps, he might have been killed by Hutu extremists for fear that he would compromise and in order to
provoke an already planned slaughter. Within hours of the crash, the hunt for Tutsi began.
After WWI, Rwanda was a Belgian colony. Belgian officials saw Tutsi as natural aristocrats. Only Tutsi were allowed
to be chiefs. Belgians also decided that they needed to distinguish Tutsi and Hutu, thus they classified them by
making them carry an identification card. It took effort to turn inequality into ethnicity. Some European versions
of Rwandan history have Tutsi pastors conquering fertile agricultural lands; but there is little evidence to support
such a story. Most royal families were considered Tutsi, but royal men married both Tutsi and Hutu women, so
that genetically categories meant less and less. Wealthy people, who claimed to be Tutsi, owned cattle. However,
Hutu could become cattle owners as well, and they would start to be identified as Tutsi. The Tutsi aristocracy was
linked to ordinary people via marriage, cattle exchange, and a common way of life. Looking back, we do not see a
long history of conflict between the Tutsi and Hutu. Polarization became acute in the 1950s, as the political
structures of the colonial era unravelled. Since schools discriminated in favor of Tutsi, the anticolonial movement
began among the Tutsi. Thus, Belgium began to favor Hutu, who became the representation of authentic Africa
against the pretentious Tutsi. The ethnically based political party Parmehutu easily won the elections that brough
Rwanda to the threshold of independence. When Rwanda became independent in 1962, the Tutsi feared that they
would become a minority group, in danger from a resentful Hutu majority. Tutsi leaders were chased away from
the political scene. The Rwandan regime was thrown out in 1973 by a military coup led by Habyarimana, who
would remain in power until his murder 21 years later. In 1990, an invasion of a Tutsi refugee army was countered
by the government army, and Hutu extremists generated the anti-Tutsi propaganda. Habyarimana started peace
negotiations hoping that powersharing would ease a desperate situation, but others were thinking of a different,
final solution.
In South Africa, the end of white power emerged not just from democratic opposition but also from a wave of
uncontrolled violence. Not all the political movements challenging white domination fit the democratic mold.
When the ANC was founded in 1912, its peaceful program was one of the several ways in which Africans
expressed themselves. Even as the ANC successfully linked its struggle to that of labor unions and city dwellers,
,migrant workers with less permanent roots in the cities were more attracted to militant ideologies of tribal
identity. By the 80s, the clashes were both between rival organizations and different ways of thinking about
solidarity. In South Africa, as in Rwanda, tribal rivalries were not part of the landscape, they were a product of
history.
Static visions of dynamic societies: colonial Africa in the 1930s
One striking feature of colonial societies on the eve of WWII was the extent to which colonial officials imposed a
static conception on societies in the midst of change. Conquering outsiders was not uniquely European: African
kingdoms often expanded at their neighbours’ expense. Colonial rule emphasized that the conquered might try
to learn the ways of the conqueror but would never get there. Both France and England had to argue with their
countrymen, who looked at Africans as units of labor to exploit by whatever means possible. Others saw the
empire as a means to save indigenous peoples from their tyrannical rulers and backwardness. The colonial powers
didn’t commit in metropolitan funds before the 40s, outside of a limited railway and road network. Private
investment was concentrated in mines, commerce, and plantation agriculture. Despite the many African
movements, European conception of Africa crystallized around the idea of static tribes, reflecting the colonial
regimes’ difficulty in governing and transforming African societies. The colonial administrations, in claiming that
they were exercising power by working through African traditional authorities, were trying to confine politics to
tribal cages. In the 1930s, Léopold Sédar Senghor (born and raised in Senegal, educated in France, one of the best
poets in the French language) met people of African descent from the Caribbean and acquired a new sense of
what Africa meant, Senghor contributed to the founding of the négritude movement, which sought to revalue a
common cultural heritage across Africa and its diaspora. Senghor insisted that all French Africans should have all
the rights of the French citizen.
2. WORKERS, PEASANTS, AND THE CHALLENGE TO COLONIAL RULE
The politics of the prosperous peasant
Starting in the late XIX century in the Gold Coast and in Nigeria, cocoa production began among migrant farmers
who negotiated access to good forest land from local kinship groups. Cocoa plantings demanded labor for years
before any income comes in; migrant farmers used their kinship networks to survive. As cocoa took off, more
distant migrants began to offer their labor and they established relations of clientage with the first generation of
planters, who after a period of loyal service helped the workers become planters themselves. The cocoa farmers
are significant because they do not fit into the framework of European agrarian politics. Cocoa planters were
likely to invest excess profits in starting trading or transport companies or ensuring their children’s access to
education. Cocoa wealth deepened kinship and community, and the role of the “big man”. The big man was male,
but increased economic activity also enhanced some possibilities for women. Among Yoruba cocoa growers, a
complex division of labor within the household ensured that women would get some of the earnings of cocoa
production. The West African “market woman” exercised considerable autonomy in her business and in her
household. Men, however, were much better positioned to use wealth to build up networks of clients and to enter
the politics of the local chiefdom. However, African farmers had to deal with the monopolistic European import-
export firms. In 1938 in the Gold Coast, cocoa planters organized a boycott of cocoa sales, managing to force the
colonial government to intervene in cocoa marketing, replacing the European firms with a government marketing
board and networks of African buying agents.
In the coffee-growing zone of Tanganyika, chiefs solidified their political control of the region, sometimes
clashing with a colonial state that favored middlemen over producers. Among the Kikuyu of central Kenya,
peasant agriculture was challenged by land-grabbing by white settlers. Many lost access to land, but young men
could work for wages on white-owned farms or in Nairobi and save enough to invest in agricultural
improvements for a later phase. Chiefs used their connections with the colonial state to gain access to land in the
African “reserves”. Race-based regulations prevented Africans from growing the most lucrative crop, coffee.
Official thinking about African agriculture was so linked to the idea of its backwardness that it was hard for
officials to recognize how much African farmers had already accomplished. After the war, colonial governments
asserted the need for an agricultural revolution in Africa as if the evolution of the past century had not happened.
The uneven process of agricultural change on the eve of the WWII produced varied consequences: the anger of
the landless against both white-land grabbers and Africans who denied communal solidarity, the grievances of
the farmers against the low prices paid by middlemen and the authoritarianism of colonial agricultural agents, the
patriarchal politics of chiefs. Linkages that successful farmers developed via trade, investment and their children’s
education put them in a position to act politically.
Intellectual linkages
Interwar Pan Africanism had several versions. One was set out by African Americans and Caribbeans, who
challenged imperialism for its racism on a world scale and argued that educated African Americans would lead
Africa out of its wilderness. Another was developed by Senghor and Aimé Césaire (French poet born in the
Martinique) whose concept of négritude stressed the African contribution to world civilization. A populist version
, spread through the African sailors. There were London-based organizations linked to communist or anti-
imperialist networks; these movements were outraged when Italy invaded Ethiopia.
There were also regional linkages. Sierra Leone, where since the late 1700s the British government had sent freed
Africans, had been a dispersal point for African traders and missionaries, educated and Christian, who built hybrid
cultures along the West African coast. In western Nigeria, former freed slaves who returned from Sierra Leone
pushed the diverse Yoruba-speaking peoples to see themselves as a nation. Afro-Brazilians, also with western
Nigerian roots, traded between Brazil and Nigeria and helped to forge a diasporic nation. In West African cities,
such as Lagos, the self-conscious, professional, Christian class was deeply affected by the exclusions of colonial
rule. It was out of this frustration that early political associations were built, notably the National Congress of
British West Africa, a regional organization of well-educated Africans who came together after the WWI to write
petitions, to publish journals, and to demand seats on the white-dominated legislative councils. They were not
opposed to the British empire, but they demanded to at least have a role in its governance and substantial local
autonomy.
In four towns in Senegal, inhabitants had most of the rights of French citizens. In 1914 a black African, Blaise
Diagne, was elected to represent these cities in the legislature in Paris. During the WWI, Diagne realized how
much France needed his help in recruiting soldiers, and he used his leverage to entrench the citizenship rights of
his constituents. The French administration later tried to contain these gains by emphasizing the traditional
nature of African society.
African political representation thus became an imaginable phenomenon, and even if most subjects stood no
chance of becoming citizens, they knew about the concept and could aspire to it. In the late 30s, African activism
became more radical. The West African Student Organization and various youth leagues formed among African
students and young city-dwellers. Leaders were coming out of wider circuits: Nkrumah and Azikiwe were
educated in black colleges in the US. They were exposed to radicalism from leftist circles in London and among
African Americans. Communications within Africa were also providing possibilities for connections. Literate
Africans could promote the values of their own cultures and reinterpret the missionaries’ lessons into calls for
their own emancipation. Churchill’s contention that the principle of self-determination applied to recent
conquests in Europe but not older conquests in Africa was not convincing to many Africans. The post-war
moment presented the opportunity to take on imperial administrations uncertain of their continued authority and
aware of their need for Africans’ contributions to rebuild imperial economies.
Religion beyond the tribe
Increased mobility brought people into contact with others whose beliefs were not the same. The expansion of
Islam and Christianity was a consequence of people leaving the belief on the local gods; monotheistic religion
provided shared principles that permitted cooperation across distance. Also indigenous religions could extend in
scale beyond ethnic borders. Some scholars argue that the adoption of Christianity went beyond changing the
religious dimension, it meant changing many personal practices, from mode of dress to design of houses.
Missionaries sought to tear down an entire complex of African beliefs regarded as savage. Many African
Christians refused to follow the missionary script. Being Christian doesn’t imply acting like a European. The
relation between Christianity and indigenous social practices could be a sensitive issue, for example when it
comes to polygamy and initiation rites. Kikuyu converts founded schools and churches to enable them to
maintain the Christian faith, while rejecting the missionary efforts to destroy Kikuyu culture. Nonetheless, the
“white man’s religion” could serve instrumental purposes – acquiring literacy – and it could provide a mode of
integration into a cosmopolitan world.
Men and women, migrancy and militance
Between 1935 and 1950 numerous strikes took place. Copper miners of Northern Rhodesia came from poor rural
areas, and they worked for seasonal periods. They were paid miserable wages, lived in inadequate housing, and
had no chance to advance. Employers did not see mineworkers as workers, they were villagers temporarily
earning money. Employers also thought of workers as single males. In fact, many women came to mine towns to
join husbands and to escape rural patriarchy. In the 1930s, chiefs and colonial officials were trying to restrict
women’s movement to town, producing a more patriarchal customary law. The Northern Rhodesian strike was
not an isolated event in the British empire; riots in the British West Indies and British West Africa profoundly
shook the government’s sense of control. Disorder could be prevented if the colonial populations were provided
with decent services and better job prospects. The Colonial Development and Welfare Act of 1940 was the first
enactment by which Great Britain undertook to use metropolitan resources for programs aimed at raising the
standard of living of colonized populations. Spending was to be focused on housing, water, schools. Behind the
Act was the idea that better services would produce a healthier and more efficient workforce.
Wartime hardships led to escalating labor conflict in Kenya, Nigeria, the Gold Coast, and South Africa. In French
Africa, the strike wave came in December 1945 in Senegal. The entire railway system of French Africa was shut
down by a very well-organized strike, until a settlement on terms more favorable to the African railwaymen was
1.INTRODUCTION
In 1994, black South Africans, for the first time, voted in the presidential election. African political movements had
been banned for more than 30 years and Nelson Mandela had been prisoned for 27 years. The same year, a plane
carrying Rwanda’s president, returning from peace discussions in Tanzania, was shot down. The government was
dominated by the Hutu people, a tribe rival to the Tutsi. A significant number of Tutsi had fled from periodic
massacres; now a group of Tutsi exiles was invading Rwanda. The Tanzanian discussions were an attempt to
resolve the conflict. But the plane crash inaugurated mass killings of Tutsi, attempting to eliminate the entire Tutsi
population. When it ended, some months later, around 800.000 Tutsi had died, as had numerous Hutu who were
opposed to the genocide, which ended only because the Hutu army was unable to fend off the invading forces,
which moved to take control of the entire territory. This produced a wave of Hutu refugees into neighbouring
Zaire (later renamed Democratic Republic of the Congo or DRC).
25 years later, South Africa has manged to keep regular elections ever since; the powerful apparatus of racial
discrimination has been dismantled. Yet South Africa remains one of the most unequal countries in the world, the
lowest social class is entirely black. Rwanda has, since 1994, been a peaceful country. International tribunals have
attempted to bring those responsible for the genocide to justice. The Rwandan stability is remarkable given that
the families of victims and perpetrators live side by side. Because of the strong memory of the genocide, the
world has tended to overlook the president Kagame’s clinging to power. The internal order has not been
replicated in the regional context. The Rwandan government has intervened repeatedly in Zaire, claiming to
defend itself against raids by exiled Hutu militias. Access to Congo’s mineral wealth has been seen as the
motivation behind Rwanda’s sponsorship of militia activity. The trajectories of both South Africa and Rwanda
reveal the ambiguity of Africa’s situation: both regimes have been politically stable, but neither has been a model
democracy.
Trajectories
The violence in Rwanda was not a spontaneous outburst of ancient hatred, it was rather prepared by a modern
government. Cultural difference was relatively small: Hutu and Tutsi speak the same language, most are Christian.
Physical features are also the same. Militias, unable to distinguish Hutu from Tutsi, demanded people to carry
with them identification cards that listed their ethnic group. Prior to the mass killings, elite Hutu organized a
propaganda campaign against Tutsi, because many Hutu still had to be convinced that there was a Tutsi
conspiracy against them. In reality, there was a Tutsi threat. In the 60s and early 70s, there were pogroms against
Tutsi that caused thousands of them to flee to Uganda. Some of the Tutsi refugees became allies of the Ugandan
rebel leader Museveni, as he worked to take over the state. The Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA), trained in Uganda,
attacked Rwanda in the 90s. In 1994, President Habyarimana took his fatal flight aimed at resolving the conflict.
Perhaps, he might have been killed by Hutu extremists for fear that he would compromise and in order to
provoke an already planned slaughter. Within hours of the crash, the hunt for Tutsi began.
After WWI, Rwanda was a Belgian colony. Belgian officials saw Tutsi as natural aristocrats. Only Tutsi were allowed
to be chiefs. Belgians also decided that they needed to distinguish Tutsi and Hutu, thus they classified them by
making them carry an identification card. It took effort to turn inequality into ethnicity. Some European versions
of Rwandan history have Tutsi pastors conquering fertile agricultural lands; but there is little evidence to support
such a story. Most royal families were considered Tutsi, but royal men married both Tutsi and Hutu women, so
that genetically categories meant less and less. Wealthy people, who claimed to be Tutsi, owned cattle. However,
Hutu could become cattle owners as well, and they would start to be identified as Tutsi. The Tutsi aristocracy was
linked to ordinary people via marriage, cattle exchange, and a common way of life. Looking back, we do not see a
long history of conflict between the Tutsi and Hutu. Polarization became acute in the 1950s, as the political
structures of the colonial era unravelled. Since schools discriminated in favor of Tutsi, the anticolonial movement
began among the Tutsi. Thus, Belgium began to favor Hutu, who became the representation of authentic Africa
against the pretentious Tutsi. The ethnically based political party Parmehutu easily won the elections that brough
Rwanda to the threshold of independence. When Rwanda became independent in 1962, the Tutsi feared that they
would become a minority group, in danger from a resentful Hutu majority. Tutsi leaders were chased away from
the political scene. The Rwandan regime was thrown out in 1973 by a military coup led by Habyarimana, who
would remain in power until his murder 21 years later. In 1990, an invasion of a Tutsi refugee army was countered
by the government army, and Hutu extremists generated the anti-Tutsi propaganda. Habyarimana started peace
negotiations hoping that powersharing would ease a desperate situation, but others were thinking of a different,
final solution.
In South Africa, the end of white power emerged not just from democratic opposition but also from a wave of
uncontrolled violence. Not all the political movements challenging white domination fit the democratic mold.
When the ANC was founded in 1912, its peaceful program was one of the several ways in which Africans
expressed themselves. Even as the ANC successfully linked its struggle to that of labor unions and city dwellers,
,migrant workers with less permanent roots in the cities were more attracted to militant ideologies of tribal
identity. By the 80s, the clashes were both between rival organizations and different ways of thinking about
solidarity. In South Africa, as in Rwanda, tribal rivalries were not part of the landscape, they were a product of
history.
Static visions of dynamic societies: colonial Africa in the 1930s
One striking feature of colonial societies on the eve of WWII was the extent to which colonial officials imposed a
static conception on societies in the midst of change. Conquering outsiders was not uniquely European: African
kingdoms often expanded at their neighbours’ expense. Colonial rule emphasized that the conquered might try
to learn the ways of the conqueror but would never get there. Both France and England had to argue with their
countrymen, who looked at Africans as units of labor to exploit by whatever means possible. Others saw the
empire as a means to save indigenous peoples from their tyrannical rulers and backwardness. The colonial powers
didn’t commit in metropolitan funds before the 40s, outside of a limited railway and road network. Private
investment was concentrated in mines, commerce, and plantation agriculture. Despite the many African
movements, European conception of Africa crystallized around the idea of static tribes, reflecting the colonial
regimes’ difficulty in governing and transforming African societies. The colonial administrations, in claiming that
they were exercising power by working through African traditional authorities, were trying to confine politics to
tribal cages. In the 1930s, Léopold Sédar Senghor (born and raised in Senegal, educated in France, one of the best
poets in the French language) met people of African descent from the Caribbean and acquired a new sense of
what Africa meant, Senghor contributed to the founding of the négritude movement, which sought to revalue a
common cultural heritage across Africa and its diaspora. Senghor insisted that all French Africans should have all
the rights of the French citizen.
2. WORKERS, PEASANTS, AND THE CHALLENGE TO COLONIAL RULE
The politics of the prosperous peasant
Starting in the late XIX century in the Gold Coast and in Nigeria, cocoa production began among migrant farmers
who negotiated access to good forest land from local kinship groups. Cocoa plantings demanded labor for years
before any income comes in; migrant farmers used their kinship networks to survive. As cocoa took off, more
distant migrants began to offer their labor and they established relations of clientage with the first generation of
planters, who after a period of loyal service helped the workers become planters themselves. The cocoa farmers
are significant because they do not fit into the framework of European agrarian politics. Cocoa planters were
likely to invest excess profits in starting trading or transport companies or ensuring their children’s access to
education. Cocoa wealth deepened kinship and community, and the role of the “big man”. The big man was male,
but increased economic activity also enhanced some possibilities for women. Among Yoruba cocoa growers, a
complex division of labor within the household ensured that women would get some of the earnings of cocoa
production. The West African “market woman” exercised considerable autonomy in her business and in her
household. Men, however, were much better positioned to use wealth to build up networks of clients and to enter
the politics of the local chiefdom. However, African farmers had to deal with the monopolistic European import-
export firms. In 1938 in the Gold Coast, cocoa planters organized a boycott of cocoa sales, managing to force the
colonial government to intervene in cocoa marketing, replacing the European firms with a government marketing
board and networks of African buying agents.
In the coffee-growing zone of Tanganyika, chiefs solidified their political control of the region, sometimes
clashing with a colonial state that favored middlemen over producers. Among the Kikuyu of central Kenya,
peasant agriculture was challenged by land-grabbing by white settlers. Many lost access to land, but young men
could work for wages on white-owned farms or in Nairobi and save enough to invest in agricultural
improvements for a later phase. Chiefs used their connections with the colonial state to gain access to land in the
African “reserves”. Race-based regulations prevented Africans from growing the most lucrative crop, coffee.
Official thinking about African agriculture was so linked to the idea of its backwardness that it was hard for
officials to recognize how much African farmers had already accomplished. After the war, colonial governments
asserted the need for an agricultural revolution in Africa as if the evolution of the past century had not happened.
The uneven process of agricultural change on the eve of the WWII produced varied consequences: the anger of
the landless against both white-land grabbers and Africans who denied communal solidarity, the grievances of
the farmers against the low prices paid by middlemen and the authoritarianism of colonial agricultural agents, the
patriarchal politics of chiefs. Linkages that successful farmers developed via trade, investment and their children’s
education put them in a position to act politically.
Intellectual linkages
Interwar Pan Africanism had several versions. One was set out by African Americans and Caribbeans, who
challenged imperialism for its racism on a world scale and argued that educated African Americans would lead
Africa out of its wilderness. Another was developed by Senghor and Aimé Césaire (French poet born in the
Martinique) whose concept of négritude stressed the African contribution to world civilization. A populist version
, spread through the African sailors. There were London-based organizations linked to communist or anti-
imperialist networks; these movements were outraged when Italy invaded Ethiopia.
There were also regional linkages. Sierra Leone, where since the late 1700s the British government had sent freed
Africans, had been a dispersal point for African traders and missionaries, educated and Christian, who built hybrid
cultures along the West African coast. In western Nigeria, former freed slaves who returned from Sierra Leone
pushed the diverse Yoruba-speaking peoples to see themselves as a nation. Afro-Brazilians, also with western
Nigerian roots, traded between Brazil and Nigeria and helped to forge a diasporic nation. In West African cities,
such as Lagos, the self-conscious, professional, Christian class was deeply affected by the exclusions of colonial
rule. It was out of this frustration that early political associations were built, notably the National Congress of
British West Africa, a regional organization of well-educated Africans who came together after the WWI to write
petitions, to publish journals, and to demand seats on the white-dominated legislative councils. They were not
opposed to the British empire, but they demanded to at least have a role in its governance and substantial local
autonomy.
In four towns in Senegal, inhabitants had most of the rights of French citizens. In 1914 a black African, Blaise
Diagne, was elected to represent these cities in the legislature in Paris. During the WWI, Diagne realized how
much France needed his help in recruiting soldiers, and he used his leverage to entrench the citizenship rights of
his constituents. The French administration later tried to contain these gains by emphasizing the traditional
nature of African society.
African political representation thus became an imaginable phenomenon, and even if most subjects stood no
chance of becoming citizens, they knew about the concept and could aspire to it. In the late 30s, African activism
became more radical. The West African Student Organization and various youth leagues formed among African
students and young city-dwellers. Leaders were coming out of wider circuits: Nkrumah and Azikiwe were
educated in black colleges in the US. They were exposed to radicalism from leftist circles in London and among
African Americans. Communications within Africa were also providing possibilities for connections. Literate
Africans could promote the values of their own cultures and reinterpret the missionaries’ lessons into calls for
their own emancipation. Churchill’s contention that the principle of self-determination applied to recent
conquests in Europe but not older conquests in Africa was not convincing to many Africans. The post-war
moment presented the opportunity to take on imperial administrations uncertain of their continued authority and
aware of their need for Africans’ contributions to rebuild imperial economies.
Religion beyond the tribe
Increased mobility brought people into contact with others whose beliefs were not the same. The expansion of
Islam and Christianity was a consequence of people leaving the belief on the local gods; monotheistic religion
provided shared principles that permitted cooperation across distance. Also indigenous religions could extend in
scale beyond ethnic borders. Some scholars argue that the adoption of Christianity went beyond changing the
religious dimension, it meant changing many personal practices, from mode of dress to design of houses.
Missionaries sought to tear down an entire complex of African beliefs regarded as savage. Many African
Christians refused to follow the missionary script. Being Christian doesn’t imply acting like a European. The
relation between Christianity and indigenous social practices could be a sensitive issue, for example when it
comes to polygamy and initiation rites. Kikuyu converts founded schools and churches to enable them to
maintain the Christian faith, while rejecting the missionary efforts to destroy Kikuyu culture. Nonetheless, the
“white man’s religion” could serve instrumental purposes – acquiring literacy – and it could provide a mode of
integration into a cosmopolitan world.
Men and women, migrancy and militance
Between 1935 and 1950 numerous strikes took place. Copper miners of Northern Rhodesia came from poor rural
areas, and they worked for seasonal periods. They were paid miserable wages, lived in inadequate housing, and
had no chance to advance. Employers did not see mineworkers as workers, they were villagers temporarily
earning money. Employers also thought of workers as single males. In fact, many women came to mine towns to
join husbands and to escape rural patriarchy. In the 1930s, chiefs and colonial officials were trying to restrict
women’s movement to town, producing a more patriarchal customary law. The Northern Rhodesian strike was
not an isolated event in the British empire; riots in the British West Indies and British West Africa profoundly
shook the government’s sense of control. Disorder could be prevented if the colonial populations were provided
with decent services and better job prospects. The Colonial Development and Welfare Act of 1940 was the first
enactment by which Great Britain undertook to use metropolitan resources for programs aimed at raising the
standard of living of colonized populations. Spending was to be focused on housing, water, schools. Behind the
Act was the idea that better services would produce a healthier and more efficient workforce.
Wartime hardships led to escalating labor conflict in Kenya, Nigeria, the Gold Coast, and South Africa. In French
Africa, the strike wave came in December 1945 in Senegal. The entire railway system of French Africa was shut
down by a very well-organized strike, until a settlement on terms more favorable to the African railwaymen was
