MC_A Concise History of Africa

Independence and Nationhood

British would have been happy to have passed it on to India. In the final days, the British couldn’t dispose of their ruinously expensive empire fast enough. To blame colonialism for the problems of Africa is to take a step too far: Ethiopia remained uncolonized and today needs more food aid than any other state, while some of the most successful parts of Africa are those that were heavily settled by Europeans, and where there was investment in infrastructure, health, education, and the promotion of some groups of people over others. It is curious that some of the larger countries with fewer problems have never taken a lead. Some claim the artificial borders that were drawn between the states produced countries that were guaranteed to fail, and which were incapable of accepting change. At the time of independence, there was general agreement over the need to retain borders, the problem being to create a national unity, or in Benedict Anderson’s terms, an “imagined community,” while others claimed that the difficulty in achieving this goal lay in ethnic, linguistic, and cultural differences. LEFT AND OPPOSITE: Desmond Tutu (left) is a South African social rights activist and retired Anglican bishop who rose to worldwide fame during the 1980s as an opponent of apartheid. He was the first to use the term “Rainbow Nation” to describe South Africa’s multicultural diversity. It was later adopted by the late Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s first black president pictured opposite with Nigerian journalist Kayode Soyinka.

Liberation Council (NLC) came to power in February 1966. The international media tends to focus only on the areas of Africa where problems continue to arise, encouraging the old idea that Africans are children, who need to be instructed and who cannot be trusted to run things on their own. Some believe European wealth came from exploiting the colonies, and there is little doubt that it brought

financial benefit to more than a few. The American poet and essayist, Kenneth Rexroth, shrewdly observed that the reason for the liberation of the colonies was that the colonizers had come to realize that imperialism was unprofitable. As early as 1892, the British journal, The Economist , had observed that “East Africa is probably an unproductive possession,” and soon after the turn of the century, the

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