The honeymoon of African independence was brief but memorable. African leaders, riding the crest of popularity, stepped forward with energy and enthusiasm to tackle the tasks of development and nation-building; ambitious plans were launched; bright young men went quickly to the top. Expectations were high; the sense of euphoria had been raised to ever greater heights by the lavish promises of nationalist politicians campaigning for power, pledging to provide education, medical care, employment and land for all. ‘Seek ye first the political kingdom,’ Nkrumah had told his followers, ‘and all else shall be added unto you.’ The march of African nationalism seemed invincible. Africa, so it was thought, once freed from colonial rule, was destined for an era of unprecedented progress. African leaders even spoke of building new societies that might offer the world at large an inspiration.
The circumstances seemed auspicious. Independence came in the midst of an economic boom. In the postwar era, world prices for African commodities – cash crops like cocoa and coffee and mineral products like copper – soared to new levels. Between 1945 and 1960 the economies of colonial Africa expanded by between 4 and 6 per cent per annum. West African groundnut production doubled between 1947 and 1957; cotton production trebled. Tea production in southern Africa doubled. In Kenya, once government restrictions were lifted, peasant output between 1954 and 1964 rose on average by more than 7 per cent per annum. The terms of trade were favourable; oil at the time cost less than $2 a barrel. Public debt was low; foreign currency reserves in many cases were relatively high. Moreover, Western governments stood ready to provide substantial amounts of aid. In 1964 the level of aid to sub-Saharan Africa in the form of grants or cheap loans from Western Europe and North America alone reached more than $1 billion. Given the extent of the vast mineral resources that Africa was known to possess – oil, gas, uranium, bauxite, diamonds, gold – the potential for economic development seemed enormous. In his book The Economics of African Development, published in 1967, the World Bank economist Andrew Kamarck concluded: ‘For most of Africa, the economic future before the end of the century can be bright.’
Even the rainfall pattern – a key factor in determining Africa’s fortunes – was propitious. Good rains fell throughout the 1950s, boosting agricultural production. In 1961 Lake Chad and Lake Victoria reached their highest levels in the twentieth century.
The advent of independence also brought a cultural revival. African music, art and literature expanded into new forms; African novelists and dramatists made their debut. In 1966 President Senghor of Senegal hosted the first World Festival of African Arts and Culture in Dakar, bringing writers, musicians, sculptors, artisans and griots – traditional storytellers – from every corner of Africa for two weeks of performances, celebrations, lectures and debates.
The study of Africa – its history, archaeology, sociology and politics – became a serious discipline in universities around the world. What attracted particular interest was new evidence discovered in 1959 that Africa had been the cradle of mankind. After years of exploring the Olduvai Gorge, a hot, desolate, stony canyon in northern Tanganyika (Tanzania), a Cambridge archaeologist, Louis Leakey, and his wife, Mary, uncovered the skull of an australopithecine, a hominid ancestor whose remains have been found only in Africa. Officially known as Zinjanthropus boisei, but more affectionately referred to in the trade as Dear Boy, it was immediately acclaimed the earliest known tool-making ancestor of mankind, about 1.8 million years old.
On the global stage, African states excited the attention of the world’s rival power blocs. The position that each newly independent country adopted in its relations with the West or the East was viewed as a matter of crucial importance. Africa was considered to be too valuable a prize to lose. While the old colonial powers sought to strengthen the special relationship they had mostly formed with their former colonies, the Eastern bloc embarked on major campaigns to gain influence in the new states. There was often intense competition between the two sides at a time when the Cold War in other parts of the world was at one of its peaks. ‘We see Africa as probably the greatest open field of manoeuvre in the worldwide competition between the [communist] bloc and the non-communist,’ said President Kennedy in 1962, echoing Harold Macmillan’s earlier view. The West tended to regard with suspicion and distrust any links between Africa and the socialist world. An even fiercer contest for influence was waged between the Russians and the Chinese.
With both the West and the Soviet bloc vying for their support, African politicians became adept at playing off one side against the other. The more idealistic leaders, such as Tanganyika’s Julius Nyerere, preferred that Africa should stand aloof from the sterile quarrels of the Cold War. But others sought to gain maximum advantage from it.
A sign of Africa’s growing international ambitions came in 1963 when representatives from thirty-one African governments established an Organisation of African Unity. The OAU was launched with many high ideals and a hotchpotch of aims, including the liberation of southern Africa from white minority rule, but also the hope that it would provide Africa with a powerful independent voice in world affairs.
As they set out to achieve their goals of economic development and social progress, African leaders settled on a variety of blueprints for the future. Most believed that development and modernisation depended on strong government control and direction of the economy, a strategy inherited from the colonial era and encouraged by an influential school of Western development economists. The private sector was considered too weak to make much difference. ‘Throughout most of Africa today, you can count the number of effective African businessmen on two hands,’ wrote Barbara Ward, one of the most influential development economists in Africa, in 1962. Only state power and planning could produce the degree of rapid change required to deliver the promises that African leaders had made before independence. A ‘big push’ was needed to break the mould of poverty and to move Africa towards sustained growth. The imperative of development thus justified greater government control and intervention, an outcome that African leaders actively sought for their own purposes.
The route most favoured by African governments and development economists alike was industrialisation. Industrialisation, it was thought, would enable African states to break out of their colonial trading patterns, ending their dependence on a narrow range of commodity exports and manufactured imports. It would have a far more ‘modernising’ impact than agriculture, providing higher productivity and creating urban employment. Agriculture was considered incapable of providing the engine of economic growth. The recommended form of industrialisation was import-substituting industry; it would replace the need for imported goods by developing local manufacturing production for domestic markets, thereby improving the balance of payments position and saving foreign exchange. What was envisaged in essence was a shift from low-productivity agriculture to high-productivity manufacturing. ‘The circle of poverty’, declared Nkrumah, ‘can only be broken by a massively planned industrial undertaking.’
In defining their ideological stance, most governments opted for the umbrella of African socialism, believing that it held the potential for fast growth after years of exploitation by Western capitalists. Drawing a comparison between socialism and colonial capitalism, Nkrumah remarked:
Ghana inherited a colonial economy . . . We cannot rest until we have demolished this miserable structure and raised in its place an edifice of economic stability, thus creating for ourselves a veritable paradise of abundance and satisfaction . . . We must go forward with our preparations for planned economic growth to supplant the poverty, ignorance, disease and illiteracy left in the wake by discredited colonialism and decaying imperialism . . . Socialism is the only pattern that can within the shortest possible time bring the good life to the people.
What particularly influenced Nkrumah and other leaders impressed by the potential of socialism was both the experience of the Soviet Union which seemed to show that socialism produced rapid modernisation, and the record of socialist parties in Western Europe after the Second World War in establishing welfare states.
African societies, it was commonly claimed, traditionally included many indigenous aspects of socialism: the communal ownership of land; the egalitarian character of village life; collective decision-making; extensive networks of social obligation; all were cited as examples. ‘We in Africa,’ asserted Nyerere, a leading proponent of African socialism, ‘have no more need of being “converted” to socialism than we have of being “taught” democracy. Both are rooted in our past, in the traditional society which produced us.’
In an essay on African socialism that he wrote in 1962, Nyerere gave an idyllic account of pre-colonial society. ‘Everybody was a worker . . . Not only was the capitalist, or the landed exploiter unknown . . . [but] capitalist exploitation was impossible. Loitering was an unthinkable disgrace.’ The advent of colonialism had changed all this. ‘In the old days the African had never aspired to the possession of personal wealth for the purpose of dominating any of his fellows. He had never had labourers or “factory hands” to do his work for him. But then came the foreign capitalists. They were wealthy. They were powerful. And the African naturally started wanting to be wealthy too.’ There was nothing inherently wrong with that, said Nyerere, but it led to exploitation. There was now a need for Africans to ‘re-educate’ themselves, to regain their former attitude of mind, their sense of community. ‘In rejecting the capitalist attitude of mind which colonialism brought into Africa, we must reject also the capitalist methods which go with it.’
Yet despite all the time and energy spent on explaining it, African socialism was little more than a potpourri of vague and romantic ideas lacking all coherence and subject to varying interpretations. For some governments it was merely a convenient label. Kenya entitled its key policy document as African Socialism and its Application to Planning in Kenya while vigorously pursuing a capitalist strategy. Côte d’Ivoire was one of the few which admitted to a policy of ‘state capitalism’. While Nyerere argued that socialist ideals would eventually produce socialist structures, Nkrumah aimed to build socialist structures in the first place. Modibo Keita of Mali described his vision of socialism as ‘a system where there will be no unemployed, and there will be no multimillionaires . . . a system where there will be no beggars, and where each will eat if hungry’. Whatever formula they chose, most socialist-minded governments placed high value on the role of the private sector and on foreign investment. What they wanted essentially was to avoid both the evils of capitalism and the pitfalls of doctrinaire socialism. Almost all remained wary of the idea of nationalisation. Only Nasser in Egypt, Ben Bella in Algeria and, for a short time, Sékou Touré in Guinea, went in for wholesale nationalisation.
More radical views about Africa’s future were often aired. Marxist economists and theoreticians argued that because colonial rule had made Africa so dependent on the international capitalist system – restricting its role to producing commodities, enabling foreign operators to export their profits and thereby limiting the possibilities for development – only a clean break with the past would release its full potential. They advocated that Africa should cut its ties to international capitalism altogether, opt out of world markets and become ‘autonomous’.
Another school of thought believed that Africa required revolutionary violence to throw off the shackles of its colonial past in order to attain true socialism. The leading proponent was Frantz Fanon, a black psychotherapist, born in 1925 on the Caribbean island of Martinique, who had fought in the French army during the Second World War, earning the Croix de Guerre with bronze star for his actions against the Germans in northern France. After qualifying as a doctor in 1952, Fanon took a post as head of the psychiatric department at a hospital at Blida in Algeria, but resigned in 1956 in protest against the brutality of the Algerian war and joined the FLN, becoming a prominent spokesman for its cause. He attended the All-African People’s Congress in Accra in 1958 as an FLN representative and in 1960 became its permanent ambassador there, gaining glimpses of how the newly independent states of West Africa were being run. Diagnosed with leukaemia in 1960, he spent his dying days in 1961 based in Europe writing a ferocious tirade attacking not only colonialism but the bourgeois regimes that had inherited power in Africa. Published in 1961 as Les Damnés de la Terre – ‘The wretched of the earth’ – Fanon’s polemic became a bible for revolutionary enthusiasts around the Third World.
Fanon argued that Africa had achieved only a ‘false decolonisation’, leaving real power in the hands of foreigners and their ‘agents’ among the ruling elites. What was needed was a violent overthrow of the entire system. Drawing on his experience of the Algerian war, he maintained that violence had ‘positive and creative qualities’.
Violence alone, violence committed by the people, violence organised and educated by its leaders, makes it possible for the masses to understand social truths and gives the key to them. Without that struggle, without that knowledge of the practice of action, there’s nothing but a fancy-dress parade and the blare of trumpets. There’s nothing save a minimum of readaptation, a few reforms at the top, a flag waving; and down there at the bottom an undivided mass, still living in the Middle Ages, endlessly marking time.
On a national level, violence helped nation-building; it unified people, providing ‘a cement mixed with blood and anger’. It also benefited individuals. ‘At the level of individuals, violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect.’
Fanon believed fervently in the coming African revolution. He pinned his hopes principally on the peasantry. He regarded workers in towns as a ‘labour aristocracy’, too compromised by the colonial system, to be of use. But he envisaged that the spearhead of the revolution would be formed by the dispossessed masses living in bidonvilles on the fringes of towns – the wretched of the earth, or the lumpen-proletariat, as he called them. ‘This lumpen-proletariat is like a horde of rats; you may kick them and throw stones at them, but despite your efforts, they’ll go on gnawing at the roots of the tree.’
A number of foreign players actively sought out revolutionary opportunities in independent Africa, notably China. Lacking the economic resources to compete with Russia on trade and aid, the Chinese hoped to gain more by spreading revolutionary ideology. They focused on dissident groups, such as the Sawaba movement in Niger, Tutsi exiles in Burundi and opposition factions in Kenya. After setting up embassy quarters in a Greek-owned hotel in Bujumbura, the capital of Burundi, in 1964, they dabbled extensively in rebel activities in neighbouring Congo, lending support to Lumumbist leaders like Gaston Soumialot in Kivu and Maniema and Pierre Mulele, a former Lumumbist minister who, after fifteen months’ training in Maoist teaching and guerrilla tactics in China in 1962–3, set up a revolutionary group in Kwilu province.
China’s presence in Africa was small, insignificant when placed alongside the West’s many contingents. Yet the reputation the Chinese gained throughout much of Africa at the time, in African eyes as much as in the Western view, was of a dangerous breed of men, capable of any feat of subversion. When China’s premier, Zhou En-lai, made a tour of African states between December 1963 and February 1964, his very appearance was taken as an ominous sign. The Lagos Daily Times described him as ‘one of the world’s most dangerous men’. His parting speech in Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, in February 1964, seemed to confirm the worst fears about China’s intentions. Speaking of the ‘earth-shaking changes’ that had already occurred in Africa, Zhou En-lai went on to assert that ‘revolutionary prospects are excellent throughout the African continent’. In the version more commonly used, his words were translated as ‘Africa is ripe for revolution’.
Another foreign player keen to find a revolutionary role in Africa was Cuba. Encouraged by the Algerians, Fidel Castro decided in 1965 to despatch an expeditionary force to eastern Congo to assist rebel groups operating there. The expedition was intended to be part of what was called an ‘International Proletarian Army’, an alliance of revolutionary groups aimed at confronting ‘imperialism’ around the world, notably American imperialism.
A team of 120 Cuban fighters was recruited for the eastern Congo mission, all volunteers and virtually all black. Their leader was the legendary Argentinian revolutionary, Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, who had become bored with life as a minister in Castro’s government and was eager for a new adventure. During the preliminary stages of setting up the mission, Guevara travelled to Algiers to consult Ben Bella, to Beijing to consult Zhou En-lai and to Cairo to consult Nasser. ‘I shall go to the Congo,’ Guevara told Nasser, ‘because it is the hottest spot in the world now . . . I think we can hurt the imperialists at the core of their interests in Katanga.’ Nasser was sceptical about Guevara’s intention to lead the mission himself. According to an account of their meeting given by the journalist Mohammed Heikal, Nasser’s son-in-law, Nasser warned Guevara not to become ‘another Tarzan, a white man among black men, leading them and protecting them’. He shook his head sadly: ‘It can’t be done.’
The group that Guevara chose to support operated in the mountains along the western shore of Lake Tanganyika. It was led by Laurent Kabila, a 26-year-old assembly member from north Katanga, a former student in Paris and Belgrade, who hoped to establish ‘a provisional government for the liberated territories of the east’. Guevara’s plan was to use this liberated zone as a training ground not only for Congolese rebels but for members of liberation movements from southern Africa. He recognised that the task might take up to five years.
In April 1965, at the age of thirty-four, Guevara arrived in Dar es Salaam, in secret and in disguise, as part of an advance party of Cuban fighters en route to the eastern Congo, a thousand miles away. Travelling in three Mercedes-Benz, they reached the lakeside town of Kigoma, then crossed Lake Tanganyika by boat to the Congo, landing there on 24 April.
The expedition was a fiasco. Guevara found Kabila’s rebels to be untrained, undisciplined, disorganised, riven by tribal rivalry and petty squabbles, and led by incompetent commanders who preferred the safety and comfort of bars and brothels in Kigoma on the other side of the lake to revolutionary action. ‘The basic feature of the People’s Liberation Army’, Guevara subsequently recorded, ‘was that it was a parasite army; it did not work, did not train, did not fight, and demanded provisions and labour from the population, sometimes with extreme harshness.’
Kabila himself put in only one appearance, arriving with copious supplies of whisky, but left for Kigoma after only five days in the field, preferring to spend his time on international travel or at his base in Dar es Salaam. His brief visit left Guevara unimpressed. ‘He let the days pass without concerning himself with anything other than political squabbles, and all the signs are that he is too addicted to drink and women,’ Guevara noted in his field diary. He dismissed Kabila as a man lacking in ‘revolutionary seriousness’.
Despite the efforts of the Cubans, guerrilla activity tended to end in disarray, with rebels fleeing in panic, abandoning their weapons and leaving their wounded to fend for themselves. ‘Often it was the officers who took the lead in running away,’ Guevara recorded. Harassed by the Congolese army and white mercenaries, the rebels suffered one reverse after another. After seven months of fruitless endeavour, weary and demoralised, Guevara organised the Cuban retreat, crossing the lake to Kigoma in November 1965. His scathing account of what had happened was written in a small upstairs room in the Cuban embassy in Dar es Salaam during December 1965 and January 1966, but it remained secret for thirty years. His opening words were candid. ‘This is the history of a failure,’ he wrote.
The difficulties that African states faced as they embarked on independence were daunting. Africa was the poorest, least developed region on earth. Its climate was often harsh and variable. Drought was a constant hazard, sometimes lasting several years; two droughts earlier in the twentieth century – in 1913–14 and 1930–3 – proved catastrophic. Rainfall in half of the continent was generally inadequate. African soils in many areas were thin, deficient in nutrients and low in organic content, producing limited yields. Most of Africa’s population – some 80 per cent – were engaged in subsistence agriculture, without access either to basic education or health services. Disease proliferated among humans, animals and plantlife. Although modern medicine had tamed epidemic diseases like smallpox and yellow fever, endemic diseases like malaria and sleeping sickness (trypanosomiasis) took a heavy toll; the tsetse fly, causing sleeping sickness among humans and cattle alike, prevented some 10 million square kilometres of potentially productive land from being utilised effectively for livestock and mixed agriculture. Locusts and red-billed quelea birds regularly devastated crops. River blindness (onchocerciasis) affected more than 1 million people living in the riverine areas of the interior of West Africa. Bilharzia (schistosomiasis), absent from a large part of the continent at the turn of the twentieth century, by 1960 had spread to almost every water area below a few thousand feet. Death rates for children in Africa in 1960 were the highest in the world; life expectancy, at thirty-nine years on average, was the lowest in the world.
There was an acute shortage of skilled manpower. Most African societies were predominantly illiterate and innumerate. Only 16 per cent of the adult population was literate. In black Africa in the late 1950s, just as the independence era was beginning, the entire region, containing a population of about 200 million, produced only 8,000 secondary school graduates, and nearly half of those came from two countries, Ghana and Nigeria. No more than 3 per cent of the student-age population obtained an education at secondary level. Few new states had more than 200 students in university training. In the former French colonies there were still no universities. Only about one-third of the student-age population at primary level went to school. More than three-quarters of high-level manpower in government and private business were foreigners.
The rate of population growth added new difficulties, stretching government services to the limit. As a result mainly of health measures, the growth rate rose from about 1 per cent in 1945 to nearly 3 per cent in 1960. Each woman in Africa contributed on average six children to the next generation. In Kenya in the 1970s the figure rose to eight children. Between 1950 and 1980, Africa’s population tripled. Nearly two-thirds of the increase occurred in rural areas, aggravating land shortages. Millions migrated to urban areas, notably to capital cities, some driven by landlessness and poverty, others attracted by the hope of a new life with regular wages, a share in the money economy, football and movies.
The urban population in Africa expanded faster than on any other continent. In thirty-five African capitals, the population increased annually at 8.5 per cent – a rate which meant that they doubled in size every ten years. In 1945 there were only forty-nine towns in the entire continent with a population exceeding 100,000. More than half were in North Africa: ten in Egypt; nine in Morocco; four in Algeria; one in Tunisia; and one in Libya. Eleven others were in South Africa. Between the Sahara and the Limpopo, only thirteen towns had reached a population on 100,000, four of them in Nigeria. In 1955, the population of Lagos numbered 312,000; of Léopoldville (Kinshasa), 300,000; of Addis Ababa, 510,000; of Abidjan, 128,000; of Accra, 165,000. By the early 1980s, Lagos and Kinshasa had populations of about 3 million each, while Addis Ababa, Abidjan and Accra had all passed 1 million. Most urban inhabitants lacked basic amenities like running water, sanitation, paved roads and electricity. Millions lived in slums and squatter settlements, in shacks made from sheets of plastic, packing crates, cardboard boxes and pieces of tin. For most there was no prospect of employment. On average less than 10 per cent of the African population at independence earned a wage.
The economic resources available to African governments to fulfil their dreams were limited. Africa’s share of world trade was no more than 3 per cent. The assets of three US corporations – General Motors, Du Pont and the Bank of America – exceeded the gross domestic product of all Africa, including South Africa. Government revenues were subject to sharp fluctuations. In Ghana, over an eight-year period between 1955 and 1963, the average year-to-year fluctuation in revenue from export duties was plus or minus 28 per cent. Only a few islands of modern economic development existed, most of them confined to coastal areas or to mining enterprises in areas like Katanga and the Zambian Copperbelt. Much of the interior remained undeveloped, remote, cut off from contact with the modern world. Fifteen African states were landlocked, relying on long and often tenuous links to the sea, hundreds, sometimes a thousand miles away.
The colonial legacy included an infrastructure of roads, railways, hydro-electric schemes and a revenue system based on commodity exports and imported goods. But much of the economies of African states had been developed in accordance with the needs of colonial powers, as Sylvanus Olympio, the first president of Togo, noted:
The effect of the policy of the colonial powers [he wrote] has been the economic isolation of peoples who live side by side, in some instances within a few miles of each other, while directing the flow of resources to the metropolitan countries. For example, although I can call Paris from my office telephone here in Lomé, I cannot place a call to Lagos in Nigeria only 250 miles away. Again, while it takes a short time to send an air-mail letter to Paris, it takes several days for the same letter to reach Accra, a mere 132 miles away. Railways rarely connect at international boundaries. Roads have been constructed from the coast inland but very few join economic centres of trade. The productive central regions of Togo, Dahomey (Benin) and Ghana are as remote from each other as if they were on separate continents.
Africa’s economies were largely owned or controlled by foreign corporations – almost all modern manufacturing, banking, import–export trade, shipping, mining, plantations and timber enterprises. They remained heavily dependent on foreign markets, supplies of capital and technology. But except for mining and trade, foreign investors found little to attract them: the risks were regarded as high; the markets of Africa were tiny. The manufacturing sector, on which so many hopes were pinned, was only a small fraction of gross domestic product, usually less than 5 per cent.
Political systems too were recent transplants. Africans had little experience of representative democracy – representative institutions were introduced by the British and the French too late to alter the established character of the colonial state. The more durable imprint they left behind was of authoritarian regimes in which governors and their officials wielded enormous personal power. The sediment of colonial rule lay deep in African society. Traditions of autocratic governance, paternalism and dirigism were embedded in the institutions the new leaders inherited.
The most difficult task facing Africa’s new leaders was to weld into nations a variety of different peoples, speaking different languages and at different stages of political and social development. The new states of Africa were not ‘nations’. They possessed no ethnic, class or ideological cement to hold them together, no strong historical and social identities upon which to build. For a relatively brief period, the anti-colonial cause had provided a unity of purpose. Nationalist leaders had successfully exploited a variety of grievances among the urban and rural populations to galvanise support for the cause. But once the momentum that they had achieved in their drive for independence began to subside, so other loyalties and ambitions came thrusting to the fore. ‘We have all inherited from our former masters not nations but states,’ remarked Félix Houphouët-Boigny, ‘states that have within them extremely fragile links between ethnic groups.’ Indeed, as the result of a long historical process during the colonial era, the engine of ethnic consciousness – the tribal factor – was more potent than it had ever been before.
African societies of the pre-colonial era – a mosaic of lineage groups, clans, villages, chiefdoms, kingdoms and empires – were formed often with shifting and indeterminate frontiers and loose allegiances. Identities and languages shaded into one another. At the outset of colonial rule, administrators and ethnographers endeavoured to classify the peoples of Africa, sorting them out into what they called tribes, producing a whole new ethnic map to show the frontiers of each one. Colonial administrators wanted recognisable units they could control. ‘Each tribe must be considered as a distinct unit,’ a provincial commissioner in Tanganyika told his staff in 1926. ‘Each tribe must be under a chief.’ In many cases, tribal labels were imposed on hitherto undifferentiated groups. The chief of a little-known group in Zambia once ventured to remark: ‘My people were not Soli until 1937 when the Bwana D.C. [District Commissioner] told us we were.’ When local government was established under colonial rule, it was frequently aligned with existing ‘tribal areas’. Entirely new ethnic groups emerged, like the Abaluyia or Kalenjin of western Kenya, formed from two congeries of adjacent peoples. Some colonial rulers used tribal identities to divide their subjects, notably the British in southern Sudan and the French in Morocco. Chiefs, appointed by colonial authorities as their agents, became the symbol of ethnicity.
Missionary endeavour added to the trend. In the process of transcribing hitherto unwritten languages into written forms, missionaries reduced Africa’s innumerable dialects to fewer written languages, each helping to define a tribe. The effect was to establish new frontiers of linguistic groups and to strengthen the sense of solidarity within them. Yoruba, Igbo, Ewe, Shona and many others were formed in this way.
Missionaries were also active in documenting local customs and traditions and in compiling ‘tribal’ histories, all of which were incorporated into the curricula of their mission schools, spreading the notion of ethnic identity. African teachers followed suit. In southern Nigeria, young men from Ilesha and Ijebu who attended school in Ibadan or Oyo were taught to write a standard form of the Yoruba language and to identify themselves as Yoruba – a term previously reserved for subjects of the Oyo empire. As mission stations were largely responsible for providing education, educational achievement tended to depend on their locality and thus to follow ethnic lines.
Migration from rural areas to towns reinforced the process. Migrants gravitated to districts where fellow tribesmen lived, hoping through tribal connections to find housing, employment or a niche in trading markets. A host of welfare associations sprang up – ‘home-boy’ groups, burial and lending societies, cultural associations, all tending to enhance tribal identity. Certain occupations – railwaymen, soldiers, petty traders – became identified with specific groups which tried to monopolise them.
It was in towns that ethnic consciousness and tribal rivalry grew apace. The notion of a single Igbo people was formed in Lagos among the local ‘Descendants’ Union’. The Yoruba, for their part, founded the Egbe Omo Oduduwa – a ‘Society of Descendants of Oduduwa’, the mythical ancestor of the Yoruba people; its aim was ‘to unite the various clans and tribes in Yorubaland and generally create and actively foster the idea of a single nationalism throughout Yorubaland’. Ethnic groups became the basis of protest movements against colonial rule.
In the first elections in the postwar era in Africa, nationalist politicians started out proclaiming nationalist objectives, selecting party candidates regardless of ethnic origin. But as the number of elections grew, as the number of voters expanded, as the stakes grew higher with the approach of independence, the basis for campaigning changed. Ambitious politicians found they could win votes by appealing for ethnic support and by promising to improve government services and to organise development projects in their home area. The political arena became a contest for scarce resources. In a continent where class formation had hardly begun to alter loyalties, ethnicity provided the strongest political base. Politicians and voters alike came to rely on ethnic solidarity. For politicians it was the route to power. They became, in effect, ethnic entrepreneurs. For voters it was their main hope of getting a slice of government bounty. What they wanted was a local representative at the centre of power – an ethnic patron who could capture a share of the spoils and bring it back to their community. Primary loyalty remained rooted in tribal identity. Kinship, clan and ethnic considerations largely determined the way people voted. The main component of African politics became, in essence, kinship corporations.
The formation of one ethnic political party tended to cause the formation of others. In Nigeria the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons, the first modern political organisation in West Africa launched in 1944, started out with the aim of establishing a broad-based national movement, but after tribal dissension it became an Eastern regional party, dominated by Igbo politicians. Yoruba politicians left to form the Action Group, building it around the nucleus of Egbe Omo Oduduwa. In Northern Nigeria, the Hausa-Fulani, while disdaining the nationalist cause which Southerners espoused, nevertheless formed in 1949 the Northern People’s Congress as a political offshoot of a predominantly Hausa cultural organisation, Jam’yyar Mutanen Arewa – Association of the Peoples of the North. In a more extreme example, in the Belgian Congo rival tribal parties were launched by the score. In most countries, political leaders spent much time on ‘ethnic arithmetic’, working out alliances that would win them power and keep them there.
Few states escaped such divisions. In Tanganyika, Julius Nyerere was helped, as he himself acknowledged, by the fact that the population was divided among 120 tribal groupings, none of which was large enough or central enough to acquire a dominant position. He benefited too from the common use of the Swahili language, spread initially by Arab traders, then taken up by the Germans and the British as part of their education system. Other states had to contend with a variety of languages, sometimes numbering more than a hundred. In all, more than 2,000 languages were in use in Africa.
There was a widespread view at the time of independence that once the new states focused on nation-building and economic development, ethnic loyalties would wither away under the pressure of modernisation. ‘I am confident,’ declared Nigeria’s first prime minister, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, during a 1959 debate over the motion to ask for independence, ‘that when we have our own citizenship, our own national flag, our own national anthem, we shall find the flame of national unity will burn bright and strong.’ Ahmed Sékou Touré of Guinea spoke in similar terms in 1959. ‘In three or four years, no one will remember the tribal, ethnic or religious rivalries which, in the recent past, caused so much damage to our country and its population.’ Yet African governments were dealing not with an anachronism from the past, but a new contemporary phenomenon capable of erupting with destructive force.
An example of the potentially explosive nature of ethnic rivalry occurred just before independence in the fertile green hills of Rwanda and Burundi, two ancient kingdoms in the heart of Africa, administered under Belgian rule as a joint colony called Ruanda-Urundi. The two kingdoms were both occupied by a Hutu majority and a Tutsi minority, speaking the same language, sharing the same customs and living intermingled on the same hillsides. In the pre-colonial era the royal elite, chiefs and aristocracy of the Tutsi, a cattle-owning people numbering no more than 15 per cent of the population of both territories, had established themselves as a feudal ruling class over the Hutu who were predominantly agriculturalists. In Rwanda the Hutu were required to submit to bonded labour service – uburetwa – from which all Tutsi were exempt. Discrimination between Tutsi and Hutu was part of everyday life. By appearance, Tutsis tended to be taller and slimmer than their Hutu neighbours, with longer faces and narrower noses. But generations of intermarriage, migration and occupational change had blurred the distinction. Hutu and Tutsi alike moved from one group to the other. Some Hutu were wealthy in cattle; some Tutsi farmed. Though ethnic divisions were well entrenched, what mattered as much as ethnicity was status. Beneath the pinnacle of the royal elite, relationships were determined by a pyramid of immensely complex pecking orders. Central rule in Rwanda was based on a tripartite structure – Tutsi cattle chiefs, Hutu land chiefs and a separate category of army chiefs, all appointed by the king. Loyalty to the Tutsi kings was widely shared.
Under colonial rule, first by the Germans then by the Belgians, more rigid definitions were imposed. German officials in the early 1900s identified Hutu and Tutsi as distinct and separate ethnic groups. With few staff of their own on the ground, they relied on the Tutsi as the ruling aristocracy to enforce control, enabling them to extend their hegemony over the Hutu.
The Belgians went further. In the 1920s they introduced a system of identity cards specifying the tribe to which a holder belonged. In cases where appearance was indecisive or proof of ancestry was lacking, a simple formula was applied: those with ten cows or more were classified as Tutsi, those with fewer were Hutu. The identity cards made it virtually impossible for Hutus to become Tutsi.
Belgian officials established a Tutsi bureaucracy and favoured Tutsi education. The Catholic Church was especially influential in promoting the Tutsi cause. Its resident bishop, Monsignor Léon Classe, who had arrived in Rwanda as a simple priest in 1907, was regarded as a leading expert and consulted regularly by the Belgian authorities. What Classe envisaged, as he made quite clear, was a medieval-style Rwanda, with a ruling Tutsi aristocracy and a Hutu peasantry, working hand-in-hand with the colonial administration and with the Catholic Church guiding the whole enterprise. When the Catholic Church was given responsibility for the entire educational system in the early 1930s, government and church officials were in full agreement on what was required. ‘You must choose the Batusi [Tutsi],’ Monsignor Classe, told missionaries, ‘because the government will probably refuse Hutu teachers . . . In the government the positions in every branch of the administration, even the unimportant ones, will be reserved henceforth for young Batusi.’ The Hutu were not entirely disregarded, but a streaming system ensured that Tutsi were given the best opportunities in education. Primary schools were segregated. The only Hutu able to escape relegation to the labouring masses were those few permitted to study in seminaries. In the forced labour regime that the Belgians ran, developing it from the previous Tutsi system, Tutsi were employed as taskmasters over Hutu labourers. Tutsi chiefs were used to enforce order and discipline. By the late 1930s the Belgians had made ethnicity the defining feature of ordinary life in both Rwanda and Burundi. Whatever sense of collective identity had previously existed in the two kingdoms shrivelled and died.
The reaction in Rwanda came during the 1950s. A period of Hutu political agitation culminated in 1957 in the publication of a BaHutu Manifesto, written by a group of nine Hutu intellectuals, all former seminarists, which challenged the entire administrative and economic system in Rwanda. The central problem, said the authors, was ‘the political monopoly of one race, the Tutsi race, which, given the present structural framework, becomes a social and economic monopoly’. They demanded measures to achieve ‘the integral and collective promotion of the Hutu’. Church leaders, including Tutsi priests, were prominent in advocating reform. Belgian officials conceded that ‘the Hutu-Tutsi question posed an undeniable problem’ and proposed that official usage of the terms ‘Hutu’ and ‘Tutsi’ – on identity cards, for example – should be abolished. The Hutu, however, rejected the proposal, wanting to retain their identifiable majority; abolition of identity cards would prevent ‘the statistical law from establishing the reality of facts’. The idea gained ground that majority rule meant Hutu rule. Ethnic obsession took hold among the small stratum of the educated elite. Political parties were formed on an ethnic basis. Hutu parties campaigned for the abolition of the Tutsi monarchy and the establishment of a republic.
The first violence erupted in November 1959, after a Hutu sub-chief, a prominent political activist, was beaten up by a band of Tutsi militants. In what became known as ‘the wind of destruction’, roving bands of Hutu went on the rampage, attacking Tutsi authorities, burning Tutsi homes and looting Tutsi property. Hundreds of Tutsi were killed; thousands fled into exile. The terminology used by Hutu extremists for the killing was ‘work’.
At this critical juncture the Belgians decided to change sides. A Belgian army officer, Colonel Guy Logiest, appointed to take charge of Rwanda as Special Resident, believed it necessary to be ‘partial against the Tutsis’ in order to reconstruct the system. In a report to Brussels he declared: ‘Because of the force of circumstances, we have to take sides. We cannot remain neutral and passive’. Recalling his mission in a book published in Brussels in 1988, Logiest spoke of his desire ‘to put down the arrogance and expose the duplicity of a basically oppressive and unjust aristocracy’.
In early 1960 Logiest began dismissing Tutsi chiefs, appointing Hutus in their places. The new chiefs immediately organised the persecution of Tutsis in districts they controlled, precipitating a mass exodus in which some 130,000 Rwandan Tutsi sought refuge in the Congo, Burundi, Uganda and Tanganyika. In local government elections, held in June and July 1960 amid continuing violence, the all-Hutu Parti du Mouvement de l’Emancipation Hutu – Parmehutu – won 2,390 out of 3,125 council seats, gaining a dominant position in almost every commune. The Belgian authorities then colluded with Hutu leaders in organising what was subsequently described as a ‘legal coup’. In January 1961 Rwanda’s newly elected bourgmestres (mayors) and councillors were summoned to a meeting at Gitarama, the birthplace of the Hutu leader, Grégoire Kayibanda, where they declared the abolition of the monarchy and the establishment of a republic. Legislative elections in September confirmed Hutu supremacy. But a report by the United Nations Trusteeship Commission warned in 1961: ‘The developments of these last eighteen months have brought about the racial dictatorship of one party . . . An oppressive system has been replaced by another one . . . It is quite possible that some day we will witness violent reactions on the part of the Tutsi.’
On 1 July 1962 Rwanda became an independent state under a republican government led by Grégoire Kayibanda, a politician devoted to the cause of Hutu hegemony and determined to keep the Tutsi in a subordinate role. On the same day Burundi gained its independence with seemingly more stable prospects. Though there were similar tensions between Tutsi and Hutu, the Tutsi monarchy in Burundi survived. Yet Burundi and Rwanda alike were to endure a series of massive upheavals.