Africans had opposed the European domination of their continent from the beginning. However, whenever this opposition gained momentum, the superiority of European military technology typically prevented any long term success. One European writer, in a satirical poem on the Scramble for Africa, wrote:
"Whatever happens we have got
The Maxim Gun, and they have not."
The Maxim gun was a semiautomatic rifle with which Europeans confronted Africans armed with spears or muskets. While the African resistance movements had certain advantages in these conflicts, including the strategic value of fighting on their own soil, they could not ultimately overcome the Maxim gun.
In 1900 the first pan-African conference was held in London. The majority of the delegates were American or West Indian blacks, part of the African diaspora that viewed with horror the imperialistic domination of their ancestral homeland. At this conference the African American leader, W.E.B. DuBois, framed the situation in Africa as an issue of race: "The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line." As much as Europeans attempted to maintain this color line, they were forced to administer their colonies with the assistance of black Africans themselves. This assistance required education of African leaders, and the educational experiences of these leaders would ultimately seal the fate of the imperial system.
In addition, the experience of Africans in World War I would also help to galvanize an effective resistance to European domination. Over 2 million Africans participated in the war, either as soldiers or laborers. Some 200,000 died. One of the strategies of the European powers was to take the African colonies of their European enemies so that when peace came they could use these colonies as bargaining chips in post-war negotiations. One of the unintended consequences of this strategy was the development of new attitudes among the African participants, who recognized that Europeans did not present a united front. Furthermore, as Africans gained a broader international understanding as a result of World War I, they noted the obvious discrepancies between the European ideologies of democracy and civilization and their actual practices in the colonies. At the end of the war, the League of Nations, which had pledged itself to freedom and self-determination in a new post-war international order, in fact merely handed over the African colonies of a defeated Germany to the European victors, principally England and France. The League repeated the ideological justifications that had originally been developed for colonial rule, pointing out that the African colonies should be governed "as a sacred trust of civilization" until the time that they were capable of standing "on their own feet in the arduous conditions of the modern world." For many Europeans the day when Africans would be capable of standing "on their own feet" was a very long ways off.
A second pan-African conference was held following the war in Paris in 1919. The delegates to this conference recognized that the international situation was ripe for change, and they hoped to secure some measure of self-determination for the African colonies. Pan-Africanism developed a distinct nationalist flavor at about this time, with Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican who had emigrated to the United States, leading the way. Garvey argued for "uniting all the Negro peoples of the world into one great body to establish a country and Government absolutely their own." Garvey was a master at turning imperialist propaganda back upon the colonial powers: "When Europe was inhabited by a race of cannibals, a race of savages, naked men, heathens and pagans, Africa was peopled with a race of cultured black men, who were masters in art, science and literature." Meanwhile in Africa, a newly educated elite class was beginning to argue for independence.
This rising nationalism would slowly evolve until a second World War offered new opportunities for freedom in Africa. The sixth Pan-African conference, held in 1945 in Manchester, England, was notable for its lack of participation by non-Africans. For the first time a Pan-African conference was dominated by Africans. The statement of purpose adopted at that conference offered a blunt message to the colonial nations:
"We are determined to be free. We want education. We want the right to earn a decent living; the right to express our thoughts and emotions, to adopt and create forms of beauty. We demand for Black Africa autonomy and independence, so far and no further than it is possible in this One World for groups and peoples to rule themselves subject to inevitable world unity and federalism.
"We are not ashamed to have been an age-long patient people. We continue willingly to sacrifice and strive. But we are unwilling to starve any longer while doing the world's drudgery, in order to support by our poverty and ignorance a false aristocracy and a discarded imperialism. . . .
"Therefore, we shall complain, appeal and arraign. We will make the world listen to the facts of our condition. We will fight in every way we can for freedom, democracy and social betterment."
The British recognized that change was in the air and developed plans to transfer power to Africans. They intended for this process to be peaceful, well-controlled, and slow. The Africans were in a much greater hurry, however. In the Gold Coast riots in 1948 convinced the British to allow elections. These elections, held in 1951, were won by the socialist Convention People's Party, and its leader, Kwame Nkrumah, was released from prison where he had been held as a political prisoner, to lead the new government. Nkrumah became the first prime minister of the newly formed nation of Ghana in 1957. He envisioned independence for the Gold Coast as the beginning of a movement that would sweep across Africa: "Freedom for the Gold Coast will be the fountain of inspiration from which other African colonial territories can draw when the time comes for them to strike for their freedom." This statement turned out to be prophetic. The scent of nationalism was in the air throughout the continent, and it was fast becoming a philosophy embraced by all segments of the population.
The most difficult transformations to self-rule in Africa occurred in those colonies where there were large European settler populations. In Kenya, for example, British farmers had taken over the highland areas and driven out the Kikuyu people. These white settlers viewed the possible independence of Kenya with alarm. In the early 1950s a Kikuyu rebellion, the Mau Mau uprising, threatened the stability of the colonial system, and the British reacted with overpowering military strength. The rebellion was crushed, and one of Kenya's most promising black leaders, Jomo Kenyatta, was imprisoned, though his role in the uprising was ambiguous. After his release from prison, Kenyatta became the first president of the new nation of Kenya in 1963.
Ironically, South Africa had been the first of the African colonies to gain independence--in 1910. However, political power was not transferred to black Africans but to the white settler minority. The result of this development was that black South Africans would actually be the last on the continent to actually control their own destiny. Very few blacks were given the vote, and by 1948 even these few had lost that right. South African whites instituted the policy of apartheid, designed to keep the races separate. Thus, while the rest of Africa was moving towards freedom and self-determination for majority black populations, in South Africa the opposite was occurring. Not until 1994 would the majority of South Africans be able to vote. In that election, the African National Congress won an overwhelming majority, and a multi-racial parliament was formed. The new president, Nelson Mandela, had been released from a South African prison in 1990 after spending 27 years in jail.
Jeff Sellen
Readings
The military wing of South Africa's African National Congress, Umkhonto we Sizwe, published a manifesto, "We are at War!" in 1961. In this document the military leaders of the ANC describe their reasons for their struggle and announce a call to arms for all black South Africans.
In his inaugural address Nelson Mandela, who was elected South Africa's first black president, outlines his vision for a new South Africa, based on the dismantling of apartheid and a new racial harmony.
