The Colonial Experience in West Africa

The Twentieth Century brought with it gigantic changes for the peoples of double-u Africa. The yoke of colonialism bound them together into a in the buff political, economic, and social order. It was as if hundreds of years of autobiography had suddenly ended, and begun again anew. In the wake of the Berlin West Africa Conference, in 1885, the great powers of Europe Britain, France, Ger many an(prenominal), and even Portugal and Belgium had carve up West Africa among themselves. European overlords either completely re steerd, or else adopted a supervisory blot over the indigenous African authorities.Proud kingdoms, like those of the Asante, Benin, and Da home platey, found themselves forced to adapt or disappear, as West Africans struggled to make sense of a world that had been turned completely upside down and inwardly out. For inside out, could easily describe the reversal of economic manipulations that came along with European conquest. Formerly, European traders had s tayed close to the coast, onlyowing the African rulers and merchants to supply Europe and her New World colonies with knuckle downs and other merchandise.The British had fin anyy succeeded in ending the slave trade some years before, and many of the coastal kingdoms of West Africa had languished as a result. Some had been nearly wholly dependent upon the trade in human beings instantaneously there would have to be new sources of revenue. For the most part, these new sources of income would be developed by Europeans who would exploit West Africas people and resources for the benefit of their home countries. However, the Africans would excessively learn from their new masters. Some of them would obtain a westward education, or work to put in the ideas of the modern industrial world to Africa.European science, technology, education, political, economic, cultural, and religious ideas would all have a profound squeeze on West Africa. The pre-colonial relationship between Europea ns and West Africans was unitary of mutual trade. In the first half(a) of the Nineteenth Century, Europeans vastly increased their purchases of palm oil, and also continued to buy tropical hardwoods, while Africans veritable the products of Europes industrial r maturation cotton and woolen textiles and iron. 1 It was only as direct European yield began to increase that economic conditions were gradually modified.The introduction of cocoa by European missionaries in the 1860s, led to its comely a major hard cash crop and primary export by the earliest period of European colonial domination, around 1900. Gold and coca were the mainstays of the providence in the Gold Coast (now Ghana). To sustenance up with their seemingly insatiable demands for these and other products, the British, French, and other others, introduced more modern techniques of production. In particular, they employed industrial methods of mining, and strengthened railroads and port facilities to enable a vas tly increased f embarrassed of goods.Yet it would be wrong to speculate that was no African response to changed economic conditions. Already, in the late 1800s, African merchant families, such as the Sarbahs, began to encourage rubber production In contrast to the palm oil trade, the rubber trade, because of a greater m unitytary return per unit of labour input and weight, drew into its orbit thousands of producers from the latterly interior, including Sefwi, Kwahu, Asante and the distant states of Brong-Ahafo, all more than 100 miles from the coast.The rubber trade also gave rise to a new group of middle-men or broken from the Fanti states, Asin, Denkyera, and Akim, who carried the trade to the further limits of the forest zone and in so doing accelerated the extension of the cash economy. Rubber became a major export with shipments totalling well over one million pounds volume in 1886 and by 1893, the Gold Coast ranked first among the rubber exporting countries of the British Em pire and third gear in the world. 3Africans were, therefore, fully able to adapt themselves to European conditions in order to increase the sizing and extent of their markets, even if this necessitated adopting new techniques, and even entirely new crops, like rubber. On the down side, an economy based on growing and harvesting rubber latex caused significant social upheavals. The influence of the coastal mercantile families and kingdoms waned in favor of inland economic interests. 4 Families like the Sarbahs expanded their trading networks deep into the Interior, opening up branch story, cajoling purchasers, and further turning economic focus toward the one paramount crop.They also became increasingly dependent on fluctuations in the European market. 5 Furthermore, the conflict between European sponsored economic development, and meddlesome European figure can be seen in the 1920s Gold Coast, where British Governor Guggisberg pursued a policy that was in many ways detrimental to the future of the African peoples under his control Anti-modernisation, anti-urban, and anti-development. Regulations and barriers against innovation proliferated. Official policy did nothing to encourage the emergence of a commercial middle class.Its assemble instead was to establish a highly formidable machinery of bureaucratic control. The most damaging consequence of colonial policy on the ground was the way in which it hindered the emergence of a native modernizing cadre, one result of which was to divert into long and bitter anti-colonial struggles much brilliant talent which could have been used creatively in development sectors. 6 The subordination of African interests to European profits condemned West Africans to economic backwards through lack of skills and genuine opportunities.The lack of skill and opportunity open to native West Africans consumes course to a discussion of European education and the new horizons it presented. Prior to the era of colonial domination, West Africas peoples had had light contact with Western ideas, except for he occasional interactions with Christian missionaries. The states, large and small, of West Africa had been universally pre-industrial, and had feature nothing in the way of modern communications, transportation, or even the kind of complex educational and political institutions that existed in the Christian and Muslim worlds.Missionaries were the first to introduce Western educational methods into West Africa For them education took place in schools, where obedient pupils listened to teachers, took examinations, and received diplomas certifying knowledge. Discipline was important, not only to make the children study, but also to define desirable habits and (that was usually considered to be even more important than learnedness itself). 7 On the whole, Western education extended only to teaching subjects that Europeans thought would be useful to their charges.Vocational training was able for people who would never have to govern themselves. 8 Nevertheless, an exposure to the Western academic tradition inspired many African families to push for a higher level of education for their children. Few pupils wanted to brook the cost and the hardship of study, only to be prepared for a rural life and a low living standard. 9 In the 1930s, in French West Africa, Colonial Government officials began to formulate a new approach that appeared to look forward to a synthesis of the European and Native traditions.Frances redefined mission civilisatrice civilizing mission was to be fulfilled by teaching the subject populations how to live according to authentic African traditions, This vision of Frances role overseas as the protector of indigenous cultures in the colonies challenged earlier presentations of the colonial mission that had presented France as the carrier of European civilization and French culture destined to bring Africa out of the darkness in which many late-nineteenth-century c olonizers claimed its people lived. 10The French administrators went so far as to strongly encourage African arts and crafts, sponsor African festivals even to teach Africans how to be African( ). In order to avoid pollution by native teachers already trained in the earlier European methods, the French actually brought in teachers from France to lead the Africans in the study of their native West African culture these teachers being observed wind Natives in local folk dances, etc. 11 Such plans represented an interesting attempt to keep Native elites loyal to France, while at the same time, well-rooted in their Native lands and cultures.Ostensibly, such practices would avoid the roofless quality of Africans educated under the earlier system. Nonetheless, exposure to European educational and economic ideas even when those ideas were coalesced with African traditions could not forestall an African thirst for greater freedom and opportunity along European lines. Colonial rulers often imposed a dual system of rightness a European one for major offenses, and a Native one for those offenses deemed minor by the Colonial Authorities.The French, early on, abolished the Native courts and level-headed system, except in rare cases, while even under the British, it was quite clear that Native justice was distinctly secondary to the real justice of the Europeans. 12 Dichotomies such as these further entrenched notions of West African inferiority. The French instituted a policy of not interfering in African customs and culture, as long as those customs did not conflict with the French aim of achieving some sort of evolution among Africans. 13 It was taken utterly for granted that African culture was inherently inferior to French civilization.By contrast, the British authorities endeavored to maintain equilibrium by combining traditional African smallholder society with the demands of the British Cocoa Board. Rural West African society was to be maintained at all c ost to prevent a breakdown of the social order, such as occurred when jobs were scarce and peasants left for the cities in the wish of finding work. There, oddly enough, the British actually encouraged the growth of an urban petit bourgeoisie in the intake of preventing rebellion.With the collapse of world markets during the Great Depression, urban and peasant unrest increased with the noticeable difference that now a radicalized bourgeoisie was available to lead that unrest. 14 In short, the European colonial administrations of West Africa twain helped and exploited Africans. With their thirst for profits, and a belief in the superiority of their own institutions, technology, and culture, they dreamed of advancing the native population while at the same time keeping that population economically productive, and under immobile European control.Yet in so doing, they introduced many attributes of the modern world to the peoples of West Africa. European notions of development, educ ation, and justice split traditional African life into separate public and private spheres especially for those who embraced European learning and techniques. 15 The divide that grew up between Europeanized Africans, and those who have remained closer to their traditional ways of life be a problem even today.One of the lasting legacies of European Colonization in West Africa was this impartial transformation this creation of a society existing in two worlds, trained properly for neither. once opened to the full force of the industrial (and later post-industrial) economy, the traditional African economy could not compete. At the same time, not enough West Africans were educated, in the European sense, to provide the skills and leadership to easily lead their people into a new era. European rule has left West Africa with many choices, not all of them good.