Roberts A.D. The Cambridge History of Africa, Volume 7: from 1905 to 1940
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IDEOLOGIES OF LIBERATION
to the opportunities and pressures on the literate minority to
become 'black Frenchmen'. As a student in Paris, Senghor did
so well that he could write a master's thesis on exoticism in
Baudelaire. And it was as a Frenchman rather than an African that
he discovered his own roots. In 1929 he was introduced by his
fellow-student Georges Pompidou to a novel about cultural
renaissance in the French provinces, Maurice Barres's
Deracines
(1897).
This made a profound impression on Senghor. Within a
year or so he underwent a reaction against the cultural demands
of Paris which amounted to a conversion. Just as DuBois had
gained inspiration from hearing Franz Boas lecture on the
kingdoms of the Western Sudan, so Senghor now began to read
the work of white Africanists; he attended lectures by the
anthropologist Marcel Griaule and studied Levy-Bruhl's work on
'primitive mentality'. Senghor even took a passing interest in
European racist theory, though this subsided when Hitler came
to power in 1933. Like other black intellectuals in Paris from
Africa or the West Indies, Senghor came to regard official French
notions of' assimilation' as a personal affront. France might make
room for black Frenchmen; it would not admit that they could
still be African. Senghor and his friends refused to make the
cultural surrender which seemed required of them; instead, they
asserted the distinctive value of black culture, for which they
coined the term
nigritude.
It is hard to say what impact these
Parisian Africans had in Africa at this period, but the concept of
assimilation was increasingly criticised in the African press in
Dahomey, and perhaps too in unpublished plays performed in
Madagascar.
Socialist theory was an important element in the mixture of
ideas to which blacks in Paris were exposed between the wars.
In Senegal, something may have been learned from the newspaper
which the French Socialist Party introduced in 1907; it is more
certain that during and after the First World War soldiers
returning from France to West Africa brought back ideas which
helped to inspire strikes at this time. Then in 1917 the Bolshevik
revolution established the Soviet Union
as
a great power explicitly
opposed to colonialism and imperialism. This was to give
Communist parties considerable potential prestige in the colonial
world. The French party, formed in 19
20-1,
soon took an interest
in expatriate blacks, and by 1924 it had recruited two students,
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the war-veteran Lamine Senghor from Senegal and T. Garan
Kouyate from Soudan; both took part later in organising black
workers in French ports. Senghor founded the Committee for the
Defence of the Negro Race, which elected Lenin posthumously as
honorary president. In 1927 Senghor attended the inaugural
conference in Brussels of the Berlin-based League against
Imperialism. This gathering included delegates from North Africa
and other parts of the colonial world (Nehru came from India),
South Africa and Latin America. When Senghor died later that
year an obituary in the monthly paper he had founded likened him
to the hero of a classic French tragedy: 'to the work of the
emancipation of his race he brought the mystical stubbornness of
Polyeucte \
39
Under Kouyate's leadership the Committee (renamed
League) used black seamen to distribute its paper in West Africa,
sought financial help from DuBois in the USA, and developed
close links with French Communists and trade unionists. However,
there was soon fierce argument over the extent of Communist
interference; government harassment was intensified; and the
movement lost momentum in the 1930s.
In South Africa, socialist thought had influenced sections of the
white working class since early in the century. The First World
War provoked a split in the Labour Party: in 1916 pacifist
dissidents formed the International Socialist League, which called
for class solidarity across the colour line and sought African
support. One Congress member,
L.
T. Mvabasa, attended meetings
of the ISL in 1917; a year later he told the Transvaal Congress,
'The capitalists and workers are at war everywhere in every
country.' 'The white people teach you about heaven...they don't
teach you about this earth on which we live...The God of our
Chiefs...gave us this part of the world we possess. '
40
By 1921 the
ISL and other socialist groups had merged to form the Communist
Party of South Africa, which both disavowed racialism and
eschewed participation in electoral politics. At first the CPSA
included no Africans, who were mostly suspicious of its white
leadership; Clements Kadalie decided to keep his distance. How-
ever, other members of the ICU took an interest; from 1925 the
party held night-school classes for Africans in Johannesburg; and
10
Quoted
in J. A.
Langley, Van-Africanism and
nationalism
in
West Africa, 1900-194j
(Oxford, 1973),
505.
40
Quoted
by P.
Bonncr in Marks and Rathbone,
Industrialisation
and social
change,
293-4.
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IDEOLOGIES OF LIBERATION
it won some support within Congress. By 1928 the CPSA
consisted largely of Africans, and James La Guma represented it
in Moscow in
1927
after attending the anti-imperialism conference
in Brussels. Unfortunately for the CPSA, the Comintern had
belatedly begun to concern itself with South Africa, which it
found hard to analyse in terms of revolutionary strategy. Policy
changes in Moscow disrupted the local party. In an attempt to
strengthen South African allegiance, Africans were brought to
Moscow: J. B. Marks, E. Mofutsanyana and Moses Kotane
attended the Lenin School in 1932-3. Meanwhile Albert Nzula
was working at the Eastern Workers' Communist University, and
not only as a pupil: in collaborating on a book about labour in
black Africa he had much to teach the founders of African studies
in Russia. Nzula, however, died in Moscow in 1934, and by then
the party line had swung round towards co-operation with
imperialist powers against Fascism — i.e. Hitler's Germany. For
many black people, international Communism stood revealed as
merely a tool of Russian foreign policy, though the CPSA
remained important as South Africa's only non-racial political
party.
British West African contacts with Soviet Communism
originated in America. Bankole Awoonor-Renner, son of an
eminent Gold Coast barrister, went to Tuskegee, became secretary
of the African students' union in the USA, attended the first
meeting, in 1925, of the Comintern-inspired American Negro
Labor Congress and was despatched with four American blacks
to study in Moscow, where he attended the Eastern Workers'
University until 1928. He then returned to the Gold Coast and
on Casely Hayford's death in 1930 became editor of the
Gold Coast
Leader.
By then, Russian interest in the black world had expanded
from the USA to Africa. In 1930 a Negro Workers' Conference
was held in Hamburg and attended by Africans from each
territory in British West Africa. Among them was I. T. A.
Wallace-Johnson, who had as wide a knowledge of Africa as any
African at the time: he had served during the war as an army clerk
in Cameroun, East Africa and the Middle East, and probably made
his first contacts with communists while working in the late 1920s
as a seaman along the coast from West Africa to South Africa.
Wallace-Johnson went on from Hamburg to study in Moscow,
where he got to know the Trinidadian George Padmore, secretary
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of the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers
and editor of its paper, the Negro Worker. Wallace-Johnson
returned to West Africa in 1933 and threw himself into a variety
of protest activities.
41
His efforts to realise Padmore's aim of
making the
Negro Worker
a'
mass
organ' in Africa were frustrated
by colonial governments, and in any case Padmore himself broke
with Moscow in 1934, following its rapprochement with Britain
and France. All the same, a good deal had been done to acquaint
Africans with Marxist—Leninist arguments and sharpen West
African criticism of colonial economies in the depths of the
depression.
African nationalism developed in response to the whole range
of ideas generated by higher education and foreign travel:
constitutional reform, Pan-Africanism, international working-
class solidarity. ' Nation' was itself one such idea. In our period,
it mattered most in West Africa. In the Gold Coast, national
feeling was invoked early in the century by writers who chiefly
had in mind the Fante people around Cape Coast, but these writers
also belonged to another sort of nation: the Christian elite whose
enclaves along the coast of British West Africa were linked by
familial and professional
ties.
When members of
this elite
combined
for political purposes in 1920, they called themselves a 'National
Congress', since their own field of action was the whole littoral
of this region rather than any one colonial territory. By 1930 the
commitment of this Congress to a united British West Africa was
under strain, and the impact of the depression intensified the shift
towards a territorial focus. Economic grievance combined with
the spread of education (and the growing numbers of those who
had studied abroad) to create a more popular and widely diffused
basis for anti-colonial protest. Coastal elites developed links with
their hinterlands: by 1932 the West African Students' Union
(WASU), based in London, had branches in Kumasi and towns
in Northern Nigeria. There was indeed a conflict of generations:
the younger men with political ambitions, such as Nnamdi
Azikiwe, were more sensitive than their elders to popular dis-
content, less respectful of British culture and civilisation, and
more inclined to see indirect rule through chiefs as an obstacle
to the extension of African freedom.
African thought about nationalism and imperialism was not
41
See chapter 8, pp. 450-5.
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IDEOLOGIES OF LIBERATION
simply provoked by African experience; it also responded to
major currents in world politics. Japan's victory over Russia in
1905 showed blacks in Africa and the Americas that economic and
technological mastery need not be a white monopoly. It made a
great impression on Casely Hayford, and also on the young
Ethiopian Gebre Heywet Baykedagn, who returned to Africa in
1905 after being educated in Germany and Austria. He extolled
the merits of bureaucratic government, but he was also a pioneer
African economic nationalist. He pointed out that his country's
political independence was undermined by its economic subservi-
ence to foreigners: until it could trade, as did Japan, on equal
terms with Europe, it was no more truly free than other African
countries. African awareness of economic imperialism was later
extended, as we have seen, through contacts both with black
American capitalists and with international socialism.
A further challenge was posed by the rise of fascist dictatorships
in Europe. In 1933 WASU's journal attacked the degeneration of
German nationalism into racism; in the Gold Coast, J. B.
Danquah reprinted anti-Nazi articles by German writers. For a
time it was easier to admire Mussolini, but in 1935 Italy invaded
Ethiopia. The shock was felt in many parts of Africa. Ethiopia
had for some time represented to Africans a potent symbol of
black independence, and not simply because its deficiencies were
less well publicised than those of Liberia or Haiti: it was after all
a Christian state with as long a history as any in Europe. D. D.
T. Jabavu, a lecturer at Fort Hare who had been the first black
South African graduate of
a
British university, observed that the
invasion had revealed the white savage beneath the European
veneer. For many West Africans, the invasion called in question
the superiority of Western civilisation, while Britain's failure to
take a firm stand against it discredited her claims to rule in Africa
as a trustee for its people's welfare. In London, a group of blacks,
mostly from the West Indies, organised a welcome party for Haile
Sellassie when he arrived as an exile in 1936. In 1937 this group
became the International African Service Bureau, a Marxist but
non-communist body which was led by Padmore and C. L. R.
James (also from Trinidad), Wallace-Johnson, and Jomo Kenyatta
(who had visited Moscow in 1931-2). Growing African awareness
of links between colonial problems and the world crisis was
ventilated in July 1939 at a conference in London that was mainly
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AFRICAN CROSS-CURRENTS
organised
by the
relatively conservative League
of
Coloured
Peoples;
its
resolutions included demands
for
national
self-
determination. Moves towards the amalgamation of black pressure
groups in London were cut short by the outbreak of war, but close
ties had been formed with
a
variety
of
British sympathisers,
especially in the Labour Party; these were to bear fruit when peace
returned.
At the end of our period, anti-colonial nationalism was wide-
spread among literate people in British West Africa and beginning
to influence illiterate workers and farmers. Both in West Africa
and
in
London collective action was addressed not simply
to
participation in the structures of colonial government but to its
replacement. There was a growing tendency to regard individual
colonial territories as capable of being turned into nation—states,
even if the means to do this had scarcely been developed. In South
Africa, the African National Congress maintained
a
territorial
network but had been reduced to a marginal role in the country's
constitutional politics, and its social base was still very narrow.
In Southern Rhodesia, a Bantu Congress had been formed in 1936
but
it
barely contained tensions between Shona and Ndebele.
Elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa, the only territory-wide African
organisation was
in
Tanganyika, and this was still primarily
a
clerical elite. Four of the men who were eventually to lead their
countries to independence were still working overseas: Leopold
Senghor, Jomo Kenyatta, Kwame Nkrumah and Hastings Banda.
They did not return until 1945 or later, and meanwhile the Second
World
War had
transformed
the
conditions
for
political
development
in
Africa. Only after the war did opposition
to
colonial rule reach a point
at
which Africans were forced to be
explicit about the character of the nation which they sought
to
liberate: was this to be a group with a shared indigenous culture
(whether or not it called itself
a
'tribe'), or was it to be the whole
population of a colonial territory, owing such unity as
it
might
possess to alien intervention?
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CHAPTER 6
THE
MAGHRIB
In 1905 the Maghrib was sharply divided. Although Algeria had
been French since its conquest in the 1830s and 1840s, Morocco
was still an independent state, and Libya still a province of the
Ottoman empire. They had not yet been overtaken by the
European partition of Africa at the end of the nineteenth century,
which began with the French occupation of Tunisia in
1881.
Both
Morocco and Libya, however, were under threat: Libya from the
Italians, who had secured international recognition of their claim
to the territory as compensation for their acquiescence in the
French protectorate in Tunisia; and Morocco from the French,
who had obtained British acknowledgement of their special
interest in the country with the conclusion of the Entente Cordiale
in 1904. By 1914 Morocco had become a second French pro-
tectorate, at the price of territorial concessions to Spain in the
north and south. Libya had been invaded by Italy, whose troops
occupied the coast.
The subjugation of Morocco and Libya was not complete until
the 1930s. The length of the conquest, combined with the
interruption of European colonialism by the First World War,
delayed the large-scale settlement and economic development of
these countries by the European states concerned. Almost
throughout the period, therefore, there continued to be big
differences between Morocco and Libya and the well-established
colony of Algeria, officially part of metropolitan France. These
differences appeared in a less pronounced form between Algeria
and Tunisia. They were offset by a policy of colonisation which
the French extended from Algeria into Tunisia and Morocco, and
which was copied by the Italians in Libya and by the Spanish to
a lesser extent in their Moroccan zones. The effect was to create
in each country a dominant resident European community which,
with the help of capital investment, was intended to ensure a close
political, social and economic connection with the metropolitan
power.
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THE
MAGHRIB
This policy of colonisation, pursued with few qualms and
considerable enthusiasm, took less than proper account of the
native Muslim population of the area. Except in Morocco, few
precautions were taken to protect the subject peoples from the
adverse effects of Europeanisation, or to assure them of a share
in its benefits. They were, on the other hand, by no means
primitive. Despite great changes in their society and economy,
which brought about widespread dislocation and impoverish-
ment, some groups were able to profit from new opportunities.
At the same time they possessed in their religion, their language
and their history the elements of
a
strong national consciousness.
The combination of these factors during the period is the least
known but certainly one of the most important subjects for
historical investigation.
1905-1914
Algeria
By 1905, the constitution of French Algeria was essentially
complete in the form which survived down to the Second World
War. With the recent reorganisation in 1896-8 of the Conseil
Superieur de l'Algerie to include elected members, and the
creation of an elected assembly, the Delegations Financieres, to
control an Algerian budget, direct administration from Paris had
come to an end, and a measure of self-government obtained in
what was officially an integral part of
France.
Under a governor-
general, responsible to the French Ministry of the Interior, these
two bodies were at the summit of a system of departments,
subdivided into
communes,
which had replaced the original military
administration of the country throughout the more inhabitable
regions of the north, leaving only the deserts of the south under
the control of the army. The similarity of this system to that of
local government in France was only superficial. The
communes
were of two kinds,
deplein exercice
and mixte, with a third category,
indigene,
for the most remote. Those
deplein exercice
were governed
as in France by mayors who represented a European community
whose size varied, but was almost always small in relation to a
Muslim majority. The communes
deplein exercice
were far larger than
any comparable units in metropolitan France, but much smaller
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1905-1914
than the immense communes
mixtes,
where the European population
was minimal, and government was in the hands of administrative
officials, district officers with their own uniform, recruitment and
career structure. It was the incompatibility of this system with that
of the mother country which had been responsible for the grant
of separate status.
Socially and economically, Algeria was in fact a colony. At the
beginning of the twentieth century there were roughly 400,000
French, 200,000 Spanish and Italians, and four million Muslims,
the highest ratio of Europeans to
'
natives' in the history of the
territory; over the next forty years the ratio dropped from 1:6 or 7
to 1:8 or 9. The two populations were segregated on the basis
of religion. Although the Muslims had French nationality, they
did not have and could not acquire French citizenship unless they
renounced their
statut
personnel,
their rights and duties under the
shari'a.
These rights and duties, for example those concerned with
marriage and inheritance, were regarded as incompatible with the
French civil code, and therefore with the obligations of French
citizenship. This was somewhat inconsistent. In the first place, the
native Jewish community of Algeria had been naturalised in 1870
as citizens
en
bloc,
Talmudic law notwithstanding. Moreover, the
act of 1889 which declared that the children of foreigners, born
in Algeria, were to become French citizens unless they wished it
otherwise, was regularly held to apply to Muslim expatriates as
well as to the Europeans for whom it was designed.' Few Algerian
Muslims ever thought it worthwhile in the circumstances to take
advantage of the procedures whereby, under the Senatus Consulte
of
14
July
1865,
they might apply for
citizenship.
The meagre total
of
8,000
citizens of Muslim Algerian origin in 1936 was largely
accounted for by professional men of no great family who had
made their way with the French in a recognised career. Muslims
regularly preferred wealth and status in their own community,
despite the many drawbacks of their position as subjects.
These drawbacks were severe. As non-citizens, Muslim
Algerians had been left by years of
assimilation
(the Frenchification
of government) without either self-government or government
on the same terms as Europeans. The introduction in 1901 of a
policy of
association,
envisaging their separate development, meant
1
C.-R. Ageron, Let Algiriens
musulmans
et la France, /Sf/-r?if (Paris, 1968), 349 and
n.i.
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