The sight of the sun acts like a starter’s pistoclass="underline" the town instantly springs into motion. It’s as if all night long everyone was crouching on his starter blocks and now, at the signal, at that shot of sunlight, they all take off full speed ahead. No intermediate stages, no preparations. All at once, the streets are full of people, the shops are open, the fires and kitchens are smoking.
Yet the bustle of Kumasi differs from Accra’s. It is local, regional, as if self-enclosed. The town is the capital of the kingdom of Ashanti (which is part of Ghana), and it vigilantly guards its otherness, its colorful and robust traditions. Here you can see tribal chiefs strolling along the streets, or the performance of a rite that dates back to ancient times. And in this culture, the world of magic, of spells and enchantments, thrives and prospers.
The road from Accra to Kumasi is not just the five hundred kilometers from the Atlantic coast to the interior; it is also a voyage into those areas of the African continent where there are fewer vestiges of colonialism than along the coastlines. For Africa’s immensity, its dearth of navigable rivers and its lack of roads, as well as its difficult, murderous climate, while presenting an impediment to its development, also furnished a natural defense against invasion: colonialists were unable to penetrate very deeply. They kept to the shores, to their ships and fortifications, their supplies of food and quinine. In the nineteenth century, if someone — like Stanley — dared to traverse the continent from east to west, the feat was widely celebrated for years to come. And it was largely due to these obstacles to communication that many African cultures and traditions have been able to survive intact to this day.
Officially, but only officially, colonialism reigned in Africa from the time of the Berlin West Africa Conference (188485), during which several European states (mainly England and France, but also Belgium, Germany, and Portugal) divided the whole continent among themselves, a status that persisted until Africa won independence in the second half of the twentieth century. In reality, however, colonial penetration began much earlier, as long ago as the fifteenth century, and flourished over the next five hundred years. The most shameful and brutal phase of this conquest was the trade in African slaves, which went on for more than three hundred years. Three hundred years of raids, roundups, pursuits, and ambushes, organized, often with the help of African and Arab partners, by white men. Millions of young Africans were deported across the Atlantic in horrific conditions, stuffed down the hatches of ships; those lucky to emerge alive would with their sweat build the riches and might of the New World.
Africa — persecuted and defenseless — was depopulated, destroyed, and ruined. Whole stretches of the continent were deserted; barren bush supplanted what had been sunny flowering lands. But the most painful and lasting imprints of this epoch were left upon the memory and consciousness of the Africans: centuries of disdain, humiliation, and suffering gave them an inferiority complex, and a conviction, deep in their hearts, of having been wronged.
When World War II erupted, colonialism was at its apogee. The course of the war, however, its symbolic undertones, would sow the seeds of the system’s defeat and demise.
How and why did this happen? First, a short detour into the foul realm of racial thinking. The central subject, the essence, the core of relations between Europeans and Africans during the colonial era, was the difference of race, of skin color. Everything — each exchange, connection, conflict — was translated into the language of black and white. And, of course, white was better, higher, more powerful than black. Whites were sir, master, sahib, bwana kubwa, unchallenged lords and rulers, sent by God to hold sway over the blacks. Into the African was inculcated the notion that the white man was untouchable, unconquerable, that whites constituted a homogeneous, cohesive force. Such was the ideology that ably supported the system of colonial domination, by teaching that to question or contest the system was absolutely pointless.
Then, suddenly, Africans recruited into the British and French armies in Europe observed that the white men were fighting one another, shooting one another, destroying one another’s cities. It was a revelation, a surprise, a shock. African soldiers in the French army witnessed their colonial sovereign, France, defeated and conquered. African soldiers in the British army saw the imperial capital, London, bombed; they saw whites seized with panic, fleeing, pleading, sobbing. They saw ragged, hungry whites, crying for bread. As they moved east, fighting white Germans alongside white Englishmen, they encountered columns of white people dressed in stripes, people-skeletons, people-rags.
The shock the African experienced as scenes from the white man’s war passed before his eyes was all the more powerful because earlier the inhabitants of Africa (with few exceptions, and in the case of the Congo, for example, none) were not permitted to travel to Europe, or anywhere else beyond their continent. And so their views of the lives of white men was based only on the luxurious circumstances whites enjoyed in the colonies.
And another thing: the inhabitant of Africa in the middle of the twentieth century had no sources of information other than what a neighbor, his village chief, or a colonial administrator told him. Therefore he knew of the world only as much as he was able to glean from his immediate surroundings, or what he heard from others during an evening’s chat by the fire.
The veterans of World War II who returned from Europe to Africa shortly reappear in the ranks of various movements and parties fighting for national independence. The number of these organizations swells rapidly; they spring up like mushrooms after a rain. They have various points of view, and various goals.
Those from the French colonies initially make limited demands. They do not speak yet of freedom. They ask only that all the inhabitants of the colony be made French citizens. Paris rejects this. Yes, someone who has been educated in French culture, who raises himself to its level — the so-called évolué—can become a French citizen. But such individuals will turn out to be exceptions.
The organizations in the British colonies are more radical. Their inspiration and program are the bold visions of the future as formulated by the descendants of slaves, Afro-American intellectuals of the second half of the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth. They called their doctrine pan-Africanism. Its principal creators: the activist Alexander Crumwell, the writer W. E. B. Du Bois, and the journalist Marcus Garvey (this last one from Jamaica). They differed among themselves, but agreed on two points: (1) that all blacks in the world — be they in South America or in Africa — constitute a single race, a single culture, and they should be proud of the color of their skin; (2) that all of Africa should be independent and united. Their slogan was “Africa for Africans!” On other matters they differed, W. E. B. Du Bois for example proclaimed that blacks should remain in the countries in which they now live, while Garvey held that all blacks, wherever they may be, should return to Africa. For a time he even sold photographs of Haile Selassie, proclaiming each was a valid return visa. He died in 1940 never having seen Africa himself.
A young activist and theoretician from Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, became an enthusiast of pan-Africanism while studying in America. He returned home in 1947 and founded a political party into which he recruited former World War II combatants as well as the young. At a rally in Accra he issued a war cry: “Independence now!” In those days, in colonial Africa, this resounded like a bomb exploding. Ten years later, Ghana became the first independent African country south of the Sahara, and Accra immediately became the provisional, informal center of all movements, ideas, and activities for the entire continent.