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Liberation Council (NLC) came to
power in February 1966.
The international media tends
to focus only on the areas of Africa
where problems continue to arise,
encouraging the old idea that
Africans are children, who need to
be instructed and who cannot be
trusted to run things on their own.
Some believe European wealth came
from exploiting the colonies, and
there is little doubt that it brought
financial benefit to more than a few.
The American poet and essayist,
Kenneth Rexroth, shrewdly
observed that the reason for the
liberation of the colonies was that
the colonizers had come to realize
that imperialism was unprofitable.
As early as 1892, the British journal,
The Economist
, had observed that
“East Africa is probably an
unproductive possession,” and soon
after the turn of the century, the
British would have been happy to
have passed it on to India. In the
final days, the British couldn’t
dispose of their ruinously expensive
empire fast enough.
To blame colonialism for the
problems of Africa is to take a step
too far: Ethiopia remained
uncolonized and today needs more
food aid than any other state, while
some of the most successful parts of
Africa are those that were heavily
settled by Europeans, and where
there was investment in
infrastructure, health, education,
and the promotion of some groups
of people over others.
It is curious that some of the
larger countries with fewer
problems have never taken a lead.
Some claim the artificial borders
that were drawn between the states
produced countries that were
guaranteed to fail, and which were
incapable of accepting change.
At the time of independence,
there was general agreement
over the need to retain borders,
the problem being to create a
national unity, or in Benedict
Anderson’s terms, an “imagined
community,” while others claimed
that the difficulty in achieving this
goal lay in ethnic, linguistic, and
cultural differences.
Independence and Nationhood
LEFT AND OPPOSITE:
Desmond Tutu
(left) is a South African social rights
activist and retired Anglican bishop who
rose to worldwide fame during the 1980s
as an opponent of apartheid. He was the
first to use the term “Rainbow Nation” to
describe South Africa’s multicultural
diversity. It was later adopted by the late
Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s first
black president pictured opposite with
Nigerian journalist Kayode Soyinka.
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