'The Colonial Experience in West Africa\r'

'The Twentieth coke brought with it vast changes for the peoples of westward Africa. The yoke of colonialism resound them together into a refreshing political, stinting, and affable order. It was as if hundreds of years of history had perfectly ended, and begun again afresh. In the wake of the Berlin wolfram Africa Conference, in 1885, the great powers of Europe †Britain, France, Ger some(prenominal), and as yet Portugal and Belgium †had carved up westerly Africa among themselves. European overlords either on the whole replaced, or else adoptive a â€Å"supervisory” position over the indwelling African authorities.\r\nProud kingdoms, interchangeable those of the Asante, Benin, and Dahomey, found themselves guided to adapt or disappear, as tungsten Africans strugg direct to make comprehend of a world that had been turned completely upside down and intimate out. For â€Å"inside out,” could substantially describe the reversal of stinting r oles that came a farsighted with European conquest. Formerly, European stackrs had stayed nasty to the coast, allowing the African rulers and merchants to supply Europe and her sunrise(prenominal) World colonies with slaves and modernistic(prenominal) â€Å"merchandise.\r\nThe British had in the end succeeded in ending the slave clientele some years before, and more of the coastal kingdoms of due west Africa had languished as a result. nigh had been al close to wholly dependent upon the trade in human beings †now on that point would break to be new-fashioned sources of r counterbalanceue. For the most part, these new sources of income would be developed by Europeans who would exploit West Africas people and resources for the do good of their home countries. However, the Africans would as rise learn from their new masters. Some of them would obtain a westerly program line, or work to introduce the ideas of the novel industrial world to Africa.\r\nEuropean sci ence, technology, education, political, economic, cultural, and sacred ideas would all down a darksome impact on West Africa. The pre-colonial relationship between Europeans and West Africans was one of plebeian trade. In the first half of the nineteenth Century, Europeans vastly adjoind their purchases of palm oil, and besides continued to buy tropical hardwoods, temporary hookup Africans received the products of Europes industrial revolution: cotton wool and woolen textiles and iron. 1 It was unless as direct European modulate began to augment that economic conditions were gradually modified.\r\nThe introduction of deep brown by European missionaries in the 1860s, led to its becoming a study hard currency crop and primary ex porthole by the earliest period of European colonial domination, around 1900. Gold and coca were the mainstays of the prudence in the Gold lantern slide (now Ghana). To observe up with their seemingly insatiable demands for these and other prod ucts, the British, french, and other others, introduced much modern techniques of production. In particular, they employed industrial methods of mining, and built railroads and port facilities to enable a vastly change magnitude flow of goods.\r\nYet it would be prostitute to think that was no African answer to changed economic conditions. Already, in the late 1800s, African merchant families, such as the Sarbahs, began to get ahead rubberise production: In contrast to the palm oil trade, the rubber trade, because of a greater monetary return per building block of labour input and weight, drew into its land thousands of producers from the deep interior, including Sefwi, Kwahu, Asante and the distant states of Brong-Ahafo, all more than 100 miles from the coast.\r\nThe rubber trade also gave rise to a new as carriage of midriff-men or broken from the Fanti states, Asin, Denkyera, and Akim, who carried the trade to the advance limits of the forest zone and in so doing a ccelerated the extension of the cash economy. caoutchouc became a major export with shipments totalling well over one million pounds playscript in 1886; and by 1893, the Gold Coast ranked first among the rubber trade countries of the British Empire and third in the world. 3\r\nAfricans were, therefore, fully able to adapt themselves to European conditions in order to increase the size and extent of their markets, even if this necessitated adopting new techniques, and even entirely new crops, interchangeable rubber. On the down side, an economy found on growing and harvesting rubber latex caused significant social upheavals. The influence of the coastal mercantile families and kingdoms waned in estimation of inland economic interests. 4 Families standardized the Sarbahs expanded their trading networks deep into the Interior, scuttle up branch story, cajoling purchasers, and further tour economic focus toward the one rife crop.\r\nThey also became increasingly dependent on fl uctuations in the European market. 5 Furthermore, the participation between European patroniseed economic development, and searching European get word can be seen in the 1920s Gold Coast, where British governor Guggisberg pursued a policy that was in many run acrosss detrimental to the prospective of the African peoples chthonic his control: Anti-modernisation, anti-urban, and anti-development. Regulations and barriers against knowledgeableness pro careerrated…. Official policy did zilch to gain the emergence of a commercial middle class.\r\nIts effect instead was to establish a highly formidable machinery of bureaucratic control…. The most damaging effect 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 large and bitter anti-colonial struggles much brilliant natural endowment 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 veritable opportunities.\r\nThe lack of skill and opportunity commit to native West Africans paths naturally to a discussion of European education and the new horizons it presented. Prior to the era of colonial domination, West Africas peoples had had little contact with westward ideas, unpack for he occasional interactions with Christian missionaries. The states, hulky and small, of West Africa had been universally pre-industrial, and had possessed nonhing in the way of modern communications, transportation, or even the kind of complex educational and political institutions that existed in the Christian and Islamic worlds.\r\nMissionaries 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 k nowledge. Discipline was important, not only to make the children study, but also to mold desirable habits and (that was usually considered to be even more important than information itself). 7 On the whole, Western education extended only to teaching subjects that Europeans ideal would be useful to their â€Å"charges.\r\nVocational upbringing was sufficient 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(prenominal) level of education for their children. â€Å"Few pupils cherished to undergo the cost and the hardship of study, only to be prepared for a rural life and a low support standard. ” 9 In the 1930s, in french West Africa, Colonial Government officials began to suppose a new approach that appeared to look forward to a synthesis of the European and autochthonic traditions.\r\nFrances redefined mission civilisatrice [civilizing mission] was to be effect… by teaching the subject communitys how to vital according to â€Å"authentic African traditions,”… This sight of Frances role overseas as the withstander of indigenous cultures in the colonies challenged earlier presentations of the colonial mission that had presented France as the bearer of â€Å"European civilization” and â€Å"French culture” destined to bring Africa out of the â€Å"darkness” in which many late-nineteenth-century colonizers claimed its people lived. 10\r\nThe French administrators went so far as to strongly encourage African arts and crafts, sponsor African festivals †even to teach Africans â€Å"how to be African”(! ). In order to invalidate contamination 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 spy leading natives in local family line dances, etc. 11 Such plans represented an interesting attempt to keep Native elites loyal to France, while at the like time, well-rooted in their Native lands and cultures.\r\nOstensibly, such practices would annul the â€Å"stateless” quality of Africans educated under the earlier system. Nonetheless, exposure to European educational and economic ideas †even when those ideas were fused with African traditions †could not forestall an African liking for greater freedom and opportunity along European lines. Colonial rulers often oblige a dual system of arbitrator †a European one for major offenses, and a Native one for those offenses deemed tyke by the Colonial Authorities.\r\nThe French, early on, abolished the Native courts and legal system, except in old cases, while even under the British, it was sort of clear that Native justice was understandably secondary to the â€Å"real” justice of the Europeans. 12 Dichotomies such as these further intrench 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 divergence with the French aim of achieving some sort of â€Å"evolution” among Africans. 13 It was taken utterly for granted that African culture was inherently inferior to French civilization.\r\nBy contrast, the British authorities endeavored to maintain equilibrium by combining traditional African smallholder community with the demands of the British Cocoa Board. Rural West African society was to be maintain at all costs to disallow a breakdown of the social order, such as occurred when jobs were scarce and tikes left for the cities in the hope of finding work. There, oddly enough, the British actually encouraged the growth of an urban petit bourgeoisie in the dream of preventing rebellion.\r\nWith the turn over of world markets during the Great Depression, urban and peasant unrest increase d †with the noticeable leaving that now a radicalized bourgeoisie was gettable to lead that unrest. 14 In short, the European colonial administrations of West Africa both helped and use Africans. With their thirst for profits, and a belief in the superiority of their own institutions, technology, and culture, they dreamed of â€Å" travel” the native population while at the analogous time keeping that population economically productive, and under firm European control.\r\nYet in so doing, they introduced many attributes of the modern world to the peoples of West Africa. European notions of development, education, and justice split traditional African life into separate public and snobby 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 remains a problem even today.\r\nOne of the lasting legacies of European vi llage in West Africa was this impartial change; this creation of a society alive in two worlds, trained the right way 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.\r\n'