A Sahel-less ECOWAS

Between the 19th century and the mid-20th century, many pan-Africanists, from Edward Blyden to Cheikh Anta Diop, held the belief that an external reversal of fortune or divergence characterized the modern world. By this, they meant that Africans were even materially (in terms of wealth and civilizational accomplishments) at par with, or even superior to the Europeans, but fortunes reversed with the Atlantic slave trade and colonial rule. This reversal and divergence then had to be counter-reversed first by gaining political independence (or collective action within a French Community) and then by pursuing economic modernization (along with a regional federation). The examination of thoughts and praxis of Kwame Nkrumah, Léopold Senghor, Félix Houphouët-Boigny and other nationalists have often been geared towards an external focus—the battle against colonialism and neo-colonialism in order to achieve counter-reversal of material fortunes.

However, among pan-Africanists and postcolonial scholars, for West Africa, what was neglected was an internal reversal of fortune and material divergence. The internal reversal refers to the argument that, on one hand, Western Sudan hosted the largest empires in West Africa including the Sokoto Caliphate, Ghana, Mali and Songhai; the bulk of urbanization, communications, agriculture, military, industry, and transportation technologies; the lucrative trans-Saharan trade routes, crafts industries and elite literacy in the pre-Atlantic period. On the other hand, the colonial and postcolonial eras have seen the same area being the poorest in West Africa.

Yet, pan-African scholarship has often contrasted the seeming relative unity of pan-African movements to the territorialization and ethnic chauvinism that accelerated with colonial powers’ capitulation to Africans by granting self-governance after the Second World War. For West Africa, this increased fragmentation of pan-Africanism, however, did not arise suddenly but was indeed always a latent feature.

Black Atlantic pan-Africanists and nationalists, in their visions for a wider spread of African nationalism in the West African sub-region, typically located capital cities in coastal states. Paul Cuffe, an African-American businessman and abolitionist envisioned Sierra Leone as the basis for black-led business ventures that would enable the economic uplifting of black people. The visions of a United States of Africa advocated by Hilary Teague—one-time Liberian Secretary of State—and others, or a Pan-African Empire, saw Liberia as its base. The American explorer, Martin Delany, saw Lagos as the base of a great African metropolis which would provide aid to the emancipation efforts of American blacks. And at the turn of the century, the Gold Coast Lawyer, Caseley Hayford, who would eventually found the National Congress of British West Africa in 1918, argued for an ‘Imperial West Africa, with federal Fanti and Ashanti as a basis’ and led by the Gold Coast and Ashanti because ‘their sons were richly endowed by Nature with the qualities of leadership and guidance’.

Many West African coastal and diasporic elites held attitudes towards the African hinterland that were indistinguishable from the Europeans who had been responsible for their training. Abbé Boilat—a catholic priest who was part of the Creole communities in Saint Louis and Gorée—believed that Africa had a rich ancient culture in classical times but, as historian Robert July restates, ‘only with the destructive and barbarous force of Islam did Africa fall into long ages of darkness, but she was once again to rise through the agency of her initial strength – the Christian church.’ J.J. Roberts, Liberia’s first president, was also committed to the superiority of Western education and strongly objected to Edward Blyden’s plan to teach Arabic at Liberia College. The first Dahomeyan nationalist, Louis Hunkanrin, who was exiled to Mauritania in 1923, characterized Mauritania as ‘uncivilized’ and expressed bias against Islam.

Moreover, while pan-Africanists take pride in Fourah Bay College (founded in 1827) and Liberia College (founded in 1862) as the oldest institutions of Western higher learning in West Africa, it is not often recalled that these were located in coastal capitals—Freetown and Monrovia, respectively. Until the 1950s entry to these institutions was largely restricted to members of the Creole community, which political scientist, Christopher Clapham notes, ‘provided them with an enormous superiority in the possession of professional skills.’

These tensions were also present abroad as coastal West Africans predominated the leadership and membership of the West African Students Union (WASU) (founded in 1925 in England) and the Fédération des étudiants d’Afrique noire en France (founded in 1950 in France). This is no surprise as, by 1953, the Northern Territories of the wealthiest British West African colony, the Gold Coast, had produced only one university graduate trained in Britain, Edmund Alhassan. For the French Soudan, which was the most economically advanced among the Sahel territories, under the French Third Republic (1870-1940) only three per cent of school-age children attended school and none was sent to France for advanced training. It was not until the 1950s that there were Sudanese studying abroad.

Dr. Herbert Bankole-Bright (a member of the National Congress of British West Africa) from Sierra Leone, was the initiator of the first meeting of West African students in London. Despite his pan-African credentials, in response to the prospect of Creoles being politically overpowered by the Sierra Leone protectorate peoples, Bankole-Bright proposed the secession of Freetown from the protectorate. Joseph B. Danquah, ex-president of WASU and a major actor in Gold Coast nationalist politics, although a sympathizer of Northern Gold Coastian causes, was fed up with the extent of Northern Ghanaian delay in accepting independence from colonial rule despite the northern elites’ insistence that economic development of their region needed to proceed. These tensions are also visible in the African press, which often was the locus of dissemination of nationalist and pan-African ideas.

Blind spots are observable in Adom Getachew’s account of the Black Atlantic tradition of ‘world-making after empire’. Getachew outlines how in 1943, Nnamdi Azikiwe had joined fellow African journalists as part of the West African Press Delegation in demanding that the provisions of the Atlantic Charter be extended to the colonies, signing a memorandum on postwar reconstruction which demanded various political and civil rights for colonized subjects and extensive social and economic reforms. Yet, this scuttles over the fact that this delegation from British West Africa (Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone and Gambia) was dominated by coastal elites. Abubakar Imam, who was the only Saharan elite among the eight-member delegation, was the only member of the delegation who refused to sign the memorandum mainly because he believed that northern Nigeria had not reached the same level of development as southern Nigeria. Hollis Lynch praise s Kingsley O. Mbadiwe’s 1942 book, British and Axis Aims in Africa, but Abubakar Imam, the editor of the first Northern Nigerian newspaper, recounts in his memoir, that some Northern Nigerians ‘were amazed at a Southerner being so rash as to make such statements about the North,’ as well as the fact that the book’s proposed distribution of government posts in an independent Nigeria completely left out the North. Mbadiwe himself, a southern Nigerian, had co-founded the African Students Association in the U.S. in 1941 alongside other coastal West African elites, partly stimulated by knowledge of WASU’s existence.