After World War II, Europeans reluctantly recognized
that the end result of colonial rule in Africa would be African
self-government, if not full independence. Accordingly,
the African population would have to be trained to
handle the responsibilities of representative government.
In many cases, however, relatively little had been done to
prepare the local population for self-rule. Early in the
colonial era, during the late nineteenth century, African
administrators had held influential positions in several
British colonies, and one even served as governor of
the Gold Coast. Several colonies had legislative councils
with limited African participation, although their functions
were solely advisory. But with the formal institution
of colonial rule, senior positions were reserved for the
British, although local authority remained in the hands of
native rulers.
After World War II, most British colonies introduced
reforms that increased the representation of the local
population. Members of legislative and executive councils
were increasingly chosen through elections, and Africans
came to constitute a majority of these bodies.
Elected councils at the local level were introduced in the
1950s to reduce the power of the tribal chiefs and clan
heads, who had controlled local government under indirect
rule. An exception was South Africa, where European
domination continued. In the Union of South Africa,
the franchise was restricted to whites except in the
former territory of the Cape Colony, where persons of
mixed ancestry had enjoyed the right to vote since the
mid-nineteenth century. Black Africans did win some
limited electoral rights in Northern and Southern Rhodesia
(now Zambia and Zimbabwe), although whites generally
dominated the political scene.
A similar process of political liberalization was taking
place in the French colonies. At first, the French tried to
assimilate the African peoples into French culture. By the
1920s, however, racist beliefs in Western cultural superiority
and the tenacity of traditional beliefs and practices
among Africans had somewhat discredited this ideal. The
French therefore substituted a more limited program of
assimilating African elites into Western culture and using
them as administrators at the local level as a link to the
remainder of the population. This policy resembled the
British policy of indirect rule, although it placed more
emphasis on French culture in training local administrators.
It had only limited success, however, because many
Western-educated Africans refused to leave the urban
centers to live in the countryside. Others, who were exposed
to radical ideas while studying abroad, rejected the
prevailing forms of Western civilization and called for the
restoration of national independence.
The Nazi occupation of northern France had an effect
on black Africans somewhat like that of the Japanese occupation
of Southeast Asia on Asians. In 1944, the Free
French movement under General Charles de Gaulle issued
the Brazzaville Declaration, which promised equal
rights, though not self-government, in a projected French
Union composed of France and its overseas possessions.
After the war, a legislative assembly for the new organization
was created, although its political powers were limited.
At the same time, African representatives were
elected to the French National Assembly in Paris. But
even this new community of nations had separate categories
of citizenship based on education and ethnic background,
and decisions on major issues were still made in
France or by French officials in French Africa.
World History
