Like the leaders of the new states in South and Southeast
Asia, most African leaders came from the urban middle
class. They had studied in Europe or the United States
and spoke and read European languages. Although most
were profoundly critical of colonial policies, they ap-
peared to accept the relevance of the Western model to
Africa and gave at least lip service to Western democratic
values.
Their views on economics were somewhat more diverse.
Some, like Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya and General
Mobutu Sese Seko (1930 –1998) of Zaire, were advocates
of Western-style capitalism. Others, like Julius Nyerere
(b. 1922) of Tanzania, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, and
Sékou Touré (1922–1984) of Guinea, preferred an “African
form of socialism,” which bore slight resemblance to
the Marxist-Leninist socialism practiced in the Soviet
Union and was more like the syndicalist movement in
Western Europe. According to its advocates, it was descended
from traditional communal practices in precolonial
Africa.
Like the leaders of other developing countries, the
new political leaders in Africa were strongly nationalistic
and generally accepted the colonial boundaries. But as
we have seen, these boundaries were artificial creations
of the colonial powers. Virtually all of the new states included
widely diverse ethnic, linguistic, and territorial
groups. Zaire, for example, was composed of more than
two hundred territorial groups speaking seventy-five different
languages.
Some African leaders themselves harbored attitudes
that undermined the fragile sense of common identity
needed to knit these diverse groups together. A number
of leaders—including Nkrumah of Ghana, Touré of
Guinea, and Kenyatta of Kenya—were enticed by the
dream of pan-Africanism, a concept of continental unity
that transcended national boundaries and was to find its
concrete manifestation in the Organization of African
Unity (OAU), which was founded in Addis Ababa,
Ethiopia, in 1963 (see the box on p. 242).
Pan-Africanism originated among African intellectuals
during the first half of the twentieth century. A basic
element was the conviction that there was a distinctive
“African personality” that owed nothing to Western materialism
and provided a common sense of destiny for all
black African peoples. According to Aimé Césaire, a
West Indian of African descent and a leading ideologist
of the movement, whereas Western civilization prized rational
thought and material achievement, African culture
emphasized emotional expression and a common
sense of humanity.
The concept of a unique African destiny (known to its
originators by the French term négritude, or “blackness”),
was in part a natural defensive response to the social Darwinist
concepts of Western racial superiority and African
inferiority that were popular in Europe and the United
States during the early years of the twentieth century. At
the same time, it was stimulated by growing self-doubt
among many European intellectuals after World War I,
who feared that Western civilization was on a path of selfdestruction.
Aimé Césaire compared the white world,
appalling weary from its immense effort
the crack of its joints rebelling under the hardness of the stars
with that of the Africans,
Those who invented neither gunpowder nor compass
those who tamed neither steam nor electricity
those who explored neither sea nor sky
but those who know the humblest corners of the country
suffering
those whose only journeys were uprooting
those who went to sleep on their knees
those who were domesticated and christianized
those who were inoculated with degeneration.2
The idea had more appeal to Africans from French
colonies than to those from British possessions. Yet it
also found adherents in the British colonies, as well as in
the United States and elsewhere in the Americas. African
American intellectuals such as W. E. B. Dubois and
George Padmore and the West Indian politician Marcus
Garvey attempted to promote a “black renaissance” by
popularizing the idea of a distinct African personality.
Their views were shared by several of the new African
leaders, including Leopold Senghor (b. 1906) of Senegal,
Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, and Jomo Kenyatta of
Kenya. Nkrumah in particular appeared to hope that a
pan-African union could be established that would unite
all of the new countries of the continent in a broader
community.
World History
