Epilogue: African Destinies

Summary

WHAT KIND OF AFRICA MAY NOW EMERGE, WHAT MODERN VARIANT of an old civilisation? Happily it is no part of an historian's duty to be wise before the event. If this book has any value, however, it must raise certain practical questions. Perhaps I may end by discussing briefly what these are.

The upheavals of the late 1960s were not the fruit of accident, bad luck or human incapacity, but of a crisis long in the making, a crisis of institutions on a continental scale. Its early signs may be found in some regions soon after 1800; in others, perhaps, as far back as the massive export of captives after 1650. Masked or delayed in precolonial times by the repeated adaptation of traditional institutions, this is also a crisis that was often deepened by the dismantlement of the colonial period.

It is furthermore a crisis whose ideological confusion has been again enlarged by various illusions. Many people outside Africa, and some within, have mistakenly believed that the colonial period not only swept away the old but also, like the English industrial revolution, laid foundations for the new. Any balanced survey of the evidence will now reveal that it achieved the first but not the second. All that emerged from the colonial period, in a structural sense, was an institutional void concealed for a while behind a political safety-curtain painted with parliamentary symbols of European provenance, a mere faf ade of order on lines drawn by alien cultures.

To most of those behind this curtain it might be distressingly clear that the old structures were in collapse, and that no new ones of enduring value had arrived to take their place. Most of those in front of the curtain were content to think otherwise. They learned better after the curtain had gone up, on the day of independence, and the elites of western European and American training were duly embarked on their allotted roles. Soon a growing tumult could be heard in the wings. Soon this tumult rushed on stage.

This is not, I know, how a majority of colonial observers have understood the drama. For them the colonial period was constructive because it was thought to have conducted Africans into the modern world, and deliberately laid down the road to African equality with the rest of mankind.