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The Commission for Technical Co-operation in Africa, 1950–65

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2008

Isebill V. Gruhn
Affiliation:
Stevenson College, University of California, Santa Cruz1

Extract

General Smuts was one of the first to draw attention to the diverse and often conflicting principles applied to Africa by the various European colonial powers. In his Rhodes Memorial Lecture delivered at Oxford in 1929, Smuts made a plea for a survey of the whole situation to find a way to exchange information about Africa. This proposal developed into Lord Hailey's African Survey, published in 1936. After World War II, European governments began to think seriously of co-ordinating their efforts in Africa. In 1945 the French and the British engaged in mutual discussions and were joined two years later by the Belgians, the Portuguese, the South Africans, and the Rhodesians. Scientists working in Africa expressed the need for a framework for co-operation at the Royal Society's Empire Scientific Conference held in London in 1946. This led to the convening of the African Regional Scientific Conference in 1949, where scientists working in nearly every country in Africa south of the Sahara met to review the role, problems, and possibilities of co-operation.2

Type
Africana
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1971

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References

Page 459 note 2 Worthington, E. B., Science in the Development of Africa (London, 1958), pp. 48–9.Google Scholar

Page 460 note 1 ‘Report by the Secretary General to the 8th Session of C.C.T.A.’ (Lisbon, 1953), p. 4.Google Scholar

Page 461 note 1 See Lawson, Ruth, International Regional Organizations (New York, 1962), pp. 287–95,Google Scholar for the full text.

Page 463 note 1 Interview with Cheysson in New York, 1964, confirmed by Verdier in Montpellier, 1965.

Page 463 note 2 ‘Participation of the Republic of South Africa in the Activities of the C.C.T.A.’; CC/B: 1/67–24, Lagos, 22 January 1962.

Page 465 note 1 Interviews with Cheysson and Verdier corroborated this point. It was apparently the so-called ‘moderate’ Nigeria which took the lead on South African and Portuguese expulsion from C.C.T.A./C.S.A.

Page 465 note 2 The delay emerges very clearly from the frequent letters sent by the Commission reminding African governments of payments due; C.C.T.A. files, Lagos.

Page 466 note 1 Many of the matters mentioned above are covered quite candidly in ‘Report of the Secretary General to the 3rd Meeting of the Administrative Committee of the Commission’ (Abidjan, 1962).

Page 466 note 2 See ‘Recommendations and Conclusions of the 18th Session of the Assembly of C.C.T.A.’ (Dar es Salaam, 1963), pp. 89.Google Scholar