by Guy Arnold
Whatever the long-term judgements of Nkrumah’s impact, he managed during the first half of the 1960s to bring the Ghana economy close to a standstill. Ghana had been one of the first countries to develop a cash economy that was based on a wide distribution of wealth through the production of cocoa on small farms. However, something like two-fifths of Ghana’s imports over the years 1961–65 were financed by the depletion of reserves or by commercial credit and when the coup was mounted against Nkrumah in February 1966 the country faced short-term external debts of US$112 million and medium-term debts of a further US$423 million. The troubled politics of Ghana during the first half of the 1960s and the parlous state of the economy that resulted illustrate, as in few other cases, how politics that take an economic base for granted will erode or ruin that base no matter how sound it may have been. Few African countries had achieved independence with a better economic outlook than Ghana which then had accumulated reserves of £200 million in London; it was the world’s largest producer of cocoa and a significant producer of coffee, palm kernels, copra and bananas for export.
Nkrumah’s ambition to modernize the Ghana economy was on a parallel with that of Nasser in Egypt; his great project was the Volta Dam. Officially known as the Akosombo dam, the Volta River Dam was completed in 1965. It had an especial importance because it was regarded as an early example of the new approach to development that was being promoted at that time: the concept of massive development projects that would enable newly independent countries to break old (colonial) economic patterns and achieve economic take-off. The dam had been conceived at the time of Ghana’s independence, pushed by Nkrumah and jointly financed by Ghana, the World Bank, the United States and Britain. The dam created Lake Volta, one of the largest man-made lakes in the world with a capacity of 148,000 million cubic metres. The lake changed the ecology of much of Ghana and created a new and extensive fishing industry. The Volta Aluminium Company (VALCO), a joint US venture with very extensive US and Ghana Government aid, built a smelter in Ghana to which bauxite from the United States or the West Indies was to be transported instead of using Ghana’s own 200 million ton bauxite resource or bauxite from neighbouring Guinea. Furthermore, US loans for the project were provided on condition that the power made available to VALCO was low-cost. Ghana, which had provided half the capital, expected to repay the loan out of power sales. Interestingly, Nkrumah failed to see that the deal illustrated all the characteristics of neo-colonialism that he so readily decried in other areas. Ghana, it is true, gained the necessary capital and technical input for the construction of the hydro-electric project that would provide power for the national grid and agriculture, and the lake for irrigation, fisheries and transport. On the other hand it had to agree that the VALCO smelter could use imported alumina and also guarantee that total taxes should not be increased over a substantial period and that there should be full convertibility of all net profits for 30 years. These conditions made full Ghanaian control impossible and represented a high price to pay for the dam. ‘Nothing could more clearly demonstrate the precautions taken by international firms to ensure that control of the total productive process should never be entrusted to one of the new states – nor better illustrate the need for regional planning in Africa itself.’15
FRANCOPHONE WEST AFRICA
In 1958 Guinea represented the extreme nationalist wing of French African politics and Sekou Touré’s brave statement ‘It will fall to us to preserve, for Guinea and for Africa, the honour of African man… We shall vote “No” to a community which is merely the French union re-christened… We shall vote “No” to inequality’ had to be paid for and the price was to be a high one. Guinea at a stroke lost its main overseas market in France and had to turn for help to a reluctant USSR. Traditional agriculture accounted for just under half the GDP and still accounted for 43 per cent in 1976 but luckily Guinea possessed 30 per cent of the world’s known bauxite reserves as well as iron ore and diamonds. During the 1960s it concentrated upon rapid development of its power potential for the mining sector; otherwise, its manufacturing base was small. Having rejected French patronage, Touré was forced to go it alone. He was both a radical and a Marxist and became a leading exponent of the one-party state and the cult of personality (his own). Although he was famous in Africa for his stand against de Gaulle, at home he became unchallenged political leader but only as the result of increasing oppression. In his first speech after independence Touré asked citizens to spy on each other. He suppressed liberty of information while private newspapers and radios were banned and citizens had to declare the extent of their wealth. His socialist policies ensured that little foreign capital was available for investment and the economy declined. He ‘discovered’ a number of plots against himself during the decade and used these to eliminate his opponents while also blaming France, the Ivory Coast and Senegal for fomenting discontent. By the end of the 1960s his dictatorship had reached its zenith but he had driven 500,000 of his people into exile and lost the confidence of the rest.
Neighbouring Mali was the third of the radical states of West Africa (with Ghana and Guinea). In April 1959 Mali joined briefly with Senegal in a Federation, which became independent on 20 June 1960. However, Senegal seceded two months later and the Republic of Mali was proclaimed on 22 September 1960. The new President, Modibo Keita, rapidly established a one-party state that accorded him full presidential powers. He tried to create a socialist economy in a country that geographically was huge and landlocked and had a tiny population most of whose people were subsistence farmers. There were some minerals but these were not exploited since they were small in quantity and in remote parts of the country. By mid-1966 the disbursement of foreign loans had reached the alarming figure of US$120 million, nearly equivalent to a third of the GDP, so that the country was accumulating huge debt service obligations for the future. Keita was obliged to come to terms with the non-socialist world he had hoped to eschew when in 1967 he felt compelled to renegotiate entry to the franc zone, which he had left in 1962. Leaving aside any shortcomings on the part of Keita, the abandonment of his socialist path was dictated by the fact that Mali’s economic base was so small and weak that it precluded effective independence of action.
Senegal was France’s oldest black colony and its capital Dakar had been the military and administrative headquarters of French West Africa. Leopold Senghor had opposed the constitutional changes introduced with the loi cadre of 1956, which had established local government for the constituent colonies of French West Africa but not for the region as a whole. This prevented the creation of a federation – something opposed by the influential Houphouët-Boigny of the Ivory Coast – and in effect meant the balkanization of the whole French territory. Senghor had favoured the unity of French West Africa and some form of federation that would have given it real bargaining power after independence and in this respect he was closer to Nkrumah than most other Francophone leaders. Because of its administrative role under France, Senegal was one of the most developed of the French territories at independence and its commercial and manufacturing sectors allowed it to compete with Ivory Coast, though both countries were heavily dependent upon agriculture as the source of their wealth. However, Senegal’s strategic situation had always been more important than its economic wealth and Dakar was one of the best ports in Africa and served the hinterland beyond Senegal. One of the most interesting of the new leaders, Senghor was a writer and poet, the proponent of the idea of negritude and deeply influenced by his love of France. His failure to establish a federation meant that Senegal lost the advantages of its former administrative role for the region and had to fall back upon an economy largely dependent upon the production and export of groundnuts, although it also had the most important textile industry in French black Africa. Senegal briefly joined with its neighbour in the short-lived Federation of Mali but this did not work out. Thereafter, Senghor worked with the Brazzaville Group of moderate countries and restored his relations with Houphouët-Boi
gny which had become strained over the argument about a federation.
The richest of the Francophone West African territories at independence was Ivory Coast whose agriculture and fisheries were the source of its wealth; exports included coffee, wood, cocoa, bananas, cotton and pineapples and in contrast to Ghana, where economic and political neglect allowed its vital cocoa sector to decline, Ivory Coast by good management would later replace Ghana as the leading cocoa exporter. The economy had grown rapidly over the years 1950 to 1960 although the manufacturing and mining sectors remained insignificant on any continental reckoning. Félix Houphouët-Boigny who ruled Ivory Coast from independence in 1960 to his death in 1993 was one of the most influential figures in Francophone Africa. ‘The architect of the Brazzaville and so of the Monrovia bloc, his policy is the antithesis of Dr Nkrumah’s, canvassing the close co-operation of independent African states instead of their federation or union.’16 Towards the end of his long rule Houphouët-Boigny was to be criticized for his extraordinary extravagance in building a vast basilica at Yamoussoukro but he always insisted upon a show to support the dignity of his office and the extravagance of the Presidential Residence in Abidjan shocked many outsiders and Africans in 1961 when they entered it although ‘an Ivorian journalist who inspected the palace on the day after the big reception, exclaimed: “My God, anyone could live here – the Queen of England, President Kennedy. It makes me feel thrilled to be an Ivory Coast citizen.”’17 Houphouët-Boigny had served as a cabinet minister in France for 13 years before he became President of Ivory Coast and was equally at home in France as in Africa. In his pragmatic way he gave Ivory Coast stability and growth. He was always pro-French and pro-West and totally opposed to Nkrumah’s concept of African Union. Writing at the beginning of the 1960s Ronald Segal provides an accurate vignette of this extraordinary man: ‘Indeed, if a bloc of modern African states exists, pro-Western and maintaining close political and economic links with France, Houphouët-Boigny is more than anyone else responsible. His history is the history of France’s rapprochment with Africa, and his policies constitute an alternative to the vigorous African nationalism of the Casablanca states.’18
Dahomey (later Benin) as we have seen experienced no less than six coups in the first 12 years of independence although, happily, these were bloodless. They resulted from the economic difficulties the country suffered during these years and the hope, unfulfilled, that a new government would be better able to balance the budget than its predecessor. More than the other countries of French West Africa, Dahomey suffered from the break up of the federation and ‘never recovered from this balkanization, for not only were the years which followed to show the difficulty both of improving agriculture and industrializing this little state, but also the return of the Beninians who had been expelled from other territories was to make more difficult the proper management of public finance’.19 The economy was overwhelmingly dependent upon agriculture with only tiny manufacturing and mining sectors. Like the rest of the region its principal markets were in Europe.
Togo had been split under the mandate system of the League of Nations between Britain and France and at independence in 1960 the British mandated territory was joined to Ghana. An agricultural economy, Togo’s staple exports were cocoa and coffee. Mining and the export of its substantial deposits of phosphates began in 1961. The first six years of independence were politically troubled and the country only achieved greater stability under Col. Etienne Gnassingbé Eyadéma who came to power by means of a coup on 13 January 1967. By that time the coup had become the most familiar means of changing governments in West Africa.
Like Togo, the former German colony of Cameroon had been divided under the mandate system of the League of Nations between Britain and France. Following independence in 1960 and the subsequent integration of Southern Cameroons, the British Trusteeship territory, into the new state (the other British section of the country, Northern Cameroons, elected to join Nigeria) the new Federal Republic of Cameroon emerged on 1 October 1961. French Cameroon, consisting of 166,489 square miles of territory with a population of 3,225,000 people, was by far the larger, dominant part of the new state; the former British Southern Cameroons covered only 16,581 square miles and had a population of 814,000 people. The President, Ahmadou Ahidjo, began the task of political and economic integration and between 1961 and 1971 federal services were expanded in the English and French states with greater federal responsibilities in particular for education, economic planning, finance, transportation and agriculture. In addition, most of the existing political parties were merged in the Union Nationale Camerounaise (UNC), though not until 1966 when President Ahidjo felt strong enough to carry through this measure, and then he made himself president of the new party. At this time Cameroon had one of the more diversified economies of Africa while also providing sea communications for landlocked Chad and Central African Republic. Though agriculture provided the economic base Cameroon possessed a wider manufacturing sector than most West African countries and during the 1960s and 1970s was to meet 50 per cent of its manufactured requirements from internal production. Ahidjo inherited a nation divided racially, ethnically and by language and for two decades he concentrated on securing control by centralization and by boosting the importance of the single ruling party and his own presidential powers. He was largely successful in this aim but at the price of curtailing civil liberties, individual rights and the freedom of the press. Ahidjo pursued a pro-Western and especially pro-French foreign policy and maintained a mixed economy in order to attract foreign investment. ‘He created a quiescent “stable” state in which private enterprise, foreign capital and the economy as a whole was able to flourish.’20
Gabon, which became independent in 1960, was very much the creation of Leon M’ba. In 1952 he had gained election to the territorial assembly and in 1953 he reorganized the Mouvement Mixte Gabonais and turned it into the Bloc Démocratique Gabonais (BDG), which remained the local division of the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA). In 1956 he became mayor of Libreville. M’ba was a strong supporter of Houphouët-Boigny and like him opposed a federal structure for French West Africa at independence and favoured, instead, each country preserving its own system and maintaining its own links with France, a policy that was appreciated in Paris. In 1958 Gabon had voted unanimously for autonomy within the French Community rather than for complete independence; when in 1960, like the rest of French West Africa, Gabon became fully independent, M’ba became the country’s first president. M’ba was conservative in his policies and very pro-France whose African policies he served well. He was consistent in his opposition to any form of federalism and, moreover, discouraged all links among the independent states of Equatorial Africa that went beyond loose economic and military cooperation. The population of the country was a mere 500,000 at independence and when in 1964 a coup temporarily toppled M’ba from power France intervened militarily to restore him. Most of the country’s agriculture was at the subsistence level and the economy depended upon the exploitation of Gabon’s rich mineral resources and its forest products. Minerals included petroleum (Gabon became a member of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries), uranium and manganese export of which during the 1960s gave the country one of the highest per capita incomes on the continent. There were also huge iron ore deposits at Mekambo in the interior but exploitation had to await the construction of the Trans-Gabonais railway. When M’ba died in March 1967 he was succeeded by his young Vice-President and firm supporter Albert-Bernard Bongo who continued his policies and close alliance with France. Bongo believed that private enterprise provided the right answer for Gabon’s development and adopted the slogan: ‘Give me a sound economy and I will give you stable politics.’
Gabon’s neighbour, the Republic of Congo (Brazzaville), was more developed though far poorer than Gabon. Its greatest asset was the Congo River on which the capital Brazzaville was situated to serve as a port and junction for traffic using the Ubangui and Cong
o rivers. The other major city, Pointe Noire on the Atlantic, was also a port and the services these two ports provided made a significant contribution to the country’s GDP. Brazzaville had been the administrative centre of French Equatorial Africa and the dissolution of this federation faced Congo with a difficult period of adjustment. The country’s first President, Abbé Fulbert Youlou, soon made himself unpopular with his pro-Western policies and support for Moïse Tshombe’s secession in Katanga. Prior to independence Youlou had proposed a Union of Central African Republics but negotiations broke down because of Gabon’s reluctance to sacrifice its economic strength to a federation. In 1963, following a confrontation with the unions and a general strike, Youlou resigned on 15 August. The army maintained order until a new constitution had been devised which established a two-man executive comprising the President and the Prime Minister. The new President was Alphonse Massamba-Debat and his Prime Minister was Pascal Lissouba. The country moved sharply to the left politically, away from its colonial inheritance, and began to follow more radical, revolutionary paths of development. Apart from palm products, sugar and tobacco, most agricultural production came from small farms. Minerals did not become important until the 1970s. There was an unsuccessful coup attempt in 1966 but in 1968 the army effectively became the supreme authority and the soldier Marien Ngouabi became head of state. He continued the radical policies of Massamba-Debat.