The reality of independence 60 years on

SOME 60 years after African independence, every year all across the continent, governments preside over glamorous and expensive ceremonies celebrating “victory” over colonial rule. The reality is that with a few exceptions, African countries were handed their “freedom” from colonial rule on a silver platter.

Even more tragically, the great majority of African countries, if not all of them, are free only in name from colonial occupation, exploitation and repression. Governments have to beg and borrow to keep their countries running, while carrying backbreaking loads of debt that they can barely finance, year in, year out.

It is an indisputable fact that the great majority of Africans have not enjoyed the benefits – the rights, freedoms, prosperity and good life – in whose name their independence was sought. In 2023, the culture of colonial autocracy and financial exploitation of the poor continues to manifest itself in the parochial mentalities of many African leaders.

Like the old colonialists, most African leaders today are more preoccupied with their own political survival and economic wellbeing than with the welfare of their people. Thus, the majority of Africans are living under the most unimaginable poverty and difficulties, rendered more insidious by the relentless cancer of corruption and greed in government circles in cahoots with unscrupulous private sector actors.

In the face of these baffling contradictions, it helps to revisit the story of African independence and its aftermath. By the end of the 1940s, no one needed much convincing of the need for decolonisation. The US was insisting on an end to imperialism as a precondition for aid to war-ravaged Europe; and the European colonial powers were themselves finding the burden of colonial rule too heavy to carry.

The political glamour and material benefits of colonialism had significantly declined, and Europe saw that maintaining colonial territories had outlived its usefulness. Europe also knew that through their colonial policies and future plans, they were assured that Africans could only be independent politically, not economically.

The emergent world economic system had firmly relegated Africa to the status of dependency, a status African governments have proven incapable of outgrowing. This is not because Africa lacks the capacity or resources, but because the politics of greed, selfishness, corruption, marginalisation and exclusion became the order of the day immediately after independence.

American insistence on decolonisation and European disenchantment with colonial rule aside, there emerged during and immediately after the Second World War an array of newly minted international rights instruments from which African nationalists freely drew to justify their demands for independence. They cited the universal rights and freedoms in the Atlantic Charter, they reaffirmed their subscription to the egalitarian creeds of the European enlightenment and the Commonwealth, and brandished these in the face of the colonial powers as evidence that Africans had a right to govern themselves.

The Atlantic Charter’s affirmation that all peoples have a right to selfdetermination was particularly potent in the hands of the eager African nationalists. In addition to the Atlantic Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 was a favourite hobby horse for African nationalists and they rode it to good effect. In the end, self-rule was granted to African countries either as a result of agitation and peaceful diplomacy or because of armed conflict, as happened in some settler and all Portuguese colonies on the continent.

Thus, the late 1950s and early 1960s gave birth to the glittering spectacles today called independence celebrations across the continent. Especially in former British colonies such as The Gambia, the independence era nationalist leaders helped organise the first such glittering spectacles and kept them going for as long as they stayed in power. Successive African leaders have uncritically mimicked their political ancestors.

For Gambia’s independence on February 18, 1965, the Queen dispatched the Duke and Duchess of Kent as her official representatives. The speeches made by both colonial and local officials during the handover of power were revealing.

It was not only chiefs and colonial officials who made strange statements during such ceremonies around Africa. Taking a cue from their leadership, ruling party stalwarts and newspapers loudly exhorted their countrymen to put all their political differences aside and join the ruling party.

In Bathurst (now Banjul), The New Gambia, which was backing the Progressive People’s Party (PPP), declared: “All politicians of all tendencies should rally round the government of the masses, the PPP, so that the country’s concerted efforts will bear golden fruits. We must not allow factions to undermine the real issues of the day.”

In effect, immediately after independence, the real issues of the day were parochialized and defined in absolute, narrow terms by the emergent African leadership and its supporters. Paradoxically, the emergent African nation