Penguin Books. Baltimore. 1961. African Series coll. David & Helen Kimble, eds. 217 p.
It might seem unnecessary to begin by emphasizing that African political parties have their roots in the African past. In the case of European and American political parties, the need to understand the historical context within which they have evolved is taken for granted. This should be equally clear in the African case but for ‘the myth that the African had no history or culture in precolonial times, as well as the belief that his culture could not — indeed ought not to — survive the disintegrative effects of the slavetrade, modernity, and colonialism’. 85
Naturally, the structure, programmes, and ideologies ofAfrican parties have been much influenced by Western models. But they have also to be understood in their relations with pre-colonial political systems. The Parti Démocratique de Guinée, for example, derives part of its effectiveness from the fact that it stresses its connections with Samory Touré's empire, just as the Union Soudanaise in Mali (formerly Soudan Frangais) looks back to the empire of Haj ‘Umar al-Tal 21. The links between pre-colonial state and modern party operate at the level of both organizations and ideas. ‘The descendants of Samory's sofa, or warriors, took the initiative in the forest villages in the formation of the PDG.’ 38 Sékou Touré, the party leader, derives part of his prestige from the fact that he is a grandson of Samory. The anti-colonial, reforming, egalitarian ideas that influenced Samory's system have been given a new interpretation by the party in a new historical context. Unfortunately this process, whereby African parties have adapted precolonial ideas and institutions to meet modern needs, has so far been little investigated. It can, I would suggest, be looked at in the following ways.
First, in societies of a highly stratified type, where a broadly feudal type of structure has survived with relatively little modification through the colonial period, political parties have tended at the outset to reproduce the traditional pattern of authority — working alliances of the fief-holders, supported by their clients and vassals. The Union Progressiste Mauritanienne in Mauretania and the Northern People's Congress in the Northern Region of Nigeria are good examples of this type; though in both cases, particular in that of NPC, the part played by the ‘new men’, educated commoners, limits the extent to which the party can be used simply to further the interests and maintain the power of the old ruling class.
In both cases the massive support which the party has hitherto obtained in elections based on a wide franchise is evidently connected with the successful use which it has made of the traditional relationships between ruling and subject castes, nobility and serfs, patrons and clients, for electoral purposes. Parties of this type, reflecting the traditional social structure, and mainly led by representatives of a pre-colonial aristocracy, are sometimes referred to as ‘chiefs' parties’: this is convenient, provided it is remembered that, since the meaning of the term ‘chief’ varies from society to society, ‘chiefs' parties’ may be of various types.
Second, parties of a quite different kind have developed as a consequence of what is sometimes called a ‘tribal renaissance’. But the term ‘tribe’ is not really appropriate to describe the comprehensive and internally differentiated communities among which such movements have conspicuously taken place: the Yoruba, the Ibo, the Ashanti, the Ewe, the Bakongo, the Kikuyu. They can perhaps most simply be described as ‘peoples’ 106, having certain common ties of culture, including language, social institutions, and history. Some of them have been united in the past within a single political system (e.g. the Yoruba under the Oyo Empire), while others, like the Ibo or the Ewe, have enjoyed looser forms of political association. Professor Balandier has analysed this renaissance, or regroupement — the effort to reconstruct the pre-colonial community as a reaction to the disintegrating effects of colonial rule — among the Fang of Gabon, and among the Bakongo, divided between French Moyen-Congo, the Belgian Congo, and Portuguese Angola 10. (In the case of such peoples as the Bakongo and the Ewe, colonial partition has clearly been one of the main disintegrating factors stimulating the movement for reintegration.)
Balandier describes how the popular movement for the reconstruction of Fang society, organized through the Alar Ayog, provided an impetus to the formation of two major Gabon parties — the Comité Mixte Gabonais and the Union Démocratique et Sociale Gabonaise. Similarly, the effectiveness of the Abbé Fulbert Youlou's party, the Union Démocratique de Défense des Intérêts Africains, in Moyen-Congo after 1956 was partly a consequence of the shifting of Bakongo messianic hopes, and the organization built up around them, from the plane of prophet movements to that of party politics 71. The Action Group, the dominant party in the Western Region of Nigeria, although it has tried, with some success, to overcome its original ethnic limitations, was constructed around the nucleus of the Egbe Omo Oduduwa, which was founded “to unite the various clans and tribes in Yorubaland and generally create and actively foster the idea of a single nationalism throughout Yorubaland 15”. In what were formerly the British and French Trust Territories of Togoland, the parties seeking Togoland unification, the Togoland Congress, the Comité de l'Unité Togolaise, and JUVENTO, the youth organization formerly associated with C.U.T., were partly products of the vigorous Ewe renaissance which has taken place since the Second World War 86. Such parties, while they derive much of their dynamic from the sense of unity which membership of a common pre-colonial culture generates, and often (as in the case of the Action Group) secure the support of representatives of the pre-colonial ruling classes, are generally led by ‘modernists’ and members of the intelligentsia.
Finally, it is clear that parties which are in no sense ‘chiefs' parties’ or ‘tribal parties’, but build their organizations on a territorial or superterritorial basis, appeal to, and seek to attract, groups which have their roots in pre-colonial society. The two major parties of the Sudan provided a particularly clear example of this type of relationship. The 'Umma Party had its links with the Ansar — in its origins a revolutionary Muslim organization of the ‘helpers’, or supporters, of the Mahdi which during the period of the Anglo-Egyptian condominium acquired the characteristics of a religious order, directed by the late Sayyid 'Abd al-rahman al-Mahdi, the Mahdi's posthumous son. On the other hand, the Ashiqqa Party and until 1956 its successor, the National Unionist Party, were closely associated with the Khatmiyya, a well-organized and powerful Muslim order introduced into the Sudan early in the nineteenth century, whose present political head is Sayyid'Ali al-Mirghanj 40. And the opposition between the 'Umma and the Ashiqqa-NUP, over the period 1945-56, in part reflected the much older conflict between Ansar and Khatmiyya.
Similar links between Muslim religious orders and political parties can be found elsewhere, for example, in Senegal. The strength of the Convention People's Party in Ghana also depended partly upon its successful appeal to the ‘young-men’, or commoners, whose semi-military organization, the Asafo companies, had tended to lapse during the colonial period, and who had lost their traditional right of representation within the Ashanti system when the restored Ashanti Confederacy Council abolished the office of Nkwankwaahene in 1935 8.
African parties are essentially products of a ‘colonial situation’ — in the sense of a situation in which an indigenous society is politically, economically, and culturally subordinate to a dominant European group 10. Parties have largely been built up around this issue: they have sought in one way or another to transform or modify this relationship of subordination and dominance between Africans and Europeans. So long as the colonial situation continues it is difficult for any African party, however conservative, to take up a position of unquestioning collaboration with the European authorities. At the same time, it is difficult for any party, if it wishes to remain legal, to press its opposition to the colonial relationship to a point which would involve the total and immediate withdrawal of the colonial power from all positions of dominance, military and economic, as well as political. Thus the slogan which the CPP successfully put into circulation in 1949-50, ‘Self Government Now’, expressed an attitude of mind rather than a programme of action.
In practice African parties have operated between these two poles, revolutionary and conformist — between the demand for the total elimination of the colonial power, and the complete acceptance of the status quo, subject only to such modifications as the Administration is willing to approve. Examples of parties which have passed through a revolutionary or nearrevolutionary phase have been the CPP in Ghana during 1949 and 1950; the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons in southern Nigeria from 1945 to 1947; the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain in French West Africa from 1947 to 1950; the upc in the French Cameroons in the period before and after its suppression in 1955; and Istiffial in Morocco and Neo-Destour in Tunisia, especially in 1954-5, the period immediately preceding independence. Parties of a predominantly conformist type have been the NPC in the Northern Region of Nigeria in the years immediately following 1951, and what were known as partis de l'administration in former French Africa — for example, UPM in Mauretania, the Bloc Africain de Guinée in Guinea, and in Togo the Parti Togolais de Progrès and the Union des Chefs et des Populations du Nord Togo See pp. 59-60.
Up to a point the ‘colonial situation’ is liable to promote oneparty dominance. So long as the ending of the status of subordination appears as the main political issue, there is a tendency for a single party to emerge — CPP, RDA, Istiqal, Neo-Destour — which enjoys mass support and symbolizes national aspirations. In this situation the leadership of the mass party is seen as the nucleus of a future national government, the only practical alternative to the existing colonial government, enjoying popular loyalty of a kind that is denied the colonial government. Hence other parties find it difficult to escape the charge that, by their mere existence, they are weakening national unity and postponing liberation. The more repressive the policy pursued by the colonial power, the stronger the pressures on the indigenous population to sink internal differences and establish some form of united national party or ‘front’ — until finally, in a situation of actual revolution, to remain outside the ‘national front’ may come to be regarded as a kind of treason (as illustrated by the attitude of the Front de Libération Nationale to the Mouvement National Algérien in Algeria). But even where tensions are less sharp, as in French West Africa during 1956-8, opposition to the multiplicity of parties, and the effort to achieve a parti unique or parti unifié, as a means to more effective bargaining with the colonial power, may become a dominant theme See pp. 57-9.
At the same time the ‘colonial situation’ may actually stimulate the multiplication of parties. A colonial Administration may find it convenient to encourage the formation and growth of ‘opposition’ parties. based upon a communal, or religious, or chiefly interest. Moreover, as the ‘colonial situation’ becomes modified, and the prospect of a transfer of power to some form of African government grows imminent, or even begins to take place' particular minority communities and interests, anxious to safeguard their own future autonomy and strengthen their future bargaining position, are moved to create their own parties in opposition to what they often regard as the ‘totalitarian’ or ‘dictatorial’ tendencies of the dominant party. Examples of such sectional parties have been the Liberal Party in the southern Sudan; the National Liberation Movement, the Moslem Association Party, and the Northern People's Party in Ghana; and the various minor parties which have developed around the demand for the creation of new Regions in Nigeria 63. It might indeed be argued that, once the unifying force which opposition to colonial rule generates has exhausted itself, the multiplication of parties is a logical outcome of the idea of self-determination which underlies all colonial nationalism. Once the principle of self-government is recognized, a number of ethnic ‘selves’ are liable to advance their claims.
Before modem political parties can operate effectively, an adequate system of communications must be established. In the case of archaic or aristocratic parties, this is less necessary, since the strength of the party is measured in much the same way as the strength of a medieval army, by the number of voters which the ‘barons’ and their principal vassals can lead into the polling stations. But mass parties depend for their effectiveness on regular contact between the central, regional, and local leadership. Policy directives have to come down from the central committee to the branches with reasonable rapidity; branches have to submit their resolutions to the centre; electoral campaigns have to be organized; party leaders and officials have periodically to visit the branches, to address meetings, raise funds, and explain party policy; at intervals national conferences have to be held, attended by delegates drawn from centres which may be a thousand miles or more distant. While, as will be seen, even in the mass parties the actual mechanism of communications varies widely, the influence of the leadership is bound to depend upon maintaining relations of confidence with the lower levels of the party hierarchy; and this implies the mobility which modem methods of transport make possible. The railway, the motor-car, the lorry, the propaganda van, the bicycle, and (for at least the national leadership) the aeroplane are indispensable tools of African mass parties: postal, telegraph, and telephone services are hardly less essential 32.
One must avoid the tendency to exaggerate the deficiencies of communications in pre-colonial African societies. They were adequate for the purposes for which they were designed. Indeed, there is a good deal of evidence suggesting that communications between the various corporate bodies and persons involved in the process of decision-making in the old kingdom of Oyo, or the Ashanti confederacy, or the Fulani Empire, were remarkably well developed. But it remains true that one basic characteristic of the setting within which African parties have been organized has been the availability of a mechanized system of communications. The substitution of a road network for forest paths, automobiles for horses and camels, and postmen for runners, has broken down the relative isolation of the pre-colonial village, and made possible a new kind of mobility. There is clearly some correlation between the level of development of physical communications in territories such as Mali, Guinea, the Ivory Coast, Ghana, southern Nigeria, the northern Sudan, Tunisia, and Morocco and the level of organization of political parties; while in regions such as northern Nigeria, Chad, or the southern Sudan, in which communications are still rudimentary, mass parties have been faced with special difficulties in extending their organization beyond the main towns. The Northern Elements' Progressive Union in northern Nigeria is a case in point. There seems also evidence that parties tend, naturally, to develop along the major routes; for example, the main strength of the upc in the French Cameroons, at the time of its suppression in 1955, appeared to lie along the Cameroons railway.
One factor contributing to the growth of African parties has been the weakening of the authority of ‘chiefs’ and the appearance of a leadership of a new type. But who are the ‘chiefs’? The term is, admittedly, a loose one; but three broad types stand out. There are the hereditary kings of pre-colonial States — whether Muslim, like the Fulani Sarkins in northern Nigeria, or pagan, like the Kabaka of Buganda or the Bami of Ruanda and Urundi — where the dynasty enjoyed a considerable measure of centralized power. There are the elected rulers — like the Yoruba Obas in western Nigeria, or the Akan chiefs in Ghana — operating within a constitutional framework which, in pre-colonial times, provided a variety of checks and balances, and in some cases procedures for the removal as well as the selection of rulers. And there are chiefs who may be — or have been — little more than appointees of the colonial government, with a status lacking roots in the pre-colonial system, like the former ‘Warrant Chiefs’ in eastern Nigeria, the chefs de canton in most of the former French West Africa, or the ‘official headmen’ in Kenya.
That chiefly power — in these and in other intermediate senses — is on the wane in contemporary Africa is not in dispute, though there are naturally large variations in the rate of decline. “Although … their position differs in many respects from that of a landed aristocracy in Europe, it is equally vulnerable to the forces of modern economic development…. Leadership … must remain in the hands of people who can organize their following over wider areas than those to which the chiefs are confined by the nature of their position.” 101 The position of chiefs is vulnerable also, in many territories, on account of their tendency to collaborate with the colonial administration. But what is important for our purposes is that the new leadership, deriving its power primarily from its status within the party, and the strength of the party within the State, can hardly establish itself until it has made progress towards displacing the older ‘chiefly’ leadership — whether this derives its authority from its status within the pre-colonial or colonial system, or from some combination of the two. Until this stage has been reached the emergent party leadership is liable to find itself described by the colonial regime in the terms applied by Sir Hugh Clifford, a former Governor of Nigeria, to the leaders of the National Congress of British West Africa in 1920:
… a self-selected and self-appointed congregation of educated African gentlemen … whose eyes are fixed, not upon African native history or tradition or policy, nor upon their own tribal obligations and the duties to their Natural Rulers which immemorial custom should impose upon them, but upon political theories evolved by Europeans … 15
Nothing, however, is simple in politics. Various forms of accommodation and cooperation for limited purposes are possible between the old élite — the chiefs, or kings, and the hierarchies associated with them — and the new élite from which the leaders of modern nationalist parties are drawn. Even where chiefly authority is in decline, it remains true that “every hereditary ruler is the supreme symbol of the unity of his people, and therefore, also, of their opposition to outsiders … an attack on him … is an offence against national sentimentwhich cannot be tolerated….” 101 Hence, where a hereditary ruler is attacked by a colonial administration, it is normal that the nationalist leadership should move in to support the throne, appealing to popular indignation against this violation of the sanctity of kingship. Thus IstiqIal strongly supported Sidi Mubammad ben Yusuf, Sultan of Morocco, and the Uganda National Congress supported Mutesa II, Kabaka of Buganda, when each was deposed in 1953. Even in the absence of a major precipitant of this kind, a recognition of common national or regional interests may promote more or less stable alliances between the old élite and the new: for example, the alliance between the Yoruba bourgeois and the Yoruba Obas (with the latter in a subordinate role) around which the Nigerian Action Group was originally built 99; or the merger in Haute-Volta in 1956 between the nationalist RDA (under the local title of Parti Démocratique Voltaique), with its main strength among the Bobo, and the traditionalist Parti Social d'Education des Masses Africaines, to form the Parti Démocratique Unifié, with the Mogho Naba, hereditary ruler of the ancient Moshi kingdom, as its honorary president 38. Even the centralizing CPP in Ghana, which regards chiefs in general as vestiges of ‘feudalism’, has found it expedient to make alliances with certain chiefs, as in favouring Brong traditionalists against Ashanti 12.
But these variations in the pattern should not obscure the basic fact that the assumptions on which kingship or chiefly rule is founded — whether the ruler be hereditary or elected, absolute or constitutional, Animist, Muslim, or Christian — are in conflict with the assumptions on which party government is founded. The authority of the chief depends primarily upon his status within the traditional order, his capacity to perform ritual functions; the authority of the party leader depends upon his achievements within the modern order, his capacity to realize desired political change. Who, on the other hand, are the ‘new élite’? From what sections of the community are they drawn? I think they can reasonably be described as belonging to 'the middle class', though certain problems are raised by the use of this term in the African context 25, 94. Clearly there is some correlation between the rapid development during the post-war period of associations of a modem type, including political parties, and other familiar processes of social change — economic expansion, the growth of towns, the spread of Western education; and, as a consequence, the emergence of new social groups, ranging from professionals, administrators, and the larger entrepreneurs, through minor civil servants, teachers, clerks, traders, and contractors, to the wage-earning class 24, 114.
Certainly the territories where some of the most effective parties have been organized — Senegal, Guinea, the Ivory Coast, Ghana, Togo, southern Nigeria, the southern Cameroons, and under somewhat different conditions the States of the Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia) — are also territories where the precolonial economic and social order has undergone a radical transformation, and a fair-sized Western-educated élite has established itself. True, one must be able to account for the retarded development of parties in an economically dynamic society, like the Belgian Congo, and their exuberant growth in a relatively static society, like Somalia; but the almost total lack of opportunities for higher education and of essential civil liberties in the former Belgian Congo — as contrasted with the existence of these preconditions for the rise of parties in Somalia — provides a partial explanation.
Part of the difficulty in deciding whether the new social groups from which the leadership of African parties is mainly drawn should be described as a middle class arises from doubts about the meaning of the term in the African context. Membership of the middle class may be thought of in various ways, as related to:
Obviously there is some overlapping between these various categories. But if an attempt is made to combine the criteria, it must be admitted that the African middle class possesses great internal diversity — including wealthy lawyers from Dakar or Lagos with near-proletarian Native Authority clerks, and university professors with Hausa traders who may once have attended a Koranic school. Moreover, there is ample evidence to show how important ties of kinship remain for those who on the basis of educational, occupational economic or social-habit criteria — would clearly be classified as middle-class. The graduate civil servant may have illiterate uncles and cousins on the compound. In most situations extended-family solidarity remains a powerful force checking the development of a sense of class solidarity. One major function of tribal unions, in their multiplicity of forms, has been to express “the persistent feeling of loyalty and obligation to the kinship group and the town or village where the lineage was localized”, and to provide institutions through which the new tendencies towards economic and social differentiation could be counteracted 15. Hence African writers in particular have often stressed the need to avoid applying Western class categories uncritically to the study of African politics. Many would agree with Assane Seck's generalization:
“the class-struggle shows itself, not in the relationships between [the African middle] class and the African mass, but in the relationships between the whole body of Africans and Europeans”. 25
One way of trying to give clearer definition to this ‘African middle class’, from which those who have achieved, or are attempting to achieve, political power through the mechanism of parties are mainly drawn, is by considering the actual membership of elected assemblies. For example, the Gold Coast (Ghana) House of Assembly, immediately after the 1954 election, included among its 104 members the following:
| Occupations/professions | Numbers |
| School-teachers | 30 |
| Clerks, commercial workers, accountants, retired civil servants, etc. | 18 |
| Members of the liberal professions (lawyers, academics, clergy, journalists, etc.) | 18 |
| Entrepreneurs, i.e. merchants, contractors, petty traders, etc. | 18 |
| &slquo;Professional politicians&srquo; | 7 |
| Farmers | 4 |
| Chiefs | 3 |
Among these, there were:
The data for the occupations of the Legislative Assembly members in the eight territories of the former French West Africa, immediately after the 1957 elections, tell a somewhat similar story 114.
| Profession/occupation | Representation |
| Teachers | |
| Senegal and Dahomey | 33% |
| Other colonies | 22% |
| Fonctionnaires, i.e. government officials of various kinds (a consequence of the French system which, unlike the British, permits civil servants to become members of Legislative Assemblies) | 27% |
| Liberal professions (fifteen per cent doctors, veterinarians, and pharmacists, and five per cent lawyers and magistrates) | 20% |
| Commerce and industry — whether as entrepreneurs or employees | |
| Ivory Coast | 21% |
| Other colonies | 14% |
| Farmers | |
| Ivory Coast | 11% |
| Other colonies | 3% |
| Chiefs | |
| Niger | 10% |
| Haute-Volta | 11% |
| Mauretania | 25% |
| Other colonies | 7% |
| Trade-unionists | 1% |
| Miscellaneous occupations | 6% |
These figures reflect some of the differences in the level of economic, educational, and political development of the territories concerned. Only in the Ivory Coast — economically the most advanced of the eight territories — did the commercial and agricultural bourgeoisie provide as many as one-third of the assemblymen. The percentage of teachers was naturally highest in the two territories — Senegal and Dahomey — where the educational system was furthest developed. The representation of ‘chiefs’ was substantial only in Mauretania, Haute-Volta, and Niger, where the new middle class had not yet succeeded in neutralizing the authority of the pre-colonial ruling class, reinforced by the support of the French Administration.
Complete figures for the educational background of members of these Assemblies are not, unfortunately, available. Data for the period 1952-7 indicate that, except in Senegal, the proportion of university-educated assemblymen was extremely small — far smaller than in Ghana. In most territories there was a substantial body of members who had received a secondary education, the great majority of whom were in fact graduates of the Ecole Normale William Ponty at Dakar — much the most important of the French West African schools in the period before the Second World War, and the main educational source of the élite that initially organized and led the post-war parties 311. But at least half of the assemblymen, and in some territories much more than half, had not received more than an upper primary education.
The conclusion which these data suggest is that the leadership of modern African parties — in so far as it can be identified with the party representatives in elected assemblies — is drawn from certain fairly well defined social groups: teachers; administrative, clerical, and commercial workers (including, in the former French territories, civil servants, mainly those employed in the intermediate and lower grades); members of the liberal professions; entrepreneurs, including capitalist farmers; professional politicians and trade union leaders. A minority of these are university-educated, and there is a sizeable layer of the secondary-educated, including, of course, those who have been through teacher-training colleges. But a large and important section of this élite has not passed beyond the primary school stage: the ‘Standard VII boys’, or their equivalent, who have played a major part in the organization and management of mass parties like the CPP and RDA..
While the actual composition of the middle class naturally varies a great deal from territory to territory, in its broad outlines it can be distinguished from the imported European oligarchy and the representatives of the pre-colonial ruling class on the one hand, and the mass of peasants and the emergent wage-labouring class on the other. Thus, looked at from one point of view, the rise of parties has tended to be associated with the displacement of the old chiefly élite — for whom the British system of indirect rule provided, on the whole, security of tenure and emoluments — by this new intellectual-professional-commercial-administrative élite.
For African parties to be created it was not only necessary that new social groups, lacking access to political power, should come into being: but also that these groups should become conscious of themselves, of their lack, and of the possibility of altering existing power-relationships on lines favourable to themselves. It was here that the contribution of African-controlled popular newspapers was of special importance 29. There is point in emphasizing the word ‘popular’. In what was formerly British West Africa, African newspapers have at least a hundred years of history behind them. In Ghana the West African Herald, edited by Charles Bannerman, started publication in 1858 18. In Nigeria the basic ideas of modern nationalism were developed by John Payne Jackson, from 1891 on, in his journal, the Lagos Weekly Record 15. James Brew during the 1870s and 1880s, and J. E. Casely Hayford a generation later, worked along similar lines in Ghana through a succession of newspapers. But this was essentially, like the press of nineteenth-century Britain on which it was modelled, written for and limited in its circulation to a small intelligentsia in a few, mainly coastal towns. Inevitably so, since in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there was only this restricted literate public to whom newspapers could appeal. As in nineteenth-century Britain, the situation has been transformed - in varying degrees in different territories — by the development of primary education.
The number of children attending primary schools in Ghana rose from about 15,000 in 1902 to about 50,000 in 1924 and 65,000 in 1935; then, more steeply, to 185,000 in 1945, 301,000 in 1951, and 456,000 in 1957. In Nigeria the number increased from about 150,000 in the mid1920s to about 1,100,000 in the early 1950s. By the mid-1930s the literate population of Ghana and southern Nigeria had increased to a point at which the new techniques of popular journalism, which Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe introduced from the U.S.A. and perfected in West Africa could be successful. From the beginning of 1935 until 1937, when he was convicted of sedition for an article appearing in his paper, Dr Azikiwe edited the Accra African Morning Post. Thereafter he returned to Nigeria, and in 1938 founded the West African Pilot, building up around it a chain of provincial daily newspapers, based on Ibadan, Onitsha, Port Harcourt, and Kano. Dr Azikiwe's genius lay — as James Coleman has pointed out — in combining business efficiency as a newspaper proprietor with “the sensationalism and pugnacity of American yellow journalism … and … the race-consciousness of American Negro newspapers” 15.
There is evidence of the development of a popular anti-colonial Press in other African territories during the 1930s. In French West Africa the obstacles were much greater than in the adjacent British territories, notably the lower literacy rate, stricter censorship, and the pre-war requirement that journals should be directed by French citizens. None the less in the Ivory Coast the first effectively African newspaper, L'Eclaireur de la Côte d'Ivoire, appeared in 1935, of which Amon D'Aby says:
This journal had an immense success in African circles. It led a campaign against senior Chiefs and against the Police; it demanded measures of social reconstruction; it urged the cause of the unemployed and of African farmers who had been hit by the economic crisis 7.
In the Maghreb, where political conditions were in some respects more favourable, popular French-language newspapers were established in the early 1930s. L'Action Tunisienne was launched by Habib Bourguiba and a group of his friends in the Destour movement in November 1932 20 and in Morocco, L'Action du Peuple, edited by Muhammad Casan el-Ouezzani, first appeared in August 1933 27 (At a later stage, the popular press of the Maghreb moved over to the national language, Arabic.)
This popular press, and the new journalism associated with it, contributed to therisc of parties in a variety of ways. First, ithelped forward the process which Dr Azikiwe has called ‘mental emancipation’ — the process whereby a subject people, which has hitherto been exposed to colonial symbols and categories of explanation, through the schools, the courts, Government pronouncements, contacts with the Administration, etc., has its attention redirected towards an alternative set of nationalist symbols and categories. This process, while it mainly affects the literate minority, certainly penetrates also to the illiterate mass, since it has been estimated that, for every one literate who reads a nationalist newspaper, as many as ten illiterates may have its contents read or retailed to them. Second, the African press — like the radical press of Chartist England — made it its function to fasten on the specific grievances of particular sections of the community and localities farmers, clerks, teachers, ex-servicemen, unemployed, market-women, railway workers, miners, secondary school pupils — and, by relating these grievances to a reasonably coherent body of anti-colonial doctrine, to stimulate the kind of political awareness that leads to action.
Third, nationalist newspapers have frequently provided a point of departure for the launching of a new political movement, or indeed an actual party. A group which has had experience of collaboration over a period in the production of a newspaper, criticizing colonial policies and challenging colonial authority' is liable to develop a common standpoint and build up a popular following, so that it becomes a relatively simple matter at a later stage to shift the focus of activity from agitation to organization. Thus the editorial committee of L'Action du Peuple contained the nucleus of the leadership of Morocco's first political party, the Comité d'Action Marocaine — established, after the suppression of the newspaper, in 1934 37. In the same year the continued criticism of the older leadership of the Destour by Bourguiba and the group associated with L'Action Tunisienne contributed to the split out of which the Neo-Destour was born 20. In a somewhat similar way Dr Azikiwe's West African Pilot prepared the ground for the NCNC in which, from its establishment in 1944, Dr Azikiwe was the moving spirit 15.
In more recent history newspapers have sometimes provided a platform which an emerging radical — or relatively radical — leadership has used to expound its own standpoint, discredit an older, more conservative leadership, and create a favourable climate for the launching of a new party. Thus, in 1948-9, Léopold Senghor's Condition Humaine in Senegal, and Kwame Nkrumah's Accra Evening News in Ghana — the one emphasizing 'African Socialism' and the other 'Self Government Now' — became organs of the rebels against the Establishment, and served as rallying-points around which the BDS and CPP were eventually constructed . 38, 55
On the whole I agree with Dr James Coleman that:
The really decisive factor — the precipitant — in the formation of political parties has been constitutional reform providing for (1) the devolution by the imperial government of a sufficiently meaningful and attractive measure of power to induce or to provoke nationalist leaders to convert their movements into political parties, and (2) the introduction or refinement of institutions and procedures, such as an electoral system, which would make it technically possible for parties to seek power constitutionally 83.
This generalization certainly seems to apply to the parties of what was formerly British West Africa, of Afrique Noire, the Sudan, Somalia and, within limits, Uganda and Tanganyika. The absence until 1959 of Dr Coleman's two pre-conditions is surely the main reason why only embryonic parties emerged in the former Belgian Congo: why nationalist demands were expressed until recently through congresses rather than parties in the Central African Federation: and why only underground political organizations have come into being in the Portuguese territories.
Another obvious point should, however, be added: that the right to organize national parties seeking political power by constitutional means must be admitted. Where, as in Algeria since the end of 1954, this right is lacking, there may be representative institutions, an electoral system, and even (as in Algeria) universal suffrage, while legal or political conditions — or both — make the organization of African parties impossible. Another type of precipitant which needs to be taken into account is the existence of a critical issue, or issues, of the kind that provokes widespread national feeling and resentment: e.g., the Government's campaign for the cutting out of cocoa trees affected by swollen shoot in the Gold Coast, the Dahir Berbère in Morocco, the scheme for Central African Federation in Nyasaland. Hence it has been suggested that the relative weakness of Uganda parties has been connected with an absence of big issues — apart from the exile of the Kabaka in 1953, itself a Buganda issue rather than a national one. 100
In the case, however, of two major mass parties which we have to consider — IstiqIal in Morocco and Neo-Destour in Tunisia — the two preconditions to which Dr Coleman refers seem scarcely to have been present. Both parties developed under conditions of semi-legality, semi-clandestinity. And, though both made use of such limited representative institutions as existed, and sought power by constitutional means where these were available, they belong to a special category, having come a good deal closer, during the colonial period, to a revolutionary model than most of the parties in Africa south of the Sahara. In their case the precipitant of constitutional reform played only a minor part, at least until the actual phase of the transfer of posver in 1954-5; and by that time Istiqlal had ten, and Neo-Destour twenty, years of history behind them.
In those African territories south of the Sahara, on the other hand, in which parties have established themselves since the Second World War, there has clearly been a two-way relationship between this process and the development of representative institutions, evolving towards some form of parliamentary and cabinet system. Constitutional reform — especially the use of elections as a mechanism for the selection of rulers, and the progressive widening of the franchise — has stimulated the growth of parties, while the new parties have pressed for further instalments of reform and for the logical working out of the principles of parliamentary democracy. Here it is worth asking how the parties have been affected by the new political framework . 32
First — and most obvious — the need to contest, and if possible win, elections has been a factor stimulating parties to build up an effective machine through which to appeal to the new mass electorates. This has been all the more necessary, given the frequency of elections in many territories, e.g. in former French Africa, where parliamentary, territorial, and eventually local council elections — not to mention occasional referenda — occurred at short intervals, putting heavy demands upon party organizations. How the different parties have dealt with this problem of organization at the constituency level — and, below that, at the village or ward level — naturally varies. Some, like the Action Group in western Nigeria, tend to work through the chiefs — the Obas — and local men of property; some, like the NCNC in eastern Nigeria, make special use of tribal unions; some, like the National Unionist Party in the Sudan before 1956, have intimate links with a religious order that possesses its own local network, some, like the CPP in Ghana, the PDG in Guinea, or the Union Soudanaise in Soudan, rely primarily upon their own tried militants. But in this matter African parties, like parties anywhere else in the world, are to some degree opportunist. Even a mass party with an essentially modern outlook, like the CPP, RDA, or Somali Youth League, will make local use of traditional authority, or religious allegiance, or the ties of clanship, where this seems expedient. 71, 96
Second, elections have involved the parties in educational, as well as propagandist, functions. “Elections made it the task of the educated Africans who ran for office to explain the vote, the choice which the vote implied, and the concept of representation. 38” Parties have had to try to ensure that their supporters and possible supporters are registered as electors; that on election day they know how to reach the polling station, which may in rural areas be several miles from their homes; that they can be identified by the returning officer; and that they are acquainted with the party symbol, since the system of voting for symbols has come into general use 32. Hence parties have tended to build up meanings and associations around the particular symbols which they have adopted: ‘Vote for the elephant [the RD A symbol]; he is wise and he never forgets’; ‘Vote for the camel [the symbol of the Union Démocratique Nigérienne], and you will be as free as he is.’ 38
At election times parties — like the government information services — include among their activities what is in effect a form of mass education.
Third, the need to appeal to a mass electorate, interested in the problems that immediately affect them, has obliged parties of all types —from the most radical to the most traditionalist— to concern themselves in some degree with local issues. This may mean water-supplies, roads, schools, clinics, or even telephones; it may also mean local disputes, including chieftaincy disputes. Dr Peter Lloyd has emphasized this point in regard to elections in the Western Region of Nigeria during the period 1951-4:
The individual sees… his elected M.P. as a man delegated to get as much for his town as possible — if he fails here he will be rejected however important his contribution to the whole region has been …. Where wards in Ijebu Remo Division were contested, the division appears to have been along the lines of a recent dispute over the succession to the throne of the Oba. In Shagamu the NCNC was led by a son of the late Oba who had recently unsuccessfully claimed the throne, but who was highly popular 91.
Another aspect of the same process has been the way in which parties have been obliged to take account of local interests; to attach to themselves as many as possible of the influential local connexions — dynastic (or anti-dynastic), ethnic, religious, commercial, trade union, etc. 32 This has meant as a rule a certain strengthening of the constituency party, and the local interests upon which it is based, as against the party headquarters, the professional politicians, the capital.
Fourth, there is no doubt that one effect of the introduction of electoral systems has been not merely to stimulate the growth of parties, but also to give them a new legitimacy. It is interesting how in territory after territory — the Belgian Congo was one of the more recent examples — a colonial Government has expressed the view that the granting of the right to vote need not, or should not, involve the development of party politics or party government; yet elections have in fact been contested on a party basis, and often have established the dominance of a particular party. Even where, as in the elections for the Nigerian Regional Houses of Assembly in 1951, party organizations were in many areas relatively weak — or, in the North, non-existent — there has been a clear tendency for the dominant party to attract to itself after the elections non-party men who owed their success to personal achievements or family connexions. The system of voting for symbols — while it does not exclude the independent candidate — gives the party a definite status: the voter may often vote for the party symbol rather than the candidate. And, as the revolt of the Independent CPP candidates in the 1954 elections in Ghana showed, the question which candidate is authorized by party headquarters to use the party symbol may be an issue of the first importance.
Finally, as Dr Ruth Schachter pointed out in relation to French West Africa, “elections synchronized political development among territories where political pressure was unequal. For example … Mauretania, Niger, and some parts of Haute-Volta could have been, and in some respects were, ruled in the old paternal way for another few years after 1945.” 31 The same could be said of most of northern Nigeria. Thus, whereas in territories like Senegal, the Ivory Coast, Ghana, or southern Nigeria elections stimulated mass movements to transform themselves into political parties — and tended to check the growth of semi-clandestine revolutionary organizations, like the Zikist movement in Nigeria — in most of the northern belt, from Mauretania to Chad, the initial effect of elections was to “encourage the formation of small electoral groups, aiming at little else than filling the relatively lucrative new offices”. 38 In such territories parties grew by contagion rather than spontaneous generation.
There is probably a tendency for outside observers to overstress the importance of external influences — whether Western European, American, Soviet Communist, or Asian — upon the organization and ideas of African parties. None the less these influences have to be understood as one aspect of the total setting within which parties have emerged.
During the period before the Second World War the contacts between the nascent African political movements and the outside world were relatively restricted — partly on account of the restrictions on movement imposed by the colonial regimes; partly because in most territories nationalist ideas had not yet penetrated beyond the circle of a small intellectual dlitc. This is less true of the Maghreb, which from the end of the nineteenth century had been exposed to the influence of the Salafiyya, the reformist movement within Islam having its origins in Egypt and deriving its main inspiration from the teachings of Sheikh Muhammad 'Abduh 27. The dominant idea of the Salafiyya, the defence of Islam, implied the development of the critical powers of individual Muslims, the struggle for national self-determination, and, as means to these ends, the construction of modem organizations, including political parties; it thus provided an intellectual basis for the Moroccan national movement, expressed initially through the Comité d'Action Marocaine 43. Another important formative influence in the Maghreb was the Lebanese intellectual, Shakib Arslan (himself a former pupil of Sheikh Muhammad, 'Abduh), who, from 1921 on, made his home in Geneva the centre of a private system of Pan-Arab and Pan-Maghreb communications 27.
Africa south of the Sahara was little affected at this period by these currents of thought from the Arab-Muslim world apart from the continuing intellectual stimulus which the Sudan received from Egypt, and which contributed to the formation of the Sudan General Graduates Congress in 1937 34. Afrique Noire was fairly effectively scaled against the intrusion of nationalist or reformist ideas from the East. Only the Four Communes of Senegal (in practice reduced to three — Dakar, St Louis, and Rufisque), whose inhabitants enjoyed the privileges of French citizens, provided a channel of communication with the outside world, and primarily with France 110. Helped by his contacts with French Socialists, Me Lamine Gueye was able to establish a Senegalese Socialist Party in the late 1920s — the germ from which later developed the Senegalese fédération of the French SFIO, founded in 1936, in the early days of the Popular Front government in France. This period of the Popular Front was significant for the later development of French African political parties for two reasons: it stimulated moves towards organization, particularly in the trade union field, in other territories besides Senegal; and it made possible, for the first time, the appointment of a certain number of Socialists, and even Communists to official positions in French Africa, especially as teachers 38. It was in this way that the new French African élite learned to adapt a theoretical framework derived from Jaurès or Lenin to their own demands and problems.
The British — or former British — African territories, especially West Africa, have an old tradition of connexions with reforming or radical organizations in Britain — the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society, for example. From such bodies African politicians who visited London could acquire a grasp of the techniques of pressure-group activity. But at the level of basic ideas the sources of inspiration lay elsewhere — among organizations of non-Europeans resident in Britain, like the League of Coloured Peoples (before 1931, the Union of African Peoples), and above all WASU, the West African Students Union, founded in 1925 by Ladipo Solanke, a Nigerian barrister. For successive generations of West African students WASU (and, after 1937, its house in Camden Square) provided a valuable forum in which the weaknesses of indirect rule could be debated, the great international issues of the day viewed in a West African setting, and friendly relations established with leaders of the British Labour Party. Through it members could achieve a sense of the worthwhileness of taking part in an historical movement which is seeking to change the world.90
But of all the formative influences perhaps the most important at this stage of history was that of the American — and included within that, the West Indian — Negro world. Two tendencies which came into sharp conflict with one another in the United States during the early 1920s — the militant, plebeian Black Zionism of the Garvey movement, and W. E. B. Du Bois's PanAfrican idea, with its much more limited appeal among Negro intellectuals — combined to shape the thinking of the generation of African nationalist leaders who studied in American universities between the two wars. 35 Dr Nkrumah, writing in his autobiography of his American period, says that, of all the literature that he studied, “the book that did more than any other to fire my enthusiasm was Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey published in 1923” 55. The PanAfrican idea germinated slowly, expressed initially through the succession of congresses which Du Bois organized: at Paris in 1919 (designed to influence the Peace Conference in its attitude to African problems), London in 1921, Lisbon in 1923, and New York in 1927.3,1, 17 Though at this stage, as Du Bois admitted, the idea was still American rather than African, the notion of inter-African cooperation as the precondition of African independence began to be more widely diffused — particularly through the little informal group of militant Pan-Africanists around the West Indian, George Padmore. Associated with this group was Jorno Kenyatta, the Kenya nationalist leader, later President of the KAU, who, like George Padmore, visited the U.S.S.R. in the early 1930s, though like him rejecting the rigid formulae of international Communism.
The period of the Second World War and the early post-war years was one in which these channels of communication between Africa and the outside world were deepened, multiplied, and diversified. The general question of the ways in which war-time developments stimulated the rise of African nationalism has been sufficiently discussed elsewhere 61, 15. Here it is only necessary to mention the particular external stimuli which influenced the growth of parties.
Unquestionably one such stimulus was the return of African ex-servicemen from the various theatres of war “ often to unemployment, or at least a lowered standard of life in their villages. The part played by ex-servicemen in the promotion of nationalist organizations, especially in the French territories, is a topic which deserves fuller investigation for earlier periods also: e.g., the case of André Matswa, who served in the Infanteric Coloniale in the First World War and the Rif War against Abd el-Krim, and who founded in 1926 the Socié Amicale des Originaires de l'A.E.F. 10. Both world wars disseminated ideas of self-determination, and assisted African leaders in relating their specific demands to an international frame ofreference. What was especially significant about the Second World War was the scale of African involvement. More than 100,000 Nigerians, for example, served in the forces, of whom more than 30,000 had experience in the Middle East, East Africa, Burma, and India, where they came into contact with other nationalisms and resistance movements 15. The mutiny of an African battalion of the Belgian Force Publique at Luluabourg in the Congo in February 1944, the clash between the Ex-Servicemen's Union and the police at the Christiansborg crossroads in Accra in February 1948, the occupation of Umuahia in eastern Nigeria by the Unemployed Ex-Servicemen's Union in 1951, were all expressions of a new revolutionary attitude. “It is therefore not surprising to find ex-servicemen among the more militant leaders of the nationalist movement during the post-war period.” 15.
There was also a marked increase in the political activities — and, after 1945, in the sheer numbers — of African students in European and American universities. Thus, side by side with the returned ex-servicemen, the returning students supplied another new élite from which the leadership of the post-war parties could be drawn. In London, WASU tended increasingly to function as a political pressure group, organizing a Parliamentary Committee which met M.Ps twice a month, cooperating with the Fabian Colonial Bureau, and submitting in 1942 a memorandum to the Colonial Office which urged the British Government “in view of the lessons of Malaya and Burma … to grant to the British West African Colonies and Protectorates Internal Self-Government Now, with a definite guarantee of complete self-government within five years after the war”. 15
Dr Nkrumah, who became Vice-President of WASU, has given a lively personal history of the ferment of activities in which, while nominally a student at the London School of Economics, he took part during 1945-7: the Fifth Pan-African Congress, held at Manchester in October 1945; the publication of the journals, The New African and Pan-Africa; the first contacts with the French African deputies in Paris; and the launching of the West African National Secretariat and the Coloured Workers' Association of Great Britain 85.
Comparable developments took place among the relatively small body of African students in the U.S.A. — estimated at twenty-eight during the war period. In 1941 they organized the African Students' Association of the United States and Canada; published a monthly journal, African Interpreter; held conferences and symposia to educate American opinion; published books; and went on lecture tours. James Coleman has stressed the importance of Dr Azikiwe's influence in steering this generation of politically minded young West Africans towards the U.S.A., and particularly to Lincoln, his own University — among them future leaders of the NCNc and CPP, including, of course, Nkrumah 15. In the early post-war years the flow, dammed during the war, increased tremendously; there were 175 Nigerian students in the U.S.A. in 1946-8, as compared with twelve during 1938-45. Though the two environments — American and British — were clearly stimuli of quite different kinds, both provided valuable training in the use of the political techniques of organization, diplomacy, agitation, and journalism.
This was also a period when new types of connexion came to be established between the African élites and the outside world. Hitherto few had had the opportunity to explore beyond the limits of Western Europe and North America, or to question the assumptions of parliamentary or presidential democracy. During the later war and early post-war years, communications between the Communist and non-Communist worlds became, for a time, more open. One consequence of this development was the increased influence of Marxist modes of thought, and increased interest in Communist methods of organization, among the new generation of African nationalists — illustrated by Kwame Nkrumah's pamphlet, Towards Colonial Freedom, written in the U.S.A. but published in London 54.
It was naturally in French Africa that the contacts between the African élite and Communist intellectuals and politicians were closest — where the part played by French Communists in the Resistance gained African respect, and where “Communists won the trust of Africans by behaving in ways that Africans had never seen Europeans behave; they were personal friends and comrades, rather than superiors” 38. At the same time the French Communist Party's participation in the tripartite Government from 1945 to 1947 gave the ideas and representatives of Communism equal respectability, and equal opportunity of access to French Africa, with those of Social Democracy and Christianity reformism. The main agency through which these ideas were diffused was the Groupes d'Etudes Communistes, which had been established by the end of 1943 in Dakar, Abidjan, Conakry, and Bamako, and existed for a short time in Bobo-Dioulasso 38. It was through these GECS that many of the post-war leaders of the mass parties of French Africa, above all the RDA, received their initial political education. While in very few cases did they produce actual Communists, as Dr Ruth Schachter has pointed out, they influenced African parties in various ways:
The GECs left an imprint on African terminology. By teaching the duties of the vanguard of the revolution, the Communists deepened the sense of mission to lead the masses which many educated Africans already had. By familiarizing Africans with developments elsewhere, through press, missions, courses, discussions, conferences, and opportunities for travel, the Communists increased African awareness of international events. By teaching about Communist forms of organization and political action, [they] influenced the structural forms of the African parties, especially the RDA. By … urging identical policies, [they] hastened the process of consolidation … of the geographically scattered modern African associations 38.
Finally, through service abroad, through the proliferation of post-war international conferences of trade unions, students, youth, etc., in which African delegations took part, through the beginnings of a new movement of African students to the universities of Egypt and India, a section of the African élite received a new stimulus from the Middle East and Asia, from Gandhism and Muslim reformism.
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