Page 10 - Afrika Must Unite

Xll INTRODUCTION

O ut of this conviction, I am necessarily as much concerned
with the problems of all the different countries which make up
our great continent as I am with those of Ghana. I have, there­
fore, drawn for illustration upon all patterns of colonialism. If
there does at times appear to be an emphasis upon the British
pattern and upon events in Ghana, it is because these are part of
my personal experience. They have been to a considerable
extent the agencies that have moulded my intellectual processes
and political philosophy. But I have also, as an African and a
political being drawn into the vortex of African affairs out of my
dedication to the cause of Africa’s freedom and unity, sustained
an indelible impression from the experience of my continental
brothers under other colonial rulers.
Their history of colonialist subjection differs from ours only in
detail and degree, not in kind. Some there are who make fine
distinctions between one brand of colonialism and another, who
declare that the British are ‘better’ masters than the French, or
the French ‘better’ than the Belgian, or the Portuguese or the
white settlers of South Africa, as though there is virtue in the
degree to which slavery is enforced. Such specious differentia­
tions come from those who have never experienced the miseries
and degradation of colonialist suppression and exploitation.
More frequently they are apologists for the colonialism of their
own country, anxious out of jingoistic patriotism to make a case
for it.
The colonial subject, the true bearer of the ‘white m an’s
burden’, can have no such philosophical approach. He is, there­
fore, unable to judge the delicate difference between having to
pass through a door m arked ‘natives’ in any part of the world
and one so marked in Johannesburg, simply because the latter
would often be in a separate, segregated area.
W hatever the means used by the colonialists, the objective
was the same. It was not that a nasty-minded bunch of men
awoke simultaneously one morning in England, France,
Belgium, Germany, Portugal, or in any other of the colonial
countries, and decided that it would be a good thing to jum p
into Africa and grind the people’s noses in the dust so that they
could all of them retire to their homelands in due course, rich
and happy from the Africans’ hardship. It was a good deal more