Page 105 - Afrika Must Unite

90 AFRICA MUST UNITE
policy in certain respects and their conscience too great, that
they abandon their loyalty in submission to their conscience.
In the case of our civil service, we were reliant not upon our
own nationals but almost entirely upon nationals of a power
which had been ruling us and who had been trained to conduct
the policy of that power. Bound to the interests of their own
country for so long, it could hardly be expected, apart from a few
exceptional cases, that they would change their attitude towards
us overnight. W hat we needed was our own African civil service.
If the colonial power had been sincere in its claim of preparing
the Gold Coast for self-government, one of its prim ary contri­
butions would have been to speed up Africanization of the civil
service and to offer access to the top posts to Africans. An excuse
frequently offered for the putting off of self-government was that
the country did not have a sufficiency of administrators and
personnel trained in other respects for the hard responsibilities
of running a state. But nothing was done to make good the
deficiency. At no time throughout the period of British adminis­
tration was any African allowed to fill the highest posts of the
civil service. Africans who were employed were allowed into the
junior grades and denied the prospect of rising to the higher
ranks. The British justification for holding them down was that
they lacked the appropriate academic qualifications and the
necessary administrative experience. The sophistry of imperialist
reasoning is studded with these truths of the vicious circle.
Educational facilities were inadequate to provide academic
standards for Africans, and experience can only be gained by
experience. The logic of the British argum ent and its laggard
approach to the problem would have kept us waiting a hundred
years and more before we had a trained civil service to implement
self-government.
We were not prepared to wait, and I turned my attention to
the problems as soon as I became Leader of Government Busi­
ness in 1951. Eighty per cent of the Gold Coast senior civil
servants were British. The twenty per cent African government
employees were mainly in the lower ranks of the senior service.
Hence I had to retain the most essential of the eighty per cent,
move up the best of the twenty per cent to take over from the
British who would leave, and introduce more Africans into the