Page 11 - Afrika Must Unite

INTRODUCTION Xlll
complex than that, despite the plundering compulsions that
sent the Portuguese and others out as early as the fifteenth
century to pluck Africa’s gold and ivory, and later its hum an
treasure, to enrich the coffers of Western monarchs and
merchants.
W hen the great scramble for Africa began in the last quarter
of the nineteenth century, colonies had become a necessary
appendage for European capitalism, which had by then reached
the stage of industrial and financial monopoly that needed
territorial expansion to provide spheres for capital investment,
sources of raw materials, markets, and strategic points of
imperial defence. Thus all the imperialists, without exception,
evolved the means, their colonial policies, to satisfy the ends, the
exploitation of the subject territories for the aggrandizem ent of
the m etropolitan countries. They were all rapacious; they all
subserved the needs of the subject lands to their own demands;
they all circumscribed hum an rights and liberties; they all
repressed and despoiled, degraded and oppressed. They took
our lands, our lives, our resources, and our dignity. W ithout
exception, they left us nothing but our resentment, and later,
our determination to be free and rise once more to the level of
men and women who walk with their heads held high.
W hen that time came and we showed our resolution to be rid
of them as unbidden and unwelcome foreign intruders, they still
refused to go until we forced the issue. It was when they had gone
and we were faced with the stark realities, as in Ghana on the
morrow of our independence, that the destitution of the land
after long years of colonial rule was brought sharply home to us.
There were slums and squalor in our towns, superstitions and
ancient rites in our villages. All over the country, great tracts of
open land lay untilled and uninhabited, while nutritional
diseases were rife among our people. O ur roads were meagre, our
railways short. There was much ignorance and few skills. Over
eighty per cent of our people were illiterate, and our existing
schools were fed on imperialist pap, completely unrelated to our
background and our needs. Trade and commerce were con­
trolled, directed and run almost entirely by Europeans.
O f industries, we had none except those extracting gold and
diamonds. We made not a pin, not a handkerchief, not a m atch.