Page 170 - Afrika Must Unite

ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL INTEGRATION I55

link mining areas or to carry cash crops and raw materials from
collection points to the ports for export. Farmers had to find their
own means of getting crops to the collecting centres. G hana and
Nigeria are better served with railways than most parts of Africa,
each having main eastern and western lines which are linked
together. Ghanaian railways handle some two million tons a
year, more than the combined lines of former French West
Africa, but less than i per cent of the tonnage carried in the
United Kingdom. Roads, too, are quite inadequate to meet the
growing needs of emergent Africa. The cost of making them is
high, and the building of a continent-wide system would have to
be centrally planned and financed.
The climate and geography of Africa present special problems
for the construction and m aintenance of both roads and railways.
But these difficulties could be surmounted within the frame­
work of a plan for over-all African development, which would set
aside reserves of funds and materials for the purpose. Such a vast
scheme would, naturally, take time to complete and priorities
would certainly be necessary to secure speedier fulfilment at
points of development vital to the corporate progress of the
continent. But with the will to attack and overcome the m any
problems and their involvements, the real ‘opening up’ of Africa
will begin. And this time it will be by the Africans for the
Africans.
This contention is supported by the example of the United
States. America’s real expansion began with her union, which
assisted the building up of a vast network of railways and roads,
so that D. W. Brogan, an accepted authority on American
political history, after remarking that in America, ‘regions as
unlike as Norway and Andalusia are united under one govern­
ment, speak a common language, regard themselves as part of
one nation’, is able to assert: ‘This unity is reinforced by the
most elaborate transportation system in the world, a system the
elaboration of which has been made possible by the political
unity.’1
Ports and waterways are no less im portant than good roads
and railways. Africa has the shortest coastline in relation to its

1 D. W. Brogan: U.S.A.: An Outline of the Country, its People and Institutions,
Oxford University Press, p. 9.