Page 204 - Afrika Must Unite

NEO-COLONIALISM IN AFRICA 189
discontent and welfare aspirations, that they are making some
headway on the road to development. Unless, however, they can
come together in a union such as Bolivar envisaged, their rate
of development can never reach anywhere near those of the
integrated, planned economies of the U.S.S.R. and China.
The United States of America, but for the firm resolve of
Abraham Lincoln to m aintain the union of the states, might well
have fallen into a disintegration which would have barred the
way to the tremendous acceleration of development that an
enormous agglomeration of land, resources and people made
possible. Lincoln plunged into a civil war to m aintain the union
as the only logical base of viability. Slavery and its abolition was
a secondary, subservient consideration, though the advantage of
free labour in a growing industrial economy, making for lower
working costs, and greater productivity, were impressing their
reasoning upon the entrepreneurs of the North.
Here, then, is the lesson for Africa, and our choice. Are we
to take the road of national exclusivism or the road of
union?
In the British West Indies at this time we are witnessing a
sorry spectacle of political jugglery which refuses to subordinate
selfish ‘big island’ interests to total West Indian welfare within
federation. Inter-island rivalries and jealousies, adroitly stirred
by designing politicians, local racial dissensions which have been
deliberately fostered to break down a one-time at least super­
ficial cosmopolitanism in such multi-racial islands as Trinidad
and Jam aica, the skilfully exploited fears of the predom inant
East Indian population of the South American m ainland terri­
tory of British Guiana of being swamped within federation by
the total African-descended population, the complacency of
island leaders, have all played their several parts in interring the
still-born federation.
Federation of the British West Indian territories, leading
eventually to a wider unity with those under other suzerainties,
is the only answer to the present poverty and stagnant agricul­
tural societies of the Caribbean world. The islands are less
numerous and scattered than those of Indonesia, where the
central government is reaching out to bring them all within a
centrally directed state. Unless they succeed in coming together