Page 205 - Afrika Must Unite

AFRICA MUST UNITE
within a federation more strongly knit under a firmer central
authority than the first attem pt, the islands of the West Indies
can have a future no different from that of the ‘banana republics5
of Central America, notwithstanding T rinidad’s oil and asphalt
industries and Jam aica’s bauxite extraction and secondary
manufactures. For these are, anyway, all foreign-owned and
controlled, and the illusion they give of ‘industrialization’ must
disintegrate before the perennial problems of over-population
in islands like Jam aica and Barbados, unemployment in all of
them, and the steadily rising inflation which has become a
noticeable feature of West Indian economies.
M eantime, separate and inwardly split into minuteness by
political friction and group animosities, they are unable to give
support to the African struggle for freedom and unity, in spite
of the bonds of race and sympathy that exist.
Vanity and narrowness of outlook were what kept the leaders
of the original states of North America from uniting for a long
time. They were finally overwhelmed by the exertions of the
people and the emergence of leaders of stature, m aturity and
farsightedness. No one today doubts that the welfare and pros­
perity of the United States would never have been achieved if
each state still cherished its petty sovereignty in splendid isola­
tion. Yet in those days there was perhaps less obvious reason for
South Carolina to join New Hampshire as members of a conti­
nental union than there is today for Ghana and Nigeria, Guinea
and Dahomey, Togo and Ivory Coast, Cameroon and Mali,
and others, to form themselves into a Union as a first step to the
creation of a union of all the states of the African continent.
T hat is why any effort at association between the states of
Africa, however limited its immediate horizons, is to be wel­
comed as a step in the right direction: the eventual political
unification of Africa.
The Central African Federation was never to be confused
with these free associations of Africans expressing their own desire
to come together. The Federation of Northern and Southern
Rhodesia and Nyasaland was forced upon the Africans of those
territories by the white settler minorities, with the consent of the
U nited Kingdom Government, in the hope that they would be
able to extend their combined hegemony over a dominion freed