Page 42 - Afrika Must Unite

COLONIAL PATTERN OF ECONOMICS 27
single chocolate factory. While we produce the raw materials for
the m anufacture oT soap and edible fats, palm products, the
manufacture of these items was discouraged. A British firm
owning lime plantations here, as it does in the West Indies,
actually expresses the juice from the fruit before shipping it in
bulk to the United Kingdom and exporting it back to us,
bottled, to retail in stores at a high price. Though we had the
raw materials needed for their manufacture, every bottle used in
this country was imported. These facts have a kind of Alice in
W onderland craziness about them which m any will find hard to
accept. But they are implicit in the whole concept and policy of
colonialism. Native initiative, where it was likely to endanger
the interests of the colonial power, was quickly stifled.
We im port a lot of soap and, as I have already said, we have
the raw materials right here. Indeed, the overseas m anu­
facturers get their vegetable oils from us. It seemed quite a sound
idea for a Ghanaian to establish a soap factory here in Ghana.
Not so sound, though, for the British firm which m anufactured
soap, or for those who shipped it to us and imported it, especially
when they were tied up together. A Ghanaian factory was
started, but the machinery ordered was of the wrong type,
designed for animal rather than vegetable fat. The automatic
cutter produced bars of laundry soap larger than those imported.
There were constant break-downs with the machinery, and the
larger soap bar could not retail at a price above that charged for
the imported soap. Inevitably the Ghanaian factory was forced
to close down, and soap continued to be imported.
I cannot understand why so m any people in the United
Kingdom still refuse to adm it that local industry was deliberately
discouraged in m any of the colonies. After all, they learn in their
school history books that the Americans complained of the same
sort of thing in the eighteenth century. They, too, were not
allowed to manufacture any commodity which might compete
with industries in the m etropolitan country. If the American
colonists had genuine economic grievances, why not us? W hy
not Africa?
In his book, West Africa, F. J. Pedler admits that the colonial
governments prevented industries from being introduced, but
gives the strange reason th a t: ‘They have wished to safeguard the