Page 48 - Afrika Must Unite

SOCIETY UNDER COLONIALISM 33
what is perhaps more remarkable is the moderation of most
African political leaders. Not a single one has advocated any
kind of policy founded on racial discrimination. All have stressed
the need for co-operation between races, based on the rule of the
majority. We have seen too much of racialism to want to per­
petuate the evil in any way.
O f course, it will be some time before all traces of colonialism
will disappear from our society. Problems connected with
health, education, housing and living conditions generally,
continue to remind us of the colonial period. We have much
ground to make up, as a result of long years of being treated as an
inferior people fit only to provide cheap labour for foreign
employers. We were supposed not to be able to appreciate, or to
need, any real measure of social improvement.
It is true that shelter in a tropical climate is a less urgent
problem than it is in a cold or tem perate climate. It is also true
that Africans do have improvised homes. This, in fact, was the
housing position in the Gold Coast under colonial administration.
But Africans did not live in shacks and m ud huts because they
preferred them to proper houses. They had no choice. They had
neither the jobs nor the resources to enable them to build. And it
never occurred to the administration to do what most advanced
countries perform as an autom atic service, undertake a popular
housing programme for the people. Nor were there any building
societies to help folk without ready capital to acquire homes.
Thus the people of this country lived as they had always lived,
crowded together in hovels as far removed from the dream of
living in a three-roomed abode with normal conveniences as a
London messenger boy is of owning Buckingham Palace.
There was once in England a similar prevailing upper-class
view of workers who lived in slums. ‘They enjoy it,5 was the
sentiment expressed. ‘They like to live crowded together. If we
did give them up-to-date houses with bathrooms, they wouldn't
know what to do with them. They would use the bath to store
coal.5 Strangely enough, this was not merely a justification for the
Conservative Governments of the time to do nothing to meet
general housing needs. Some really believed that only the
educated upper class wanted and knew how to appreciate a
decent house.