Page 70 - Afrika Must Unite

FREEDOM FIRST 55
Go to the people
Live among them
Learn from them
Love them
Serve them
Plan with them
Start with what they know
Build on what they have.

This would be my advice to members of any nationalist and
progressive Party.
The campaign of the Convention People’s Party was helped
by the press. O n the very day I left the U.G.C.C. the first issue of
my paper The Accra Evening News was published, with its
challenging m otto: ‘We prefer self-government with danger to
servitude in tranquillity.’ I reached a wide circle of readers
through the columns of this paper, and hamm ered home the
message of full self-government and the need to organize for
victory: ‘The strength of the organized masses is invincible. . . .
We must organize as never before, for organization decides
everything.’1
The whole question of publicity, the spreading of information
about the aims and achievements of any political party, is of
supreme importance. In the struggle for independence, where
the colonial government controls the major avenues of in­
formation and gives its blessing to the reactionary press, the
mechanics of propaganda employed by the freedom movement
are vital. The reach of the press is, of course, narrower in areas
where there is a high degree of illiteracy; but even in those areas
the people can always be reached by the spoken word. And
frequently the written word becomes the spoken word.
A popular anti-colonial press developed in Africa during the
1930s. In 1932, H abib Bourguiba founded the Action Tunisienne.
In Morocco, the Action du Peuple edited by M uham m ad Hasan el-
Ouezzani appeared in August, 1938; the editorial committee
contained the nucleus of the leadership of Morocco’s Comity
d ’Action M arocaine. In the Ivory Coast UEclaireur de la Cote
d’Ivoire began in 1935. Three years later, in 1938, Dr Nnam di
1 T he Accra Evening News, 14 January 1949.