Page 82 - Afrika Must Unite

PROBLEMS OF GOVERNMENT 67

colonial country, with our existing pattern of tribal loyalties and
traditional customs strained by the superimposition of other
loyalties and practices, it could not be regarded as extraordinary
if the pattern proved too tight here and there, or too loose in
other places. Members of the m aturer democracies will tend
naturally to equate our conditions with those current in their
own country, forgetting the time it took their nation to evolve
to its present standard, and forgetting, too, the economic and
social conditions of our people. It is natural for people to look at
another country through their own telescope and quite hum an
to judge another’s achievements or failings by their own
experience.
There is a tendency to forget that Britain’s evolution into
democracy was not altogether peaceful. It was a little over three
hundred years ago that they chopped off the head of a king,
made their middle-class revolution and installed Cromwell as
their dictator. The feudal ties were not completely broken and it
required another revolution more than two centuries later, with
its accompanying social jolts, to secure the base of that parlia­
m entary democracy which the British people today mistakenly
assume as a merit inherent in their national character. The
states of America fought a bitter civil war, whose memories still
condition attitudes and thinking, to impose their union. Its con­
stitution, based upon the affirmation of the equality of all men,
took several years to find full acceptance, and even today its
tenets are disregarded in many parts of the country. There is
still strife in America over the application of the essence of
democracy to all of its members.
Conditions in G hana today are comparable with those pre­
vailing in Britain or France or America at the time when they
were struggling to establish a free form of government, rather
than those which currently obtain in those countries. It would be
fairer, therefore, to ask what was the nature of the regime in those
countries then and make the appropriate adjustments for the
development of liberal ideas in the world since those days. The
economic position of our people is no better than that of the
workers in Britain at the same stage of their social and political
development, perhaps a little w7orse in some aspects. Their social
services were just as primitive, their country-wide educational