Page 92 - Afrika Must Unite

BRINGING UNITY IN GHANA 77
in a false situation. The imposition of any form of press censor­
ship was an idea most repugnant to me, since it ran counter to
everything I had always believed in, everything for which I had
struggled in my life. Freedom of expression had been one of the
essential rights for which I had fought. I had gone to prison for
daring to say things the colonial administration had not liked.
O ur fight had been the fight for the freedom of our people, and
the native inhabitants of the land, against an alien regime that
denied freedom. Now that we had won our emancipation and
launched our national existence, were we to allow our independ­
ence to be endangered by the very people whose speech and
action had abetted the colonial regime ? We had embarked upon
a course that aimed to push forward the clock of progress. Were
others to be given the freedom to push it back ? We had to face
up squarely to the question whether a seedling less developed
state, eager to modernize itself in the interests of the community,
threatened by the unpatriotic deeds of a minority opposition,
could perm it itself all the forms which established democracies
have taken generations to evolve. A young state has to work
doubly hard, has to deny itself many of the trimmings that have
become the accepted norm in the older nations.
O ur experience is proving that democracy as a functioning
system in newly emergent states must inevitably undergo many
stresses. Its machinery and pattern of government are being
superimposed upon social structures different from those in
which they originally developed. Democracy has undergone
development to its present accepted forms in the advanced
countries in circumstances of compulsion that have yet to be
reached in the young nations now attem pting to throw them ­
selves apace out of a stagnating economic backwardness into
modern industrialized settings able to provide wide material and
social benefits for all the people. It is not at all accidental that
the great exponents of democracy are precisely those countries
where industrial growth has achieved its highest levels within
free development. T hat growth, accompanied at periods by
social distress and discontent, was based upon vast private
accumulations of capital and proceeded at a pace which was
slower in the countries that embarked earlier upon the industrial
road and faster in those that started later.