Neocolonialism by Kwame Nkrumah 1965
SPEAKING of West Africa of 1962, the United Nations Economic Commision for Africa pointed out:
‘Few other regions of the world show such a multitude of fairly small States both as far as production and population go. The only similar region of some importance is Central America.’
West Africa is in fact divided into nineteen separate independent States and includes two colonial enclaves possessed by Spain and Portugal. The population of the area is about a third of the total population of Africa, yet the average population of the independent countries, if Nigeria is excluded, is about 2-3 million. It is, however, illusory to regard even Nigeria as an exception to the balkanisation policy practised by the departing colonial rulers. The constitution imposed on Nigeria at independence divided the country into three regions (which have since grown to four) loosely joined on a Federal basis but with sufficient powers left to the regions (which have since grown to four) loosely joined on a Federal basis but with sufficient powers left to the regions to cripple overall economic planning. If the other States of West Africa are examples of political balkanisation, Nigeria is an example of economic balkanisation. Ghana, with a population of over seven million, only escaped a similar fate by the resistance put up by the Conventions People’s Party government to a British plan which would have created no less than five regions, some with a population of less than one million, yet each possessing sufficient powers to defeat central planning.
Kenya, which was also forced to accept at independence a similar type of constitution, has only recently been able to establish a unified regime.
When France was faced with the possibility of being forced to accept some form of independence, or at least self-government, for the territories of the old colonial federations of French West and Equatorial Africa, a series of balkanisation measures were adopted by the French Government. The Loi-Cadre of 1956 established the frontiers of the present French-speaking States. The dismantling process begun by the Loi-Cadre was completed by the referendum of 1958 on the Constitution of the French Fifth Republic. Each of the territories established by the Loi-Cadre was called upon to decide separately whether it wished to remain an overseas territory of France, an autonomous Republic within the French Community or to be independent.
Teresa Hayter, a research assistant of the British Overseas Development Institute, in the April 1965 issue of the journal of the British Royal Institute of International Affairs has described the process:
‘The territories were to make separate decisions; it was therefore they and not the Federations of West and Equatorial Africa which were legally to inherit France’s powers; no provision was made for strengthening the Federal institutions and in fact they were dismantled after referendum and came formally to an end in April 1959. The original purpose of the Federations had been to enable the colonies to pay for themselves, through a reallocation of their revenues; ... Senghor in particular has bitterly accused France of “balkanising” Africa in the Loi-Cadre... With the choice so loaded, only Guinea voted against the Constitution; all the others became autonomous republics, members of the Franco-African Community.’
Fearing that the example of Guinea might be followed by other states which had decided to join the Community, the French Government removed everything of value from the territory. Administrators and teachers were withdrawn. Documents and even electric light bulbs were removed from government buildings. Financial assistance, trade support and the payment of pensions to Guinean war veterans were discontinued.
Despite the pressure placed on Guinea in this way, the remaining French States were forced by the internal pressure to seek political independence. This destroyed the conception usually associated with General de Gaulle, the originator of the French Community, of a non-sovereign group of African States each separately linked to France. One after another the ‘autonomous Republics’ obtained international sovereignty but under such adverse conditions that they had in fact to maintain all the military, financial, commercial and economic links of the previous colonial period. In order to exist at all as independent States, these former French territories were forced to accept French ‘aid’ even to meet their recurrent expenses.
French ‘aid’ to developing countries is, in proportion to the French national income, the highest in the world and is, in absolute terms, the second highest. Nearly all of this ‘aid’ is absorbed by commitments in Africa, and nearly half of it goes to the fourteen States which were previously autonomous republics and whose combined population is only slightly larger than that of Nigeria. Aid of this type can dictate African relations with the developed world and, as experience has shown, can be extremely dangerous to the recipients.
French African aid originally arose from the advantage which French firms and individuals derived from the African franc zone and this has determined the framework in which the aid is still provided. So long as the relationship which the aid provided was profitable to France it naturally continued. It was in effect a levy on French taxpayers for the benefit of French individuals and firms.
The overall value of the policy to France was that in return for guaranteed markets and prices for colonial primary products, such as coffee, cocoa, groundnuts, bananas and cotton, the African States had to import from France fixed quantities of certain goods, such as machinery, textiles, sugar and flour, which were then uncompetitive in price or surplus in Europe, and in addition the States were forced to limit their imports from countries outside the franc zone. While this scheme made nonsense of any plan for inter-African trade it was a period highly profitable to France. With the fall in the world price of primary commodities these profits began to diminish, as did enthusiasm for ‘aid’ in France. At the present moment the most which can be said in favour of French aid is that it does not now, as it did in the past, make an actual profit for France from the less developed States of its former African empire. Teresa Hayter sums it up:
‘France does not gain in its transactions with the States nor does it lose: aid, private investment, French Government expenditures and imports from them are balanced by exports to them, repatriation of capital and remittances of profits and salaries.’
This state of affairs is considered to be no longer of value to France. The Jeanneney Report published in 1964 and expressing the official French view, pointed out that the protective system of the French zone was no longer in the interests of France and the Report therefore advocated the re-deployment of French aid. In any event, France had to comply with her obligations to the European Common Market. Under the new Convention of Association which came into force in the summer of 1964, the six members of the European Common Market are to achieve in stages a free trade area and this will no longer make it possible for France to discriminate in favour of the African States nor for these States to discriminate against France’s Common Market partners. Exports from these States will by the end of a five-year period have to be aligned to world prices. In consequence the primary production which they have built up on the strength of the promise of guaranteed markets and prices is likely to fail to be competitive in world market conditions. It is difficult to see how Senegal in particular can manage without a French subsidy for her groundnuts, and President Senghor has already called attention to the serious economic position into which this puts his country.
In fact, the limited neo-colonialism of the French period is now being merged in the collective neo-colonialism of the European Common Market which enables other States, hitherto outside the French preserve, to profit by the system. It also rationalises the division of Africa into economic zones based upon Europe, by drawing in four other States. The Congo (Leopoldville), Burundi and Rwanda are, as previous Belgian colonies, tied to the Belgian economic system and Somalia through its previous association with Italy is also brought in as an associated State of the Common Market.
A grouping such as this raises the wider problems of African neo-colonialism and emphasises its irresponsible nature. Of the States carved out of the former French colonies one, Guinea, has been able, with great suffering and losses it is true, to cut free from the type of neo-colonialist control imposed on the others. Mali has been forced to accept some of the rules and regulations which govern the relations of the former French colonies to France, but at least she has set up her own currency, limits transfers of money abroad and receives from France only a partial guarantee of the parity of her currency with the French franc. In the case of all the other States their currencies have been stabilised on a fixed parity with the French franc and have a total guarantee from the French Treasury. These States pay their receipts of French francs into operation accounts in the French Treasury. These accounts can be overdrawn and the States can draw on them against their own currencies to an unlimited extent. Obviously, however, whatever the theoretical position, the international financial position of these countries is subject to control in that at any time their operation accounts in the French Treasury could be blocked, as was done in the case of Guinea. Most, at any rate, of the States concerned lack the strength to stand up against such pressure as did Guinea.
Why then, it may be asked, are these powers not sufficient to enable France to persuade these States to follow present French foreign policy which is based upon a ‘third force’ concept? France did not support the United States and Belgium in their ‘humanitarian’ intervention at Stanleyville in the Congo. Unlike Britain and the other Common Market countries, France has openly opposed the United States policy in Santo Domingo, has recognised the Peoples’ Republic of China and has recommended the neutralisation of Vietnam. Yet only a minority of the African States which would appear to be under French neo-colonial control have followed the French line. The majority of them refuse to recognise China or in any way suggestive of being under United States rather than French influence. The answer to this apparent paradox will, I believe, be found in the following chapters of this book in which I attempt to explain the power and ramifications of international financial control. Here one has a super State which can at times even override the policy wishes of the nominal neo-colonial master.
The control of the funds of the French neo-colonial African States is exercised by the administrative council of their central banks, which are composed partly of Frenchmen without whose agreement no decision in monetary policy can be taken. This French banking complex, with its absolute control of the currencies and external payments of the French neo-colonial States, could, in theory, dictate that these States follow a French policy. However, the complex is itself subject, in the manner later described, to external pressures which support United States rather than French policies where a difference of opinion arises.
Part of the value of commencing a study of neo-colonialism in its African context is that it provides examples of every type of the system. It is impossible to define the African situation in terms of independent States, divided into the non-aligned and neo-colonialist camp, colonies and racialist States such as South Africa. In Africa, all former colonies which have now become independent, including particularly South Africa, are subject in some degree to neo-colonialist pressures which however much they wish to resist they cannot entirely escape, struggle as they may. The difference in reality is between those States that accept neo-colonialism as a policy and those which resist it. Similarly, the colonial problem of Africa is in many ways really neo-colonial. The Portuguese African territories appear at first sight only to raise the issue of freedom from colonial rule but in fact they exist as colonies only because Portugal is itself a neo-colonial State. For the last fifty years the great powers have regarded the Portuguese colonies as counters which they can exchange between themselves in order to readjust the balance of power. In 1913 the British and Germans had initiated an agreement for their division and this was only prevented by the outbreak of the first world war. In the appeasement period prior to the second world war, when it was thought that Hitler could be bought off by an offer of colonial territory, the Portuguese colonies were again regarded as the suitable bribe.
If Portugal controls these colonies now it is only because of the military strength which she derives through her NATO alliance. Portugal is however not a member of NATO because of any military assistance which she could render the alliance but because this is a convenient way by which Portuguese territory can be made available to the forces of other members of the alliance.
At the other end of the scale is the French colony of Somalia. It continues to exist as a colony not because France would resist pressure to grant it independence but because of African disunity. It is a point of dispute between Somalia and Ethiopia. African disunity maintains this colony. If it were to go on either of its neighbours it would almost inevitably provoke a conflict between them.
Rhodesia, while theoretically a colony, is really a fossilised form of the earliest type of neo-colonialism which was practised in southern Africa until the formation of the Union of South Africa. The essence of the Rhodesia system is not to employ individuals drawn from the people of the territory itself to run the country, as in the newer type of neo-colonial State, but to utilise instead an alien minority. The majority of the European ruling class of Rhodesia only came to the Colony after the second world war, but it is they and not the African inhabitants, who outnumber them 16 to 1, that Britain regards as ‘the Government’. This racialist State is protected from outside pressure because under international law it is a British colony, while Britain herself excuses her failure to exercise her legal rights to prevent the oppression and exploitation of the African inhabitants (of which of course she officially disapproves) because of a supposed British parliamentary convention. In other words, by maintaining Rhodesia nominally as a colony, Britain in fact gives her official protection as a second South Africa and the European racialists are left free to treat the African inhabitants as they will.
The Rhodesian system thus has all the hallmarks of the neo-colonial model. The patron power, Britain, awards to a local government over which it claims to have no control unlimited rights and exploitation within the territory. Yet Britain still retains powers to exclude other countries from intervening either to liberate its African population or to bring its economy into some other one of influence. The manoeuvring over Rhodesia’s ‘independence’ is an excellent example of the workings of neo-colonialism and of the practical difficulties to which the system gives rise. A European minority of less than a quarter of a million could not maintain, in the conditions of Africa today, rule over four million Africans without external support from somewhere. When the settlers talk of ‘independence’ they are not thinking of standing on their own feet but merely of seeking a new neo-colonialist master who would, in their view, be more reliable than Britain.
As will be seen from the chapters which follow, modern neo-colonialism is based upon the control of nominally independent States by giant financial interests. These interests often act through or on behalf of a particular capitalist State, but they are quite capable of acting on their own and forcing those imperial countries in which they have a dominant interest to follow their lead. There is, however, an older type of neo-colonialism which is based primarily on military considerations. A world power, having decided on principles of global strategy that it is necessary to have a military base in this or that nominally independent country, must ensure that the country where the base is situated is friendly. Here is another reason for balkanisation. If the base can be situated in a country which is so constituted economically that it cannot survive without substantial ‘aid’ from the military power which owns the base, then, so it is argued, the security of the base can be assured. Like so many of the other assumptions on which neo-colonialism is based this one is false. The presence of foreign bases arouses popular hostility to the neo-colonial arrangements which permit them more quickly and more surely than does anything else, and throughout Africa these bases are disappearing. Libya may be quoted as an example of how this policy has failed.
Libya has had a long colonial history. From the sixteenth century onwards it was a Turkish colony, but in 1900, in the heyday of colonialism, France and Italy agreed that if Italy would not oppose France occupying Morocco, France would not oppose Italy occupying Libya. So when in 1911 and 1912 France was occupying Morocco, Italy went to war with Turkey and, defeating her, annexed Libya.
Despite promises during the second world war to the people of Libya that they would never again be subjected to Italian rule, France tried at the peace settlement to have Italy reinstalled in order to support her own position in Tunisia. This solution proving impossible, Libya became nominally independent but actually under British neo-colonial control.
According to the figures collated by the British Overseas Development Institute, during the period 1945 to 1963 Libya received no less than 17 per cent of the total bilateral aid which Britain gave to all foreign countries outside the Commonwealth in that period. The Overseas Development Institute notes that ‘although these payments to Libya are counted as “aid” there is no doubt that they are in essence straightforward payments to the Libyan Government in return for the use of bases’. Nevertheless, popular pressure in Libya has now made it necessary for the Libyan Government to terminate the military agreement for the British bases.
These limitations on the real independence of many countries in Africa should not be allowed to obscure the very great achievements already gained in the struggle for African independence and unity.
In 1945 Africa largely comprised the colonial territories of European powers, and the idea that the greater part of the continent would be independent within twenty years would have seemed impossible to any political observer in the immediate post-war period. Yet, not only has independence been achieved but considerable progress has been made towards the establishment of African unity. To this unity there are still powerful obstacles but they are no greater than the obstacles already overcome and, if their nature is understood, they are clearly surmountable.
Already, and this will ultimately be the decisive factor, the mass of the African people support unity in the same way as they previously supported the various local movements for political independence. Many of the political leaders of French West Africa, for example, did not at first support independence. In 1946, in the French National Assembly, of which he was then a member, M. Houphouet-Boigny, the President of the Ivory Coast, claimed ‘there are no separatists on these benches... there is a powerful bond, capable of resisting all tests, a moral bond which unites us. It is the ideal of liberty, fraternity, equality, for whose triumph France has never hesitated to sacrifice its most noble blood’. The same policy of the maintenance of unity with France was also supported at that time by President Senghor of Senegal, who said, ‘The French union must be a conjunction of civilisations, a melting-pot of culture... it is a marriage rather than an association.’
In the same way as mass pressure made it impossible for an African leader to oppose independence, so today mass pressure makes it impossible for him openly to oppose African unity. Those who are against it can only show their opposition in indirect ways: by suggesting that the pace towards it is too fast; that this or that plan is impracticable or that there are procedural difficulties which prevent them assisting in formulating a practical plan for it. The case for African unity is very strong and the instinct of the mass of the people right.
It is only when the artificial boundaries that divide her are broken down so as to provide for viable economic units, and ultimately a single African unit, that Africa will be able to develop industrially, for her own sake, and ultimately for the sake of a healthy world economy. A common currency is needed and communications of all kinds must be developed to allow the free flow of goods and services.
The Economic Commission for Africa has repeatedly emphasised the need for economic planning on a continental scale. The inadequacy of national planning can be demonstrated by a glance at the economies of, for example, Mali, the Upper Volta, Niger and Uganda. These land-locked States, which export large quantities of food products to other African States, cannot remain indifferent to the agricultural self-sufficiency schemes adopted by their neighbours. Similarly, a national government planning the establishment of a new industry may find that a neighbouring State is developing one like it. Such duplication would probably result in wasted resources if each was depending on exporting its surplus to its neighbour.
Few would argue against the need for economic planning on a national scale. How much stronger is the argument for continental planning. The modern trend is towards larger economic and political units as interdependence of nations and peoples grows. No country can be completely self-sufficient or afford to ignore political events outside its borders. Africa is clearly fragmented into too many small uneconomic and non-viable States, many of whom are having a very hard struggle to survive. As already noted, others have had to cling to old ties with former colonial rulers and have become easy prey to neo-colonialist forces. Some of them have found themselves, whether they liked it or not, drawn into the cold war and into the rivalries between foreign powers. The Congo is a notable example.
Naturally, each national government is concerned primarily with the welfare of its own citizens. It could only be expected to agree to a policy of unification if the immediate and long-term benefits became so apparent that it would be positively damaging to its citizens not to co-operate. We are faced here with the problem of uneven economic growth. Some African countries are richer in natural resources than others. The less fortunate will need reassuring that their interests will not suffer at the hands of the more developed States.
Past economic union experience has not been encouraging. The linking of the Rhodesias and Nyasaland benefited chiefly Southern Rhodesia. Kenya has gained principally from the East African Common Market, Uganda and Tanganyika being at best only marginal gainers. In the former French colonial federations the benefits of economic unity tended to centre in Brazzaville, Abidjan and Dakar. These examples further strengthen the argument for continentally-planned economic growth so that all States can benefit from industrialization and other improvements made possible by unified direction. The richer countries will be able to help the poorer. Resources can be pooled and development projects co-ordinated to raise the living standards of every African.
The time factor is important. As ECA has pointed out, now is the time to act, before each State gets too deeply involved in major investment and structural decisions based on narrow, national markets. With each month that passes, the foreign interests of neo-colonialism get a tighter grip on Africa’s economic life.
The comparatively recent penetration of American big business into Africa points once again to the danger from neo-colonialism. So also does the combining of large firms to form powerful monopolies. How can some of our smaller States hope to bargain successfully with powerful foreign combines some of which control financial empires worth more than the State’s total revenue? The smaller the State, and the more formidable the foreign interests, the less likely are the conditions for economic independence to be met. For example, Ghana, because of its economic size and alternative industries, has been in a stronger position for bargaining with the aluminium companies than much smaller, and economically more limited Togo can hope to be in dealing with French phosphate interests. The domination of Africa’s economy by foreign firms must be ended if we are to achieve rounded economic growth, and this can only be done through unified action.
Something in the nature of an economic revolution is required. Our development has been held back for too long by the colonial type economy. We need to reorganise entirely so that each country can specialise in producing the goods and crops for which it is best suited.
With economic unity, those countries in Africa which are beginning to establish modern industries would benefit from wider markets. We would all be in a better bargaining position to obtain higher prices for our goods and to establish adequate taxation of foreign factor earnings. In fact, a whole new pattern of economic development would be made possible. Agriculture could be modernised more quickly with more capital at its disposal. Industries on a larger and more economic scale could be planned. These could afford to make use of new techniques involving heavy capital outlay. Smaller plants planned to meet only national needs are likely to have higher costs, and are eventually less able to reduce costs than optimum-sized units.
National planning bodies would still have a very important part to play in a unified Africa. They would, for example, supply essential information about local conditions, but their work would be made easier with the experienced advice and help of a single planning body keeping an eye on Africa’s interests as a whole. The research and training in development projects already being carried out by the ECA Development Institute in Dakar would be strengthened to serve both the continental and national bodies. Expensive failures due to lack of co-ordination would be avoided. A case in point is the Inga dam project which is to provide power for a sugar refinery, a plastics and hardboard (from sugar cane waste) complex in Bangui, which in turn will ship bulk plastics to a plastic products industry in Brazzaville. Obviously there should be a planning body able to phase and harmonise construction timing for the Brazzaville and Bangui plants, the power lines from Inga to Bangui and Brazzaville, and the transportation services between Bangui and Brazzaville and the dam itself.
In the process of obtaining economic unity there is bound to be much hard bargaining between the various States. Integration of different aspects of economic policy will proceed at different rates, and there may be disappointing delays and compromises to be worked out. But given the will to succeed, difficulties can be resolved.
In general, the broader the front on which economic unity is launched the quicker the goals and policies of a fully developed Africa can be achieved. An all-African planning body could take immediate steps towards the development of large-scale industry and power; for the removal of barriers to inter-African trade; and for the creation of a central bank and the formation of a unified policy on all aspects of export control, tariff and quota arrangements. The ECA has carried out several surveys designed to provide information to help in the making of decisions on these points.
Among immediate needs are the manufacture in Africa of agricultural machinery of all kinds to speed up the modernisation of agriculture. We need supplies of electrical equipment for use in the growing electric power production essential for industrial growth. Mining and industrial machinery must be produced in Africa to lower the costs of developing our mineral resources. Construction machinery and supplies, chemicals, fertilisers, plastics, are all urgently required, and Africa must produce them for her own requirements. Reports of the ECA Industrial Co-ordination Missions to different regions in Africa suggest that the production of iron and steel, non-ferrous metals, engineering supplies, chemicals and fertilisers, cement, paper and textiles should be developed on an inter-African basis since their efficiency depends on large-scale production. Other industries which can run efficiently on a smaller scale can be planned nationally.
The location of the various industries will, of course, depend on many factors such as the availability of power, mineral deposits, nearness to processing plants, markets and so on. Production of aluminium and copper, for example, will have to be developed in those countries where the essential resources, ore and cheap power, are available. The manufacturing of aluminium and copper products, however, need not take place in the countries producing the metals. Similarly, the production of cotton is limited to certain climatic regions, while cotton textile industries can be developed further afield.
Every African State has some contribution to make to the economic whole. There are, for instance, no known deposits of potash in West Africa, but requirements can be met from North Africa, Ethiopia and possibly also from the Congo (Brazzaville) and Gabon. Plans for nitrogenous fertiliser production in Zambia have already been worked out. The plant could be supplied with coal from Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) and low-cost power from the Victoria Falls, Kenya, with its large forest reserves, could become the centre of a wood distillation complex able to supply the countries of East and Central Africa with gas, acetone, methanol and tar. There are many other examples too numerous to describe.
The urgent need to plan industrial development on a continental scale must not, however, blind us to the equally important need to do the same for agriculture, fishing and forestry. In The Role of Industry in Development: some Fallacies, Dudley Seers has pointed out the inter-dependence of agriculture and industry:
‘Materials are needed for growing industries; more important, the swelling town labour force needs to be fed, and this implies that a rising surplus of food has to be produced in the countryside. ... To over-emphasize industry, as some countries have found to their cost, leads paradoxically in the end to a slower rate of industrialisation.’
African States are importing larger amounts of food than ever before from abroad. This trend must be stopped by a carefully planned expansion of our own agriculture.
As an industry, there can be specialisation so that each region or State concentrates on producing the agriculture products for which it is best suited. For instance, it is wasteful for each West African State to try to be self-sufficient in rice when Senegal’s Casamance district would be well able to supply the need. Equally, Mali and Upper Volta are obvious exporters of fresh, tinned and processed meat, while coastal States would supply fresh, tinned and smoked fish.
A further argument for unified agricultural policy is implied in the need to step up efforts to combat many of the efforts to combat many of the obstacles to economic growth. Locusts, the tse-tse fly and plant diseases are no respecters of political frontiers. Research into their control would benefit from a pooling of brain power and technical know-how. So also would medicine and social services. How much greater the chance of wiping out major epidemic diseases like river blindness and sleeping sickness if action against them is co-ordinated and unified.
Transport and communications are also sectors where unified planning is needed. Roads, railways, waterways, air-lines must be made to serve Africa’s needs, not the requirements of foreign interests. Communications between African States are quite inadequate. In many cases it is still easier to travel from an airport in Africa to Europe or America than to go from one African State to another.
Economic unity to be effective must be accompanied by political unity. The two are inseparable, each necessary for the future greatness of our continent, and the full development of our resources. There are several examples of major unions of States in the world today. In Africa Must Unite I described some of the more important ones, and warned against the danger of regional federations in Africa.
Africa today is the main stamping ground of the neo-colonialist forces that seek the domination of the world for the imperialism they serve. Spreading from South Africa, the Congo, the Rhodesias, Angola, Mozambique, they form a maze-like connection with the mightiest international financial monopolies in the world. These monopolies are extending their banking and industrial organisations throughout the African continent. Their spokesmen push their interests in the parliaments and governments of the world and sit on the international bodies that are supposed to exist for the promotion of world peace and the welfare of the less-developed countries. Against such a formidable phalanx of forces, how can we move? Certainly not singly, but in a combination that will give strength to our bargaining power and eliminate so many of the duplications that give greater force and greater advantage to the imperialists and their strategy of neo-colonialism.
Decolonisation is a word much and unctuously used by imperialist spokesmen to describe the transfer of political control from colonialist to African sovereignty. The motive spring of colonialism, however, still controls the sovereignty. The young countries are still the providers of raw materials, the old of manufactured goods. The change in the economic relationship between the new sovereign states and the erstwhile masters is only one of form. Colonialism has achieved a new guise. It has become neo-colonialism, the last stage of imperialism; its final bid for existence, as monopoly-capitalism or imperialism is the last stage of capitalism. And neo-colonialism is fast entrenching itself within the body of Africa today through the consortia and monopoly combinations that are the carpet-baggers of the African revolt against colonialism and the urge for continental unity.
These interests are centred on the mining companies of South and Central Africa. From mining they ramify onto an involved pattern of investment companies, manufacturing concerns, transport, public utility organisations, oil and chemical industries, nuclear installations and many other undertakings too numerous to mention. Their enterprises spill across the vast African continent and over the oceans into North America, Australia, New Zealand, Asia, the Caribbean, South America, the United Kingdom, Scandinavia and most of western Europe.
Connections, direct and indirect, are maintained with many of the giants of American industry and finance. They are supported by leading bankers, financiers and industrialists in the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, Germany, America and elsewhere. The rotas of their directorates are filled with names that have a familiar ring for those who have the least knowledge of international finance and industry. Names like Oppenheimer, Hambro, Drayton, Rothschild, d'Erlanger, Gilet, Lafond, Robiliart, van der Straeten, Hochschild, Chester Beatty, Patino, Engelhard, Timmins are ubiquitous. Others, equally powerful in the interests they dominate, avoid the publicity of lengthy lists of their directorships, either by complete absence from the pages of directories anxious to advertise their glories, or by coyly hiding their eminence behind a lonely announcement with name and address.
These intricate inter-connections of the great imperialist monopolies expose the real forces that are behind world events. They indicate also the pattern which links those events to the developing countries at different points of the globe. They reveal the duality of the interests that force the developing countries to import goods and services which are the products of companies combined in the monopoly groups directly exploiting their natural resources or intimately associated with them. This is the double edge to the guillotine that cuts off Africa’s wealth from Africa, to the greater enrichment of the countries which absorb her primary materials and return them to her in the form of finished products.
In their new-found independence, it is to these very same monopolistic groups that the new African States are obliged to turn to supply the requirements arising from the need to lay the foundations for their economic transformation. The policy of non-alignment, whenever it is exercised, imposes the obligation to ‘shop around’, but since capitalism has come to the peak of monopoly, it is impossible for any of us to avoid dealing with monopoly in some form or another. But it is in the nature of our arrangements with the monopolies that the freedom or otherwise of the African States lies. Where we establish and maintain the integrity of our financial institutions and keep our basic projects free from imperialist control, we leave ourselves room to manoeuvre away from the neo-colonialism that, unfortunately, has closed its grip upon countries whose independence is over-shadowed by a heavy reliance upon extra-African associations. In this atmosphere of relative freedom, the giant combines that open up industrial enterprises on our soil do so on arrangements that are well screened and are part of nationally planned advancement. The national banks are really national banks, formed and run out of the country’s own resources, and our other financial and economic institutions are guarded against neo-colonialist infiltration.
Unhappily, these conditions are rare in Africa. Most of the territories pass into the state of national sovereignty in unviable circumstances that inhibit even a modicum of free movement within national limits. They could be overcome, but only within the combined strength that continental unity and a central connective socialist policy, free of attachments to other continents, could give. As things are, most of our new States, alarmed at the prospect of the harsh world of poverty, disease, ignorance and lack of financial and technical resources into which they are thrust from the womb of colonialism, are reluctant to cut the cord that holds them to the imperialist mother. Their hesitancy is fostered by the sugared water of aid, which is the stop-gap between avid hunger and the hoped-for greater nourishment that never comes. As a result, we find that imperialism, having quickly adopted its outlook to the loss of direct political control, has retained and extended its economic grip (and thereby its political compulsion) by the artfulness of neo-colonialist insinuation.
The increasing expansion of productive capacity and potential output of the advanced capitalist countries has its corollary in the necessity to export on a geometrically increasing scale the finished products of industry and the excess capital that could only further inflate competition at home, but brings rapid and high returns from the industrially-starved new nations. Hence the fevered jostling for position in these areas as well as in that of raw materials monopoly, which is using Africa as the playground, not only of the cold war (an aspect of the fight of capitalism for existence against socialism), but of the competitive struggle of international monopoly. North America imports into Africa rose from 10-3 per cent in 1959 to 13-7 per cent in 1962, while those from other western countries and Japan remained the same or declined slightly. This corresponds to the increasing American investments in the continent’s extractive industries and the growth of United States participation in financial establishments on this continent. American banking houses are making inroads into territories formerly catered for solely by European and British banks. The French banks still dominate in the former French countries and the Belgians in the Congo; but this is frequently a front for American participation.
European financial advisers constantly counsel the African countries on the advantages that they can receive from remaining in association with the erstwhile ‘mother country’, while depreciating the possibilities of inter-African association. Much subtlety is employed by Lombard, the commentator of the Financial Times. In an article which appeared in the issue of 6 February 1964 of this influential London newspaper, a product of an industrial holding company which also produces The Economist, Lombard asserted that ‘there is not much that African countries can do directly to help one another financially at this stage of their economic evolution’. He is therefore ‘glad to see that the independent African countries are now coming to recognise that it is very much in their own interests to preserve the monetary ties with leading European countries they inherited from their colonial days. ... They obviously entertained strong suspicion that the enthusiasm their old mother countries were displaying for allowing them to remain within their monetary areas was motivated largely, if not wholly, by consideration of self-interest. And they are inclined to assume that this implied that their own purpose would be served best by following up political independence with its financial equivalent at the earliest possible opportunity’.
Lombard assured his readers that the Africans showed wisdom when the secretariat of E.C.A., assisting the Organisation of African Unity to implement its resolution on the possibility of establishing an African clearing house and payments union, had the good sense ‘to seek the advice of the distinguished American monetary authority, Professor Triffin of Yale University’. Need we be surprised that in his report the distinguished American professor pointed out that ‘it would be most unwise lightly to condemn or break up financial arrangements with major trading companies and financial centres’. This, of course, we might consider neo-colonialist penetration, but to Lombard it is only one side of the picture. For there are two worlds, and the African countries ‘should now strive the best of both worlds, by maintaining and even further developing the relations they have with the major international monetary areas and at the same time building their own financial self-help mechanisms’. How is it possible to resolve two contradictions Lombard does not volunteer to explain, but what he does confess is that this unresolvable two-way procedure ‘would meet with nothing but the fullest approval from their (African) present monetary area associates’.
This says plenty and we have no difficulty in believing what it says, for the simple fact is that those who control the major international monetary areas are placing their time bombs within the ‘self-help mechanisms’ of the African countries. For these mechanisms are controlled by the financial monopolists of imperialism, the bankers and financiers who have been very busy in the past few years setting up establishments throughout Africa, infiltrating into the economic heart of many countries and linking with the most important enterprises that are being established to exploit the continent’s natural resources on a larger scale than ever before for their own private gain.
Though the aim of neo-colonialists is economic domination, they do not confine their operations to the economic sphere. They use the old colonialist methods of religious, educational and cultural infiltration. For example, in the independent States, many expatriate teachers and ‘cultural ambassadors’ influence the minds of the young against their own country and people. They do this by undermining confidence in the national government and social system through exalting their own notions of how a State should be run, and forget that there is no monopoly of political wisdom.
But all this indirect subversion is as nothing compared with the brazen onslaught of international capitalists. Here is ‘empire’, the empire of finance capital, in fact if not in name, a vast sprawling network of inter-continental activity on a highly diversified scale that controls the lives of millions of people in the most widely separated parts of the world, manipulating whole industries and exploiting the labour and riches of nations for the greedy satisfaction of a few. Here resides the mainspring of power, the direction of policies that stand against the advancing tide of freedom of the exploited people of Africa and the world. Here is the adamantine enemy of African independence and unity, braced in an international chain of common interest that regards the likely coming together of the new nations as a major blow at its continued domination of the resources and economies of others. Here, indeed, are the real workings of neo-colonialism. Here indeed are the economic ramifications of the monopolies and combines. Their financial and economic empires are pan-African and they can only be challenged on a pan-African basis. Only a united Africa through an All-African Union Government can defeat them.