Kwame Nkrumah and the Dawn of the Cold War by Marika Sherwood;

Author:Marika Sherwood;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Book Network Int'l Limited trading as NBN International (NBNi)

7

The Gold Coast, Nigeria and Francophone West Africa, 1945–8

This chapter provides a glimpse at the challenges WANS was facing and the challenges Nkrumah faced when he returned home, and at what was happening in West Africa.1

Gold Coast

In his book looking at the economy of Africa, historian D.K. Fieldhouse notes that in the 1940s ‘almost all modern manufacturing, banking, import-export-trade, shipping, mining and a number of plantations, timber enterprises and so on [were] foreign owned or controlled’. The British companies were, of course, working closely with the government, in London and in the colonies. Historian Sarah Stockwell reports that the ‘management’ of the United Africa Company (UAC) and Ashanti Goldfields Corporation ‘enjoyed comparatively close association with politicians and the Colonial Office’. It is of some interest that F.J. Pedler, a very senior Colonial Office official, joined the UAC in 1947, becoming its director in 1951 and then its deputy chairman (1965–1968); he was also director of Unilever from 1956 till 1968.2

During the war the government took over the buying and selling of cocoa, thus controlling prices and the incomes of thousands of cocoa farmers. It set up marketing boards for all exports and imports; 90 per cent was allocated to the Association of West African Merchants, which had no African members. The chairman of the Cocoa Marketing Board was John Cadbury. There was a monstrous gap between what these merchants paid to the farmers and the prices they obtained on the world markets – for example, in 1946 Nigerian growers received £16.15.0 per ton for palm oil, which was then sold to the British Ministry of Food for £95 per ton. Private companies were making a fortune: for example, the profits of Ashanti Goldfields Corporation for 1945 was £743,755, c.£29 million today. The UAC (a subsidiary of Unilever) owned 368 ‘retail outlets’ in 1948; the profits of Unilever for 1940 were £9.6 million (c.£493.1 million today).3

As noted in Chapter 4, when World War II ended the Gold Coast branch of the Farmers Committee of West Africa sent a delegation to London to protest against the government not revoking the wartime control of the buying and selling of cocoa. They were ignored.4

In 1946 the new governor, Sir Alan Burns, introduced a constitution which established a legislative council, made up of the governor as the president, six government officials, six nominated members and 18 elected members. However, the council was only in an advisory capacity, so the governor and his executive council could ignore it. Furthermore, eligibility to vote was very limited. After a year in Accra, Burns was appointed to serve on the UN’s new Trusteeship Council. At a meeting in New York in December 1947 he expressed his feelings about Africa quite clearly: ‘the major problems obstructing general improvement [are] fear of the supernatural and inferiority complex … Africans tend to blame others and refuse to admit their own faults … Persons clamouring for self-government will confuse the issue and set the clock back … Must educate African people for self-rule.’5

American foreign correspondent A.

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