Africa since 1940 The Past of the Present

Looking backward from the 1960s, it is easy to see why the story of post-war politics is often told as if everything led to a single, inevitable outcome: national independence. It is more difficult to see what somebody in 1945 or 1947 – say, a young, politically minded African returning from higher education abroad – aspired to and expected to attain. Or a family who had just settled in a mining town after years of periodic separations, missed the familiar sociability of village life but perhaps not the constraints of their elders, and hoped that their children could obtain an education. Or a farmer, selling his cocoa in the booming world market, aware that colonial marketing boards were holding onto much of what his crops earned, and wondering if his children would continue to help with the harvest.