Istwa Nou

Across Africa the colonial administrations wanted the same three things. They wanted revenue, raised by a tax levied on every head or every hut, which for most Africans was the first plain evidence that they no longer governed themselves. They wanted labour, and a tax payable in cash was the instrument for producing it. They wanted cash crops and minerals moving outward. Schools and clinics stayed in missionary hands into the 1920s and the state itself was absent from most of daily life. What it did build was transport. Railways and roads tied the continent to the world economy, and Reid calls that the deepest thing colonialism left behind. During the 1920s a good many Africans thought the arrangement might work for them, since organised violence had fallen off, cash crops and migrant wages were available, and populations were recovering from the disasters of the previous thirty years. The Depression closed that opening. By the middle of the 1930s officials were complaining about the aimlessness and the brutality of their own system.