Istwa Nou

Europe in 1945 was exhausted and no longer the centre of anything, squeezed between the United States and the Soviet Union after four centuries of preeminence. That made African colonies more valuable in strictly economic terms. Britain leaned on its African possessions harder than it ever had, opening fresh areas to trade, investment and production. Eastern and central Africa became important sources of raw materials for a country short of everything, and those materials sat outside the dollar zone, so Britain could rebuild without depending wholly on American credit. A pattern follows. Portugal, the weakest of the colonial economies, kept its empire until the 1970s precisely because it could not manage without the commercial crutch. Britain, the strongest by the 1950s, gave up political administration soonest, because its economic recovery and its influence let it keep the substance while shedding the cost. In Lisbon economic control required political control. In London and Paris it did not. The two visions belonged to different centuries.

After the war colonial governments went into crop production themselves. State marketing boards in British West Africa fixed prices to prevent a repeat of the 1930s collapse, and substantial public money was made available for colonial development for the first time. African growers saw the arrangement clearly enough. They were paid a small share of what their crops fetched, and the surpluses piled up in good years went into large capital projects instead of back to the farmers who had produced them. Capital-intensive schemes favoured machinery and settler experts over African smallholders. The groundnut scheme in Tanganyika laid out plantations on North American prairie lines. The ground was too dry, the soil too thin, the machinery no match for the climate, and it cost British taxpayers millions. French investment in Niger River dams for cotton failed similarly, as farmers there grew sugar and rice for local sale. Officials also compelled farmers to dig erosion trenches, rotate crops and cull cattle. These measures politicised the countryside and handed nationalist leaders a constituency.

Portugal and Belgium ran smaller economies than Britain or France, had fewer options, and held on hardest. For Antonio Salazar's government in Lisbon the colonies absorbed surplus Portuguese population, in the way Fascist Italy had imagined using Eritrea and Ethiopia, and supplied markets and raw materials on the nineteenth century pattern. Portugal exported its own authoritarian system wholesale to Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau, where opposition was not permitted and reform was not discussed. The Belgian Congo boomed during and after the war on copper, rubber, gold and tin sold to the Allied war effort, and on uranium that went into the atomic bombs used against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Some of that money reached an emerging Congolese middle class. Most of its purpose was Belgium's own recovery. Lisbon feared that any reform in its African territories would open the door to British and French interests. The powers with the least room to manoeuvre eventually left their colonies with the most violence.