Istwa Nou

After the disturbances in the Gold Coast, the British appointed the Coussey Commission to find out what had gone wrong in their model colony. It recommended more African representation and constitutional reform, and officials hoped this would strengthen the moderate elite of the United Gold Coast Convention. They presented Kwame Nkrumah as a dangerous radical and J. B. Danquah as the safe alternative. In the 1951 elections Nkrumah's Convention People's Party won heavily, and the British released him from prison and worked with him because there was nothing else to do. He became leader of government business and pushed decolonisation along steadily, arguing in private that a settlement was the only guard against disorder while speaking in public as a radical. Internal self-government came in 1954 and full independence in 1957, the first anywhere in sub-Saharan Africa. Two things produced it: mass protest that forced constitutional concessions, and a campaign of strikes and boycotts that made governing expensive while giving the troops nobody to shoot at. The habit of one commanding figure standing for a whole movement shaped what these new states became.

The approach to independence in Rwanda was dominated by the split between Tutsi and Hutu, which German and then Belgian administrators had hardened out of older and looser social categories into a fixed racial hierarchy with identity cards to match. In 1959 a Hutu rising against the Tutsi monarchy killed a great many people, and the Belgians restored order only to begin managing a transfer of power to the majority they had spent decades governing through its rivals. Parmehutu, the main Hutu party, swept the local elections of 1960. The monarchy was abolished the following year, and Parmehutu took the country to independence in 1962. Ethnic violence did not stop. The fear that the Tutsi were about to take power back was the trigger for the massacre in 1994 of Tutsi and of the Hutu thought to be friendly to them. In Burundi next door the Tutsi held power from independence until 1993. The categories were an administrative convenience. They became the lines along which two countries tore.