Istwa Nou

The economies handed over at independence were organised around a handful of export crops. Colonial administration had never tried to feed the territories or to link them internally. The aim was a possession that paid for itself out of export duties and tax, so roads and railways ran from the growing districts to the nearest harbour and stopped there. By the 1950s the acreage under cash crops was rising while the capacity to grow food for local eating was falling, which put rural households in a position where growing more left them poorer. Marketing boards bought at fixed low prices and sold abroad at much higher ones, and independence did not close them. The pattern was old. In the nineteenth century the continent exported captives, ivory and palm oil. In the twentieth it exported cotton, cocoa and gold. Around 1950 there was reason for optimism, with high postwar prices, expanding mines, and a West African merchant class better off than its South Asian equivalent.