africa's liberation struggle: retrospect and prospect || thirty years of liberation struggle

Thirty Years of Liberation StruggleAuthor(s): Basil DavidsonSource: Africa Today, Vol. 34, No. 4, Africa's Liberation Struggle: Retrospect and Prospect(4th Qtr., 1987), pp. 5-16Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4186443 .

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Thirty Years of Liberation Struggle

Basil Davidson

Presented as the Keynote Address at the 30th Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association, Denver, Colorado, November 20, 1987.

Distinguished Colleagues: I express my thanks to your outstanding Association, and to its distinguished officers, for conferring upon me this honor and opportunity, thereby expressing confidence in my ability, such as it is, to deserve the one and exploit the other. If I am somewhat less unnerved than I might be it is because no few of you in this gathering are friends, even old friends; and we have marched together-or should I say wandered together, sometimes stumbled together-through many years of difficult testing, which have nonetheless been vividly enjoyable years of African experience.

The title you have selected is in itself something of a manifesto; it indicates what has seemed to me to be, to have always been from the start, a distinguishing feature of our approach and attitude to the work to which we have put our hands. It has been necessary to undertake a struggle to liberate ourselves, our students, our wider audience, from a veritable jungle of inherited misconception or ignorance about Africa. It has been necessary to commit ourselves to ventures in scholarship and research which many, outside our disciplines and commitment, have thought strange or even eccen- tric. As it is, these thirty years of liberation struggle have bodied forth and en- shrined the strong development of your Association and matured the rich harvest of your academic and practical work, from which all of us in the international community of Africanists have drawn benefit.

These 30 years more or less coincide with my own experience of Africa, which began in any serious way in 1951. This gives me no claim on superior wisdom: on the contrary, anyone who has written about Africa for as long as I have done is bound to be painfully aware of mistakes of judgment and of errors of interpretation. What long and perservering experience does give one, perhaps, if one can make oneself sufficiently self-critical, is some insight into the movement of history through which we have lived; and this must be the justification, fragile or otherwise, for this address. A personal view of the vast and contradictory theme indicated by your title may, I hope, have some value even if only as a stimulant to disagreement.

Basil Davidson describes himself as 'a student and then historian of Africa, 1950 to the present." Prior to that, and during the early ears of his African studies, he pursued a career as journalist, and still frequently supplies articles on contemporary African affairs to, among others, The Ecoomost, The Times, and Wet Aidf. Among his many books are Lost Cties of Airke (1959), The Afrles Past (1964), The Aifrles Gsins (1969), and Cas Africa Sun'he? (1974).

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Unrealized Hopes and Continuing Possibilities

Let me begin by stating what I take to be the central question that must arise in this context. Thirty years ago, and more, the prospects that seemed likely to follow, ?ven bound to follow, the anti-colonial liberation, the decolonization, of Africa looked bright, lit with hopes of solid reconstruction, of peaceful change, of many-sided human and material progress. Today, those prospects-much more often than fulfilled-seem denied and even mocked. To affirm that Africa today is plunged into acute crisis, whether of institutions, of human relationships, or of material immiseration, is only to say what everyone knows to be true.

One is reminded of Bertolt Brechts comment, offered in the midst of Europe's submersion beneath the Hitler flood of half a century ago, that the person who is laughing is simply the person who hasn't yet heard the bad news. And if one wished to epitomize Africa's fall from the moral and social assumptions of the liberation struggles we have known, what could be more convinc- ing, more dreadful in its implications, than the recent political killings in Burkina Faso? Boasting of their pure and progressive credentials, the colleagues- indeed, the close and intimate friends-of Thomas Sankara could evidently think of nothing better than to take up their guns and murder him. If the nationalism of Africa, with all its claims to be a liberating force, has been reduced to that level of degradation, to that grim caricature of the behavior of those expected to use the nation-state as a gateway to freedom, then indeed the central question cannot be avoided: Why this degradation, how has it come about?

I ought to say, perhaps, that for myself I do not feel depressed or apologetic. If we live in difficult times, what's so special about that? If enter- prises of great pith and moment have come to grief, what's new in that? The beauty of life lies in the making of the journey. And this journey that we have made has been, repeatedly, a journey of success. The study of Africa led us to conclude that the removal of foreign rule from Africa, the restitution to Africans of their rights as persons and as communities, would and even must bring about a huge widening of the scope for historical development; and we saw what has proved to be true. Even in the midst of this generalized collapse of the new nation-state, the movement of development-in every field of African life-reveals, as so many of you have borne witness, a vivid and creative process. Our optimism, our sense of participation over the last thirty years in the vital evolution of a major branch of the human family, can seem in no way falsified by events. That said, any optimism today can stand only on the ground of a severely critical survey.

In offering some aspects of that kind of survey, I shall try to avoid taking you unnecessarily through well-trodden territory. To this informed gathering

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there is no need to read off the milestones we have passed. Nor would you easily stay to listen if I merely repeated what we have said before: in my own case, chiefly in a volume of essays, published twelve years ago in 1975, under the somewhat light-hearted title of Can Africa Survive?

We have generally agreed, I suppose, that the root-source of current problems lies in the conjoined legacy of the pre-colonial with the colonial past, above all, in its promotion of ruling groups-of strata, of elites, define them how we may-intended to reproduce in Africa the bourgeois society and state of England and France; as well as in the constrictive and distorting pressures of Great-Power policy in its various forms and influence. Given the very dif- ferent history of Africa, this has had to be a Europe-centred design of a notably inappropriate nature -as some of us can claim to have seen and said at the time. It is thus in the arena formed by this variant of the nation-forming design that we may best hope to find the answers that we need. The crisis in Africa, on this view, is a crisis of the post-colonial nation-state.

Our Quest for Understanding

Much, obviously, remains controversial. We seldom know enough. At the same time we can insist that these thirty years have enabled our international community of Africanists to construct and articulate a knowledge of the continent that is infinitely larger and better based in science than that possessed by any previous generation. Not only, moreover, have we witnessed the years in which this African humanity has stepped into its long-denied place of equali- ty among all peoples: beyond that, we have played some part, and not always an insignificant part, in helping this good thing to happen.

Looking back, I am repeatedly struck by the depths of my own ignorance when we began: an ignorance that was as all-embracing as all-concealing as one could imagine. I remember being lectured on the subject, for my own good, by that so very severe and yet so generous and far-sighted pioneer whom you rightly recognize as the founding father of Africanist studies in this country-the late and much-regretted Melville Herskovits. The author of The Myth of the Negro Past was not a gentle teacher: because he was an en- thusiast, because he had been obliged in his time to hammer hard on the doors of Academe before his concerns and ideas could gain admittance, and because he was Mel Herskovits! In the prevailing ignorance of Africa, some forty years ago, he set a standard of demand for knowledge, for well-tested knowledge, which has remained of permanent value.

Nearer to us, along the same line of reminiscence, another memory comes back. Sometime in 1952, maybe in May or June, I reached Lagos after

4th Quarter, 1987 7



a long journey through some of the territories of what was then French West Africa. This was a journey of discovery-such as one made in those years through countries and communities utterly unknown outside the confines of colonial administration. And if we knew little about the British African colonies, we knew still less about the colonies of other empires-and least of all, no doubt, about the colonies of Portugal. There were next to no books to guide us. Little in state archives was then accessible. Investigative journalism was practically unknown; reports of that sort could pretty well be numbered on the fingers of one hand: I think of Henry Nevinson's report on Angola of 1904, of Gide's journey through the French Congo in 1929, of Negley Farson's journalism in the 1930s, and of the then recent tour de force composed by John Gunther under the title-truly an ambitious one-of Inside Africa. Vast areas were mere names on the map, or else written about only in respect of their white-settler communities.

So I had wandered in 1952 through Senegal and Mali and Ivory Coast on my journey of discovery. I had not journeyed easily, it must be said, and often not comfortably: constantly hampered, of course, by suspicious and usually hostile colonial officials entirely unaccustomed to answering questions about the natives-above all when asked by inquisitive travellers from other European countries. And yet I travelled with a vivid sense of lifting at least a corner of the veil on extraordinary scenes and peoples. And there in Lagos, having reached some deplorable hostelry-but all the hostelries of colonial Africa, especially of British colonial Africa, were places to quit as soon as you were able-there I found an American.

Rare to find an American in West Africa in those years. But here was an American who had also been making a journey of discovery- in his case, through British West Africa-and whose resultant state of mind was, I soon found, much the same as my own: the state of mind of someone who feels that he has seen what no one else has ever seen before. Something of the state of mind-and it's this kind of reward, you'll have known it for yourselves, that Africa gives to the patient traveller in search of truth-as that of Mungo Park, in 1797, when at last he reached "the majestic Niger" "glittering in the morning sun," and saw it flowing "to the eastward"

This American was James Coleman; and we became friends. We told each other of what we had seen and heard on our various travels, and we forgot-for a while, anyway-the dreadfulness of that Lagos hostelry.

Reaching back, I think that some of the optimism that we felt, some of the euphoria as one remarkable series of events followed upon another, some of the enthusiasm that carried us along, arose precisely from this sense of discovering what had been hidden, what had not been admitted by colonial officials and authorities, and from finding pathways to understanding which seemed to be, and really were, of the highest possible interest.

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So we became less ignorant: and, as our African contacts widened and our Africanist studies grew wiser, or at any rate less unwise, we came to perceive that the process of post-colonial transition, of anti-colonial reconstruction, was bound to be long and contradictory. We came to shed-and I think I can say "we," even if I am here talking of myself-to shed those white-centered assumptions, white-directed attitudes, with which we had necessarily set out. Our judgments likewise necessarily began, with this process of struggle for understanding, to differ from the orthodox or conventional. Once we stood firmly on Africa-centred ground and approach, the familiar habits and assumptions of colonial policy-of British policy, in my case-came rapidly to appear mistaken or even catastrophic. We could and we did begin to question policy-and this again, in those years, was something new and highly con- tentious, causing many personal expulsions or prohibitions from entering various colonies; and it led to a conclusion which is now a commonplace- that the actions and attitudes of the world outside Africa have as much to do with the onset of crisis inside Africa as any which have an African origin.

External Intervention and East/West Rivalry

If the proposed external models of the post-colonial nation-state-no matter of what provenance, whether British or French or Belgian or Portuguese -have proved inept or even absurd, whose primary fault has that been? If, for example, these new states have been obliged to continue and expand the production and export of raw materials on terms of trade more or less continuously adverse or unequal in their value, again whose fault has that been? Africans have been told: export or die. Now, it seems, even that choice has been closed. Today, in all realism, they must export and die. But if they have accepted these demands, obeyed these orders, have they had- do they have now-any effective altemative?

I want to look at these questions in the light of two zones of acute crisis in contemporary Africa-and look at them from the angle of our experience of the past thirty years or so. I shall not be suggesting, for a moment, that the African players in these dramas do not have to bear and accept their own large share in scenes of violence, greed, and irresponsibility. We are far beyond the point at which excuses can be entered for anyone: nor is history in the least likely to accept any. When the political murderers are African-and how many political murders by Africans have we had to watch, murders of the best men and women among them-patience and tolerance can wait outside the doors of judgment. That said, what of the responsibilities of the outside world?

It has long seemed to me that outside world powers have made delu-

4th Quarter, 1987 9



sion into a formative basis of policy. Not invariably, of course: and yet repeatedly and decisively in one central and invasive context. I mean the delusion that Africa's problems, Africa's future, are to be decided by the outcome of a con- test, ideological or material, between-in our familiar jargon- 'West" and 'East'; between what we are accustomed to label as capitalism and what we are accustomed to label as communism; more crudely still, between the influence and example of the USA on one side, and of the USSR on the other. Perhaps few of us who study Africa any longer think in such simplistic terms: but we shall easily recognize, all the same, that the hysterias of the "Cold War" have exercised and still exercise a conditioning effect which has greatly distracted the course of African history in these thirty years, and hugely com- plicated the difficulties, in any case large, of the struggles for post-colonial change and reconstruction.

No less seriously, this fixation on an essentially irrelevant ideological rivalry has done much to obscure the true locus of Africa's gathering crisis- which is the relationship not between west and east, but between north and south: between, that is, the ex-imperialist and industrialized economies of Europe, America, and Asia, and all the former colonial or quasi-colonial economies, wherever they may be.

No matter what conspiracies the Soviets may have had in mind, or in hand, and no matter how complacently we may believe that our own western systems and destinies are written by some divine right into the present and future record of Africa, the fact remains that it is the overall economic relationship between north and south which has been, and which now is, the dominant determinant in whatever Africans may be able to achieve. It is there, today, that the real struggle has to lie.

For this determinant has acted, over these thirty years, as an effective prolongation of the older and outright imperialist determinant: these countries, continuing to become relatively poorer, continue to pay tribute to all those powers and corporations, investors and speculators, whose base is in the industrialized countries. No efforts, so far, have availed to make any decisive change in this relationship of comparative gain to the north and comparative loss to the south; and so it is that the history of these years, when later genera- tions come to write it, will be seen as one of an extension of the decades of outright imperialism. Of course, it has been sometimes affirmed, in denial of what I have just said, that these years of struggle encompass, in fact, the arena within which systems of nascent capitalism pass through their early phases, and await meanwhile the magical moment when their continued growth will carry them to a stable maturity. One can only reply, as a fallible student of what is and not of what might be or should be, that we have seen no such process taking place: on the contrary, we have seen a continued decline into generalized immiseration.

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it is certainly no part of my intention here to embark on a polemic: that would be out of place. Too much remains unsure and controversial. I want only to argue that what I have called the delusion of the west-east determinant has produced policies and decisions which have gone far to derail the whole project of post-colonial reconstruction, and has repeatedly frustrated or even prevented the further unfolding of all those constructive trends to which we have given the name of anti-colonial liberation. Those trends presumed-and with good reason, as it seemed at the time-that a post- colonial Africa would be able to enjoy and deploy a large independence within the limits of our global world, would be able to free itself from major external interferences, and therefore would be able-as our friend Amilcar Cabral liked to say-to resume the command of Africa's own history. This was the sense of all those struggles, of the charter of the OAU, of the non-aligned movement and other such initiatives.

But what has happened?

Soviet Intervention in the Horn

The first of the two regions I want to look at is the Horn of Africa. There, indeed, the record of these years has been a sad one. Severe drought and famine have done their devastating work. But it is equally beyond doubt that political ineptitude, combined with external interference, have greatly worsen- ed the impact of drought and famine. Here in the Horn one has seen, very clearly, that post-colonial reconstruction is beyond reach just so long as foreign interference continues. Over the past dozen years in the Horn, this has been above all the interference and self-serving policy and action of the USSR.

The facts are no doubt complex, but they are also reasonably well known. No matter what other conclusions one may draw, or reservations one must enter, the essential problem of the Horn, historically, has been the continued imperialism of the Ethiopian state, and its inability to undo the colonial enclosures of the late 19th century, and thus to move towards a solution of the various inter-nationality questions which the formation of Menelik's empire, enlarged by Haile Selassie in his annexation of Eritrea, unavoidably fomented and sharpened.

What seemed likely to emerge from the land seizures and other upheavals which led to the downfall of the regime in 1974, and the onset of what seemed to be a revolution -and in some respects surely was a revolution -was a real measure of devolution, political or social, to major constituent communities within the Ethiopian heritage-one can even say within the Abyssinian heritage. It appeared very feasible, at least in 1974 and 1975, that a construc-

4th Quarter, 1987 11



tive compromise could be reached on the status of the Somali-inhabited Ogaden. My own conclusion at that time, from many sources, was that war between Somalia and Ethiopia could have been averted by Ethiopian concessions to autonomy: concessions which could have had the effect of blur- ring the colonial frontier established in the 1890s as part of Ethiopia's share in the imperialist partition of the Horn.

Nothing like that came about. Instead, we saw the active military intervention of the Soviet Union seconded by Cuba. I thought and wrote then-and I was far from being alone-that these interventions were bound to be the prelude to continued violence and upheaval; and this is what has come about. Far from being left to settle their own conflicts as best they could, these peoples of the Horn have been pestered and persecuted by external pressures and ambitions which do not and cannot serve the interests of any kind of post- colonial reconstruction, no matter how we may gloss the term.

One sees this still more clearly in the case of Eritrea. No matter what the remote historical ties of the peoples of Eritrea with those of Abyssinia may or may not have been -and half of France belonged to England in the Mid- dle Ages -Eritrea took shape as an Italian colony formed from previously in- dependent communities in that territory. Eritrea passed into the Ethiopian Em- pire in 1952 by decision of the United Nations, but as an autonomous region with its own structures of an Eritrean state.

Ten years later Eritrea was illegally annexed to the Ethiopian state: a former Italian colony became, in effect, an Ethiopian colony. And twenty-four years of Eritrean struggle have duly followed-in these latter years against Ethiopian armies decisively armed, equipped, trained and encouraged by the USSR, earlier a supporter of the Eritrean anti-colonial cause. The October Revolution of 1917 might proclaim the right of all the constituent non-Russian nationalities of the Tsarist Empire to decide their own future and to secede if they wished, and might make good that promise by granting independence to Finland. Yet six decades later, a Soviet-style regime in Ethiopia, backed by Soviet military might, began sending into Eritrea invasion after invasion to prevent exactly what 1917 had promised and made good.

Nor have we seen the end of the consequences of this historical failure, in and after 1974, to solve national questions within the Horn by a democratization of the Ethiopian state. History here has become blocked. An Amhara domination inherited from the old imperial dispensation, but now again stiffened by a rigidly centralizing dictatorship, continues to face rejec- tion by powerful constituent minorities, notably those of the Oromo and in Tigray; and one must even fear that further explosion of these inter-nationality conflicts, with all their costs and consequences, may yet threaten the survival of the traditional entity of Ethiopia itself. And if that is so, then nothing save a withdrawal of foreign-based disruption can enable a constructive reorganiza-

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tion to begin and to continue. If Gorbachev's perestrojka has urgent application at home, it certainly has urgent application in the Horn of Africa.

U.S. lntervention in Southern Africa

But what is sauce for the goose must be sauce for the gander. Turn to southern Africa-virtually to the whole sub-continent south of the Congo Basin-and we find a parallel process of disruption.

Yet this time it is the West,-above all the United States of America which plays the role of disruptive external force. I say this in no anti-American sense. It could not easily be that a Briton of my generation, the generation which fought through the anti-Hitler war, could ever be anti-American: on the contrary, all the roots of my own life have fed on pro-American soil and conviction. I am one of that multitude, across the Atlantic, who were raised in respect and even reverence for the country led by Franklin Roosevelt not because of his domestic politics about which we cared little and knew less, but because he led an America which stood for freedom, and meant it. Yet in southern Africa today, time and again over these past years, we have had to watch the actions of an America which has stood for the denial of freedom.

Historically, the central issue in southern Africa has long been plain, and about this, at least, there can be no controversy. Since Britain's defeat of Napoleonic France at the outset of the 19th century, the whole sub-continent was step by step enclosed within the power and control, direct or indirect, of the British Empire. One after another, in a long series of invasions and dispossessions which many of you have helped to investigate and chronicle, the peoples of the sub-continent were deprived of their sovereignty and independence; and it was above all the imperial hegemony of Britain which exercised power from one end of this vast region to the other.

The aims of African nationalism, coinciding with the decline and dismantlement of British imperialism, were to take over the role and exercise of that hegemony, and resume an African control of these African lands: aims very clearly enunciated in the various charters and manifestos of the late 1950s.

But African nationalism at once found itself confronted by a determined rival. By early in the 1960s the apartheid regime of Afrikaner ambition in South Africa-a racist South Africa immensely strengthened by the course of the Second World War-was already putting in its blunt and determined claim to be the residual legatee of British imperialism throughout the whole region; and it seemed, for a while, that the claim must succeed against weak and divided African states. By 1970 the Western Powers-and for all I know the




Eastern Powers as well-were evidently sure (and we have yet to be able to look into the state archives of the period) that the white-minority regimes in place were going to stay in place -whether in South Africa, in Rhodesia, or in the Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique.

But the process of decolonization, here as elsewhere, already had its own momentum. However unexpectedly, the nationalist movements in the Portu- guese colonies proved capable of achieving a leadership, a mass following and participation, and a maturity of political skills, which enabled them to im- pose defeat on the armed forces of an authoritarian Portugal-a Portugal, moreover, which enjoyed to the end a more or less total support by the major Western Powers, not least the USA and Britain. This singular success in freeing large territories from foreign rule at once changed the balance of power and influence in the sub-continent to the disadvantage of apartheid South Africa and Pretoria's hegemonic aspirations. The new regimes of popular nationalism in Angola and Mozambique were able to survive. This survival en- sured the success of a comparable popular nationalism in Rhodesia, and Zim- babwe emerged in 1980. Even Namibia, it then seemed, could soon cease to be a South African colony. Meanwhile, inside South Africa, pressures for democratization by the black majority revived from the repressions and the silence of the 1960s, and became -as they continue to become-far stronger than they have ever been before. Once again it seemed that the processes of decolonization and democratization would restore to African hands-to the hands of the overwhelming majority-the overall control which British imperialism had taken from them long before.

Yet what we have seen since then-and now, of course, we are dealing with years which are not yet history-is a continued struggle for the legacy of that overall control. This is an unresolved historical process, in other words, within which the use of violence by the apartheid regime -direct violence by its armed forces in flagrant denial of every aspect of international legality, or indirect violence by South African puppet and totally dependent African forces such as UNITA in the case of Angola and Renamo in that of Mozambique- threaten chaos or even reduce to chaos wide areas of those two countries: while, at the same time, South Africa flouts the decisions of the world community in the case of Namibia-and, inside South Africa, stubbornly denies every prospect of genuine reform, once more filling its jails and graveyards with those who ask for change.

Once again, the movement of history is blocked; and ruin takes the place of post-colonial reconstruction. Whatever the outcome may now be, we are clearly in the presence of a major historical tragedy. The damage now being wrought by Pretoria and its agents is incalculably great, and it may require decades, even on the most hopeful of assumptions, to restore it. What could otherwise be a process of negotiated democratization inside South Africa may

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now pass beyond reach, and nothing may now lie ahead of us save fresh erup- tions of violence and destruction. Yet the crucially decisive superpower, in this case, nonetheless refuses all effective action to forestall or stop these erup- tions and aggressions, or else-as with its promotion and support of UNITA- throws fresh fuel upon the flames of subversion.

And yet the concept of a West-East determinant- of the actual existence of a decisive West-East ideological struggle in this whole region-seems never to have been more of a delusion than it does here. What history suggests, rather, is that the central issue here in play, the true determinant, concerns the right of peoples, of all these African peoples, to achieve forms of government of their own choice, to work out their own destiny, and thereby open, and keep open the pathways to their own development.

Without risking fruitless prophecies-and whatever may now evolve or fail to evolve in South Africa and in the sub-continent generally, it would in any case appear that a new chapter in this whole history-the history of what we have called struggle for national liberation -may now be in its early pages. This chapter may have to unfold the further decline of the continent into a helpless poverty and confusion, a helpless subordination to forces beyond its control, and even beyond its influence. There is no lack of warning signs, and certainly no need for me to list them. Yet it may also be that this new chapter will record the emergence of alternative policies and new departures. If so, the history of these past years, above all of the past ten years or so, can at least yield some clues as to what these new departures may be.

Conclusion

To begin with, it cannot be said that the basic policies and principles of Africa's struggle for emancipation from the constraints of the past, pre-colonial as well as colonial, have been falsified by events. On the contrary, wherever these policies and principles have been applied in evoking mass participation in the work of reform and reconstruction, they have amply proved their value. The post-independence failures and setbacks-wherever, that is, these have not been the result of external aggression and subversion-have invariably derived precisely from failures in the practice of mass participation. Can peasants, we may now be led to ask, ever produce the kind of leadership required by programs of reform and reconstruction within the nation- state? Can intellectuals ever come to the decisive rescue of peasant communities? Cabral thought so; we may find it more difficult to agree with him in the light of the last ten years.

What seems nonetheless evident, from these last years, is an attempt to




find a way back to forms of democratic activation, at the base of society, whereby the powers of central government, the powers of state bureaucracies, can be checked and usefully re-directed. We have seen this attempt in various ways and with various results. What it might have led to in Angola and Mozam- bique can scarcely be measured, by reason of the external aggressions from which these countries have suffered and continue to suffer. So far as the former Portugues territories are concerned, only in the peripheral though intensely interesting case of the Cape Verde Republic does it seem that the principles of mass participation have been applied with a consistent success: elsewhere, today, those principles remain largely a memory of the liberation wars or the rhetoric of empty speeches.

Yet the attempt to solve the structural problems of the post-colonial state by means of devolution to local assemblies and their executive committees has recurred again and again. We have seen it in one form or another-often tentative, seldom carried to maturity-in Ghana since the advent of the present regime there, in Burkina Faso at least until the murder of Thomas Sankara, and in some other countries; and in my own opinion this attempt is likely to remain a central feature of the years ahead. We may expect to see it applied, for example, in Uganda under the leadership of Yoweri Museveni.

Perhaps, too, we may see a revival of the old ideas and policies of the Pan-African movement. Given that the OAU-like its progenitor, the UN- will continue to be an institution of governments, and therefore will often be stultified, there is nevertheless still scope for political movements which can overcome the obstructions of the colonial partition and its legacy of divisiveness. Certain developments among the southern African countries- notably in new forms of military and political co-operation-seem to point in that direction.

Such developments are likely to be reinforced by every real step that moves away from policies of urban growth at the cost of rural growth, and towards policies of a far more balanced, if slow, pace and project of reconstruction. In short, this new chapter is likely to turn away from grandiose plans of more or less miraculous economic evoluton, and look towards a realistic assessment of resources.

We shall see. But there are at least two things that are certain. One is that the next thirty years of Africa are going to be no less strenuous and sur- prising than the last thirty years. And the second is that the study of Africa will remain as valuable, as important, even as mandatory to the health of our civilization, as it has been during the years under review here today. Looking round this formidable gathering I see that the study of Africa has valiant defenders. Allow me, therefore, to offer the most sincere congratulations on your work, and the most sincere good wishes for its future.




africa's liberation struggle: retrospect and prospect || thirty years of liberation struggle

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