African Destiny
By ROGER FALK WHEN, in 1938, the African Survey was published, a gap in the factual, compact literature of Africa south of the Sahara had been admirably filled. This prodigious work has been brought nearly up to date with a 1956 Edition* and its equally prodigious author, Lord Hailey, who is now in his eighty-seventh year, has re- written practically all the hundreds of informa- tion-packed pages. It has an objectivity and balance (which, in any case, you would expect from a man who spent nearly forty years in the ICS), which compare interestingly with, say, John Gunther's Inside Africa and which, while not perhaps leaving the reader as breathless and excited as Gunther, make one realise that Africa is a great deal more than statistics, attitudes and personalities. The dispassionate analysis of each and every situation envisaged in the scope of the work, written in undramatic but faultless prose, has a curiously elevating effect. Lord Hailey's astonishing capacity for factual summary is a tribute to one who must surely, in his day, have had considerable qualms about what, since he turned away from India and looked west to Africa in 1935, he has seen going on.
In taking south of the Sahara as the area of ' study, French, Portuguese, Belgian and Spanish territories come under consideration as well as British. With the possible exception of the French, a striking thing about the Survey is the fact that, since 1938, the British have moved along the road of a recognition of 'Africanism' (Lord Hailey's word) much faster than the others, and yet there is a certain bitter-sweet quality in the attitude of the rest of the world to Britain's efforts. 'African- ism' is a good word; Lord Halley makes the point that 'Africanism' rather than 'Nationalism' more fairly describes the force that has driven so much of postwar Africa towards its destiny.
There are two phases, says Lord Hailey, of this Africanism : one more definite and constructive, the other less so. The first 'envisages the attainment of a Government dominated by Africans and expressing in its institutions the characteristic spirit of Africa as interpreted by the modern African.' But he qualifies this by saying that this is not necessarily an indigenous product; it was born from ideas developed by Europeanised Africans after study of the Western world. The second, less constructive, phase does not express * AN AFRICAN SURVEY: REVISED 1956. By Lord Halley. (0,U.P., £5 5s.) itself in 'any one vision of the political or social future of the African.' It is often, indeed, little more than a form of reaction.
These wise pronouncements are thought- provoking indeed. How, for example, is the phenomenon of Ghana to be explained? Here would seem at first sight to be a manifestation of dynamic nationalism in its most potent form. Here also, if what one senses of the brooding idealism of Dr. Nkrumah when one meets and talks with him is not just the transitory impact of a huge personality, would appear to be a glimmer of a pan-Africanism the consequences of which, if it grew, could be immense.
The Survey takes the view that the develop- ment of the spirit of Africanism has not involved the emergence in Africa of a concept of pan- Africanism and points to the great variation of this spirit, in force and objective, from one Country to another and from one community to another. Ghana is not a national expression so much as an African one. It is the result of an ideal which has used the inevitably restrictive concept of nationhood to get'a start and which, in the task of 'fulfilment it is now setting itself,'has too much to do to have either the time or the leadership to pay more than a kind of lip-service to vague pan-Africanism. The Ghana Prime Minister is realising—and at high speed—that constructive statesmanship begins at home.
Thousands of miles to the south, in the Union, another form of nationalism, equally misleading, has manifested itself. The fusion into a single country of the four territories was assisted by a nationalist concept but, as the years have gone by, this nationalism—the self-protecting attitude of a white minority—has become muddied and retrogressive. To what extent the resentment aroused in the African population in the Union to such measures as apartheid can be said to be creating a positive Africanism is a subject upon which the Survey barely touches. It is surely too soon, in any case, to judge this issue.
• Ghana and the Union of South Africa, at seem- ing opposite ends of the Pole, are part of Africa, and have much of the African heritage in com- mon as have all the other countries south of the Sahara examined in the Survey. A work such as Lord Hailey's contributes memorably to enabling ordinary people to see how these countries have reached their present point and the vast com- plexity of the problems that face them.
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