Building the African State
MCCORD, WILLIAM
Building the African State THE POLITICAL AWAKENING OF AFRICA Edited by Rupert Emerson and Martin Kilson Prentice-Hall. 175 pp. $4.95. EDUCATION AND NATION-BUILDING IN AFRICA Edited by L....
...Balewa became prime minister of free Nigeria and his party charged Chief Akintola with "subversion"-before both men were slain during last month's Nigerian rebellion...
...A man of refreshing flexibility, he condemns colonialism, but regards it as largely a dead issue...
...There are moments, too, when the African search for identity, as revealed in this book, seems ludicrous-particularly in the quotes from Nkrumah's 1954 election manifesto...
...Thiam's book, The Foreign Policy of African States, is by far the most sophisticated analysis of his continent's politics ever produced by an African statesman...
...Here is a passage from a poem entitled "Dead Man's Dump" which suggests the quality of Rosenberg's work: They left this dead with the older dead, Stretched at the cross roads...
...He pushed and stretched language like a sculptor to make it yield all it could in the way of imagery and meaning...
...If men of his wisdom grow in influence, the African quest for political identity will not end in frustration...
...He is a Socialist, but he knows of the need for private foreign capital...
...He is well acquainted with the dangers of anarchy (since he served in the cabinet of the now defunct union of Mali), but he rejects a totalitarian solution to the problems of Africa...
...They seek in the traditional Western ideologies, in some form of "African" socialism, or in a bastardized version of Garveyism an explanation of life which will restore meaning to cultures shattered by colonialism...
...The editors say that education is useful, that colonial governments differed in their policies, and that the exodus of European professors may endanger the quality of university education in Africa...
...H. Lawrence, James Joyce, E. M. Forster, and the rest -were all elsewhere...
...Yet, the book also clearly demonstrates the intellectual force of a man like Tom Mboya, whose perceptive critique of the colonial regime in Kenya did much to convince European settlers that, in the end, they would have to cooperate constructively with an African majority...
...And one of Dakar's graduates, Doudou Thiam, the young foreign minister of Senegal, is a good example of the new generation in African politics...
...It is a remarkably apt characterization of death, that last phrase: "the great sunk silences.' In addition to suggesting the fundamental tension of opposites in the literature of the Great War, the contrast between heroism and antiheroism, between expectation and reality, Bergonzi essays a number of stimulating critical opinions...
...Included are an official British memorandum on colonial policy in 1925, technical reports by manpower experts, as well as exhortations by African politicians on the need for education...
...poets who saw the War from the trenches was Isaac Rosenberg, a gifted man who, like Owen, died in the last year of World War I. In addition to Owen's sense of the horror of the battlefield, Rosenberg had a fine plastic feeling for language...
...He advocates neutralism, while specifically demonstrating the hypocrisy that can parade under this label...
...4.50...
...The editors note, in passing, that the University of Dakar has produced a greater number of politically inclined students than have most other African schools...
...A sane, balanced, moderate man, he has gone beyond the flamboyance of Nkrumah...
...He emphasizes "N?©gritude," but rejects its racialist implications...
...EDUCATION AND NATION-BUILDING IN AFRICA Edited by L. Gary Cowan, James O'Connell and David G. Scanlon Praeger...
...Those of us who wish the new African nations well should read his book...
...The best writers of the time-D...
...He made both the word and the world it represents active again...
...7.50...
...403 pp...
...By and large, the severe ethnic conflicts that have at times racked African politics have been absent from student bodies...
...author, "The Springtime of Freedom" Educated Africans, to reiterate a truism, have embarked upon a political quest for identity...
...The Political Awakening of Africa, in presenting some of the solutions which contemporary Africans have found, well illustrates the fascinating diversity of the African response to the dilemmas posed by the European intrusion...
...THE FOREIGN POLICY OF AFRICAN STATES By Doudou Thiam Praeger...
...The fact that the political awakening of Nyerere and most other African leaders can be traced to their education underlines the importance of Education and NationBuilding in Africa, a specialized book comprising an odd assortment of statements on the subject...
...The volume ends with quotations from men like Julius Nyerere who have successfully forged a new "identity" and realistically face the problems of African development and modernization...
...One cannot quarrel, really, with these judgments, but one must add that nothing really superlative has come out of the Great War...
...The book ranges from a selection by F?©lix Houphouet-Boigny, a classic ?©volu?© who defends the role of France in Africa, to Marxists such as Gabriel d'Arboussier who repeats the clich?©s current on the French Left in the 1940s...
...The grass and colored clay More motion have than they, Joined to the great sunk silences...
...134 pp...
...At times, the excerpts are pathetic: One can only feel sorrow in reading the plea of Nelson Mandela as he addresses "your worships" while hopelessly battling for his freedom before a biased South African court...
...He desires a "United States of Africa," yet recognizes that this is little more than an aspiration...
...At times they are ironic: For example, a debate between S. L. Akintola and Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa concerning whether Nigeria should have had self-government in 1957...
...Burnt black by strange decay Their sinister faces lie, The lid over each eye...
...He believes, for instance, that the best war poets were Wilfred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg, that the best war novel by an Englishman was Parade's End, by Ford Madox Ford, and that the best long poem on the theme of the War was In Parenthesis, by David Jones, the Welsh poet who has been getting a great deal of attention recently because of his strong sense of the continuity of the British past and his feeling for place...
...Reviewed by WILLIAM M. McCORD Fox Professor of Sociology, Rice University...
...He writes both as a scholar and as an official immediately involved in the dayto-day conflicts in his part of the world...
...Although a valuable collection for Africanists, the book makes few original points...
...Chief Akintola argued for immediate independence while Balewa demanded its postponement because of the backwardness of the nation, particularly the North...
...Perhaps the most original contribution of the book is its demonstration that educational institutions have "encouraged solidarity between students of different ethnic origins...
Vol. 49 • February 1966 • No. 4
