Pan-African and nationalist economic thought during the colonial era
In colonial West Africa, land remained overwhelmingly under African control and occupation. In the case of the large British colonies, Nigeria and what is now Ghana, this was to a great extent the result of African success in export agriculture, out-competing European planters in Ghana and rendering European plantations against the interest of colonial treasuries and British merchants.
The effect was to permit greater opportunities for African enterprise in farming and trade than in the settler and plantation colonies characteristic of southern and central Africa. This context was a premise of the writings we discuss in this section. Given limited space, we concentrate here on three authors: Edward Wilmot Blyden (Liberia, 1832—1912), Winfried Tete- Ansah (Ghana, 1889-1941) and Nnamdi Azikiwe (Nigeria, 1904-96). Among these, Tete-Ansah published least, being primarily a businessman: and even his writing, though framed in general African terms, was geared to advertising his companies and encouraging investment in them. Blyden and especially Azikiwe were politicians as well as writers. Tete-Ansah's concern was entirely with commerce; for the others, economic arguments were just part of broader visions. All of them had interesting ideas on the economic future of Africa. For all three, perhaps the fundamental issue was African destiny in a world dominated by the West. Was the best response to assert and maintain the distinctiveness of African civilization, or to adopt Western methods in the hope of emulating Western material achievements? In this context, what should Africans expect from the African diaspora in the Americas: comradeship in difference, or partnership in playing the whites at their own game?The West Indies-born Blyden landed in Liberia, from the USA, at the age of eighteen and became a politician in the African-American dominated republic, the only part of West Africa to escape European rule.
A leading advocate of the return of African-Americans to Africa, his conception of African culture could hardly be more different from that of the Asante dissidents quoted above. In African Life and Customs (Blyden, 1908a) he characterised ‘the African system' as ‘socialistic and co-operative', based on ‘collective ownership by the tribe of all the land and water' (Blyden, 1908a, extracted in Lynch, 1971, 167). He added ‘The property laws of Africa in intention and in practice make for the widest distribution of wealth or well-being and work steadily against concentrating the wealth of a community, either of land or production in the hands of a comparatively small number of individuals' (Blyden, 1908a, extracted in Lynch, 1971, 170). Blyden, along with others among the westernized West African elite of the late nineteenth century, had called upon Britain to establish a protectorate over much of West Africa, as a means of stimulating Africans onto the world stage (Lynch, 1971, 315). Writing deep in the colonial era, Tete-Ansah gave much of the space in Africa at Work (Tete-Ansa, 1930), his only book, slim and self-published, to reproducing statements by liberal colonial officials. This was apparently in the hope of assuring African-American readers that West Africa was indeed making material progress. Like Blyden, he called upon diasporic Africans to come to the help of what he called ‘the Race' as a whole: but not through socialism but by joint action for self-enrichment; by investing their capital in Africa, rather than necessarily coming to live there in large numbers (Tete-Ansa, 1930). For Blyden (whose position was described by Craufurd Goodwin (1967, 443) as ‘the pinnacle of African institutionalism'), ‘the political economy of the white man is not our political economy, his moral philosophy is not our moral philosophy; and far less is his theology; and wherever he has been successful in forcing these upon us there has been atrophy and death' (Blyden, 1908b, extracted in Lynch, 1971, 122). Blyden's struggle for an authentically African political economy, his appeal to (a version of) the pre-colonial past and his plea for Pan-Africanism anticipated important tendencies of the postcolonial era.In contrast, Tete-Ansah seems not to have doubted that whites and blacks shared the same political economy. But, whereas the Asante exiles thought an absence of taxation would be sufficient for hard-working individuals to prosper, Tete-Ansah recognised the problem of European monopolies. He accused ‘foreign corporations, mostly European' of ‘attempting to monopolize the marketing by creating a vicious barrier between the producers and the consumers abroad through organized systems of banking and trading which practically deny those facilities required in an international exchange of commodities' (Tete-Ansa, 1930, 63). In colonial Ghana cocoa brokers and farmers thought so too, countering the formation of successive European cocoa-buying cartels with organised ‘hold-ups' of their exports and boycotts of imports. Tete-Ansah's contribution was to make and act on the case for African adoption of European business forms, notably limited liability companies and banks (Hopkins, 1966). In contrast to Blyden, Tete-Ansah firmly believed that Western forms of economic organization should be adopted by Africans. European monopolists should be challenged by ‘mutual organization' among Africans and, he earnestly hoped, African-Americans (Tete-Ansa, 1930, 63). He himself founded three limited liability companies, most notably the Industrial and Commercial Bank Limited, which he based in Nigeria. All, however, foundered sooner rather than later: the bank did so in 1930, the same year as his book appeared (Hopkins, 1966).
Azikiwe, too, was willing to criticise African economic practices in comparison to Western ones. He was especially harsh on what he described as the preference of African businessmen for working alone, rather than pooling financial resources. One-man businesses ‘will work out temporarily, but [a] time will come when that one man will face problems which require many heads to solve' (Azikiwe, 1937/1968, 132).
‘Because of this' single-handedness, and in contrast to European firms, ‘the average African business liquidates with the death of the owner' (Azikiwe, 1937/1968, 133). Putting his words into practice, Azikiwe himself joined the Nigerian indigenous banking movement in the 1940s, buying what eventually became the African Continental Bank. In 1954 he formed the first elected regional government in Eastern Nigeria. Meanwhile the bank was struggling to meet stringent regulations imposed by the 1952 Banking Ordinance in Nigeria. Controversy arose when his government injected funds into the bank: though he had disclosed his interests and resigned from its management, he remained the major shareholder. Both his career and the bank survived, he becoming the first president of Nigeria (1963—66), while the bank was one of only three of the more than twenty indigenous banks founded in the colonial period in Nigeria to survive the early decades of independence.