Model Question and Answers for APSC | The anti-colonial struggles in West Africa were led by the new elite of Western-educated Africans. Examine.

Ans: As India got M.K. Gandhi as its leader to conduct a mass movement during India’s freedom struggle, the West African countries also had similar leaders from the western-educated Africans.

Anti-colonial struggles in West Africa

By the later 1940s, however, there were appreciable numbers of Africans in both the French and the British colonies who had emerged from traditional society through the new opportunities for economic advancement and education. By the 1940s there was enough education to make European-style political activity possible in all the coastal colonies.

There thus developed a general feeling among the intelligentsia that the colonies were being deliberately exploited by ever more firmly entrenched European political and economic systems and that there had developed a new, wider, and mobilizable public to appeal to for support. In 1946 politicians in French West Africa organized a federation-wide political association, the African Democratic Rally (RDA).

In British West Africa the tensions were greatest on the Gold Coast. In 1947 the established politicians brought in Kwame Nkrumah, who had studied in the United States and Britain and had been active in the Pan-African movement, to organize a nationalist party with mass support.

The new elite of Western-educated Africans

• Leopold Sedar Senghor served as the first president of He led Senegal to independence.
• Amilcar Lopes da Costa Cabral was one of Africa’s foremost anti-colonial He was the founder and secretary- general of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde and led Guinea-Bissau to freedom from Portugal.

• Kwame Nkrumah asked the nationalists to find the political kingdom first and eventually, it will add all other necessary In 1957, he led the Gold Coast to freedom and renamed the country Ghana.
• Nigerian statesman and political leader Nnamdi Azikiwe was the leader of Nigeria during the anti-colonial struggle. He led Nigeria to its independence in 1960.
• One of the prominent African critics of the French colonial empire in Africa, Kojo Tovalou Houenou struggled for the equality of race and founded the Negritude
• Felix Houphouet Boigny was the first President of the Ivory He led Ivory Coast to independence.

West African nations, however, had faced peace and stability after independence. The incident of civil wars, dictatorships, and military revolts severely affected the whole country.