ABSTRACT
Human societies necessarily picture the future in terms of the habit 'patterns of expectation formed 'by their past experience. It is therefore not surprising that the European colonising powers, as I endeavoured to show in my book on Capital Investment in Africa, l originally thought of their task of pacifying and opening up the continent very much in terms of investment in railways, roads, and communications which, it was hoped, would, as was the case in America, pave the way for the migration into an 'empty' continent of European peoples who would 'naturally' proceed to develop its resources. The construction of a basic framework of communications was in any case an inescapable burden. It was necessary for strategic and administrative reasons; without it the African continent would have remained as closed to the world economy as it had been south of the Sahara almost since the dawn of history.
