ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the ways governmental elites and the media in Britain discussed both democracy and autocracy in early post-colonial Africa, and Britain’s role and influence in shaping African politics. It considers the relationship between government and the media, although the main goal is a comparative analysis of public conversations that played out on newsstands, and the private ones ‘backstage’ within Whitehall’s corridors of power. In the much-truncated timeline of the post-war era, attention turned increasingly towards what might be obtained from a post-colonial continent friendly with its ex-colonial masters. Developments in Ghana and Sudan raise the obvious question as to how British commentators and politicians engaged with the idea of sub-Saharan democracy when it was believed already under attack so early in its life.
