ABSTRACT
When The Gold Coast became the independent state of Ghana in 1957 and the first independent state in West Africa euphoria swept the region, stimulating in turn greater pressure for independence by other states. By 1965 all former French and British territories were independent as was Liberia, unique because it had never truly been a colony (see Figure 4.1). The one exception was Portuguese Guinea, now Guinea-Bissau, which was involved in a long and destructive struggle with the Portuguese, but which finally won its independence in 1974. Thus from a single region dominated by the colonial administrations of Britain and France, and to a far lesser extent by Portugal, there emerged fifteen independent states, each with leaders with very different, but clearly defined political ideologies – some Marxist, such as Benin, and some with strong capitalist orientations such as the Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) – on how social and economic aspirations could be realized in a region where living standards of the majority were still painfully low. What was particularly interesting was the attitudes of the new states to decolonization. At one extreme, Kwame Nkrumah in the guise of a national liberator chose to sever ties with Ghana’s colonial past, while at the other extreme, Houphouët Boigny of Côte d’Ivoire retained very close links with France as according to Dunn (1978:12-13) he was either ‘a lackey of international capitalism, or a paragon of pragmatic rationality’. Attitudes of other states have been eclipsed to some extent, by the new leaders of Ghana and Côte
d’Ivoire, but there were clear divisions. Senegal chose to retain ties with France, though was not as close as Côte d’Ivoire, while Mali and Mauritania chose to move away, rejecting even the common currency of the francophone states, though Mali has now returned to the franc zone. And Guinea, which had antagonized President de Gaulle of France by asking for total independence a few short months before France was ready to grant it, was abandoned by Paris and forced to go its own way. But for all the choice that freedom implied, the reality of independence has been much more tightly constrained.
