ABSTRACT
The half-dozen havens of the educated African elite which dotted the Atlantic seaboard of West Africa in the nineteenth century were unique in contemporary Africa. For these enclaves were nurseries of a new species of African-hybridized, transmogrified, and passionate borrowers of Western values, ideas, norms, mores, thought-patterns, religion, and cosmology, deserters of their fatherland’s cultural heritage, revellers in the white man’s mental world, worshippers of the white man’s literary education, and apostles of political, economic, social and cultural aspirations completely at variance with the aspirations of the rest of the continent. This educated elite, as the group is usually labelled, had more in common with white men in Europe and America than with the multimillion unlettered Africans in the vast interior of the continent. Little wonder that by and large the medium of communication of this relatively small group was either English, French, or Portuguese; they were unabashed hankerers after, and importers of, the white man’s style of life in matters of dress, entertainment, freemasonry, marriage, burial, articulateness through the press and parliamentary system of government; or that very many of the group desired that, if need be, the white man should employ physical force to bring the illiterate interior to accept the white man’s style of life.
