For a British university graduate in the early
1950s, the Colonial Service offered a fine oppor-
tunity for a fulfilling and worthwhile career. After
a brief apprenticeship, in his late twenties or early
thirties, he could expect to become a district com-
missioner in the Fiji Islands or an African colony
and to be given responsibility for thousands of
‘natives’ as the ultimate magistrate and authority
on the spot. Such opportunities for young
men to exercise paternalistic power did not exist
in the Western world. The only drawback of
Colonial Service was the question of marriage, or
more accurately the problem of how a single white
male might find a suitable wife to take to the bush.
Marrying locally was impractical; there were few, if
any unattached white girls, and an interracial mar-
riage was unthinkable. Fulfilment of this basic
human need therefore had to be arranged rather
rapidly on a spell of leave back home; the district
commissioner’s wife thereafter fulfilled an import-
ant role in the white colonial society, which had
its strict pecking order from the governor and his
wife downwards. On the surface, little had
changed for half a century in the customs and
mores of colonial government and the same held
true for the French. A career in the colonies was a
career for life. But then, little more than ten years
later, it all came suddenly to an end. District com-
missioners are no more. Black Africa asserted its
political independence in country after country.
The story of the demise of the colonial civil
servant, a mere microcosm of history, has a widerbearing; it illustrates a phenomenon historians
can repeatedly observe. Major upheavals often
occur abruptly, surprising contemporaries with
their speed and dynamism. It is historians – them-
selves actually no better than anyone else at antici-
pating the future – who later analyse how changes
have been gradually in the making over a period
of decades.
As empires go, European rule over most of the
African continent was of relatively short duration;
apart from forts and territories on the coast, polit-
ical empire began much later than in Asia and the
Americas and ended sooner. Economic empire
was, however, older. Europe’s interest in Africa
was predominantly economic long before parti-
tion in the latter part of the nineteenth century.
The Europeans replaced the Arabs in linking
Africa’s produce with the rest of the world. Until
the nineteenth century the most important
African product was human beings – slaves. Other
resources were harnessed to serve Western needs
in the world economy. From an African perspec-
tive the dominant theme is white exploitation. But
eventual Western political control also led to the
imposition of a new order, the creation of embry-
onic nations. These took the form of European
colonies with internationally agreed frontiers, and
they were opened to the influx of Western ideas of
government, which included the doctrine of self-
determination. The supplanting of the African
means of exchange by European money and the
introduction of market economies, roads and(^1) Chapter 63
THE END OF WHITE RULE IN WEST AFRICA