government was seen by leaders such as Nkwame Nkrumah, the first Prime
Minister of Ghana and author of a book entitled Neo-colonialism: the Last
Stage of Imperialism, as not ending economic colonialism.
The core of the neo-colonialist argument is that a distinction between
political and economic freedom misses the point that there can be no real
political independence while economic dependency remains. Economic
colonialism has serious political consequences. So political autonomy had
not really been achieved with the formal and constitutional ending of colo-
nial government. Supposedly independent societies and their sovereign
governments were found to be lacking in control of their economies
(Berman, 1974, p. 4). The expression ‘neo-colonialism’ tries to encapsulate
the idea that economic power and the political power that flows from it still
reside elsewhere even when ‘independence’ has been achieved. O’Connor,
for example, defined neo-colonialism as ‘the survival of the colonial system
in spite of formal recognition of political independence in emerging coun-
tries’ which had become ‘the victims of an indirect and subtle form of dom-
ination by political, economic, social, military and technical (forces)’
(O’Connor, 1970, p. 117). But those subtle and indirect forms of domina-
tion had, as their root cause, the economies bequeathed by the colonial
powers at the time of constitutional independence.
The new rulers of the former colonies found that the major proportion of
the resources available to them were controlled from metropolitan centres
that hitherto had ruled their countries directly. Independence appeared
largely symbolic. For Nkrumah:
the essence of neo-colonialism is that the state which is subject to it is, in
theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international
sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policyis
directed from outside. (Nkrumah, 1965, p. ix, emphasis added)According to Julius Nyerere, the first President of Tanzania, his country
achieved ‘political independence only’ in 1961. It attained neither economic
power nor economic independence:
We gained the political power to decide what to do; we lacked the eco-
nomic and administrative power which would have given us freedom in
those decisions. ... A nation’s real freedom depends on its capacity to do
things, not on the legal rights conferred by its internationally recognised
sovereignty. (Nyerere, 1973, p. 263)76 Understanding Third World Politics