Top Highlights

• There was an acute shortage of skilled manpower. Most African societies were predominantly illiterate and innumerate. Only 16 per cent of the adult population was literate. In black Africa in the late 1950s, just as the independence era was beginning, the entire region, containing a population of about 200 million, produced only 8,000 secondary sch...
• The colonial legacy included an infrastructure of roads, railways, hydro-electric schemes and a revenue system based on commodity exports and imported goods. But much of the economies of African states had been developed in accordance with the needs of colonial powers, as Sylvanus Olympio, the first president of Togo, noted: The effect of the polic...
• Africans had little experience of representative democracy – representative institutions were introduced by the British and the French too late to alter the established character of the colonial state.
• In the first elections in the postwar era in Africa, nationalist politicians started out proclaiming nationalist objectives, selecting party candidates regardless of ethnic origin. But as the number of elections grew, as the number of voters expanded, as the stakes grew higher with the approach of independence, the basis for campaigning changed. Am...
• Belgian officials established a Tutsi bureaucracy and favoured Tutsi education. The Catholic Church was especially influential in promoting the Tutsi cause.