COLONIAL OPPRESSION

●​ European immigrants, who were encouraged to come to Africa as pioneer farmers and
given large tracts of land to farm, forced Africans to provide cheap labor.
●​ Large plantations were established for growing cash crops.
●​ At the beginning of colonial occupation, the African resistance took the form of armed
revolt.
○​ Examples
■​ The Temne and the Mende of Sierra Leone revolted against the hut tax.
■​ The Nama and the Herero people in Namibia revolted against German
forced labor.​ ​ ​ ​
○​ Typical of “primary resistance,” spontaneous and local uprisings.
■​ They were not militarily successful—for obvious reasons including the
lack of a country-wide organizational base—and were brutally
suppressed.
●​ Later, people adopted strategies that were more moderate and employed conventional
means.
○​ Associations were formed for the purpose of addressing specific grievances: low
wages, poor educational and health facilities, inadequate prices for cash crops
grown by African farmers, lack of business opportunities, and absence of
representation in local political councils.​ ​ ​ ​ ​
○​ When these reforms were thwarted by colonial settlers, the Africans ultimately
began to think about self-rule as their answer.

MISSIONARY CHURCHES
●​ The Catholic Church was introduced into Africa by the Portuguese in the late 1400s in
Benin and was soon extended to Congo and Angola.
○​ Christian proselytizing seems to have been simply helpful in facilitating the
establishment of Portuguese presence in Africa for commercial purposes.
○​ The African chiefs or kings that were approached also saw the political potential
of using Christianity to unify their empires and strengthen their own positions.
●​ In other African countries, Christian missionaries either preceded the colonial takeovers
or came in immediately after a country had been declared a colony. Colonial authorities
found that Christianity had a pacifying effect on the African people, with its emphasis on
spiritual matters over earthly affairs.
●​ The Christian church also served to patch up the disintegrating African communities hit
hard by colonial policy, without attacking the root causes of the disintegration.
○​ One such example was the devastating defeat suffered by Tanzanian people in
the so-called “Maji Maji Rebellion” of 1905–1907.
○​ Africans chose to resist oppressive German colonialism. The Germans put down
the revolt.
○​ 120,000 Africans had lost their lives.
○​ The destruction was so thorough that the Africans lost faith in their ancestral
spirits also. Following their devastating defeat, most of these people turned to
Christianity.
●​ In many African colonies, mission schools were the main educational institutions, and
the expense of educating Africans was often borne entirely by the missions.
○​ Mission education had three modest goals:
■​ to provide the basic literacy that would enable Africans to absorb religious
education and training and help in the spread of the Gospel;
■​ to impart the values of Western society, without which missionaries
believed the Africans could not progress;
■​ to raise the level of productivity of the African workers (both semiskilled
and clerical) without necessarily empowering them sufficiently to
challenge colonial rule.
○​ Mission education was, generally speaking, inadequate, especially in its
emphasis on a religious education that Western society was already finding
anachronistic.
○​ Ali Mazrui (1978) concludes that missionary education was perhaps far more
successful at producing a new cultural African than a consistent Christian.
○​ Missionary education then had dual consequences for the Africans:
■​ it gave them skills with which to articulate their demands and question the
legitimacy of colonial authorities;
■​ it also turned out to be a powerful medium of African acculturation of
Western Christian (and political) values
●​ The majority of the first generation of African leaders, among them Julius Nyerere
(Tanzania), Jomo Kenyatta (Kenya), Léopold Senghor (Senegal), Kenneth Kaunda
(Zambia), Nnamdi Azikiwe (Nigeria), and Hastings Kamuzu Banda (Malawi), were
products of missionary education in their own countries.
●​ In South Africa, the Africans who organized the first nationwide political movement to
address the needs of the Africans and to oppose the impending racist legislation being
contemplated by the white minority government in 1912 were pastors.
●​ In Kenya, the independent schools that African religious leaders opened were quite
political in terms of articulating the grievances of their people, as well as in combining
local and Christian beliefs.
●​ The missionaries excluded the Africans from any meaningful role in running the
churches.
●​ They maintained a discrete social distance from the Africans, interacting with them in a
patronizing manner, and preaching the Gospel or teaching African school children simply
as a job to do, not a sacred calling.
●​ In eastern, central, and south- ern Africa, where European settlers had their own
schools, the missionaries preferred to send their children to racially exclusive schools,
never raising any moral objections to the existence of such segregated schools.
●​ They looked down upon African rituals, customs, and languages and, in some cases,
deliberately attempted to destroy African institutions. Even the use of traditional music
and dance in worship was severely discouraged as barbaric and heathen.
●​ Africans founded their own churches, separatist churches, where they could interpret the
scriptures in ways that did not denigrate their cultures and their heritage and where the
people could enjoy “religious self-expression.”
 ●​ Such separatist churches included the Chilembwe church in Malawi, the Kimbangu and
Kitawala churches in what is now called the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the
Tembu church in South Africa.
●​ Kofi Awoonor (1975) writes, “Religious propaganda was an essential aspect of imperial
expansion, and the colonial powers had long grasped the important truth that it was
cheaper in the long run to use the Bible than military power to secure distant dominions.”

WORLD WARS I AND II

●​ An African poet, Taban Lo Liyong, once said that Africans have three white men to thank
for their political freedom and independence: Nietsche, Hitler, and Marx;
○​ Nietsche for contriving the notion of the superman, the master race;
○​ Hitler for trying to implement Nietsche’s idea in Germany with a view to extending
it globally, thus setting off the most destructive war the world had ever witnessed;
○​ Marx for raising the consciousness of the oppressed and colonized masses in
Africa by universalizing the concept of economic exploitation of human beings.
●​ Africans were drafted to serve in both wars—a million of them in World War I and 2
million in World War II. The British alone were able to enlist about 700,000 Africans to
fight on their side in World War II.
●​ They learned modern military skills in battle and demonstrated leadership abilities.
○​ These African soldiers, after returning home, were willing to use their new skills
to assist nationalist movements fighting for freedom that were beginning to take
shape in the colonies.
○​ Service in the colonial army made it possible for Africans from different regions of
the same colony to meet and get to know one another, an important step in the
breakdown of ethnic barriers and the development of shared identification with
the country as a whole.
●​ Finally, economic conditions deteriorated considerably in the colonies during and
between the two world wars: high unemployment, accelerated rural-urban migration
resulting in overcrowded cities, inadequate schools, and health facilities.
○​ All resources were diverted to the war effort, and Africans were coerced to
produce more to feed Europe even as they were not producing enough to feed
themselves.
○​ Africans were taxed more and forced labor became more widespread.
○​ European colonial powers were exhausted physically and economically after
each world war.
○​ Thus, they were not willing or able to commit substantial resources to improving
dire social and economic conditions in the African colonies. They were unwilling
militarily to suppress nationalist movements that had been fuelled by the
devastation of the war.

PAN-AFRICANISM
●​ Three names often associated with Pan-Africanism are Henry Sylvester-Williams, W. E.
B. DuBois, and Marcus Garvey.
●​ Sylvester-Williams, a West Indian barrister, is credited for originating the idea of
Pan-Africanism, an ideology consisting of two key elements: the common heritage of
people of African descent all over the world and the incumbency of African people to
work for the interests and the well-being of one another everywhere.
●​ The most meaningful aspect of Pan-Africanism had begun before the first formal
Pan-African Congress was called by H. Sylvester Williams in London in 1900.
○​ Only a scattering of Caribbeans, Africans and a few Black American intellectuals
attended, the most noted being DuBois.
○​ The independence of African nations was not demanded at that time.
○​ What they demanded was an improvement in the educational conditions of
Africans so that they would eventually be prepared to lead themselves.
●​ The responsibility to continue the work begun by Sylvester-Williams then fell upon Dr. W.
E. B. DuBois, an African American intellectual and political/social activist.
○​ DuBois felt that black people in the New World, in order to free themselves from
racial discrimination and rampant racism, must reclaim their African roots and
become proud of their heritage.
○​ He further maintains that Pan-Africanism is part of the international proletarian
struggle against imperialism, and has its roots in a class phenomenon - the
oppression of African labor by international capitalism.
○​ DuBois was moved to revive the Pan-African movement by two factors.
■​ One was the information coming out of Africa that showed that Africans
were being severely mistreated for resisting colonial exploitation,
especially in the Belgian Congo, where reports indicated that Africans
refusing to sign up for labor were being physically tortured and mutilated.
■​ The second factor was the need to seek some recognition for the
important contributions that African veterans had made in World War I.
Only European veterans were rewarded generously for their efforts, while
the Africans who had fought valiantly and helped liberate German
colonies were not honored in any way.
○​ DuBois wanted the European powers to adopt a Charter of Human Rights for
Africans as a reward for the sacrifices they had made during the war fighting for
Allied Powers.
●​ In the United States, the Pan-African movement was marked by intense and bitter rivalry
between DuBois and Marcus Garvey, despite agreement on the basic premise of their
struggle.
●​ Garvey was a racial purist; and he felt that the best way to redress the tribulations of
black people was to return to Africa.
○​ Using the slogan, “Africa for the Africans at home and abroad,” Garvey founded
the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in Jamaica in 1914 and
moved it to the United States in 1916.
○​ He hoped that the UNIA would become a powerful mass movement with the goal
of returning to Africa (to establish an African kingdom in Ethiopia which would
rival in grandeur any white civilization that had ever existed).
 ○​ He started a series of business ventures (including a merchant ship), adopted a
flag for the black race (red, black, and green), introduced an African national
anthem set to martial music (that spoke of Ethiopia as the land of our forefathers,
which our armies were poised to rush to liberate), and founded a newspaper, The
Negro World (published in English, French, and Spanish).
○​ Despite his personal and legal difficulties in the United States and his eventual
eclipse, Garvey is credited with psychologically rehabilitating the color “black,”
instilling in black people all over the world a keen awareness of their African roots
and creating “a real feeling of international solidarity among Africans and persons
of African stock.”
●​ In 1919, a Pan-African conference, the first of five such conferences organized by
DuBois, would not have been allowed to take place in Paris, had it not been for a
prominent African, Blaise Diagne of Senegal.
○​ The first African to serve in the French parliament, Blaise Diagne used his
influence with the French Prime Minister to secure permission for the conference
to be held.
■​ The Allied Powers, assembled to sign the Treaty of Versailles, were not
sympathetic at all to such a large meeting of black people.
■​ The United States was afraid that DuBois might use the international
forum to publicize lynchings of black people in the United States.
■​ The Europeans did not want any negative publicity associated with the
brutal and repressive actions of their governments in African colonies.
■​ And none of the Allied Powers wanted the sterling accomplishments of
black soldiers highlighted by this gathering for fear of offending the white
soldiers and the European public.
●​ 1919 Pan-African Conference
○​ The 1919 Pan-African conference concluded with a petition to the Allied Powers
to place the former German colonies under international supervision in order to
prepare them for self-rule.
○​ The League did in fact adopt the mandate system, a measure that conformed to
the spirit and intention of this petition.
○​ A resolution was also adopted demanding that European powers protect Africans
from abuses of all sorts and set up a bureau under the League to make sure that
legitimate demands of African people were being met.
○​ The Pan-African conference also demanded that education be provided, that
“slavery,” forced labor, and corporal punishment be outlawed, and that some form
of political participation be permitted.
●​ 1921 Pan-African Conference
○​ The 1921 Pan-African conference was conducted in three sessions held in
London, Brussels, and Paris, respectively.
○​ The first session reiterated the same demands as the 1919 conference.
■​ However, this time, the demands were backed by an eloquent assertion
concerning the inherent equality of human beings.
 ■​ It adopted the "London Manifesto" which focused on the rights of the
Negro people.
○​ The second session was moved to Brussels and immediately ran into
controversy.
■​ The Belgian press alleged that the conference was communist inspired.
■​ The session was finally allowed to meet, albeit briefly, only to endorse the
resolutions and statements already passed at the London session.
○​ The third session then moved on to Paris.
■​ It was chaired by Monsieur Blaise Diagne of Senegal, attracting a large
number of Africans from the French colonies.
■​ Here, once again, the demands for reforms were affirmed, and in addition,
DuBois was chosen to present yet another petition to the League of
Nations asking the League to look into the treatment of people of African
descent the world over and to set up a mechanism for ameliorating their
appalling conditions.
●​ 1923 Pan-African Conference
○​ The 1923 Pan-African conference was held at a time when DuBois’ rivalry with
Marcus Garvey’s organization was at its height.
○​ In addition to reiterating previous calls for colonial reforms, this session also
called for due process (including jury trials) for Africans accused of crimes in the
colonies and for an end to lynchings in the United States.
○​ Because of studies and reports indicating that forced labor and virtual slavery
existed in Portuguese African colonies, DuBois and his colleagues decided to
hold the second session of the 1923 conference in Lisbon.
●​ 1927 Pan-African Conference
○​ The 1927 Pan-African conference was held in New York.
○​ Emphasized the need for African countries to build stronger ties with the then
USSR.
○​ Several events of some significance to the black community were occurring at
the time.
■​ First, Marcus Garvey’s UNIA was near collapse and an end to the bitter
and divisive rivalry between DuBois and Garvey was imminent.
■​ Secondly, the supreme ruler of the Ashanti people of Ghana, King
Prempeh I, who for years had been exiled to the Seychelles islands for
refusing to cooperate with the British, had been allowed to return home. It
lifted the morale of the conferees and added stature to the convention that
the Ashanti king sent representatives to the New York meeting.
■​ Thirdly, the imminent economic depression in the United States saw
financial contributions to DuBois’ work dwindle to a trickle. He had relied
for financial support on the small but loyal African American middle class,
which was soon threatened with economic ruin.
●​ 1945 Pan-African Conference
○​ Elaborate preparations went into the 1945 Pan-African conference, to be held in
Manchester, England.
 ○​ For the first time, African political parties, trade unions, youth leagues, and
students’ associations sent representatives.
○​ The gathering was the largest and the most representative Pan-African
conference ever held.
○​ It was a crowning achievement for DuBois, then universally acknowledged as the
“Father of Pan-Africanism,” who flew in from New York to convene it.
○​ Reports were presented on conditions of black people in Africa, the United
States, the West Indies, and Britain.
○​ It marked the transformation of the Pan-African movement from a protest
movement—seeking moderate reforms including the right to form a trade union,
to be paid a decent wage, to vote for representatives in local councils, to obtain
health care and housing, etc.—to a “tool” of African nationalist movements
fighting for self-rule.
○​ The idea of independence was echoed throughout all the discussions at the
conference.
○​ Information was provided about other struggles elsewhere in the world that were
being waged against the same colonial powers that Africans were facing, and the
participants were able to draw some lessons that might be applied to the African
struggles.
○​ The conference allowed Africans in attendance to develop ties and relationships
among themselves that helped them later in organizing their people when they
returned home.
●​ Pan-Africanism began as a protest movement against the racism endured by black
people in the New World, slowly evolved into an instrument for waging an anti- colonial
struggle dedicated to bringing about African rule in Africa, and ended up as a dream or
inspiration for African leaders and intellectuals who hoped that perhaps in the future,
African states might be federated as the United States of Africa.
●​ Pan-Africanism was the inspiration behind the efforts of Dr. Kwame Nkrumah.
○​ Soon after becoming prime minister of the newly independent state of Ghana in
1957, he immediately set about convening in 1958 in Accra what might be called
the sixth Pan-African conference. He called it the All-Africa People’s Conference.
○​ It attracted new and more militant leaders like Patrice Lumumba of Congo and
Tom Mboya of Kenya. The question then was not whether all of Africa was going
to be free, but how soon.
○​ In 1963, Nkrumah, Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, and Gamal Abdel Nasser
of Egypt were instrumental in founding the Organization of African Unity (OAU), a
meeting forum for all newly independent African nations.
●​ The contribution of Pan-Africanism to the successful development of African nationalism
and to the consciousness of people of African descent all over the world in helping them
to secure a sense of connectedness with their African roots is quite significant.

THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS AND THE UNITED NATIONS

●​ The League set up a mandate system under which colonies in Africa and elsewhere that
had been governed by the losing World War I combatants, Germany and Italy, could be
 transferred as mandates to victorious Allied Powers. Such transfers were based on two
conditions:
○​ That these mandated territories be administered with a view to their ultimately
being granted independence
○​ That the European powers in charge of these mandated territories submit annual
progress reports to the League as to what they were doing to prepare the
territories for eventual self-rule.
●​ It was already being envisaged that
○​ German colonies such as Tanganyika, Togo, Cameroon, Namibia, Rwanda, and
Burundi might be granted self-rule.
○​ Tanganyika, the western half of Togo, and the southwestern portion of Cameroon
were mandated to Britain
○​ The eastern half of Togo and the eastern portion of Cameroon went to France.
○​ Rwanda and Burundi were mandated to Belgium
○​ South West Africa (whose name was later changed to Namibia) was mandated to
South Africa.
●​ The young Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia was prophetic in his declaration at an
emergency meeting of the League of Nations, following the unprovoked invasion of his
country by Italy in 1936, when he said that a world body that seemed paralyzed to act in
the face of such blatant aggression had failed miserably to justify its existence and was
doomed to extinction.
○​ Three years after that state- ment, the war broke out in Europe as Germany
undertook to conquer Europe and expand the Third Reich.
○​ The League’s aims and principles were not articulated clearly enough and the
League did not have the institutional mechanisms for resolving global conflicts.
●​ Forty-six countries, including the United States, met in San Francisco and produced the
founding charter of the United Nations Organization.
○​ The League’s mandates system was transformed into the United Nations’
trusteeship system, overseen by a Trusteeship Council.
○​ Italy subsequently lost her entire African empire, as Eritrea was given to Ethiopia,
which annexed it.
●​ Italian Somaliland became a U.N. Trust Territory, and Libya was made “a self-governing
kingdom” under the auspices of Great Britain.
●​ The United Nations charter, in Article 62, directed its Economic and Social Council to
“make recommendations for the purpose of promoting respect for, and observance of,
human rights and fundamental freedoms for all.”
●​ In 1948, the United Nations approved a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which
spelled out an array of rights that all human beings are entitled to, regardless of their
nationality or race.
●​ In Article 73, with respect to non-self-governing territories, the U.N. charter charged the
relevant members of the world organization “to develop self-government, to take due
account of the political aspirations of the peoples, and to assist them in the progressive
development of their free political institutions, according to the particular circumstances
of each territory and its peoples and their varying stages of advancement.”
 ●​ Articles 62 and 73 represented an unequivocal moral and political statement to the effect
that colonialism was, then as now, unacceptable in the inter- national community and
that all European colonies in Africa and Asia had the fundamental right to govern
themselves.
●​ Socialist states like the Soviet Union, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia, ideologically
opposed to colonialism and imperialism, and newly independent countries like India were
more than willing to extend moral and material assistance to the African nationalist
movements.
●​ The United Nations has continued to be a catalyst in promoting independence, human
rights, and literacy.
●​ It has provided hope to millions of working people by encouraging the adoption of
progressive international labor legislation and by protecting the right of workers to form
unions to improve their working conditions.

INDEPENDENCE MOVEMENTS
●​ When colonial authorities drew boundaries, they did not pay any regard to the actual
distributions of the various national peoples and ethnic communities;
○​ the geographical entities that had been drawn to the convenience of the
Europeans contained diversities of peoples.
○​ Ethnically homogeneous colonies were rare and diverse African groups being
governed by one colonial authority were able, through their leaders, to forge a
sense of belonging to that geographical entity.
●​ William Tordoff identifies seven social/economic groups, each with its own factional
interests to protect, yet willing to support initiatives directed toward securing greater
political rights and even independence for the country.
○​ Professional groups, consisting of lawyers and doctors, who tended to be allied
with wealthy merchants and contractors.
○​ Teachers, clerks, and small merchants—or, in Marxian terms,the petty
bourgeoisie - who were impatient with the status quo and eager to have the
system transformed so that they could better themselves and perhaps help
others as well.
○​ The colonial bureaucracy, including Westernized Africans who were the
immediate beneficiaries of the “Africanization” of top government positions when
independence came
○​ The urban workers, interested in improving their wages and working conditions
through trade unions (some of which were affiliated with emerging political
parties, while others were not)
○​ Small shopkeepers, petty traders, and hawkers who made up the “informal
sector” of colonial economies
○​ Cash crop farmers, some of whom were wealthy, and all of whom constituted a
powerful and important segment of Africans
○​ Peasant farmers, who toiled on their small farms in the countryside and grew
most of the food eaten in the country. Peasant concerns had to do with
agriculture; they protested policies that controlled the market prices of their
 produce in urban markets, restricted ownership of cattle, or charged exorbitant
fees for cattle dips.
●​ The nationalist struggle was waged, in part, by religious associations, trade unions, and
welfare organizations, as well as by political parties.
○​ In the case of religious associations,
■​ Mission churches in Africa were closely identified with colonial rule from
the very beginning.
■​ Many African churchgoers broke away in order to be able to practice their
customs: funeral rites, marriage celebrations, modes of dress, etc.
■​ Early secession of churches occurred in Nigeria and South Africa as early
as the 1890s.
■​ In Kenya, there was the Dini ya Musambwa (Religion of the Spirits)
founded by Elijah Masinde, which preached against colonial rule and
attacked foreign religions as a deviation from the Africans’ old and
revered cultural ways.
■​ It campaigned for cultural authenticity and was strongly sympathetic to the
Mau Mau uprising.
○​ In the case of trade unions,
■​ Trade unions and welfare associations were formed as towns began to
grow, particularly after World War II, and Africans in urban areas began to
form associations to assist new arrivals from the rural areas with
accommodations, jobs, spending money, and a supportive network of
individuals from “home.”
■​ In British colonies, these kinds of “tribal” associations, with parochial
interests and regional bases, were encouraged because they met the
needs that colonial authorities did not have the resources or the
inclination to address.
■​ Trade unions also began to organize on a sectoral basis since they were
not permitted to go “national” or to become political.
■​ In some cases, the trade unions themselves became indistinguishable
from nationalist movements.
■​ Tom Mboya of Kenya began his career as the head of the Local
Government Workers’ Union in Nairobi while also serving as an official of
the Kenya African Union (KAU). KAU was banned during the Mau Mau
uprising against the British.
■​ When Mboya was elected General Secretary of the Kenya Federation of
Labor (KFL) in 1953, he attacked draconian colonial measures that
included mass removals of African families from their homes, the practice
of “collective punishment,” and the introduction of the “kipande” (the pass
book) for controlling the movement of Africans in the country.
■​ Tom Mboya’s rise to the position of General-Secretary of the Kenya
African National Union, the party that led Kenya to inde- pendence in
1963, was a natural consequence of his extraordinary experience as a
labor organizer and activist.
 ■​ In Nigeria, Morocco, Cameroon, and Zambia, trade unions wanted to
maintain their autonomy and to concentrate on economic issues rather
than to align themselves with political parties.
○​ In case of political parties,
■​ Many of these political parties began as interest groups composed of
educated African civil servants, lawyers, doctors, and pastors often living
in urban areas.
■​ They were originally moderate, reasonable, and interested only in limited
reforms; they were not mass movements and did not try to supplant the
colonial government.
■​ One of the earliest such groups was the Aborigines’ Rights Protection
Society founded in 1897, in Ghana, to ensure that the African people did
not lose their rights to land.
■​ The National Congress of British West Africa, composed of educated
Africans from the West African British colonies of Gold Coast (Ghana),
Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Gambia, wanted the right to vote extended to
educated Africans.
■​ Some political parties began as youth movements. A prime exam- ple
would be the Nigerian Youth Movement, which began as the Lagos Youth
Movement (LYM) in 1934.
■​ The LYM became the Nigerian Youth Movement, attracting support from
all parts of Nigeria except the north and expanded its agenda to include
protesting discriminatory legislation and pressing for the Africanization of
the civil service.
■​ Examples of other political parties that arose out of young people’s clubs
were the Rassemblement Democratique Africain (RDA) founded in 1946
in French West Africa, the United Gold Coast Convention founded in 1947
in Ghana, and the Northern Rhodesia African Congress formed in 1948.
●​ In British Africa, African organizations were allowed only if they were social/welfare
committees or regional organizations.
●​ The British policy of “indirect rule” impeded the ability of Africans in the colonies to
establish nationwide organizations or to be able to work with others outside their regions.
●​ The French believed that, with assimilation, African peoples would ultimately remain
within the larger French community of nations, under France’s leadership. So they
sponsored political parties in the colonies as chapters of the French national parties.
●​ Despite the atomizing impact of the divide- and-rule policies employed by colonial
authorities, which we described, it is remarkable indeed that African people were able to
wage fairly unified movements.
●​ The struggle mirrored all the contradictions of African societies that existed before
colonialism and which have persisted since independence.