140 years ago, at the Berlin Conference on West Africa, the African states and communities were denied any sovereignty. The subsequent European colonisation continues to damage Africa to this day.

So what  I've done so far is to show Independence thought  of in the sense of sovereignty has moving in three  phases or three waves in Africa. The first was  independence from former colonial rule, second  was independence from corrupt unrepresentative  political elite and a third Independence against  what is seen as indirect form of colonialism,  which the first Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah described as neo-colonialism. And that is  currently receiving a lot of attention especially  in the context of current geopolitical happenings  and especially in discussions about how to reform  the multilateral institutions.

(15:40) Dr. Kofi Takyi Asante, University of Ghana, explains how protest movements came together in affected West Africa immediately after the conference and the transformations they underwent in the 20th and 21st centuries. In his conclusion, he links two important aspects for the future: the demand of African states for equal participation in international institutions and the promotion of democracy.

https://youtu.be/5P3snkjEv1w

to the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5P3snkjEv1w&t=940s (15:40)

Thank you all for being here, I arrived in  Berlin yesterday and I'm very pleased with  the welcome that I've gotten. I'll be talking  about the national movement of protest in the  aftermath of the Berlin Conference. I must  say though that you know of course the Berlin  Conference spared what is known as the Scramble  for Africa. But in many parts of Africa that  scramble happened decades earlier, in West  Africa, for instance, specifically in Gold  Coast which became Ghana after independence. In  the small city of Accra, where I currently live,  in 1840 the city was divided into British Accra,  Dutch Accra and Danish Accra. Eventually the British  won over.

So those scrambles had gone on. The Gold  Coast became, formerly became a British colony,  Crown Colony, in 1874. So again about  a decade before the Berlin Conference. What the Berlin Conference did was to  kind of provide a more of an orderly  situation on what has been going on and then of  course formalize a lot of what has informally  been taking place up to that point. So protest  that emerge after the Berlin Conference took  a number of forms. The first protest  movement actually came from the elite  Africans who stayed in the coastal areas  where European power was most established.  

Many of those, these in West Africa, were called  Euro-Africans. They were called Euro-Africans  because many of them literally were the children,  were mixed-raced children between European  merchants or soldiers or traders and African  women. But then not all of them, many of them had  received formal education, they were Christians,  and so they participated in a certain discursive  space which was European and many genuinely  embraced European civilization on the Gold Coast. 

In the decades before the Berlin Conference  many of them had collaborated with the Colonial  Administration, the emerging colonial order.  Some in Gold Coast, in Niger for instance,  had worked as high ranking officials in the  colonial government as District Commissioners.  

And in the Gold Coast one actually rose to become  a Governor, acting Governor. So they thought they  were going to inherit the emerging state, colonial  state. They were most influential in a period  when Africa largely wasn't very safe for European  settlement except parts of the East Africa,  East of Africa and Southern Africa. West Africa,  Central Africa you know the malaria.

By the end of  the 19th century because of advances in medicine  it was possible for more Europeans to stay,  to settle in parts of Africa. So their importance  to the Colonial establishment had diminished and  many of them had found themselves pushed to  the margins of the colonial establishment.

So a lot of the protest was actually by African  elites who wanted to play a more Central rule in  the colonial government. And then of course they  sometimes found common cause with the traditional  leaders, the Chiefs, who felt their powers  being eroded by the colonial administrations.  

So the grieved elites who wanted to play a  more active role in the colonial government  sometimes work with the traditional leaders who  found their powers at risk. And then there were  other grievances as well, because of the expansion  of formal education, European style education,  a growing number of young people who had received  education but then whose opportunities for,  

you know, economic well-being was  limited under the colonial government. 

So these also formed protest movements,  sometimes in opposition to the colonial  government, of course, our grieved elite often  supported them but then their protests were  sometimes against the traditional authorities  as well who at different points in time worked  with the colonial Administration, especially  for the British colonial government because  they wanted to administer their colonies  with as little cost as possible they often  

work with existing traditional structures.  So at different points in time traditional  leaders worked with the colonial government which  brought them at loger heads with their own people.  

So a lot of these dynamics happened from the  late 19th century to sometime in the inter- war  period. After the Second World War the dynamics  of protest changed drastically from improving  opportunities within the colonial context to  now demands for independence. Because of the  debates going on internationally as well and also  because of the nature of the Second World War. 

So what I've sketched out so far  showed different kinds of demands,   different kinds of grievances from the late  1850s to sometime in 1960 when Independence  was granted.

What took place was mainly formal  political independence which some critical  

scholars have described as “flag independence”.  They call it flag independence because subsequent  development showed the independence came without  substantive control of the economy and natural  resources. And this occurred because of a number  of reasons during colonial rule. The structure  of colonial dominance involved extraction of  resources without commercial investment in the  local economies. So at Independence many African  countries were dependent on the export of primary  commodities which has continued until present.  And in some instances attempts were made to  industrialize these economies, but that often led  to credit crisis, debt crisis, because of balance  of payment problems that is involved in import  of technologies to drive industrialization. So by  the late 1970s and 1980s most African countries  have run into troubles of various kinds, mainly  economic crisis and political crisis as well and  in many places there were civil wars and warlords.

By the 1990s  and the 10 of the 21st century there was a wave  of democratization across Africa. And many have  described this as a second Independence because  you had a lot of, you know, social movements,  

Grassroots mobilization against political leaders  who were seen as not representing the interest  of their population and so in certain sense  are seen as having betrayed the earlier  or the first generation of Independence that  occurred in Africa. So it's been over 30 years  since this wave of democratization which has been  described as the second Independence took place.  

Currently, of course, the economic situation  having substantially improved and we are now  seeing a similar kind of movement, social  movement, which we saw across Africa during  the colonial period asking for, of course,  economic emancipation, a fairer distribution  of the resources of the continent, but also  demands for security because of the outbreak  of jihadist violence across West Africa.

So what  I've done so far is to show Independence thought  of in the sense of sovereignty has moving in three  phases or three waves in Africa. The first was  

independence from former colonial rule, second  was independence from corrupt unrepresentative  political elite and a third Independence against  what is seen as indirect form of colonialism,  which the first Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah described as neo-colonialism. And that is  currently receiving a lot of attention especially  in the context of current geopolitical happenings  and especially in discussions about how to reform  the multilateral institutions. In the past few  years there's been talk about the composition  of the UN security Council for instance, because  these are institutions that were formed before  the countries of Africa and other continents that  were colonized as well, you know, Latin America  and Asia, before they became independent and so  

the balance of power in these institutions  reflect the balance of power that existed in  the pre-1945 world.

And then of course if we look  at the financial and economic architecture as well,  you know, and in these days we have the emergence  of private organizations, credit rating agencies,  hedge funds as well that play a central role in  the economic strategies of developing countries,  for instance access to foreign loans, which have in  recent years, since covid-19, for instance seeing a  

wave of debt crisis in Ghana, definitely in Zambia,  Egypt and other countries. So there's been a lot of discussions currently and I'm really I've  been pleased since I came yesterday seen the  serious attention being given to recognizing the  harms of colonialism, you know, and trying to  write the wrongs.

Of course this have been going  on for a while return of looted artifarts for  

instance. One would hope that France would learn  a lot of lessons from Germany because their  relationship with their colonies have been a bit  frosty and Macron hasn't been helping things with  some of his recent statements. But then there  are also some very serious issues remaining,  for instance the issue of economic sovereignty  which for many African leaders at the time of  Independence was really key and which currently  haven't been fully resolved. So if you look  at what is happening in the West African Sahara  region for instance, I know in the international  media the leaders of those countries, Niger,  Burkina Faso and Mali, are often dismissed as  part of the authoritarian wave but there's still  very a strong ground swell of support for them  because of the perception that they are continuing  an earlier tradition of regaining control of the  natural resources. Some of the moves which  have been made recently, for instance taking  more control of the uranium mines in Niger for  instance and Malis attempt to make sure foreign  companies pay higher taxes.

They've gotten a lot  of popular support. In Senegal something similar  is happening, but the government in Senegal is  very different, they were elected at the polls,  they've also made similar expressions of interest  to review the oil and gas contracts for instance  that Senegal assigned. Progress on that hasn't  been as swift as it is in the sahelian countries.  

So there's a wave happening and in the context  of the discussions globally of authoritarianism  versus democracy I think it's going to be very  important to pay attention to how some of these  demands could fit into from the global South  to some of the interest of countries in the  West as well, because a lot of those demands are  based on again not only sovereignty but democracy  

rights and if we want to preserve democracy  it may be much better to join these kinds of  demands to fight against what may be seen as the  authoritarian wave. So I think I would end here,  there's going to be Q&A, I look forward to  further interaction with you. Thank you.