9 - Conclusion

Summary

The states of the West African littoral have widely different colonial histories and post-colonial experiences. It is unlikely that the full range of disparities between such experiences can be explained in any simple and comprehensive fashion. It is far from clear, for instance, that the varying demerits of colonial rule stand in at all a direct relation to the varying achievements of post-colonial governments. Consider, for example, the three Guineas. Guiné-Bissau contrasts most agreeably with Equatorial Guinea far to the south, western Africa's diminutive but notably horrid answer to Amin's Uganda, though each is a product of the lackadaisical Iberian style of colonialism. Both, too, contrast in many ways with ‘Guinée Sékou Touré’, a regime with wide initial popular support but always intensely personal in character. Sékou Touré himself battles grimly on, like an eighteenth-century prizefighter increasingly blinded by his own blood. As Bill Johnson shows so eloquently, Touré has chosen his country's political fate for it and he has spread the consequences of his choice very broadly indeed. He has chosen gallantly; but also, and increasingly, he has chosen gratuitously. C'est magnifique; mais ce n'est pas la politique. By contrast those who have taken the capitalist way with less resentment have in some cases found its gradients decidedly less steep. Their political theory is plainly more conservative: for forms of dependency let fools contest; what e'er is best administered is best. (And dependency being what it is, best-administered means administered with the minimum of fuss and gratuitous ressentiment.) Their political practice by contrast is eminently flexible, entrepreneurial enough indeed to make a friend of a wide variety of hostile occasions.