There are probably a billion videocassettes in the United States. Yet few, probably under a thousand, are African films. I want to ask why this is and describe a strategy to change it.

How can one of the least known and most under-funded cinemas in the world, African cinema, find a place in the most lavishly promoted and capitalized media marketplaces on earth, the U.S. feature film market?

To make a case for greater American involvement in Africa is to take cognizance of what has gone before — eclectic embrace followed by selective disengagement. The Nixon Administration has opted for a policy of designating certain target countries for bilateral assistance and political cultivation. The itineraries of American public figures from the Vice President and Secretary of State to the astronauts and Mrs. Nixon tell us where the emphases are being placed: on the two long-standing areas of concern, Liberia and Ethiopia; on Africa's most populous state, Nigeria; on one of its larger states, Zaire, and on the home of one of Africa's senior pragmatic statesmen, Kenya. Somewhat more peripheral interest is maintained in Ghana, which has moved into the column of “reasonable” regimes. Most recently the situation in Sudan has dazzled U.S. policymakers with visions of picking up chips from the Soviets and conjuring up the type of Cold War determinant of involvement popular in the 1960s.

Conjecture on any aspect of future events in Africa is hazardous; applied to politics, it may be altogether unsafe. Yet one cannot avoid looking into the future in some way. In essence our guesswork consists of extrapolations based upon trend analysis. A number of present events and forces display characteristics that suggest persistence. The convergence of the forces and their persistence offer reasonable basis for projections into the future.

Judging by the nature of past superpower involvements in Africa, it is easy to make a case for future interventions by both superpowers and intermediate (European) powers in Africa beyond the year 2000.

My statement is not an attempt to convey new information. Indeed, anyone reading simply the record of the Congressional hearings will have all the essential and relevant facts. Why is it that we have been ever searching for but never coming to the truth? Why do we listen but never hear, look but never see, manipulate but never truly feel? Perhaps we express the right facts but the wrong values?

Prophecy is one of the simplest ways for an historian to destroy his credit and reputation. Having been persuaded to take this risk, I shall partly cover it with one small insurance policy: I shall set forth what seem to me to be the relevant facts, but not be too dogmatic about the conclusions to be drawn from them.

Where will South Africa stand twenty-five years from now? What will have happened during those years? In theory there are, I think, only four possibilities: (i) that the status quo will remain essentially unchanged; (ii) that radical changes, involving or at least leading to the abolition of all racial discrimination, will come about peacefully, by constitutional means; (iii) that the regime will be overthrown by invading foreign forces; and (iv) that it will be overthrown by revolution within the country, with or without foreign support. As there are strong reasons for believing that none of these alternatives is really possible, some factor seems to have been overlooked. Perhaps it will appear as the four alternatives are examined.

Paraphrasing Félix Houphouët-Boigny, Ivoirian politician Camille Aliali once said, “Democracy is a system of government for virtuous people. It seldom works even in mature countries. We must be realistic. Our people are ignorant of the problems we face. They cannot be left to choose the solutions,....” In 1990, the president and his close associates changed their minds. On May 3, 1990, the president of Côte d’Ivoire announced the legalization of opposition parties and the intent to hold multi-party elections. On October 28, Ivoirians voted in their first multi-candidate presidential election, which pitted the eighty-five year old Houphouët against long-standing critic and candidate of the “democratic left” coalition, Laurent Gbagbo.

Zambia’s contemporary experience of recession without resolution is, alas, quite typical of the majority of African states over the decade; for since the celebration of ten years of independence in 1974, its national income has been in almost continuous decline. But this economic decay has had an uneven impact, between both time periods and social groups: occasional injections of foreign aid or loans have been permissive of relative affluence for elements in the bourgeoisie and labor aristocracy along the line-of-rail. The full impact of negative growth has been felt in the more distant rural areas and among the peasantry and the unemployed.

A literary scholar runs a certain risk when he ventures into the troubled waters of African politics. But a poet—whether it is Shakespeare carefully plotting his historical plays to conform to and support the Tudor position on the Wars of the Roses or Wordsworth confusing the atmosphere of the French Revolution with the air of heaven or Ginsberg howling with rage and existential despair at the sight of democracy betrayed—makes political statements. Sometimes these statements are only subtly and indirectly political; at other times they are specific and topical. In either case, they are part of the milieu in which a political culture flourishes. They are, in fact, part of the political culture itself.

I want to examine several of the ways in which indigenous poets of West Africa have functioned as part of the developing political culture. And I want to address myself specifically to political culture—a term of some exactness which nevertheless allows considerable latitude for analysis and speculation. The political culture of a society might be described as the political system internalized in the perceptions, judgments, feelings, and attitudes of its people. In their important study, Civic Culture, Almond and Verba (1966: 15-16) have this to say about the “orientation” which constitutes political culture:

At the present time, Accra--eighty years the seat of Gold Coast administration, and fifteen years the capital of an independent Ghana--stands atop an urban system that is relatively well developed by Black African standards. In several years the municipal population will reach the million mark, notwithstanding the fact that less than 5 per cent of the labor force is employed in modern manufacturing industries. Unlike most large cities in the West which expanded in response to the needs of industry, Accra grew despite a dearth of secondary industries. Foremost among its competitive advantages during the colonial period were its traditional role as a port, its administrative importance as a political capital, and its fortuitous location vis-à-vis the earliest cocoa-producing districts. It is proposed that this latter advantage was the primary determinant of the urban growth and spatial organization of Accra during the second decade of the present century, a seminal phase in its commercial development.

In this paper I would like to discuss the impact of the early years of the cocoa trade, first, on Accra in relation to the emerging urban system and, second, on the changing pattern of commercial land use within the town. Most of the discussion refers to those years between 1908, when the first significant cocoa exports occurred, and 1921, by which time the townscape of Accra clearly displayed the impress of the cocoa trade. During this brief but eventful period the economic shock waves released by the revolutionary new crop set up a condition of disequilibrium within the colonial space-economy. Centers, such as Accra, which serviced the cocoa trade flourished, while many other languished. The paper focuses, then, on cocoa as a primary influence on the economic geography of Accra, at a time when its leadership in the urban hierarchy was being consolidated.