The Developments in the Dark Continent, Africa in the Twenties.

Until the nineteenth century Africa had remained a continent which Europeans touch and knew only at the edges. The land, people and civilizations of the Africa interior had remained largely unknown to them. Only when new path into the interior were cleared by explorers and missionaries, and when the Western imperialist stepped up their search for new colonies in the later nineteenth century, did the Europeans begin to penetrate the darkness beyond the African coats.

Before the Great War most of the European colonies in Africa were largely unaffected by the trade and industry of the rest of the world. Few had much in the way of communication system except the bare ‘spinal columns’ of the railway network of the future. Only in South Africa was there anything like a complete rail farming areas as well as ports. Quite simply, much of enough of them to organize the colonies, their people and their economies in ways which would bring maximum benefit to the mother countries. For example, British East Africa had only been taken over in 1895, the Belgian Congo in 1908, and French West Africa in 1909. The Great War had interrupted the exploitation of the continent almost before it was really under way. Once the war was over, the imperial powers (except Germany, of course) returned to the business of getting Africa to earn its keep.

Through the 1920s the story of colonial Africa was on of Western investment in a wide range of agriculture produce, in mining, in the extension of the railway network and the development of harbours.

By the end of the twenties the merchants and traders of the western empire had developed two kind of economy in Africa. The colonies of the West Africa and most of East Africa exported crops grown on the small holdings of peasant farmers, the colonies of the Southern and West central Africa (and Liberia in the west and Kenya in the east) exported mineral ores and crops cultivated on large plantation by wage earning labourers.

Most colonies specialized in one or more primary products for example, cocoa in Western Nigeria and the Gold Coast, ground nuts in Northern Nigeria and Senegal, cotton in the Sudan and Uganda, rubber in Liberia, coffee in Kenya and Tanganyika, copper in Northern Rhodesia , copper, diamond and palm oil in the Congo.