Background to Independence

SOME 40 YEARS AGO, a distinguished Belgian Colonial Magistrate, Paul Salkin, published an interesting little volume entitled, Central Africa in 100 years. He sketched for his Belgian audience a gloomy portrait of what the 21st century might hold in store for Africa. By that time, he forecast, only Algeria would still be a colony. Congo was only tenuously held on a trusteeship. Its European tutors were engulfed in a wave of disaffection and revolt. Salkin recounts a melancholy conversation between the European Governor-General of the Congo, and the former King of the Belgians, long since pensioned off as a university professor. The Negroes, said the governor, becoming ungovernable. University graduates, worker agitators, American Negroes invite them to disobedience and suspicion . . . Those who struggle most ardently against us are the university graduates, who owe us everything. For them higher education means simply, 'Africa for the Africans ...