Thomas Hodgkin, Nationalism in Colonial Africa (New York: New
York University Press, 1956).
René Dumont, False Start in Africa, trans. by Phyllis Ott with an
additional chapter on British Africa by John Hatch (New York:
Frederick A. Praeger, 1969 [French edition 1962]).
Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Washington,
D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974).
When most people think of Africa today, the image is children
with distended bellies slowly starving to death, or human
skeletons, more dead than alive, wasting away from AIDS, or rivers
running red, choked with bodies from the latest tribal massacre, or
children with stumps instead of arms or legs, civil war victims whose
disfigurement made a point, although no one is really certain what
that point might have been. Poverty, tribal violence, governments
overthrown, gargantuan corruption, pandemic disease, and death—
this is the Africa of popular imagination. Sadly, there is far too much
truth to the stereotype. At any given moment, a good fourth of
African countries are in the throes of murderous communal violence
or civil war. Democracy survives or re-emerges in an unstable and
ever-shifting handful. Corruption is simply the price of survival
almost everywhere. Even Botswana—ever democratic, honestly
governed, growing in prosperity, always mentioned when talk turns
to whether or not Africa is a hopeless basket case—is not exempt,
with one-third of its people suffering from HIV or full-blown AIDS.
Amid today’s desolation, it is hard to imagine that anyone had
ever been optimistic about Africa’s future. Yet people had been. At
independence, the excitement of freedom and the prospect of rapid
economic advance bred enthusiasm and hope. Academics and
international development agency technocrats poured into Africa
for on-the-ground experience. Applying the latest ideas from the
social sciences, they confidently predicted economic take-off fueled
by a democratic socialism that would raise up even the lowliest,
leaving no African behind. Instead, in virtually every country, the
standard of living has fallen dramatically, life is bleaker and harder
than it had been when the first Black African country received its
independence over 50 years ago.
What went wrong in Africa? One major problem is an “international
demonstration effect”” of rising expectations brought by the
pervasiveness of Western culture and consumerism, especially
American, which created an “”awareness gap”” in all but the remotest
villages. This gap is the chasm between the life that most African
people actually have and the life that they want to have, which is
based on their often meager but powerful knowledge of what those
in the West do have. The envy caused by the international demonstration
effect is especially destabilizing: even if an African country
does make great economic progress, the gap between its people’s
level of attainment and the level of attainment lived in the West
barely seems to lessen and it may noticeably increase, increasing
public resentment and political instability.1
Tribalism has also played a more noted part in Africa’s failure,
especially when co-joined with mass poverty. The zero-sum economic
environments typical of very poor states can ruin economic
rationality and efficiency. Due to tribal rivalries, every government
program becomes political: Government officials often could not
consider it a rational act to build a coffee-processing factory in a
region that grows coffee even though to an outsider the move seems
the height of rationality and even though the plant will ultimately
benefit the whole nation. The problem is that people from other
regions and tribes do not see the greater good that the factory would
bring; they only see that the factory, money, jobs, and infrastructure
went to some region or tribe other than themselves. In such a world,
good government cannot survive, or at least government officials
believe that it cannot. For this reason, many African leaders have
sacrificed long-term development for short-term survival, spreading
development projects and spending to areas that might not need
them or are unsuitable for them, e.g. building the coffee-processing
plant hundreds of miles from the coffee, the railroad, and the ocean.
Of course sacrificing long-term benefits for short-term survival may
ultimately destroy a government, but for most African politicians,
that is a chance worth taking. This is exacerbated by officials
spending lavishly on their own tribe at the expense of everyone else.
Such concerns have led African Studies scholars to argue for greater
emphasis on raising the level of political understanding through
education in the schools and exhortation by African political elites.
The reasoning is that if they can teach people which policies are in
their nation’s interest, then their people will be more likely to accept
those policies. Others have called for revolutionary change through
despotic government to remove those who act against the nation’s
interest and to force the population to go along with what is best for it.
Rarely do scholars call into question the rationality of having a
socialistic government in such a socio-political milieu. This article
does by focusing on three seminal books on Africa, each of which
assumes that socialism is the best path for African governments to
follow. Each author recommends a different style of socialism, and
for each type of socialism, the results in a country that followed the
author’s policies will be assessed. The primary countries studied
here—Ghana, Tanzania, and Guinea—were Africa’s most significant
and best known socialist experiments. As should be no surprise
in the shadow of the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellites,
all three countries’ experiments in socialism were disasters. As in the
Soviet Bloc, so too in Africa, socialism killed prosperity. Businessmen,
commercial farmers, and subsistence peasants all saw their
fortunes consumed, their dreams never reality. Socialism only
benefited a New Class of party hacks, government bureaucrats, and
academics who oversaw the socialist behemoth. This New Class has
become what Marxists called (referring usually to leaders in conservative
regimes) a “”bridgehead elite,”” tied to an international New
Class of European and American foreign service officers, officials for
international development agencies like the International Monetary
Fund, World Bank and United Nations, officials for Non-Governmental
Organizations (NGOs), and academics. The resulting international
iron triangles of repressive third world elites, foreign
service/grant-making bureaucrats, and academics have done well for
themselves: Academics receive research grants while getting to play
at revolution in distant lands from the tenured safety of the ivory
tower; international bureaucrats see their agencies’ missions expand,
their personal power and perquisites grow, while having the
satisfaction of watching their experiments in development performed
on distant human guinea pigs; and of course the development
machine enriches and empowers the elites in the socialist
country that is the victim of the developed world’s interest and
largesse.
At the first moment of independence, the most important work
on Africa was Thomas Hodgkin’s Nationalism in Colonial Africa,
published in 1956. This book was in print and used in college courses
into the 1980s although it is no longer in print.2 Hodgkin’s focus was
the colonies, protectorates, and “”overseas departments”” of sub-
Saharan Africa (he excluded Arab North Africa, and South Africa
since it was independent). (18-19)Hodgkin’s work appeared at the
dawn of decolonization. Sudan was given its independence January
1 of that year, Ghana would receive it the next, and within ten years,
most of Africa would be independent. Yet ten years before, at the
end of World War II, almost everyone in Europe and Africa assumed
that Africa would remain under European control for decades: the
Belgians assumed it would be many decades. Africa’s sudden
acceleration toward independence is what prompted the book.
Hodgkin called for a change in the political science of Africa. He
argued that scholars should no longer focus on the problems that
Europeans had in ruling colonies since the colonies might become
independent at any moment. Instead, he said that scholars should
study Africans’ institutions to understand what was happening in
Africa and what independence would bring. (10, 15)
By the time Hodgkin wrote Nationalism in Colonial Africa,
scholars had published numerous local studies of African political
institutions, but he noted that these were scattered throughout many
different journals, written in several languages, and often difficult to
find. What made his book seminal was his pioneering grand synthesis
of these studies, along with what he modestly called “”a limited
amount of personal enquiry.”” In addition to analyzing Africa, Hodgkin
also sought to place Africa into the latter part of the worldwide
nationalist movement that had begun with the French Revolution
and its demand for the rights of man, and evolved into the rights of
nations. (15–17)
Hodgkin believed that World War II played the vital role in
destroying colonialism. Western Europe emerged dramatically
weakened, its air of invincibility crushed under the fall of France and
Belgium. The Europeans’ weakness became manifest in Asia, as
India, Indonesia, and Indochina won their independence. The war
also brought a dramatic psychological change among Africans.
African servicemen came home from the war with far less awe of
Whites than they had had before they were drafted. The Nazis’
vicious racism forced everyone to examine the racist assumptions
associated with colonialism. Leftist parliamentarians who came to
power at war’s end among the metropolitan nations opposed colonialism
on principle and set to work against it. For those reluctant to
begin this effort, the United States put its power behind the anticolonial
movement and the United Nations endowed anti-colonialism
with its moral authority (at a time when such a thing could be said
to exist). (32–33, 142)
Decolonization was not a purely European phenomenon, of
course. Black Africans themselves played the primary role in making
Europeans give up and grant independence, although the Africans
were inadvertently assisted by European policies. University-educated
Africans, most of whom received their educations in Europe,
were the vanguard of the independence movement. The British
thought these men would gradually supplant White colonial officials;
the French believed that by educating them, they were
creating assimilées (one who is assimilated), the Belgians believed
they were creating évolués (evolved ones), and the Portuguese
believed they had turned them into civilisados (civilized)—i.e.,
Black Frenchmen, Belgians, and Portuguese who would remain
part of their respective empires. The Europeans gave these “”new””
men power at the expense of traditional chiefs, and were repaid with
demands for independence. African people revered these new
leaders for having mastered the Europeans’ ways and knowledge—
they were at home in the traditional and modern worlds—and then
using this knowledge against the Europeans. (15)
For Hodgkin, nationalism was an amorphous concept that
included the efforts of religious leaders seeking greater autonomy
for their churches, labor leaders organizing workers, and tribal
associations seeking to uplift downtrodden tribesmen. By including
proto-nationalist movements that did not have explicit nationalistic
goals, Hodgkin sought to show “”the ‘mixed-up’ character of African
political movements.”” The chief criterion he followed was that the
group had to be “”in its own way expressing opposition to European
control and a demand for new liberties.”” (23–25) The goals of African
nationalists ranged from tribal leaders who limited their gaze to
improving the lot of their tribe, national leaders who sought to bring
independence for their colonies, and visionaries who wanted to
meld regional or pan-African unity. Hodgkin believed that tribalist
particularism might assert itself “”in the short run”” in some countries,
and noted the special difficulty faced by some African states caused
by European-created borders that divided some tribes among two or
more colonies. (20–22)
Hodgkin’s book began with a short analysis of the policies
followed by the three major powers whose colonies were showing
the greatest nationalism—Great Britain, France, and Belgium—
comparing and contrasting how their policies had encouraged or
retarded the growth of nationalism. Their post-war policies had
inadvertently fueled the nationalist impulse: much improved infrastructure
and communications brought by the spending of hundreds
of millions of dollars by each of the colonizers, major expansion of
free public education in the French and British colonies and by
Catholic missions in the Belgian Congo (today’s Democratic Republic
of the Congo; formerly Zaïre), greater opportunities for higher
education in Europe, dramatic growth of towns and cities, the rise
of a working class in those urban areas, and a shift by the colonizers
from supporting the leadership aspirations of tribal chiefs to giving
their support to young university-educated men. (29–32)
Hodgkin characterized the differences among the colonizers as
stemming from contrasting philosophical bases. The French, he
argued, were Cartesians who sought an organized, systematic, and
centralized colonial regime that sought to create black Frenchmen
who would reside in overseas provinces of France and have all the
rights of Frenchmen. (33–40) The British, he argued, were Empiricists
who responded to each colony individually, seeking to solve
localized problems. If there was an overarching theory behind
British rule, it was the idea of “”indirect”” rule, meaning that they had
sought as much as possible to rule through traditional elites. In West
Africa, the rise of the “”new”” men led to further adjustments, often
the creation of two-chambered parliamentary bodies based on the
British system, with most power in an elected legislature dominated
by the educated elite and an upper house of limited or advisory
power occupied by traditional chiefs. In East Africa, with large and
powerful settler colonies, the British followed what Hodgkin called
a Burkean system in which the “”interests”” dominated the legislature.
This meant rule by white settlers since they dominated the landed,
commercial, and mining interests. Asians (usually East Indians)
were also given representation as they controlled the smaller commercial
businesses. Blacks, who were mostly peasants and laborers,
had the weakest representation. Citing Burke’s Reflections on the
French Revolution, Hodgkin wrote that if Europeans and Asians did
not dominate, “”ability and property would be swamped by numbers;
and the State would ‘suffer oppression’ because it would be ruled by
‘working tallow-chandlers.'”” (40–47)
The Belgians were idealistic Platonists, in Hodgkin’s schema,
who sought to put the Republic into practice whether consciously or
not. The government would rule as a benevolent despot, deciding
what was best for the African peoples. The benevolent Belgian
“”philosopher-kings”” would mold the plastic African mass. Education
was the responsibility of church missions. Their focus was
teaching “”unquestioned and unquestionable moral values.”” Giant
business concessions ran the economic life of the extractive economy.
Huge sections of the Congo were ruled as if they were gigantic
company towns in which everything from lodging to entertainment
was provided by the concessions. The races would be legally divided
in the laws and regulations under which they would be ruled and the
places where they could live. Political parties, trade unions, and an
independent press were banned; indeed, they were considered
unnecessary. Hodgkin concluded that the Belgians believed that
expert administrators who provided for black Africans’ welfare
needs and who made available consumer goods for the masses could
thus arrest demands for social and political change. As a result,
Africans in much of the Belgian Congo had better physical living
conditions and social services than the rest of Africa, but far less
freedom than those ruled by the British and French, and greater
regulation over their lives than any other colonial Africans. The
Belgians’ expectation was that they would “”civilise”” the Blacks by
“”organising their lives and behaviour on the basis of Belgian middleclass
values”” in order to train them “”to be good burghers””: in other
words, to transform them into Belgians, a process expected to take
decades if not hundreds of years. (48–55, 72)
Hodgkin considered the “”new towns”” of Africa to be the most
important force that broke down traditional beliefs, values, and
social ties, thus creating the possibility for nationalism: “”For it is
above all in these new urban societies that the characteristic institutions
and ideas of African nationalism are born and grow to maturity,””
he argued, “”and from these centres that they spread to, and
influence, ‘the bush.'”” (18) The new towns offered the average man
(and sometimes even the average woman) heretofore unheard of
opportunities for acquiring new skills and powers. “”[S]een from one
standpoint,”” Hodgkin wrote, the new towns “”lead to a degradation
of African civilisation and ethic; seen from another, they contain the
germs of a new, more interesting and diversified, civilisation, with
possibilities of greater liberty.”” Hodgkin argued that Europeans and
“”Africans who think like Europeans”” held the former view, and the
mass of Africans the latter. (63) The new towns were commercial
centers where commodities would be traded and shipped overseas.
They grew, just as in the Western world, as people migrated in
search of jobs and money, opportunity, or to get away from what
many saw as a stultifying rural existence. What made them different
from traditional towns was their great size, the emphasis on money
and consumption, the residents’ search for personal liberty, the
mixing of tribes, and the influence of European values and behavior,
which the African middle class especially tended to imitate. (70–71,
78, 79–81, 66) Poverty was endemic, as were joblessness, lack of
adequate affordable housing, and the sanitation problems associated
with overcrowding and rapid population growth. (76) Also
fueling the post-war movement to the new towns was the colonial
governments’ effort to modernize Africa by sending European
technical specialists to African cities. These Europeans required
domestic help and the ancillary businesses established to provide
them a European-style life, creating “”a large expansion in the
demand for that basic African commodity—’boys.'”” (66)
Thanks to the new towns, Hodgkin argued, new associations
formed among people from different areas and tribes. Urban
associations mended the unraveled tapestry of common purpose
that had been the traditional role of kin and tribe in the rural world.
Hodgkin argued that, in essence, urban associations replicated the
role of the tribes in an urban setting. They were led by younger,
educated men rather than by the traditional elders and chiefs who
led in the villages, and they transmitted new values and ideas to the
rural world. These associations also taught their leaders vital modern
management skills like book-keeping, running meetings, and handling
correspondence, thus providing the new leaders with professional
training that would help them in their independence movements
and once they achieved independence. Many of these
associations were not founded for nationalist reasons (“”in a
colonial society hardly any association can be totally disinterested
in current political questions,”” e.g., “”a football club may formulate
proposals for constitutional reform”” [85]) while others were
consciously nationalist in their activities and demands. Along with
their role in fostering nationalism, Hodgkin believed that these
associations (Alexis de Tocqueville would have called them “”intermediate
institutions””; modern bureaucrats would call them NGOs)
would prove vital in ensuring that independent African governments
would remain democratic. Hodgkin argued that the most
important of these were three: separatist churches and prophetic
movements, trade unions, and political parties. (84–87, 92)
Among religious groups, Hodgkin focused on separatist churches
because “”they are bodies which depend almost entirely upon African
initiative and direction.”” (93) At their core is frequently found the
demand for social justice, which immediately put them at odds with
colonial authorities: “”The tradition whereby Christian institutions
and symbols serve as a form through which men can express their
aspirations for social and political change is as ancient as the Church
itself.”” (94) Hodgkin argued that in the face of colonial oppression,
“”the moral crisis accompanying the disruption of tribal society,”” and
“”the invasion of commercial values,”” it is only natural that such
movements arose. (95) This was especially true among Protestant
Africans, who tended to read the Bible literally and in racial terms,
with Blacks as God’s children and Whites barred from Heaven.
Separatism and political activism were so common among African
Protestants that the Portuguese banned Protestant missionaries
from their African colonies “”on the ground that they are the advanceguard
of African nationalism.”” The Portuguese believed that the
Protestant notion that each person should read and interpret the
Bible for himself was the first step in creating a rebel. (97–98) In
apartheid South Africa, where political opposition could only come
in the guise of religion, separatist churches numbered in the
hundreds. By contrast, Hodgkin noted, in West Africa, as colonial
regimes liberalized, the political significance of separatist churches
declined as they were supplanted in the nationalist struggle by
political parties and trade unions. (105)
While separatist religions continued to follow most elements of
traditional European theology, prophetic movements did not. They
are based on the teachings of a prophet and follow a Pentecostal style
of worship, with emotional services, faith healing, public confessions,
the idea that followers are members of an “”Elect,”” and
millenarian teachings often tied in with race (“”the rule of Europeans
will give way to the rule of Saints.””) Their millenarianism tended to
make them more radical in their social teachings because of their
“”contempt for the civil authorities of this world.”” These nationalistic
qualities often put prophetic movements in conflict with European
churches and with colonial administrators. (107–111)
Religion provided a traditional framework for proto-nationalist
and nationalist goals. For Hodgkin, trade unions were a more
modern nationalistic association. Nationalism is in part about inferior
economic status, he argued, which put trade unions at the center
of the nationalist movement. Hodgkin focused on the trade union
movement rather than the middle class that dominated the nationalist
movement because there was better data available and because
of the key role that trade unions had historically played
around the world in nationalist movements. No doubt Hodgkin’s
radicalism—he was known as one of Oxford’s “”Red Dons””—also
played a part. (114–117)
Wage earners made up a tiny portion of Black Africans when
Hodgkin wrote Nationalism in Colonial Africa: He estimated the
number at five percent of colonial Black Africa, and trade unionists
were only ten percent of them, roughly 500,000 people. Because of
Africa’s low level of industrialization, most laborers worked on
plantations, in forestry, transportation, or in mines. The numbers
were small, Hodgkin admitted, but he pointed out that China only
had two million workers in 1940, and the Communists had taken
over in their name less than ten years later. (117–119, 133)
#page#
African trade unions’ main issue was wages. Higher wages was
the constant goal, but merely maintaining buying power was a
struggle because post-war inflation was very high. The influx of
Europeans sent to oversee the expanded industries also contributed
to the demand for better pay since they received wages ten times
higher than the average wage for Africans in Southern Rhodesia
(modern Zimbabwe), and in the copper belt of Northern Rhodesia
(modern Zambia), the lowest paid European made 500 times more
than the highest paid African. The unions had little leverage against
the employers since they lacked money and organizational skills, and
because most employees were unskilled (in French African towns,
the ratio of unskilled to skilled was three to one) and saw themselves
as peasants who only joined the commercial economy sporadically,
as the need arose, rather than as proletarians. (118–119) The huge
potential pool of unskilled labor allowed European managers to
put into practice their “”nineteenth-century attitude to trade
unionism,”” i.e., “”mass dismissals as the appropriate method of
dealing with ‘agitators’ and ‘malcontents.'”” (132–133) Hodgkin
noted that while these problems were similar to those faced by
British workers in the nineteenth century, and that the British
workers had overcome these problems, the situation was more
difficult for Africans because of illiteracy and the polyglot of
African peoples who went to work in the cities, which created
difficulties that British unions had not faced. One advantage that
the Africans did have over their nineteenth-century counterparts
was that their leaders could study the history and successes of
European trade unions, and European unions sent representatives
to Africa to help organize and train local unions. The unions’
strength was in their democratic forms (union cards, rules,
meetings, and elections), which among the better-organized unions
“”have acquired…the sanctity of tribal custom.”” (120–123, 128–
133)
Although there were virtually no African trade unions before
World War II, and post-war Leftist Europeans governments and
European trade unionists played a significant role in assisting
African unions after the war, Hodgkin did not consider trade unions
to be an exotic import that would wither in Africa. Proto-union strike
committees had spontaneously formed in West Africa before World
War II, and they had long-term goals to improve the lives of their
workers, although their goals were perhaps more in the nature of
guilds rather than unions. (124–128)
That unionism led to nationalism, Hodgkin argues, came from
the racial division within African business, where European employers
and managers oversaw Black workers. Even in West African
colonies that had no formal color bar, businesses refused to hire
Africans who had earned higher degrees from Europe, such as
engineers, because they did not want Africans giving orders to
Europeans. Thus if the African middle class wanted to advance, it
seemed that the only way to do so would be to rid themselves of
European control. (122–123) Business paternalism, which Hodgkin
likened to “”‘feudalistic capitalism,'”” also sparked nationalism among
the workingmen. Although it was created to ensure that big business
would have a stable and trained work force, workers came to resent
this “”system of welfare, which is ‘logically totalitarian’—that is it
attempts to control both form and content of the totality of worker
ideas and activism.”” Free trade unions “”fit ill with this conception,
since they are liable to disturb business harmony.”” (123)
The Belgians especially had followed this system, as part of their
Platonist ideal of an organic state in the Belgian Congo. Rarely has
theory been so obliterated by harsh reality. The Belgians’ long-term
commitment to remain in the Congo can be seen in their carefully
planned, missionary-led educational structure. By the 1950s, the
churches had created a strong elementary school system but had
only a minuscule number of high schools because government
policy was to give Europeans jobs that required such skills. As the
generation of elementary-educated Africans grew up and became
Europeanized through their education and work for European
business concessions, their children would receive high school
educations and would gradually replace mid-level European
managers. When the next generation grew up, their most gifted
children would receive higher educations and they would begin to
take over the upper management positions and professional jobs.
The sudden force of the African nationalist movement forced the
Belgians to make a radical acceleration in their timetable to
independence: In 1955, the year before Nationalism in Colonial
Africa was published, the Belgians announced that the Congo
would become independent in 1985. In June 1960, the Belgians
granted the Congo its independence. Only sixteen Congolese had
university educations. A week later, the army mutinied against its
Belgian commanders and civil war broke out. Today one of
Africa’s most prosperous and economically developed colonies is
bankrupt and suffers constant civil war.
Some labor leaders entered politics, bringing to the nationalist
movement different “”background, experience and ideas from
the professional and business elites”” that dominated most colonies’
politics. (136–137) Hodgkin argued that most nationalist
African politicians were democrats whose policies reflected popularly
held views. Supporting them were mass-based parties with
wide, deep, committed support from the people. The parties had
risen and spread from the towns to the countryside, becoming
colony-wide movements almost inadvertently, thanks to the Europeans
having made hundreds of millions of dollars worth of
post-war investments to improve colonial infrastructure. Improved
means for transport and communication allowed political
parties to deploy their leaders and organizers within the colonies
or to the capitals of the colonizers far more quickly, easily, and
cheaply: “”Thus party propaganda and slogans can be widely
diffused, local branches established, and local grievances ventilated.
The gospel is preached; new converts are won; the faithful
are confirmed—even in the remotest bush.”” (29–30, 142–143)
Based on Western models, these parties gave voice to the
people, encouraged them to speak out, listened to what they had to
say, and worked to turn their inchoate desires into policy. (139–
168, especially 158–160, 161–168) Usually these parties were
based on class and ideology rather than primordial loyalties.
Hodgkin argued that they were a tangible manifestation of the
colonies’ independence movements. Once independence was
won, they would keep the masses mobilized in pursuit of economic
development and national unity. In comparison, Hodgkin saw the
opposition as stodgy and old-fashioned, a congress of conservative
interests held together by its opposition to the mass party.
Leadership in these old-fashioned congresses was usually based
on status or wealth, and the parties’ bases were particularistic—
often those tribes that dominated the economy. Confronted with
the mass-based parties and their more forward-looking ideas, the
older parties were compelled to adapt, Hodgkin argued, becoming
more strident in their demands for independence and calling
for their members to take such direct action as protest marches.
These opposition parties, along with trade unions and religious
movements, would serve as counterweights to ensure that the
mass-based parties did not become dictatorial once in power. (84–
92, 139–168)
The Gold Coast was clearly Hodgkin’s model. When he wrote
Nationalism in Colonial Africa, the Gold Coast was one year away
from independence as the nation of Ghana, sub-Saharan Africa’s
first colony to receive its independence. Its mass-based party, the
Convention People’s Party (CPP) and the CPP’s leader, Kwame
Nkrumah, were exactly what Hodgkin had described as prototypes,
as were Nkrumah’s former mentor, Dr. J.B. Danquah, and his
particularistic National Liberation Movement perfect examples of
the old-style politics. Like most people who wrote about Nkrumah,
Hodgkin believed he had true charisma, a religious aura that created
a mass following that translated into personal power. To his followers,
Nkrumah was the “”Osagyefo””—Redeemer. “”Seek ye first the
political Kingdom,”” he would call out to his followers, who would
respond, “”I believe in Kwame Nkrumah.”” Nkrumah’s political
kingdom was independence and socialism. Capitalism is a system of
exploitation not in keeping with traditional African values of cooperation
and caring, he said. More practically, he claimed capitalism
“”is too complicated a system for a newly independent state; hence
the need for a socialist state.””3 To prevent private enterprise from
corrupting his vision, Nkrumah’s National Development Plan called
for “”the complete ownership of the economy by the State.””4
For Nkrumah, socialism meant government-sponsored industrialization
and the construction of elephantine improvements in
infrastructure. “”Industry rather than agriculture is the means by
which rapid improvement in Africa’s living standard is possible,”” he
said.5 Agriculture tied people to the past and forced Ghana into a
subordinate position in the world economy. So strongly did Nkrumah
oppose agriculture, that he called the farming of cocoa, Ghana’s
primary cash crop that had made it one of Africa’s most prosperous
colonies, a “”poor nigger’s business.””6 If Ghanaians would follow him
and accept his policies, Nkrumah promised, “”We shall achieve in a
decade what it took others a century…and we shall not rest content
until we demolish those miserable colonial structures and erect in
their place a veritable paradise.””7
The power of Nkrumah’s charismatic appeal seemed to be
borne out in the 1956 elections, the Gold Coast’s last under colonial
rule. The winner would lead the Gold Coast to independence as
Ghana the following year. Nkrumah’s CPP won 67 percent of the
seats, an overwhelming victory and mandate to rule.8 Ten years later,
in February 1966, he was overthrown. Ghanaians danced in the
streets. Hodgkin had been proven wrong in virtually every part of his
analysis despite Ghana having been considered by most to be the
best led and most prosperous colony. What went wrong?
The power of charisma proved to be much weaker than Hodgkin
had imagined. Charismatic leaders could use their charisma for
movements such as the struggle for independence, with big, simpleto-
understand goals, heroic and exciting events like marches and
protests, and a definite shared enemy against which all could unite.
But charisma also showed itself to be transitory, narrow, and
shallow, unable to translate into an effective day-to-day movement
that could keep people motivated for the hard job of developing a
nation. Charisma built too thin a base to support the complex and
heavy structure that representative democracy requires. Nor had
charisma translated into a mass-based CPP. While Nkrumah’s party
had won 67 percent of parliament in 1956, the victory was not so
impressive as it seemed. The CPP carried only 57 percent of the
vote, winning such a high percentage of seats because the oppositions’
vote was concentrated in just a few districts. Even more telling,
only about 30 percent of the Ghanaian electorate had actually voted.
That meant Nkrumah’s party had only received the vote from 17
percent of eligible voters in the country’s seminal election, proof
again of just how limited had been Nkrumah’s charismatic appeal.
The so-called “”mass base”” of the CPP was really a narrow stratum
consisting of coastal tribes and “”veranda boys””—young men with an
elementary school education who came to the cities in search of work
and, when they could not find it, snuck onto people’s verandas to
sleep at night. Urban professionals and such tribes as the Ashanti
and Ewe were decidedly not enamored with Nkrumahist charisma.
It turned out that charisma was a highly particularistic phenomenon
that did not translate from one tribe to another.9
Nor was Nkrumah the democrat that Hodgkin assumed him to
have been. Nkrumah was not a democrat who turned to coercion
when his charisma failed: within a year after independence, he
pushed through parliament emergency powers that gave him the
right to deport his opponents. In 1958, it was a preventive detention
act, giving him the power to jail his opponents for up to five years
without the right of appeal. Then came an industrial relations act that
banned industrial strikes. Opponents were jailed, newspapers silenced,
unions crushed.10 At a CPP rally in 1959 Nkrumah said, “”I
want it to be firmly understood that it is the Convention People’s
Party which makes the Government and not the Government which
makes the Convention People’s Party.””11 He called multiparty
democracy an “”imperialist dogma”” and banned opposition parties.
The parliamentary system was transformed into a presidential
government, and Nkrumah was made president for life. His picture
appeared on coins and stamps, he had a massive statue of himself
erected in front of parliament, and the Kwame Nkrumah Ideological
Institute explained how he had remade Ghana into a beacon of
freedom for all the world to follow.12 Just as Nkrumah was not the
democrat Hodgkin believed him to have been, the opposition was
much weaker than Hodgkin had imagined, far too weak to stand up
to Nkrumah’s ruthlessness. Opposition politicians were jailed or
went into voluntary or involuntary exile, opposition parties were
outlawed, trade unions were crushed and their leaders co-opted, as
were religious leaders, and chiefs who opposed Nkrumah were
“”destooled”” (dismissed) and replaced by party hacks. Nkrumah
threw opposition leader Danquah, once his mentor, in jail where he
died, and he jailed his college classmate, Foreign Minister Ako
Adjei, on trumped up charges.13
Ghana might have survived Nkrumah’s dictatorship reasonably
well had it not been for his messianic socialism. Hodgkin made only
two overt references to socialism in his text, no doubt because the
ideology was so pervasive among Africa’s leaders. On socialism,
he wrote:
The future, one might reasonably guess, lies with the ‘mass’
parties…. One common characteristic is the radical character of
their professed aims, set out in elaborate written constitutions, in
which western democratic and socialistic ideas are blended with
African nationalistic doctrine. (161)
Hodgkin cites several socialist passages from the CPP’s constitution
then returns to this theme a few pages later:
The theoretical weapons with which African nationalists make
their revolutions have been largely borrowed from the armouries
[sic] of the metropolitan countries. Much of the political thinking
of contemporary African leaders is bound to be derivative. They
are themselves the products of European schools and universities.
(170)
Unlike his contemporaries, Nkrumah studied in the United States,
but he learned the same lessons. The giganticist socialism he
brought back to the Gold Coast was a profound economic disaster.
Industrialization was financed by the state, most famously at the
Kwame Nkrumah Steel Works and, with U.S. help, the gigantic
Volta River Project dam and hydroelectric project. He wasted tens
or even hundreds of millions of dollars on neo-Stalinist showcase
projects: $8 million for a state house, more than $16 million for a
conference hall used to host a single meeting of the Organization of
African Unity, $17 million for a dry dock, $16 million for a short,
usually deserted highway that ended abruptly in the rain forest.14
Added to the industrialization and modernization program was
a remarkably thick layer of corruption. Nkrumah bragged of the
tractors he imported to modernize Ghanaian agriculture. Connor
Cruise O’Brien, a socialist academic who served for three years at
Nkrumah’s request as vice chancellor of the University of Legon
(responsible for the day-to-day operation of the university since
Nkrumah himself was chancellor), described a conversation with a
senior bureaucrat who was leaving government service over those
tractors:
The Farmers Co-operative wanted currency and clearance to
import 24 more tractors. I wanted to know just what use they had
made of the last 24 tractors they imported. They wouldn’t tell me,
so on a hunch I went down to the harbor at Tema and found all
24 of them, rusting in the rain with their tyres [sic] flat.
The minister had wanted to import more because, for each tractor
Ghana imported, he received a kickback from the seller. The system
had become “”graft disguised as development,”” with the powerful
growing rich as they bilked their people. All the while the world
credited Nkrumah for his progressive policies.15
Ghana was by no means unique, Nkrumah by no means uniquely
dictatorial, his party by no means uniquely corrupt. Ghanaian
elected officials, bureaucrats, and CPP leaders had become a new
ruling class. The very year of Ghana’s independence, Milovan Djilas,
the vice president of Communist Yugoslavia, described a similar
phenomenon in his own country. He said that these corrupt officials
were a “”historically unique”” ruling class that had been created by
political rather than economic power. They used their political
positions to control “”socialized property, as well as the entire life of
society.”” Thus “”the Communist states have seen, in the final analysis,
the origin of a new form of ownership or of a new ruling and
exploiting class”” that possessed “”the most complete authority of any
single new class”” in history. He called it the “”new class of owners and
exploiters.”” For publicly discussing these ideas, Djilas was fired as
vice president and, for writing The New Class, he spent five years
in jail.16
Just as in Yugoslavia and the Soviet bloc, so too did Ghana create
a New Class. Apparently it was socialism that was the cause: It was
the nature of states whose governments controlled the means of
production to produce a New Class. In this as in so many other ways,
Ghana was an archetype for Black Africa. Since the New Class’
position “”brings with it the privileges of the world,”” wrote Djilas,
“”unscrupulous ambition, duplicity, toadyism, and jealousy inevitably
must increase….because the road to power and to material
privileges is open only through ‘devotion’ to the party—to the class,
to ‘socialism’—unscrupulous ambition must become one of the
main ways of life.””17 Thus the sequel to O’Brien’s story. When the
civil servant went to Nkrumah,
Nkrumah appeared to be shocked. He sent for the chairman of
the Farmers Co-Operative. I told my story in the presence of the
two of them, and Nkrumah said to the chairman: “”How do you
explain this, Joe?””At that, Joe went on his knees in front of Nkrumah, and
clutched Nkrumah’s knees. He said: “”Osagyefo””—Nkrumah’s
title—””if I ever let you down, you may hang me in the public
square. Hang me in the public square!”” Nkrumah lifted him up
and embraced him, and that was that.18
The corruption was everywhere. After his downfall, Nkrumah
himself was found to have embezzled some $5 million. O’Brien saw
firsthand the atmosphere of jocular piracy that surrounded Ghana’s
New Class when he attended the opening session of parliament:
Nkrumah read a prepared speech…. Ghanaians, he said, were
not allowed to hold funds deposited in banks abroad. He said he
knew that even certain members of parliament had infringed this
rule. Still, he offered an amnesty to all who would repatriate their
foreign currency holdings by a certain date. Those who continued
to hold moneys to deposit abroad after that date would be
severely penalized.Throughout this entire passage of their president’s speech,
his entire parliament rocked with laughter. They found the bit
about the amnesty and the bit about the penalties equally
hilarious. And as the parliament laughed, the president was
smiling.19
Because outsiders saw only the written word, Nkrumah was
lauded for his tough stance against corruption. In these ways did
Nkrumah and his minions turn foreign exchange reserves of $481
million into a $1 billion national debt in less than ten years.20
#page#
Of course those at the top did not have to pay for the orgy of
greed. Money for simple road maintenance was cut—there is no
glory in filling potholes—and the progressively deteriorating roads
made it harder and harder and more and more expensive for farmers
to get their crops to market. This was made worse by high taxes on
gasoline. The government also robbed the cocoa farmers through a
national marketing board. By law, all cocoa had to be sold to the
board at a fixed price. The purpose was to give farmers a stable
income in the face of fluctuating market prices while imposing upon
them an indirect tax. In theory, the government would pay the
farmers slightly below the world market price, then sell the cocoa on
the international market at the higher price, thereby providing the
government with revenue while protecting the farmer from middlemen
who would leverage them into accepting a too low price. By the
early 1960s, the government was paying far less than any middleman
would have had the nerve to offer and, unlike the middleman, the
government could and did force farmers to sell. In response, farmers
smuggled their crops to neighboring countries that paid a decent
price, but the price of getting caught was jail. Nkrumah’s disdain for
agriculture (and his hatred for the Ashanti, who dominated cocoa
farming and had bitterly opposed him throughout his career) was
clear. Cocoa financed his industrial socialism and the corruption it
spawned. Cocoa farmers were not to benefit.
Herein may lie Hodgkin’s most egregious error: his failure to
take into account the importance of agriculture in the life of
independent Africa. While he devoted a key chapter of his book to
the new “”proto-industrial”” towns of colonial Africa, (18, 63–83) he
devoted nothing comparable to agriculture. Likewise, his chapter on
“”Workers and Peasants”” is devoted almost exclusively to trade
unions, with less than a single paragraph dealing with peasants
(115–138), despite peasants making up the overwhelming majority
of Africans.
In Hodgkin’s defense, his book is Nationalism in Colonial
Africa, and cities were the locus of nationalist activities. Urban
workers were the foot soldiers, and Western-educated elites the
leaders. Peasants everywhere were notoriously conservative and
disengaged from politics of all sorts, including nationalist politics. In
failing to consider 90 percent or more of Africa, Hodgkin was merely
reflecting the thinking and experience of the nationalist leaders
themselves. Nkrumah, after all, had derided cocoa farmers and had
preached industrialization as the key to the kingdom of earthly
paradise. Even though he wrapped his socialism in layers of rhetorical
kente cloth about its African origins, Nkrumah was espousing the
most nakedly Western ideas about how to modernize a poor country.
One of the few analysts who understood this fallacy and recognized
the nightmare it was bringing to African life was René
Dumont. Although much of Dumont’s work was published in the
United States, his influence there was minor (all of his books are now
out of print). In France and French Africa, Dumont was and remains
extremely significant, with many of his books re-issued in the last
decade and three books written about him and his work since 1997.
Dumont was aghast at the foolhardily optimistic expectations for
African development, prosperity, and democracy. His experience as
an agronomist who had studied the lives of Africa’s peasant masses,
and as a political scientist who watched African economic and
political elites in action, showed him first-hand that the bases for
development as nationalists like Nkrumah understood it did not
exist. Dumont’s 1962 work, False Start in Africa, chronicles the
innumerable false starts and avoidable disasters that have spanned
the continent. “”Men alone are responsible for the economic backwardness
of Africa,”” Dumont argued. “”The question is which ones,
Africans or Europeans.”” (32) He answered: Both.
Europeans “”believed that they were free to do anything”” to
Africa and Africans, “”endowed as they were with ‘innate superiority.'””
They stripped Africa of first its people and then its wealth,
brutally and without remorse.21 World War II changed the attitudes
of Europeans and Africans. The Nazis’ monstrous racist policies
discredited racism. France’s fall to the Nazis shattered the myth of
colonial invincibility, increasing the confidence and militance of
African nationalists. Colonial exhaustion from the war and then
France’s defeats in Vietnam and Algeria also redounded to the
nationalists’ benefit. Feeling the winds of change, Europeans embarked
on a crash program of political reform and building social
infrastructure to prepare Africans for independence. France, for
example, sought “”to bring French Africa up to France’s level right
away,”” an absurd notion that failed to take “”into consideration the
vast difference in economic development and standard of living.
This difference was often as much as 15 or 20 to 1.”” (47) The
colonial powers wasted their money building expensive stadiums,
town halls, schools, and hospitals in the major cities while leaving
most of the countryside untouched. When they did pour money
into the countryside, it was for large-scale efforts to grow or
manufacture cash crops. Planning was negligible, projects gigantic:
wide roads were built without purpose (the French doubled in
width a highway from the Central African Republic to Chad, a
true road to nowhere), harbors constructed in such a way as to fill
the river’s mouth with silt, crops introduced in areas where they
would grow poorly, sprawling agricultural efforts requiring massive
irrigation systems that ultimately ruined already marginal
soil, sophisticated farms without skilled workers—all were typical
of the Europeans’ efforts to throw conscience money at their
devolving colonies. (34–53, 56–59, 61–72, 272n) No project was
too big to finance; small projects that could have an immediate
impact on people’s lives, like equipping farmers with modern hoes
and teaching how to use them, were too small to finance. (53–55)
Europeans wanted to bask in the reflected glory of their work.
Hoes would cast only the tiniest reflection.
Europeans called colonialism a “”school”” which would teach
Africans modern ways. In a sense they were right. Like the Europeans,
African elites were drawn to the giant dams, wide roads, and
huge plantations. They were “”seduced by the idea of modern
machines,”” especially tractors, despite their exorbitant cost and
often destructive impact on the soil. When Dumont would ask
government officials why they did not opt for smaller, cheaper,
simpler solutions, they would answer that since the Europeans
funded the enterprises, “”This money didn’t cost us anything, who
cares if it doesn’t bring in much.”” (86–87, 59)
The New Class was likewise seduced by the colonial lifestyle:
“”Too many African élites have interpreted independence as
simply meaning that they could move into the jobs and enjoy the
privileges of the Europeans.”” As a result, “”The principal ‘industry’
of these countries at the moment is administration…. As presently
conceived, administration will be the ruin of these countries.””
(78) Even the smallest African country had a huge stratum of
government officials: ministers, members of parliament, bureaucrats,
and soldiers who received huge salaries and lucrative
perquisites while contributing little to national development. (78–
87) In Gabon, for example, members of parliament earned
salaries 65 percent higher than their counterparts in Great
Britain. (80) In addition, “”Along with high salaries often go
beautiful houses, completely furnished, sometimes palaces for
governors and a large domestic staff, on the expense account, and
cars usually with chauffeurs.”” (86) New Class money poured out
of Africa to Swiss bank accounts “”‘for their old age.'”” Despite their
pay and perks, the New Class was by no means industrious.
Dumont claimed that its members were allergic to work. Throughout
French West Africa, Dumont found, “”A deputy works (?)
three months out of the year and receives 120,000 to 165,000
francs a month all the year round. In six months of salary, or 1.5
months of work, he earns as much as the average peasant in
thirty-six years, a whole lifetime of hard labour [sic].”” (81,
parenthetical in text)
Despite these tremendous privileges, the African elite proved
itself easily corruptible, and on a scale of their own devising:
“”Corruption was certainly not unknown in the colonial milieu….
Since independence, however, the increase in corruption has taken
on alarming proportions.”” (86–87) Nepotism was the rule, “”the
African who has ‘arrived’ feels obligated to take his large family in
charge, sometimes his friends and village.”” (83–84) The problem had
already grown so bad by 1962 that Dumont, a man who hated
paternalism as much as he hated colonialism, recommended holding
off on further “”Africanization”” of factories and other modern
business enterprises because of the corruption and nepotism that
those already Africanized had suffered. (93–95) Dumont called a
section of his book, “”The ‘Elites’: A Modern Version of Louis
XVI’s Court.”” (78–81)
The New Class refused to see itself in this unflattering light.
Its members considered themselves entitled:
[I]n 1961 at the école Camerounaise d’Administration [the
Cameroon School of Administration], I asked the group of two
hundred civil servants and students if anyone there, out of
patriotism, would be willing to give back to the government a
substantial portion of his salary. One hand, a courageous one, was
raised. I then remarked that this fact would be duly noted in my
book. Four other hands went up. I appealed to their patriotism,
but not one of the students present, which included the entire
school, raised his hand. (81)
When the president of Togo, Sylvanus Olympio, tried to cut the
army’s pay in 1962, he was overthrown in sub-Saharan Africa’s first
military coup, then shot and killed (legend has it by his successor)
while scrambling over the wall of the French Embassy. Had there
been any sentiment across the Continent for reining in salaries,
Olympio’s humiliating end killed it.
Clearly Africa was off to a “”false start,”” but Dumont did not
consider the situation hopeless. In fact, he called one chapter of his
book, “”Underdevelopment can be Conquered in Twenty Years.””
(267–284) The answer, he wrote, was to modernize agriculture in
simple but fundamental ways, such as teaching people to abandon
traditional methods like slash-and-burn agriculture, which quickly
leads to the washing away of topsoil, and use the profits from
increased production to fund small-scale industries. Dumont called
for African governments to adopt an “”African”” socialism in which
they would seek “”African solutions for uniquely African problems
and conditions,”” giving “”priority to satisfying the most urgent needs
of the great majority of people.”” (100–101) He laid out page after
page of simple, small-scale programs that, if implemented, would
turn around the lives of the African masses: cut the pay of the
“”bureaucratic bourgeoisie””; use local building materials instead of
importing cement (or marble) for schools, clinics, and government
offices; provide small loans to farmers so they can avoid usurious
local lenders; teach people to use donkeys for plowing instead of
tractors or (at the other extreme) oxen; introduce more sophisticated
hoes; train sheepdogs so that herdboys can go to school; build small
factories to make fertilizer; encourage farmers to use fertilizer, teach
them how to use it, and lend them the money to buy it; buy buses and
trucks for public transportation instead of luxury cars for the few;
provide primary and vocational schools for all instead of higher
education in the liberal arts for the elite; ensure healthy diets for the
poor instead of luxury foods for the rich; and literally dozens of other
ideas with hundreds of permutations. (53–55, 72–75, 99–194, 232–
234, 258–261, 267–270, case studies, successful and unsuccessful,
are provided in the appendices, 304–317)
Despite brimming over with ideas, False Start in Africa is often
unsatisfying. The book’s nineteen chapters and dozens of subchapters
read more like a series of articles than a sustained argument,
making it almost impossible to summarize effectively. These problems
are reflected in Dumont’s seeming inability to make smooth
transitions from section to section or sometimes even paragraph to
paragraph, causing the reader to lose the argument’s thread. If the
reader steps back and closely follows Dumont’s detailed table of
contents though, the book’s logic is clear—colonialism, traditional
culture, and the New Class hold Africa back; practical education,
exhortation, and government focus on the needs of the small
farmer will bring development—but actually reading the book
causes the reader to lose sight of the larger purpose. Dumont also
assumed that his readers are familiar with the basics of agronomy.
When he discussed the consequences of irrigation-created soil
“”hardening,”” for example, he did not explain what soil hardening is
or why it is a problem.
Dumont admitted that several countries had tried to follow the
path he prescribed, notably Ahmed Sekou Touré’s Guinea and
Modibo Keita’s Mali. Both were already failing by 1962. The New
Class was largely to blame. In Mali, considered to have perhaps the
most radical and certainly one of the most humane and down-toearth
leaderships in French Africa, Dumont showed that Keita’s
good intentions had not flowed down to his ministers or to the
local level: “”When political leaders and particularly civil servants
address the Mali peasants, they give them orders, in much the
same way as the colonial administrators used to. They do not
understand rural problems and therefore cannot help the peasants
effectively.”” As a result, the peasants were disaffected and
saw no reason to follow their leaders: “”As long as peasants remain
uneducated, they often present the most frightening inertia to all
forms of progress”” (59) because “”[t]heir interest in innovations
and technical improvements has not been sufficiently stimulated.””
(242–244) The ultimate result was economic disaster and
Keita’s overthrow in 1968. Of Guinea, famous as the most
revolutionary of socialist states but already a dismal failure when
he visited, Dumont bluntly wrote: “”The problems of Guinea have
resulted from a dearth of competent and honest leaders. To some
extent, a lack of knowledge can be compensated for by complete
honesty, and vice versa: but a country cannot do without both.””
When Dumont visited in 1959, he found, “”The ardour for work
among Guinean officials who accompanied me…was very moderate.
I had hoped that independence would stimulate it; not at all.””
(244–247, 87) Touré retaliated by coining a new word,
“”Dumontisme,”” which he applied to foreign experts “”who make
sweeping prescriptions for underdeveloped countries on the basis of
a brief visit.””22
The questions for Dumont were “”how to break the chains of
reactionary thought in order to free the people’s minds to newer and
better ways?”” and “”how to break the grip of the indigenous elites and
the socialistic giganticism that they had adopted as their own?”” At the
risk of over-simplifying, his answer was revolutionary Maoism.
Dumont believed that revolutionary socialist countries like Cuba
and China offered Africans the best path to development (but he
admitted that Stalinism had led the Soviet Union off the path). (80,
84, 251, 253, 256–257, 259) Over and over he cited the Chinese and
Cuban revolutions’ spectacular dynamism as the ideal for Africa.
Dumont attributed their alleged successes to their leaders’ willingness
to educate their people while listening to their problems, and
to the leaders’ willingness to slog in the mud with the people to
garner first-hand understanding of their plight. Dumont also praised
the Cubans and Chinese for gearing their educational systems
toward the practical—Greek and Latin were forsaken for practical
training in economic development and literacy in local languages.
The contrast between these socialist states and newly independent
Africa was startling in Dumont’s portrayal:
“”We want a liberal arts education for our élites,”” an African
student told me, rejecting with distaste the idea of work at his
school. The education he calls “”liberal”” is in reality middle-class,
and is widening the gap between the educated élite and the
peasant mass. He might benefit from a trip to the Soviet Union or
China to see how education is allied with productive work. (92–93)
In Cuba, Dumont noted: “”‘Education, Work and Guns’ is the motto
of the Rebel Cuban Youth.”” (93n.2) Throughout False Start in
Africa, Dumont made similar comparisons in the fields of agricultural
reform, economic redistribution, and industrialization, demonstrating
the Communists’ advantages and advances. He saw these
gains as the product of social revolution for which his book is a
blueprint. He foresaw Africans accruing benefits similar to those the
Cubans and Chinese experienced, although he warned Africans
against going to the occasional extremes that came from the Communists’
revolutionary fervor:
A revolution would have the advantage of forcing Africans to see
problems as they are…. But the cost in the short run would be
higher…. The fact that independence was acquired without
s
