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Background to the Emergence of the National Congress of British West Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 May 2014

G. I. C. Eluwa
G. I. C. Eluwa*
Affiliation:
Department of History and Archaeology, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Nigeria
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Extract

By the end of the second decade of the twentieth century a new nationalist movement had emerged in British West Africa which was significant of a new political awakening in that part of the world. This was the National Congress of British West Africa (NCBWA), which differed in important respects from earlier “nationalist” movements in the area. The NCBWA, unlike previous movements, envisaged a united British West Africa as a political objective to be attained, was organised on a scale that simultaneously embraced all four colonies of British West Africa, and was led almost exclusively by the educated elite of the area.

A study of the background to the emergence of the NCBWA reveals not only that the germ of the movement was rooted in a fairly distant past but also that a variety of interesting forces of a fairly recent occurrence “conspired” to ensure its birth. The incipient nationalism which the movement embodied reflects a line in a chain of reactions to the British advent into and “colonization” of West Africa. British involvement in this area was chiefly the result of her need to safeguard her trading interests. In the establishment of her regime in West Africa, educated Africans were regarded as allies in the task by the colonial master. Consequently from the 1840's to the 1880's Africans rose to high positions in the colonial service. In Sierra Leone, for example, William Ferguson, Afro-West Indian by origin and a medical graduate of Edinburgh, was appointed its governor in 1844, while John Ezzidio, a Nupe ex-slave who had become a wealthy trader and a pillar of the Colony's Wesleyan Church, was appointed a member of the Sierra Leone Legislative Council in 1863 (McIntyre 1966, pp. 155-156; Fyfe 1962, pp. 229-232 et passim).

Type
Research Article
Information
African Studies Review , Volume 14 , Issue 2 , September 1971 , pp. 205 - 218
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1971

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