Background to Big Power Involvement in Africa

V Subramaniam

Western colonial rule imposed by an organised European society on a diffuse African society required and created an intermediatory class of professionals such as clerks, teachers, lawyers, church leaders, etc. This middle class arose from the colonial situation and encounter. It imitates the manners and attitudes of the colonial rulers to impress them as well as to impress the African masses. It is a lopsided middle class because the commercial and agricultural sectors of the middle class developed slowly or did not develop at all under colonialism.

There was of course an important difference of degree between the derivative middle class created by the French and that created by the British. The former encouraged the educated middle class in their colonies and drafted it into the vortex of French politics before independence was granted to various African territories. Hence the French-speaking African middle class is attached to French culture and even French foreign policy to a considerable extent. Indeed even the anti-colonial ideology and poetry produced in French-speaking African countries seems to derive its inspiration from France itself. […]