Answer:
Explanation:
The end of the colonial period and the establishment during 1957–76 of all the former colonies as independent states was attributable both to a change in European attitudes toward Africa and the possession of colonies and to an African reaction to colonial rule born of the economic and social changes it had produced.
Europeans had colonised western Africa in the later 19th and early 20th centuries confident that their civilisation was immensely superior to anything Africa had produced or could produce. Yet hardly had their colonies been established than these convictions began to be challenged. World War I, and the immense misery and loss of life it caused, led some Europeans to doubt whether nations who could so brutally mismanage their own affairs had any moral right to dictate to other peoples. Some reflection of this view was seen in the League of Nations and the system of mandates applied to the former German colonies. Although in western Africa these were entrusted to either French or British administration, the mandated territories did not become the absolute possessions of the conquerors, and the role of the new rulers was declared to be to equip the mandated territories and their peoples for self-government.
A second shock to European self-confidence came with the Great Depression of the 1930s, when trade and production shrank and millions of Europeans had no work. It began to be argued that a remedy lay in more active development of the overseas territories controlled by Europe. If more European capital and skills were directed to the colonies, so that they could produce more raw materials for European industry more efficiently, both Europe and the colonies would gain; as the colonies became wealthier through the exploitation of their resources, the people of the colonies would buy more from Europe.
In 1929 Britain had enacted the first Colonial Development Act, providing that small amounts of British government money could be used for colonial economic development, thus breaking the deadlock by which the only colonial governments that could embark on development programs to increase the wealth of their subjects, and to improve their own revenues, were those that already commanded sufficient revenue to pay for the programs or to service the loans the programs required. The idea that the colonies should be actively developed, in the European as much as in the African interest, was broadened during and after World War II. Transport and currency problems made it urgent for Britain and France to exploit strategic raw materials in their colonies. Furthermore, during 1940–44, when France itself was in German hands, it was only from the colonies and with their resources that Gen. Charles de Gaulle and his associates could continue the fight.
The British funding policy, initiated in 1929, of providing the funds needed for colonial development was greatly expanded in the 1940s and extended to social as well as economic plans. After the war the governments of both Britain and France required their colonial administrations to draw up comprehensive development plans and in effect offered to provide the funds for those that could not be funded from local resources.
