ABSTRACT
During the post-war years both British and French governments were faced with growing contradictions between their intention to substitute counsel for control in relationships with their African dependencies and more urgent incentives to use the economic and military resources of those dependencies to strengthen their international influence. Their need provided Africans who could establish credentials as spokesmen in the colonial dialogue with opportunities to insist that the political independence of their countries provided the only acceptable basis for collaboration. Events in Asia, where independence was relatively successfully conceded to India, Pakistan, Burma and Ceylon but bitterly contested in Indo-China and Indonesia, seemed posthumously to justify Roosevelt's insistence on the importance of that word. In face of insistence from African leaders and of international pressures colonial reformers in London, if not yet in Paris, had to suppress their persistent doubts as to whether international sovereignty and universal suffrage represented viable or desirable objectives for every colony. A crucial struggle to secure control over the process of decolonization took place in the Gold Coast, where colonial reformers at times lost the initiative to a new type of political party which mobilized African discontents on a platform of populist nationalism. Because Nkrumah's success had wide repercussions for British policy-makers as well as African patriots, this encounter will be examined at some length. After 1951, careful distinctions between different stages of local autonomy, and between self-government and independence, became increasingly irrelevant, at least in colonies where there were no powerful immigrant minorities. But much constitutional ingenuity was still applied in vain searches for alternative goals in colonies where expatriate interests could exert influence in the metropolis.
