espoused Negritude .
Negritude was an anti-colonial cultural and political movement popular among African and Caribbean students in Paris who influenced independence politics by promoting the values of black identity and African culture .
Senghor went on to lead Senegal for twenty years but the surprising part was that as the president of Senegal he still remained a French citizen and on retiring from politics he relocated to France where he lived until his death .
This was probably the best example of the French ability to assimilate and control its former colonies . The shining example of African ability that Senghor personified was nothing more than a French puppet in a black skin .
It appears that all the original heroes of the African independence were covert collaborators of the colonial powers that allowed power to shift into safe hands . This legacy of duplicity is what is haunting most African countries at present .
This is perhaps the reason why they were unable or unwilling to espouse democratic ideals and to allow meritocracy to take root since to share power would have exposed them to the deals they had agreed to as a prerequisite to ascension to power .
Kenneth Kaunda was another independence hero who was unable to relinquish power and eventually descended from the glorious leader to a despised autocrat . At one time his citizenship had been revoked to dramatize his origins in Malawi .
It is a pitiful picture when African politicians have to resort to such tactics to compel another politician to relinquish power . The special circumstances created by African independence movement have
divided Africans more than they have united them .
Closer home the political story was not any different although the region took very different political paths which proves the dictum that a nation rises and falls on the vision or lack thereof of its leader ’ s vision . It does not appear that there has been any discernible vision for Africa .
Uganda ’ s independence hero was Milton Obote . He took the reins of a country that had well established kingdoms that had been allowed by the colonizers to co-exist as they created a stable administrative machinery that worked for Britain .
Since Uganda was not a colony but a protectorate , the British did not exercise direct political and economic control but governed through existing indigenous entities . Ideally when Britain exited , they should have left Uganda as they found it .
But Britain had created a country called Uganda with defined borders and independence was granted to that artificial entity called Uganda . This has serious administrative ramifications since Obote was really an administrative head not the head of the autonomous kingdoms .
The only way Obote was going to be the country ’ s leader was by dismantling the kingdoms and he did so by abolishing the kingdoms in 1966 but he also set in motion a series of events that were to lead to his being ousted twice as the president of Uganda .
Ugandans had gone through a series of traumatic events as a result of Obote trying to exert his authority in a country that had really nothing in common except for the arbitrary boundary that the British had created and insisted was a country .
The Uganda example points out to perhaps one of the underlying reasons that have
It is completely disheartening to note that few leaders have been able to avoid the curse that power has a tendency to corrupt and as a leader gets more comfortable in the wielding of unbridled power the more their moral rectitude diminishes . plagued all African nations which is that all the countries are not natural entities that evolved over time but artificial political creations for economic exploitation .
The current Uganda president Museveni was a recent liberation hero and he rescued Uganda from a predictable pattern of coups but with his ascension to power he seems bent in creating a dynasty in Uganda and has been at the helm for thirty-eight years .
Although he periodically goes through the motions of pretending to have democratic elections , Uganda is an autocratic country or better still a military enclave where dissent and free speech is curtailed and controlled .
Depending on which Ugandan you ask , Museveni is either a hero or the devil incarnate . But it is quite clear that the seeds of instability in most African countries were sawn by the original independence leaders who failed miserably in forging African nations .
Tanzania ( formerly Tanganyika and Zanzibar ) was originally colonized by Germany and later by the British after the first world war . The Tanzanian independence hero was Julius Nyerere , a principled socialist who left Tanzania an interesting legacy .
He is the only African leader that can be quoted as not having used the presidency to amass personal wealth and for that reason he was able to captivate Tanzanians into a social experiment which was harsh but had a sound ideological foundation .
The Ujamaa village collectives that he instituted and was derisively mocked by the Kenyan president as a man eat nothing society was his attempt at making Tanzania self sufficient in agriculture and to devolve administration to the lowest possible level - the village .
As an economic model it was a failure , which Julius Nyerere eventually admitted but as a social model it was a resounding success . Tanzania is the only country in Africa to attempt social cohesion as a deliberate attempt to forge nationalism .
Julius Nyerere was also an intellectual , an author and a fiery orator who was able to capture the imagination of Tanzanians and create a homegrown ideology that transcended the natural barriers of tribalism and ethnocentric tendencies among Africans .
Julius Nyerere , fondly called by his citizens as ‘ Mwalimu ’ set out to create a nation and
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