The Outlook for Africa

Abstract

Within the last decade the greater part of the world's largest continent has passed from direct subjection to colonial powers in Western Europe to more or less well defined political sovereignty. Only fourteen years after the Free Officers' coup in Cairo or nine years after the independence of Ghana, the great majority of Africans whether living north or south of the Sahara have embarked upon the forging of a new destiny. Outside Africa the political and intellectual status of this continent had undergone a change that is scarcely less impressive. This status is now immensely different from that of the colonial period, even from that of the late 1950s. The historical achievements of Africans are increasingly traced and understood. Their traditional cultures are studied and respected. Their spokesmen are listened to as none were ever listened to before. All this speaks for no mean victory in the good old cause of human liberation from the servitudes of the past. Reflecting it, most Africans have lately felt and still feel the onward drive and movement of immediate and fruitful growth within their own lives, or at least, for the older generations, within the lives of their children and their children's children.