This is an account of how artists and cultural workers have striven to gain and maintain the freedom to produce art in a milieu that threatened to either exploit their labors for political ends or to marginalize them as unimportant and unworthy of public and private patronage and support. It also seeks to explain how they have organized and sought to expand their influence and independence. Cultural politics has many dimensions, including the larger issues of defining and enriching the values and purposes of a community, establishing the identity and parameters of the community and its culture, and locating the bounds of social and political discourse. Such a perspective takes culture in its most expansive sense—the concepts, habits, arts, skills, languages and institutions of a people.

This article will focus on a more narrow view of cultural politics—the struggle over who represents the communities of cultural workers and practitioners, particularly in their dealings with the state and other dominant institutions, and how those communities have coalesced to pursue their perceived interests. Thus, culture is a synonym for those fine and popular arts that reproduce and reinforce systemic values, and those that corrode and undermine the social regime. And it is the battle for the control of the arts and those who create and disseminate the arts that will be examined here.

The past few years have seen a tremendous increase in the direct involvement of Africa's military men in political affairs. Between January, 1963, and early 1968 there were no less than nineteen successful military coups, military-led secessions, or military actions instrumental in bringing about changes of government in that continent. This total can be augmented by the numerous attempted military coups, mutinies, secessions, and plots that failed to gain power or that were foiled before launching. This increase in the political activities of the military in Africa calls for an assessment of the degree to which Africa's military men are accepted as legitimate national leadership material by Africa's masses and intellectuals.

SCHOLARS, theoreticians, and statesmen in the West and in the Communist world have propounded numerous explanations of the political, economic and social underdevelopment of Africa and Asia. But few have sought to determine exactly what the leaders of the underdeveloped countries themselves think about the problems of underdevelopment. To what do they attribute their retarded status? Answers to this question are important for at least three reasons. First, their views serve as basic theoretical and empirical foundations for domestic measures designed to ameliorate the relatively backward conditions. Second, their answers also temper and condition their attitudes and policies toward the West and the Communist world. Third, a comprehension of their views gives us an opportunity to assess their current ideological tendencies and thus it provides an added dimension in which to discuss future Western policy alternatives. This paper, therefore, attempts to describe and analyze the various explanations for underdevelopment advanced by the leaders of six West African states — Ghana, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Mali, Nigeria, and Senegal.

Too frequently policy makers in Washington or Moscow see local or regional issues in southern Africa solely through their own, often distorted, lenses. And seen exclusively in ideological, or alternatively East-West or Cold War terms, they view their interests as inherently antagonistic. The old African maxim popular among non-aligned leaders in the early 1960’s is apropos: “When the bull elephants fight, the grass gets trampled.” Yet, unlike two elephants contesting clashing claims to territory of or sexual supremacy, southern Africa is not the territory of either of the super powers. Nor does Angola belong to other regional powers, notably South Africa. Although such states may have “interests” there. Angola is not their’s to shape.

The use of mercenaries in Africa has been almost universally condemned. Africans in particular loathe foreign mercenaries. Small wonder, with the memory and reality of the Congo experience still fresh. So pejorative has the label ‘mercenary’ become in Africa that at one point in August 1962, when United Nations troops had been occupying a none-too-quiescent Katanga, the Katangan Minister of the Interior passed a U.N. road-block manned by Indian troops and cursed them by shouting across the barrier, ‘Mercenaries, mercenaries!’1 And this came from a member of the very Government that had hired the first contingent of mercenaries in the independent Congo.

Well over 50 years ago, John Mensah Sarbah, a Gold Coast lawyer, romantically described the traditional social order in these terms: ‘In the African social system the formation of a pauper class is unknown, nor is there antagonism of class against class.’1 Similar views still prevail throughout most of Africa and the western world. Moreover, a rationale based on this ostensible ‘classlessness’ is employed by Africa's leaders to justify single-party rule and the repression of dissident elements in society, and to explain and defend policies of African socialism.

In recent years tremendous concern has been expressed about the problems of what had first been identified as “backward,” then euphemistically “underdeveloped” or “undeveloped,” and now more positively “developing” or “emerging” areas. A wealth of factual and theoretical studies has been produced, attempting to view the problems of underdevelopment broadly and to construct a conceptual framework by which we might comprehend the apparently complex phenomena occurring in those regions. In spite of this growing scholarly interest, and without attempting to minimize the contribution of those who are laboring in this as yet untapped field, it is this writer's contention that too few studies have been undertaken which examine and analyze the views of those individuals most influential in shaping the future of the emerging states—the national political leaders.