Quotes: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa #8

“The British make much of the fact that they conceded the idea of self-government immediately after the last war, but self-government was a long cry from independence, and the notion of training people for independence was nothing but a political gimmick. Lady Margery Perham, a true voice of patronising colonialism, admitted that the Colonial Office’s timetable for independence had to be scrapped in the face of the mobilised African people. For that matter, even African leaders never hoped to achieve national sovereignty as rapidly as they did, until the mass parties began to roll like boulders down a hillside.”

Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), pg. 343.