The British aid policy for (ex-) tropical colonies in Africa has been considered a part of ‘neo-colonialism’, a term which, in Nkrumah’s famous words, indicates that ‘in theory’ a colony attains independence but ‘(i)n reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside’. This paper challenges this alleged image of the neo-colonial policy in Africa. British Aid Statistics and official documents of the 1960s and the 1970s cast a new light on the perspective of the British aid policy and Britain’s external relations with Africa in the heady days of independence.
Britain launched its ‘Colonial Development’ policy immediately after World War II. It was part of a strategy to strengthen the sterling area by boosting commodity exports in tropical colonies. By the mid-50s,however, during a time of falling commodity prices, Britain increasingly questioned the colonial contributions to the sterling area and to the British economy itself. Britain then reappraised her economic relations with the colonies, especially the tropical colonies of Africa. The result was that, at some point in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, the British official development assistance shifted its focus from tropical Africa towards the poor countries of Southeast Asia.
The British retreat from Africa was significant for both Britain and Africa. The retreat seemed reasonable from the British point of view, given the end of the primary product boom and the ‘Golden Age’ of European growth. Britain needed to prioritize its economic policy with the aim of shifting the major battlefield for investment and trade with Europe, North America and East Asia. Therefore, it got rid of Africa, which was no longer a serious player in the international economy, to make the utmost use of its limited economic resources, including its aid budget. For Africa, it meant that, from the very first moment of independence, the continent was eliminated from the economic interest of developed countries, and thus, forced to have a tenuous relationship with the center of the international economy.
In conclusion, this paper reveals that Britain did not push for neo-colonial relations with developing countries but was eager to discard her ties to sluggish economies. However, this ‘indifference’ toward the world, rather than neo-colonial ‘re-colonization’, has serious implications, because it simply suggests that the British deserted Africa and did nothing about its past deeds in the continent. Thus, there remained the untouched colonial structure, for example, the monoculture economy and emotional entanglements about past ‘colonial responsibility’.