relopmood.blogg.se

It also provides a potential framework for resolving disputes between African members.

The Commonwealth amplifies the voice of African nations, providing it with an additional means of lobbying major donors and diplomatic players like the UK, India and Canada. So what continues to bind Anglophone Africa (as well as Mozambique and Rwanda) to the Commonwealth? In 2021, those sorts of sentimental links to the UK are inevitably less pronounced. Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya studied at the London School of Economics, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania studied at the University of Edinburgh, Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia was the proud son of a Malawian Church of Scotland missionary, and Malawi’s own independence leader, Hastings Kamuzu Banda, was an elder in the Church of Scotland. The trend was set by India’s independence leader, Jawaharlal Nehru, who studied at Harrow Public School and Cambridge University, and his counterpart in Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who was trained as a barrister at Lincoln’s Inn in London.Īfrica’s first generation of leaders might not have all enjoyed quite the same degree of educational privilege. In part, at least, because so many of their leaders were formed by that imperial culture.

And perhaps the biggest mystery of all is why a group of nations that struggled to win their independence from the UK should have chosen to reconstitute themselves in an organisation that closely resembles the shape of the former British Empire.