Africa and Africans gained some economic advantages from the war. Africa needed to supply itself with manufactured goods which were no longer coming from Europe. So there was a small-scale industrial expansion in Africa. Also, European armies created a demand for more cash crops, and Africa supplied the need.

Senegales leader Leopold Sengor with Ivory Cost's Houpheit Boigny

Senegal led the way in industrialization. Up to 1939 Senegal exported groundnuts to France, where the oil was processed, to be exported from France to various parts of the world. From 1939 Senegal supplied North Africa with groundnut oil directly from its new processing works which was producing 40 000 tons in 1941. Senegalese oil exports took on a rising trend throughout the war and little by little replaced exports of groundnuts. Before the end of the war additional mills were started in Soudan (Mali), Upper Volta and Niger. In West Africa generally other export-processing industries were expanded as a result of wartime needs. Saw-milling, cotton-ginning and fish-canning factories were built in French and British colonies.

In East Africa there was a marked expansion of cash crop farming. In Kenya, Africans were encouraged to grow crops which previously they had been prohibited from planting. Africans were also allowed to break into the Asian-controlled retail trade, and many of them, especially the Kikuyu, took advantage of this opportunity.

Yet on balance, the war had more harmful than beneficial economic effects on Africa, and these provided a powerful stimulus to nationalist opposition to the colonial regime. Much of the industrialization, especially in the area of French West Africa controlled by the pro-German Vichy regime, was due less to economic stimulus than to massive forced recruitment of seasonal labour to produce the raw materials for the factories. Nor did the industrialization greatly help employment. There were indeed more jobs, and many men flocked to the cities for them. But far more came than could be employed. Indeed, from 1939 to 1945 there was an increase in urban unemployment.

In any case, Africa's wartime industrialization was on a limited scale. It served to raise African expectations and to whet African demands for more urban Jobs and to develop their countries. Danquah, the leading wartime nationalist politician of the Gold Coast, wrote in 1943: "It is not enough to live in the old agricultural economy. We must manufacture and buy our own goods. We must industrialize our country.'

For most of the people of Africa, the war period, as in 1914-18, intensified their existing problems. The white man's war became 'the black man's burden'. As usual, the peasants suffered most. In French West Africa canton chiefs were ordered to deliver fixed quotas of certain products, regardless of the capacity of an area to produce them. For example, districts where rubber could not be grown were ordered to produce rubber, along with areas that could grow it, which meant that the former bought it from the latter at exhorbitant prices.

President Boigny

And the increase in rubber growing was matched by a significant increase in the incidence of sleeping-sickness, as rubber workers went deeper into the forests, and of famine, as labour was diverted to rubber from food-crop production. French middleman firms made enormous profits from this exploitation of the African peasantry.

The burdens of the ordinary people were added to immeasurably by the run-away wartime inflation. Inflation was an inevitable consequence of the higher prices for imports and often lower prices for exports brought by the war. The peasant received little in the way of imported goods, but everything that he had that could be taken away from him, was taken away, to contribute to the strategic needs of the white men at war with one another. One of the greatest evils was the system of 'voluntary' subscriptions to the war effort, whereby chiefs forced goods and money out of the peasantry and pocketed a large part of the proceeds. This abuse was particularly prevalent in those parts of French Africa ruled by De Gaulle's Free French.

Charles De Gaulle

Wartime economic conditions led to mounting discontent by African farmers, traders and wage-earners. The Nigerian general strike of 1945 was a natural reaction to wartime hardships. It was supported by Azikiwe's National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC), which had been formed in 1944 partly out of nationalist conviction, and partly as a result of the war economy.

Perhaps the best-off Africans in the war were those who joined European armies. They were generally well fed, well clothed and comparatively well paid. Yet their discontent was considerable when, after demobilization at the end of the war, they had to find their way in a depressed economy.