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- This report was produced for the British government in 1959. It was
part of a very long document looking at how well democracy was established
in countries which had been part of the British empire.
- Many of the countries which had been part of the empire were independent.
Britain and the USA hoped they would become democracies.
- However, leaders of the newly independent countries did not always
follow the way democracy was supposed to work. For example, Dr Nkrumah
in Ghana used the police and army to make life difficult for his political
opponents.
- This report shows that the British government was concerned about
the situation in Ghana. It could be interpreted in different ways.
- Some might say this document shows that the British should have carried
on ruling Ghana. The country was disunited and that the different peoples
who made up the country were finding it hard to work together. They
preferred British rule to being ruled by each other.
- Others might say that the British did not give Ghana’s people
enough chance to rule themselves while Ghana was part of the empire.
Democracy struggled because the British never really practised democracy
when they ruled the country. The British also created many of the problems
by carving up the map of Africa in the 1800s and ignoring the different
peoples, languages and religions that the British boundaries cut across.
- Nigeria suffered with this issue even more severely than Ghana.
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