‘The wind of change’: decolonisation in British West Africa

British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s speech to the South African houses of parliament on 3 February 1960 has become firmly associated with the process of decolonisation in British Africa. Macmillan’s speech, however, had first been delivered almost unnoticed to an audience in Accra, the capital of independent Ghana, only a few days previously. If in South Africa he attempted to explain the future of Britain in Africa to an apprehensive audience, in Accra his speech was delivered to a nation already free from colonial rule. Ghana, formerly known as the Gold Coast, had been one of Britain’s greatest successes in Africa. Economically strong and politically relatively well developed, it provided an obvious starting-point for the implementation of reform on the continent of Africa.