1920s–1930s: (Social Change and Emergent Crisis — The 1920s as a Period of Relative Prosperity with Road Networks and Motor Transport Penetrating Deeper into…

1920s–1930s: (Social Change and Emergent Crisis — The 1920s as a Period of Relative Prosperity with Road Networks and Motor Transport Penetrating Deeper into Rural Areas, Pioneer Farmers Pushing Commercial Agriculture into New Areas, Europeans Hostile to Increasingly Powerful African Entrepreneurs, and the Fragility of the Economic System Already Clear Before the Great Depression): During the 1920s and 1930s, small-scale African farmers continued to dominate cash-crop production across much of tropical Africa. The main innovation of the 1920s and 1930s was the building of road networks and the introduction of motor transport, penetrating deeper into rural areas and carrying commercial agriculture to villages previously out of reach. Market towns thrived, and African cultivators — mostly men harnessing women’s labor — were often able to colonize new land for cash crops. After the era of military conquest, the 1920s was a period of stability, relative prosperity, and population growth. New communities were being formed that were partly peasant and partly capitalist. Europeans were generally hostile to increasingly powerful African entrepreneurs — colonial administrations preferred to deal with traditional authority invested in indirect-rule chiefs, and were wary of new economic elites that would increasingly dabble in politics. The fragility of the economic system was already clear: Africans had no means of fundamentally influencing the vagaries of the market, and Africa’s main exports remained agricultural products, forest products, and minerals, which severely limited the potential for sustainable development. In some parts of West Africa, the legitimate commerce of the nineteenth century essentially continued unaltered through the colonial era.