1945–1960s: (The Deeply Flawed Transfers of Power — The Late-Colonial State Failing to Produce Civil Society or Adequate Education, Illiteracy Leaving Citize…

1945–1960s: (The Deeply Flawed Transfers of Power — The Late-Colonial State Failing to Produce Civil Society or Adequate Education, Illiteracy Leaving Citizens Vulnerable to Manipulation, Rushed Training Programs for Elites, and Political Volatility Not Simply the Corollary of Colonial Failure but Also the Reassertion of Long-Term Nineteenth-Century Dynamics of State-Formation): Ultimately, even orderly transfers of power were deeply flawed. The late-colonial state had not produced the kind of civil society needed to safeguard political stability or provide appropriate checks and balances. The colonial modernization project was a botched job, not least in terms of education — open to only a minority until the last years of colonial rule, it meant a citizenry with high illiteracy rates, lacking both the willingness and ability to hold leaders accountable, vulnerable from the outset to manipulation by ruthless or unsteady elites. Even the elites themselves, emerging as a governing class, were frequently ill-equipped, the product of rushed training programs in advance of independence. The political volatility that resulted, however, was not simply the corollary of colonial failure — alongside these short-term factors were the longer-term dynamics of state formation and the political and economic conflict this invariably involved, dating to the nineteenth century. The failings of the late colonial state compounded these, but the new era of independence witnessed the reassertion of long-term, distinctively African dynamics. The nations born in the 1950s and 1960s were not blank slates upon which enlightened leaders might write new futures — they were palimpsests, layer upon layer of unfinished struggles, and the ink of the latest inscription was barely dry before the older texts began bleeding through.