Neo-colonialism in West Africa

It is possible today to draw up a fairly accurate balance-sheet for the economic development of states in West Africa at the end of their first decade of independence. It is a balance-sheet, however, which raises rather more questions than it provides answers, and only historical research can further reveal the true nature of the problems.
This work certainly makes no claim to be an economic history of the area. Such a history is still beset by serious obstacles.
The first of these is the basic documentation, which is reputedly extremely poor. Still, there are records, even if our economists make little use of them, and our statisticians take a poor view of the information-quantitative as well as qualitative-collected by the administrations of the past. In fact this information is often superior to that collected at great expense in recent years. Author discovered this for himself in studying the economic development of the French Sudan between 1928 and 1959.¹
The second, and more real, obstacle corresponds to the gaps in the university system. The division of work between the different disciplines of social science isolates each group of researchers. Economists are ignorant of social facts and of the historical process which formed the structures within which the phenomena they study exist. Historians are unable to use the tools of quantitative economic analysis; and sociologists, under the sway of traditional ethnography, take little interest in the great trans formations by which the Africa of the towns and the decisive rural areas has been integrated into the 'world market', but concentrate on isolated, vanishing tribes and their religion.