3 Review(s)

West African Responses to European Imperialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries provides a brief survey of West Africa before the imperial expansion of Western European nations to the region. Author F. Ugboaja Ohaegbulam offers insight into the cultural values, practices, and civilization West African society had developed prior to the imposition of European imperialism. He examines the origins, causes, nature, and consequences of the European expansion to West Africa. Ohaegbulam documents the theories and ideologies used to justify the expansion, the strategies of the expansion, and the policies of imperial control and their consequences, while discussing the various measures West African societies adopted during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to resist European imperialism, which eventually collapsed less than two decades after the end of World War II. Showing how, after the collapse, West Africa faced a formidable task of building new post-colonial states and reinvigorating its culture, Ohaegbulam asserts that West Africa needs new visionary and committed leaders to maximize the positive aspects of this mixed record.