The BBC West Africa correspondent, Elizabeth Blunt, based in Abidjan, Cote D'Ivoire reflects on Africa at 40.

Go back forty years, to 1957, and Ghana was just regaining its independence, the first of the new black African nations to re-emerge from the period of colonial rule. But go back another forty, to 1917, and that colonial rule had barely reached some parts of West Africa. We are now getting very close to the point when parts of West Africa will have been independent for longer than they were ever colonised, and when people there will finally be able to see the colonial period as just a passing phase in their history, and no longer the single defining experience, the cause of everything which came after.

Yet the region was profoundly perhaps permanently - marked by those colonial years. The old colonial boundaries, for instance, those arbitrary lines drawn on a map at the Berlin conference, have stuck. The countries they created have taken on a reality, developed a nationalist spirit. People speak of their neighbours as "typically Nigerian", or "just like a Guinean." Cross one of those arbitrary borders, and there is at once a distinct change of tone and style, even where tribal groups overlap the frontier. Gambians are different from Senegalese, Ivorians from the Ghanaians to the east and the Liberians to the West, even though many of them talk the same language.

Maintaining colonial boundaries, once seriously worried about, is no longer an issue. Forty years on there seems no immediate likelihood that the map will change.

This region of African was also more than any other deeply affected by the rivalries between the colonial powers. The divide between the English speaking and French speaking countries still lingers. At the everyday level, French speaking countries take three-hour lunch breaks, and even the ricketiest of street corner stalls sells French bread for breakfast. Barristers in their English speaking neighbours swelter under white wigs in steamy tropical court rooms. More seriously, the English-French divide has split the region into two camps in virtually every serious political argument of the past forty years.

But that divide is starting, very slowly, to be eroded. In terms of the language itself, English is winning, just as it is everywhere in the world, and for the same reasons it is the language of international business, of Hollywood movies, of the internet and the computer age. But the former French colonies have a common currency and a degree of economic integration which other countries envy. That currency, the cfa franc, has held its value as others plummeted, and is now on its way to becoming the single currency of the region. There are Guinean francs and Gambian dalasis, but in both countries shopkeepers are just as happy perhaps even happier to accept cfa francs. Guinea Bissau, a former Portuguese colony, has just joined the franc zone, and traders all over the region do a lot of their business in cfa.

The cfa franc has been a huge benefit to those countries which use it, giving them monetary stability, and easy access to foreign exchange. But it does raise the question of how independent West Africa really is, even forty years on. The franc zone is run by the French treasury, and the cfa franc, with its fixed parity, is really a form of French franc in disguise. And ex-French colonies still have much closer ties to the former colonial power than other countries in Africa. In nineteen-seventy-seven, when Ghana was celebrating twenty years of existence, the battle cry among radicals was that Africa had achieved political but not yet economic independence. That is just as true now as it was then, but today, in the age of global business, it seems beside the point. The Asian Tigers, which have lifted themselves out of poverty, have done it by knitting themselves into the fabric of the world economy. The pursuit of independence and self-sufficiency as an economic goal now looks like a dead end.

Today what worries Africa is not lack of independence, but fears that it is being left to its own devices while the rest of the world goes about its business. Asian countries are booming, and becoming full partners in the world economy, so are parts of the former Soviet Union. Africa risks being left on the sidelines. You can read newspapers and watch television in the United States and most parts of Europe for days on end without Africa ever being mentioned. If West Africa broke off from the rest of the continent, and fell into the Atlantic Ocean, apart from the French government and a few chocoholics, would the rest of the world even notice?

When the world does sit up and take notice, it is still all too likely to be as a result of wars and other crises American marines airlifting foreigners out of Sierra Leone; French troops evacuating Brazzeville. The latest international initiative for Africa plans by the United States, France and Britain to strengthen the peacekeeping capacities of African armies, shows a degree of interest in the continent, but also a desire to shift the burden of international fire-fighting to the countries of the region.

But at least the United States in recent months has been showing more interest. President Clinton has declared that Africa will be the continent of the twenty-first century. No one here is quite certain what that means, but they hope that in another forty years at least, they will be full players, not just spectators in the world's affairs.
 

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