Who Held the Pen

Illustration: a pen, a sealed instrument and a map of Africa.

Today, Sunday 4 October 2026, Lesotho’s independence is sixty years old. This past Thursday it was Nigeria’s turn, at sixty-six. Before this month closes, Uganda, Zambia and Equatorial Guinea will each mark theirs, and Guinea, which proclaimed its independence in October 1958, belongs in the same company. These are among the independence days that October carries, and I have chosen not to pass over any of them in silence.

At every such anniversary we reach for the same verb. We say independence was won. But I am a reader of documents, and when I read the documents that made these six days, I find that the sentences do not say “won”. They say something else, and the difference is worth a Sunday.

The question the documents answer

A founding document is a deed. A deed names who conveys and who receives, and it fixes a day. So I want to put a plain question to each of these six instruments: who is the subject of the sentence? Who appoints the day, who concedes, who proclaims?

None of this erases the long politics that came before each day, and the documents are silent about it. That silence is not an accident either. It is what happens when one party holds the pen.

Four Acts of a foreign Parliament

Four of the six days were fixed by Acts of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Each names an “appointed day”, and in each the verb belongs to Westminster.

Nigeria first. The Nigeria Independence Act 1960 provides that “On the first day of October, nineteen hundred and sixty (in this Act referred to as “the appointed day”), the Colony and the Protectorate as respectively defined by the Nigeria (Constitution) Orders in Council, 1954 to 1960, shall together constitute part of Her Majesty’s dominions under the name of Nigeria.” Section 1(1). Read it slowly. The word “independence” does not appear in that section at all. The Act’s long title speaks of “the attainment by Nigeria of fully responsible status within the Commonwealth”. The sentence that matters comes next, in subsection (2): from the appointed day, “Her Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom shall have no responsibility for the government of Nigeria or any part thereof”. That is the transfer. It is written as the withdrawal of a responsibility by the party that held it.

Uganda follows the same grammar. On “the ninth day of October, nineteen hundred and sixty-two”, the territories of the Uganda Protectorate “shall together form part of Her Majesty’s dominions under the name of Uganda” (Uganda Independence Act 1962, section 1).

Zambia’s and Lesotho’s Acts, by contrast, use the word. Zambia’s Act provides that on “24th October 1964” Northern Rhodesia “shall cease to be a protectorate and shall together become an independent republic under the name of Zambia” (Zambia Independence Act 1964, section 1). And Lesotho’s provides that on “4th October 1966” the territory of the Colony of Basutoland “shall cease to form part of Her Majesty’s dominions and shall become an independent kingdom under the name of Lesotho” (Lesotho Independence Act 1966, section 1).

Notice what these four tell us. The form of the new state is named in the Act itself. A dominion in one section, a kingdom in another, a republic in a third. The name of the country is in the Act. So is the day. We keep the days. We should read the rest of the sentence too.

A decree from Madrid

Equatorial Guinea is the plainest of the six, and I will keep my account of it as plain as the document. It was not a British Act. It was a Spanish decree: Decreto 2467/1968, de 9 de octubre, por el que se concede la independencia a Guinea Ecuatorial, published in the Spanish official gazette on 11 October 1968 (Boletín Oficial del Estado). In my translation, it is the decree “by which independence is conceded to Equatorial Guinea”. Its second article reads: Se declara independiente el territorio de Guinea Ecuatorial, a partir de las doce horas del día doce de octubre del corriente año. The territory of Equatorial Guinea is declared independent, from twelve noon on the twelfth day of October of this year.

The decree is dated the ninth. The independence it declares takes effect on the twelfth, at noon. The verb in the title is concede. I record it as it stands, and I add nothing to it.

A proclamation

Guinea’s is a different sentence, with a different subject. In October 1958, after a referendum held on 28 September, Guinea proclaimed its independence. When the United Nations General Assembly took up Guinea’s admission in December that year, the delegate of Iraq told it that, four days after the referendum, Guinea had “solemnly proclaimed” its independence. Here the verb is not “appoint” and it is not “concede”. Here the territory is the one that speaks, and the record of the United Nations carries that account of it.

I do not set Guinea against the other five as though one were authentic and the rest were not. That would be a cheap reading, and it would be wrong. The point is narrower. A document in which the former ruler appoints a day and a document in which a territory proclaims one are different instruments, and the difference deserves to be read.

Three verbs

Put the six side by side and the thesis stands in the documents without any help from me.

Table: the six October independence days, in the order they fall in the calendar, and the instruments that made them. The words in quotation marks are the instruments’ own. Guinea’s day is not given here, so it comes last.

Independence in October was, in the instruments that made it, appointed, conceded or proclaimed. It was not simply taken, and it was not merely given. It was written, and the question that matters is by whom.

The four Acts do not all speak alike, and the difference is in the texts. Nigeria’s and Uganda’s place the new state inside Her Majesty’s dominions: each “shall together” constitute or form part of them. Zambia’s and Lesotho’s take the new state out. It “shall cease” to be a protectorate, or to form part of those dominions, and it becomes “an independent republic” or “an independent kingdom”. The Act follows the form of the state it creates. Why London chose one form for one territory and another for the next is a question about the politics before each appointed day, and the documents do not answer it.

One thing, though, the four share. Each was a British territory, and each is a member of the Commonwealth today, an association that grew out of the British Empire. Nigeria joined in 1960, Uganda in 1962, Zambia in 1964 and Lesotho in 1966. So the form that each Act gave the new state did not decide membership: a dominion, a republic and a kingdom all joined.

Spain’s decree is a different kind of instrument again. The British Acts are written in the language of administration: a day appointed, a responsibility withdrawn, legislative power handed on. The Spanish decree is written in the language of a gift. Its title concedes independence, and its second article declares the territory independent. Both are acts of the party that is leaving, and each chose the grammar in which to leave. Whether the two grammars say anything about how those two powers saw what they were leaving, the instruments cannot tell us.

This is not a case for cynicism. A day that was appointed by a foreign Parliament has been kept, for sixty years in Lesotho’s case, by a people who made of it their own. The anniversary belongs to them, whatever sentence began it. I make the opposite point. We honour these days best when we read the paper that made them and are not afraid of what the grammar says.

I read Lesotho’s from the South African side. It is a kingdom entirely surrounded by South Africa. Its anniversary is, in the plainest geographic sense, a neighbour’s, and no South African has the right to treat it as a footnote. Nor, for that matter, should we assume that our own settlement escaped the same question. Ours was adopted at home, by a Constitutional Assembly, and certified by our own Constitutional Court on 4 December 1996, at the second attempt, after the Court had sent the first text back in September. I take pride in that, and in the fact that the Court was willing to say no. But a document written at home is only a better answer to the question of who held the pen. It does not end the question.

Before the appointed day, someone else held the pen. The question that remains is who holds it now. What these six states have written since is a longer reading than one Sunday allows, and it belongs first to their own citizens. What I can add from here is the question that sits underneath it: what was independence meant to be for?

What does independence mean?

It is a question we must never get tired of answering.

The beginning of the end of colonialism and the onset of independence carried in its womb great promise for the African people. It set in motion forces that would reshape the continent’s political, economic and social landscape, in ways both exhilarating and fraught with difficulty, as newly sovereign nations grappled with the twin burdens of inherited colonial structures and the soaring expectations of their peoples.

In July 1953, before Ghana’s independence, Dr Kwame Nkrumah, then Prime Minister of the Gold Coast, moved in its Legislative Assembly the motion to adopt the Government’s White Paper on constitutional reform. The speech is known as “The Motion of Destiny”, and is printed in his Revolutionary Path (Panaf, 1973). He said:

“Mr Speaker, we have frequent examples to show that there comes a time in the history of all colonial peoples when they must, because of their will to throw off the hampering shackles of colonialism, boldly assert their God-given right to be free of a foreign ruler. Today we are here to claim this right to our independence...”

“The right of a people to decide their own destiny, to make their way in freedom, is not to be measured by the yardstick of colour or degree of social development. It is an inalienable right of peoples which they are powerless to exercise when forces, stronger than they themselves, by whatever means, for whatever reasons, take this right away from them. If there is to be a criterion of a people’s preparedness for self-government, then I say it is their readiness to assume the responsibilities of ruling themselves. For who but a people themselves can say when they are prepared? How can others judge when that moment has arrived in the destiny of a subject people? What other gauge can there be?”

Here a people’s right to decide its own destiny is asserted as inalienable, and the only judge of its readiness is the people itself.

Nkrumah went on to call the Honourable Members, as a result of “the relentless tide of history”, to “a sacred charge”: they held the destiny of their country in their hands, and oppressed peoples across Africa and the New World were looking to them “with desperate hope, as an inspiration to continue their grim fight”. He reminded the Assembly that “As long as we remain subject to an alien power, too much of our energy is diverted from constructive enterprise”, and, further on, he said: “Mr Speaker, we can only meet the challenge of our age as a free people. Hence our demand for our freedom, for only free men can shape the destinies of their future.”

I quote Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso for what he said, and I say nothing here about Burkina Faso today. Receiving the Order of José Martí in Havana on 25 September 1984, he said, in the English text first published in Cuba’s Granma Weekly Review and reprinted in Thomas Sankara Speaks: “We have been fighting, we fight, and we will continue to fight to create, with our own hands, the material foundations for our happiness.”

Herein is contained the ultimate dream and vision of the pioneers of our freedom, from which I suppose the current generations do not have the luxury to detract.

As midwives of our independence, many of the leaders of the liberation struggle were of the view that independence was as much about material progress as it was about the far bigger question of what that progress would imply.

Frantz Fanon, in the closing pages of The Wretched of the Earth (1961), warned the Third World against building a copy of Europe. In the Macgibbon and Kee edition of 1965, as transcribed on marxists.org:

“So, comrades, let us not pay tribute to Europe by creating states, institutions and societies which draw their inspiration from her. Humanity is waiting for something other from us than such an imitation, which would be almost an obscene caricature.”

Sixteen years earlier, in 1945, Anton Lembede had made the same point in an article, “Know Thyself”, in the Bantu World:

“‘But’ one may retort. ‘Civilisations grow by borrowing and assimilating some useful material from other civilisations and nations.’ Quite so. But there is a difference between ‘borrowing and assimilating’ and ‘being borrowed and assimilated.’ Yes, the difference may be subtle but it is vast and fundamental.”

“Africans too, cannot be mere doers and imitators of other nations and their ideologies. Africans can borrow and assimilate what is good from elsewhere but they must at all costs retain and determinedly preserve their own essential character and identity. This is the basic teaching of Africanism and is in line with the ideas of great thinkers, for, with a few exceptions, Socrates and Darwin are the highest peaks of human intelligence. KNOW THYSELF.”

The oppressed needed to understand that attaining freedom was one thing, but doing something meaningful with it was quite another.

In May 1946, in an article, “Policy of the Congress Youth League”, in Inkundla ya Bantu, Lembede wrote:

“Freedom is an indispensable condition for all progress and development. It will only be when Africans are free that they will be able to exploit fully and bring to fruition their divine talent and contribute something new towards the general welfare and prosperity of Mankind; and it will only be then that Africans will enter on a footing of equality with other nations of the world into the commonwealth of nations; and only then will Africans occupy their rightful and honourable place among the nations of the world.”

The article’s next principle, the sixth, is that “Africans must aim at balanced progress or advancement.”

A generation later, Steve Biko closed his essay “Black Consciousness and the Quest for a True Humanity”, first published in 1973 and collected in I Write What I Like, on the same note, of a freedom still to be made:

“We have set out on a quest for true humanity, and somewhere on the distant horizon we can see the glittering prize. Let us march forth with courage and determination, drawing strength from our common plight and our brotherhood. In time we shall be in a position to bestow upon South Africa the greatest gift possible – a more human face.”

Political independence from colonialism in Africa should mean, first and foremost, the restoration of sovereignty – the right of African peoples to govern themselves, control their own resources, and shape their own destinies without external domination. But true independence goes far beyond flags and anthems. It requires:

• Economic sovereignty – determining economic policy, managing natural resources for the benefit of local populations, and building diversified economies rather than remaining locked into extractive relationships that enrich former colonial powers.
• Cultural and psychological liberation – reclaiming indigenous knowledge, languages, and cultural identities, and freeing education and media from frameworks that treat African ways of knowing as inferior.
• Political self-determination rooted in local realities – developing political systems suited to African societies, which includes genuine democratic participation, accountability, and unity across ethnic lines.
• Pan-African solidarity – predicated on regional integration and continental cooperation to increase Africa’s collective bargaining power, since true independence is far harder for small, fragmented states in a world dominated by great powers.
• Non-alignment and dignity in foreign policy – refusing to be a proxy in others’ conflicts, and engaging globally on terms of mutual respect rather than dependency.
• Social justice and equity – that delivers land, opportunity, and dignity to ordinary people. Independence is incomplete if it only replaces foreign elites with domestic ones who perpetuate inequality.

In short, political independence should be the beginning, not the end, of liberation. Where it has been celebrated as an endpoint, many African countries remain economically dependent, culturally subordinated, and politically constrained. The unfinished project of independence is to convert legal sovereignty into real freedom for African people.

That is the work these anniversaries leave to those of us who are alive. A constitution, a state, a country’s name: each is a sentence that someone must go on writing, and defending against those who would hold the pen in our place.