The anti-colonial struggles in West Africa were led by the new elite of Western-educated Africans. Examine.

Anti-colonial nationalism in West Africa was largely conceived and organised by a new elite of Western-educated lawyers, journalists and teachers — though it triumphed only when this elite harnessed mass discontent.

Leadership of the Western-educated elite

• Early constitutionalism: the lawyer J. E. Casely Hayford founded the National Congress of British West Africa (1920), demanding elected representation across the four British colonies.
• Kwame Nkrumah, educated in the United States and Britain, built the Convention People's Party in the Gold Coast; his “Positive Action” campaign of strikes and boycotts won Ghana's independence in 1957 — the first in sub-Saharan Africa.
• In Nigeria, Nnamdi Azikiwe galvanised nationalism through his newspaper West African Pilot and the NCNC, while the London-trained lawyer Obafemi Awolowo led the Action Group.
• In Francophone West Africa, the Paris-educated poet of Negritude, Leopold Senghor (Senegal), and Felix Houphouet-Boigny (Cote d'Ivoire) led their territories through assembly politics to independence in 1960.
• The Fifth Pan-African Congress (Manchester, 1945), shaped by Nkrumah and George Padmore, turned elite pan-Africanism decisively toward mass mobilisation.

Limits of the elite thesis

• Mass forces supplied the muscle: ex-servicemen (the Accra riots of 1948), cocoa farmers' hold-ups, market women and trade unions radicalised the movement beyond polite petitioning.
• Sekou Toure of Guinea rose through trade unionism rather than elite higher education, and led the 1958 “Non” vote against de Gaulle's Community.

The proposition is therefore broadly valid: the Western-educated elite conceived, organised and led West Africa's anti-colonial struggles — but converted colonial reform into independence only by mobilising workers, farmers and veterans behind their leadership.