The yellow is for gold but also the sun and the green, like Ghana symbolises the country's rich vegetation. For Guinea, the red represented the blood spilt in the fight against colonialism but also the sweat of the peoples labour. The combination of red, yellow/gold and green would be continued as more Sub-Saharan African countries gained their independence, although the meanings of the colours might vary. The red symbolises the campaign for freedom, yellow the mineral wealth, and green the natural green areas of the country. In the centre of the flag is a black star, which Marshall interprets as a reference to the aforementioned shipping company although other sources cite emancipation and freedom as being depicted here. As the first country to gain independence from European rule, Ghana promptly followed suit, adopting the same colours as Ethiopia, in the same horizontal tricolour but in a different order (red at the top, gold in the middle and green below). Marshall suggests that he may have mistakenly identified these as the Ethiopian colours (wrongly thinking that their flag contained black rather than gold).Įither way, the traditional African colours were established. His choice of colours was red, black and green Garvey is quoted by Marshall as stating that the red shows sympathy for ‘the Reds around the world’, the green was to evoke the Irish fight for freedom and the black to represent the people’. The business failed and he was arrested and deported back to Jamaica but not before he commissioned a pan-Africa flag and showed it off to representatives of 25 African countries. Marshall also mentions the influence of Marcus Mosiah Garvey, the Jamaican-born founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), a movement set up in Jamaica and expanded to the United States in the early 20th Century which promoted pride among African-Americans of their ancestry and encouraged many of them to return home via the Black Star Line shipping enterprise he set up. According to Tim Marshall in his book Worth Dying for: The Power and Politics of Flags, the colours stemmed from Ethiopia’s christian tradition and are a reference to the rainbow that God created after the great flood. The colours they went with were green, gold, and red in a horizontal tricolour. With Ethiopia being the only modern day African country to avoid colonisation, it was thus the first to come up with its own unifying flag. This is the first of a series of articles which will look at the origins of some of Africa’s flags and what they represent.
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