Why Most African Flags Use the Red, Yellow, and Green Colors?
The Untold Story Behind Most African Flags
On October 11th, 1897, a year after Ethiopia defended itself from Italian colonization at the Battle of Adwa, Emperor Menelik II authorized the creation of a flag containing a rectangular tri-color from top to bottom: red, yellow, and green.
This flag will eventually have the first letter of his name placed on the center stripe, and it will become a clear reference to the Ethiopian Abyssinian Empire, as the only African state that resisted modern European colonialism having defeated the Kingdom of Italy in 1896.
This Ethiopian flag will be changed several times over the years, as the country itself evolved from a monarchy to a dictatorship and then to parliamentary democracy. But these three colors will remain.
In March 1957, Ghana became the first country in sub-Saharan Africa to gain independence and Kwame Nkrumah became the country’s first Prime Minister and President.
Nkrumah emerged as a major advocate for the unity of Independent Africa. And he embodied a political activist approach to Pan-Africanism – championing the “quest for regional integration of the whole of the African continent”.
You see, the concept of Pan-Africanism is a worldwide movement that aims at encouraging and strengthening the bonds of solidarity between all indigenous and diaspora ethnic groups of Africa.
Nkrumah was strongly inspired by Ethiopia’s resistance against foreign occupation and decided to incorporate the country’s tri-color scheme into the Ghana flag – as a way of paying homage to Ethiopia for being the only African country – aside from Liberia, that was never colonized.
They took Ethiopia’s flag – which by this time had the green stripe on top instead of red, flipped it, and placed a black 5 point star in the center of the flag.
Soon other newly independent African countries would follow suit.
Guinea, upon gaining independence in 1958, took the same idea but this time they went for a vertical tricolor scheme instead.
Mali’s flag is Guinea’s flag but with green at the beginning and red at the last strip.
The flag of Cameroon, similar to Mali, has red at the middle band with a yellow star and a yellow stripe at the end of the flag.
The flag of Senegal is very similar to that of Mali but with a green star in the middle.
Other African countries that had these colors in their flags include Togo, Comoros, Burkina Faso, Seychelles, Guinea-Bissau, Sao tome and Principe, Congo, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Mauritania, Benin, and so many others.
These three colors red, green, and yellow with the inclusion of black will later be known as the Pan-African colors.
Although the meaning of the individual colors used in a country’s flag may differ from country to country; the countries of the flags that make use of the Pan-African colors have similar meaning with green representing the unique nature of the continent having good land for agriculture, red representing the blood, and common heritage of Africans during the fight against oppression from colonialism, yellow representing the wealth of Africa, and finally, black which signifies the color of the people.
However, there is another variation of the Pan-African color scheme, developed by Marcus Mosiah Garvey – the Jamaican-born founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), that makes use of just Red, Green, and Black colors. Countries like Malawi, Kenya, and the former country of Biafra were inspired by this color combination. The colors of these flags do however share similar meanings with those inspired by Ethiopia.
Now, the adoption of these particular colors by these African countries was not because they lacked artistic or design tastes. We must understand that at that time, these countries were just recovering from colonial oppression. And the way they could relate with each other was to adopt similar colors as similar colors may signify similar heritage. And again the ideals of Pan-Africanism which is a call for a United Africa was a big deal for the continent African at that time.
We are indeed grateful to these African countries for choosing to adopt the Pan-African colors in their flags because every time the flags of these countries are raised, they remind us of the great African soil, the wealth in the continent, the color of the people, and above all, the blood of those who gave everything for the land they loved.
