Ernest Montgomery was born in New Haven, CT in 1931. He graduated from University of North Carolina with a degree in political science and received his masters in African studies from John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. In 1955, he travelled to Paris on a French Government grant to study French Colonial Policy, and worked in Africa from 1956 to 1974 for USIS, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and Checchi and Co. as a development Economist. He is now retired and living in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
These are his recollections of the time he spent in Nigeria, the Gold Coast (now Ghana), Guinea, Niger, and Togo before and after their independence.