Red white black flag with yellow star

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. 

The African colours

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. The colours they went with were green, gold, and red in a horizontal tricolour. 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. 

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. 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. 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’. Marshall suggests that he may have mistakenly identified these as the Ethiopian colours (wrongly thinking that their flag contained black rather than gold). 

Ghana

Either way, the traditional African colours were established. 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). 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. The red symbolises the campaign for freedom, yellow the mineral wealth, and green the natural green areas of the country.

Following the same colours

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. For Guinea, the red represented the blood spilt in the fight against colonialism but also the sweat of the peoples labour. The yellow is for gold but also the sun and the green, like Ghana symbolises the country's rich vegetation. Cameroon, like Guinea, went with a vertical tricolour and for them the colours are about unity; green is for the vegetation in the south of the country, yellow for the Savannah in the north, and the red is for a connection between the two. The yellow star placed in the centre reinforces the idea of a united nation. 

Togo’s design was much more of a variation. Instead of a tricolour it consists of five vertical stripes of which three are green and two are yellow with a red square in the corner containing a white five-pointed star. The five stripes are seen to depict the five fingers of human behaviour and thus are a call on the Togolese people to take positive action in everyday life. Other interpretations suggest that the five stripes stand for the five regions of the country. The white star is there to represent hope and life for the Togolese to develop as good people to help the nation prosper. The star’s positioning on top of a red square gives it a meaning of freedom achieved through the blood spilt by the anti-colonial martyrs.

The views and opinions expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Best of Africa.

For all the talk of American exceptionalism, there is at least one thing that is unexceptional about the United States: it’s flag. The Star-Spangled Banner’s particular shade of red shows up in 14.3 percent of all national flags, making it the second most common color after white. And the dark blue of the American flag’s canton is also shared by 13 other nations.

In fact, the world’s 196 countries stick to a surprisingly small palette when it comes to picking their flags. The most popular shade of yellow, for example, shows up in the flags of Lithuania, Columbia, Ghana, St. Lucia and Vietnam, among many others, giving it a foothold on five continents and making it third most popular individual shade. (Overall, blues and greens are more popular than yellows.)

Sometimes, it’s not just the colors that seem familiar. In perhaps the most famous example of two countries showing up somewhere wearing the same outfit, Liechtenstein and Haiti both arrived at the 1936 Olympics flying identical banners.

Methodology

The complete code used to generate this data, which uses Mathematica 10, is available on the Wolfram Cloud.

After downloading the 196 flag images from Flagpedia.net, we added up the total number of pixels of each color. This yielded 527 different shades across 36.6 million pixels. Because digital images are only approximations of the colors in the physical flags, we decided it was safe to further simplify these colors down to the traditional “web safe” palette of 216 possible colors. That reduced the number of distinct shades from 527 to 63.

These 63 colors were then grouped into parent categories of white, black, red, blue, green and yellow using a simple algorithm to determine which parent color each shade most resembled. This process required a small about of manual tweaking for colors on the border between green and blue.

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