Decolonisation of Africa
The decolonisation of Africa is a process that largely took place from the mid-1950s to 1975 during the Cold War, with radical government changes on the continent as colonial governments made the transition to independent states. The process was often marred with violence, political turmoil, widespread unrest, and organised revolts in both northern and sub-Saharan countries including the Mau Mau rebellion in British Kenya, the Algerian War in French Algeria, the Congo Crisis in the Belgian Congo, the Angolan War of Independence in Portuguese Angola, the Zanzibar Revolution in the Sultanate of Zanzibar, and the Nigerian Civil War in the secessionist state of Biafra.
Background
The "Scramble for Africa" between 1870 and 1914 was a significant period of European imperialism in Africa that ended with almost all of Africa, and its natural resources, being controlled as colonies by a small number of European states. Racing to secure as much land as possible while avoiding conflict amongst themselves, the partition of Africa was confirmed in the Berlin Agreement of 1885, with little regard to local differences. Almost all the pre-colonial states of Africa had lost their sovereignty, with the only exceptions being Liberia (which had been settled in the early 19th century by African-American former slaves) and Ethiopia (later occupied by Italy in 1936). Britain and France had the largest holdings, but Germany, Spain, Italy, Belgium, and Portugal also had colonies. The process of decolonisation began as a direct consequence of World War II. By 1977, 50 African countries had gained independence from European colonial powers.
External causes
A large number of Africans volunteered during World War II and fought in both European and Asian theatres of war. This led to a deeper political awareness and the expectation of greater respect and self-determination, which was left largely unfulfilled.
On February 12, 1941, United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill met to discuss the post-war world. The result was the Atlantic Charter. It was not a treaty and was not submitted to the British Parliament or the Senate of the United States for ratification, but it turned out to be a widely acclaimed document. One of the clauses, Clause Three, referred to the right to decide what form of government people wanted, and to the restoration of self-government.
Prime Minister Churchill argued in the British Parliament that the document referred to "the States and nations of Europe now under the Nazi yoke". President Roosevelt regarded it as applicable across the world. Anticolonial politicians immediately saw it as relevant to colonial empires. The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, three years after the end of World War II, recognised all people as being born free and equal.
After World War II, the US and the African colonies put pressure on Britain to abide by the terms of the Atlantic Charter. After the war, some Britons considered African colonies to be childish and immature; British colonisers introduced democratic government at local levels in the colonies. Britain was forced to agree but Churchill rejected the universal applicability of self-determination for subject nations.
Italy, a colonial power, lost its African Empire, Italian East Africa, Italian Ethiopia, Italian Eritrea, Italian Somalia and Italian Libya, as a result of World War II. Furthermore, colonies such as Nigeria, Senegal and Ghana pushed for self-governance as colonial powers were exhausted by war efforts.
The United Nations 1960 Declaration on the granting of independence to colonial countries and peoples stated that colonial exploitation is a denial of human rights and that power should be transferred back to the countries or territories concerned.
Internal causes
Colonial economic exploitation involved diverting resource extraction (such as mining) profits to European shareholders at the expense of internal development, causing significant local socioeconomic grievances. For early African nationalists, decolonisation was a moral imperative around which a political movement could be assembled.
In the 1930s, the colonial powers had cultivated, sometimes inadvertently, a small elite of local African leaders educated in Western universities, where they became familiar with ideas such as self-determination. Although independence was not encouraged, arrangements between these leaders and the colonial powers developed, and such figures as Jomo Kenyatta (Kenya), Kwame Nkrumah (Gold Coast, now Ghana), Julius Nyerere (Tanganyika, now Tanzania), Léopold Sédar Senghor (Senegal), Nnamdi Azikiwe (Nigeria), Patrice Lumumba (DRC) and Félix Houphouët-Boigny (Côte d'Ivoire) came to lead the struggles for African nationalism.
During the Second World War, some local African industries and towns expanded when U-boats patrolling the Atlantic Ocean reduced raw material transportation to Europe.
Over time, urban communities, industries, and trade unions grew, improving literacy and education, and leading to pro-independence newspaper establishments.
By 1945, the Fifth Pan-African Congress demanded the end of colonialism, and delegates included future presidents of Ghana, Kenya, Malawi and national activists.
Economic legacy
There is an extensive body of literature that has examined the legacy of colonialism and colonial institutions on economic outcomes in Africa, with numerous studies showing disputed economic effects of colonialism.
The economic legacy of colonialism is difficult to quantify and is disputed. Modernisation theory posits that colonial powers built infrastructure to integrate Africa into the world economy; however, this was built mainly for extraction purposes. African economies were structured to benefit the coloniser and any surplus was likely to be 'drained', thereby stifling local capital accumulation. Dependency theory suggests that most African economies continued to occupy a subordinate position in the world economy after independence with a reliance on primary commodities such as copper in Zambia and tea in Kenya. Despite this continued reliance and unfair trading terms, a meta-analysis of 18 African countries found that a third of countries experienced increased economic growth post-independence.
Social legacy
Language
Scholars including Dellal (2013), Miraftab (2012) and Bamgbose (2011) have argued that Africa's linguistic diversity has been eroded. Language has been used by western colonial powers to divide territories and create new identities which have led to conflicts and tensions between African nations.
Law
In the immediate post-independence period, African countries largely retained colonial legislation. However, by 2015 much colonial legislation had been replaced by laws that were written locally.
Transition to independence
Following World War II, rapid decolonisation swept across the continent of Africa as many territories gained their independence from European colonisation.
In August 1941, United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill met to discuss their post-war goals. In that meeting, they agreed to the Atlantic Charter, which in part stipulated that they would, "respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live; and they wish to see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them." This agreement became the post-WWII stepping stone toward independence as nationalism grew throughout Africa.
Consumed with post-war debt, European powers were no longer able to afford the resources needed to maintain control of their African colonies. This allowed African nationalists to negotiate decolonisation very quickly and with minimal casualties. Some territories, however, saw great death tolls as a result of their fight for independence.
Historian James Meriweather argues that American policy towards Africa was characterized by a middle road approach, which supported African independence but also reassured European colonial powers that their holdings could remain intact. Washington wanted the right type of African groups to lead newly independent states, which tended to be noncommunist and not especially democratic. Meriweather argues that nongovernmental organizations influenced American policy towards Africa. They pressured state governments and private institutions to disinvest from African nations not ruled by the majority population. These efforts also helped change American policy towards South Africa, as seen with the passage of the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986.
Modern colonialism
In the Colonial Era, colonialism in this context refers mostly to Western European countries' colonization of lands mainly in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Oceania. The main European countries active in this form of colonization included Spain, Portugal, France, the Tsardom of Russia (later Russian Empire), the Kingdom of England (later Great Britain), the Netherlands, Belgium and the Kingdom of Prussia (now mostly Germany), and, beginning in the 18th century, the United States. Most of these countries had a period of almost complete power in world trade at some stage in the period from roughly 1500 to 1900. Beginning in the late 19th century, Imperial Japan also engaged in settler colonization, most notably in Hokkaido and Korea.
While some European colonization focused on shorter-term exploitation of economic opportunities (Newfoundland, for example, or Siberia) or addressed specific goals such as settlers seeking religious freedom (Massachusetts), at other times long-term social and economic planning was involved for both parties, but more on the colonizing countries themselves, based on elaborate theory-building (note James Oglethorpe's Colony of Georgia in the 1730s and Edward Gibbon Wakefield's New Zealand Company in the 1840s). In some cases European colonization appeared to be primarily for long-term economic gain, as in the Belgian Congo where Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness described life under colonial rule in the 19th Century and Siddharth Kara has described colonial rule and European and Chinese influence in the 20th and 21st Century.
Colonization may be used as a method of absorbing and assimilating foreign people into the culture of the imperial country. One instrument to this end is linguistic imperialism, or the use of non-indigenous colonial languages to the exclusion of any indigenous languages from administrative (and often, any public) use.
British Empire
Ghana
On 6 March 1957, Ghana (formerly the Gold Coast) became the first sub-Saharan African country to gain its independence from European colonisation. Starting with the 1945 Pan-African Congress, the Gold Coast's (modern-day Ghana's) independence leader Kwame Nkrumah made his focus clear. In the conference's declaration, he wrote, "We believe in the rights of all peoples to govern themselves. We affirm the right of all colonial peoples to control their own destiny. All colonies must be free from foreign imperialist control, whether political or economic."
In 1948, three Ghanaian veterans were killed by the colonial police on a protest march. Riots broke out in Accra and though Nkrumah and other Ghanaian leaders were temporarily imprisoned, the event became a catalyst for the independence movement. After being released from prison, Nkrumah founded the Convention People's Party (CPP), which launched a wide-scale campaign in support of independence with the slogan "Self Government Now!" Heightened nationalism within the country grew their power and the political party widely expanded. In February 1951, the CPP gained political power by winning 34 of 38 elected seats, including one for Nkrumah who was imprisoned at the time. The British government revised the Gold Coast Constitution to give Ghanaians a majority in the legislature in 1951. In 1956, Ghana requested independence inside the Commonwealth, which was granted peacefully in 1957 with Nkrumah as prime minister and Queen Elizabeth II as sovereign.
Winds of Change
Prime Minister Harold Macmillan gave the famous "Wind of Change" speech in South Africa in February 1960, where he spoke of "the wind of change blowing through this continent". Macmillan urgently wanted to avoid the same kind of colonial war that France was fighting in Algeria. Under his premiership decolonisation proceeded rapidly.
Britain's remaining colonies in Africa, except for Southern Rhodesia, were all granted independence by 1968. British withdrawal from the southern and eastern parts of Africa was not a peaceful process. Kenyan independence was preceded by the eight-year Mau Mau Uprising. In Rhodesia, the 1965 Unilateral Declaration of Independence by the white minority resulted in a civil war that lasted until the Lancaster House Agreement of 1979, which set the terms for recognised independence in 1980, as the new nation of Zimbabwe.
Belgium
Belgium controlled several territories and concessions during the colonial era, principally the Belgian Congo (modern DRC) from 1908 to 1960 and Ruanda-Urundi (modern Rwanda and Burundi) from 1922 to 1962. It also had a small concession in China (1902–1931) and was a co-administrator of the Tangier International Zone in Morocco.
Roughly 98% of Belgium's overseas territory was just one colony (about 76 times larger than Belgium itself) – known as the Belgian Congo. The colony was founded in 1908 following the transfer of sovereignty from the Congo Free State, which was the personal property of Belgium's king, Leopold II. The violence used by Free State officials against indigenous Congolese and the ruthless system of economic extraction had led to intense diplomatic pressure on Belgium to take official control of the country. Belgian rule in the Congo was based on the "colonial trinity" (trinité coloniale) of state, missionary and private company interests. During the 1940s and 1950s, the Congo experienced extensive urbanization and the administration aimed to make it into a "model colony". As the result of a widespread and increasingly radical pro-independence movement, the Congo achieved independence, as the Republic of Congo-Léopoldville in 1960.
Of Belgium's other colonies, the most significant was Ruanda-Urundi, a portion of German East Africa, which was given to Belgium as a League of Nations Mandate, when Germany lost all of its colonies at the end of World War I. Following the Rwandan Revolution, the mandate became the independent states of Burundi and Rwanda in 1962.
French colonial empire
The French colonial empire began to fall during the Second World War when the Vichy France regime controlled the Empire. One after another, most of the colonies were occupied by foreign powers (Japan in Indochina, Britain in Syria, Lebanon, and Madagascar, the United States and Britain in Morocco and Algeria, and Germany and Italy in Tunisia). Control was gradually reestablished by Charles de Gaulle, who used the colonial bases as a launching point to help expel the Vichy government from Metropolitan France. De Gaulle, together with most Frenchmen, was committed to preserving the Empire in its new form. The French Union, included in the Constitution of 1946, nominally replaced the former colonial empire, but officials in Paris remained in full control. The colonies were given local assemblies with only limited local power and budgets. A group of elites, known as evolués, who were natives of the overseas territories but lived in metropolitan France emerged.
De Gaulle assembled a major conference of Free France colonies in Brazzaville, in central Africa, in January–February 1944. The survival of France depended on support from these colonies, and De Gaulle made numerous concessions. These included the end of forced labour, the end of special legal restrictions that applied to natives but not to whites, the establishment of elected territorial assemblies, representation in Paris in a new "French Federation", and the eventual representation of Sub-Saharan Africans in the French Assembly. However, Independence was explicitly rejected as a future possibility:
- The ends of the civilizing work accomplished by France in the colonies excludes any idea of autonomy, all possibility of evolution outside the French bloc of the Empire; the eventual Constitution, even in the future of self-government in the colonies is denied.
Conflict
After the war ended, France was immediately confronted with the beginnings of the decolonisation movement. In Algeria demonstrations in May 1945 were repressed with an estimated 6,000 Algerians killed. Unrest in Haiphong, Indochina, in November 1945 was met by a warship bombarding the city. Paul Ramadier's (SFIO) cabinet repressed the Malagasy Uprising in Madagascar in 1947. French officials estimated the number of Malagasy killed from as low as 11,000 to a French Army estimate of 89,000.
In Cameroun, the Union of the Peoples of Cameroon's insurrection which began in 1955 headed by Ruben Um Nyobé, was violently repressed over two years, with perhaps as many as 100 people killed.
Algeria
French involvement in Algeria stretched back a century. Ferhat Abbas and Messali Hadj's movements marked the period between the two wars, but both sides radicalised after the Second World War. In 1945, the Sétif massacre was carried out by the French army. The Algerian War started in 1954. Atrocities characterized both sides, and the number killed became highly controversial estimates that were made for propaganda purposes. Algeria was a three-way conflict due to the large number of "pieds-noirs" (Europeans who had settled there in the 125 years of French rule). The political crisis in France caused the collapse of the Fourth Republic, as Charles de Gaulle returned to power in 1958 and finally pulled the French soldiers and settlers out of Algeria by 1962. Lasting more than eight years, the estimated death toll typically falls between 300,000 and 400,000 people. By 1962, the National Liberation Front was able to negotiate a peace accord with French President Charles de Gaulle, the Évian Accords in which Europeans would be able to return to their native countries, remain in Algeria as foreigners or take Algerian citizenship. Most of the one million Europeans in Algeria poured out of the country.
French Community
The French Union was replaced in the new Constitution of 1958 by the French Community. Only Guinea refused by referendum to take part in the new colonial organisation. However, the French Community dissolved itself amid the Algerian War; almost all of the other African colonies were granted independence in 1960, following local referendums. Some colonies chose instead to remain part of France, under the status of overseas départements (territories). Critics of neocolonialism claimed that the Françafrique had replaced formal direct rule. They argued that while de Gaulle was granting independence, on one hand, he was creating new ties with the help of Jacques Foccart, his counsellor for African matters. Foccart supported in particular the Nigerian Civil War during the late 1960s.
Robert Aldrich argues that with Algerian independence in 1962, it appeared that the Empire practically had come to an end, as the remaining colonies were quite small and lacked active nationalist movements. However, there was trouble in French Somaliland (Djibouti), which became independent in 1977. There also were complications and delays in the New Hebrides Vanuatu, which was the last to gain independence in 1980. New Caledonia remains a special case under French suzerainty. The Indian Ocean island of Mayotte voted in referendum in 1974 to retain its link with France and forgo independence.
Sweden
Sweden temporarily controlled several settlements on the Gold Coast (present Ghana) from 22 April 1650, and soon lost its last on 20 April 1663, when Fort Carlsborg and the capital Fort Christiansborg were seized by Denmark.
Cape Coast
In 1652, the Swedes took Cape Coast (in modern Ghana) which had previously been under the control of the Dutch and before that the Portuguese. Cape Coast was centered on the Carolusburg Castle which was built in 1653 and named after King Charles X Gustav of Sweden but is now known as the Cape Coast Castle.
United States
Colony of Liberia
The Colony of Liberia, later the Commonwealth of Liberia, was a private colony of the American Colonization Society (ACS) beginning in 1822. It became an independent nation—the Republic of Liberia—after declaring independence in 1847.
| Country | Colonial name | Colonial power | Independence date | First head of state | Independence won through |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Liberia | Liberia | United States | 26 July 1847 |
Joseph Jenkins Roberts William Tubman |
Liberian Declaration of Independence |
Acquisition of sovereignty
| Country | Date of acquisition of sovereignty | Acquisition of sovereignty |
|---|---|---|
| Algeria | 3 July 1962 | French recognition of Algerian referendum on independence held two days earlier |
| Angola | 11 November 1975 | Independence from Portugal |
| Benin | 1 August 1960 | Independence from France |
| Botswana | 30 September 1966 | Independence from the United Kingdom |
| Burkina Faso | 5 August 1960 | Independence from France |
| Burundi | 1 July 1962 | Independence from Belgium |
| Cabo Verde | 24 September 1973 10 September 1974 (recognised) 5 July 1975 |
Independence from Portugal |
| Cameroon | 1 January 1960 | Independence from France |
| Central African Republic | 13 August 1960 | Independence from France |
| Chad | 11 August 1960 | Independence from France |
| Comoros | 6 July 1975 | Independence from France declared |
| Democratic Republic of the Congo | 30 June 1960 | Independence from Belgium |
| Republic of Congo | 15 August 1960 | Independence from France |
| Djibouti | 27 June 1977 | Independence from France |
| Egypt | 28 February 1922 | The UK ends its protectorate, granting independence to Egypt |
| Equatorial Guinea | 12 October 1968 | Independence from Spain |
| Eritrea | 1 June 1936 5 May 1941 19 May 1941 10 February 1947 19 February 1951 15 September 1952 |
Abyssinian campaign Independence from Ethiopia declared |
| Eswatini | 6 September 1968 | Independence from the United Kingdom under the name Swaziland |
| Ethiopia | 5 May 1941 | Abyssinian campaign |
| Gabon | 17 August 1960 | Independence from France |
| Gambia | 18 February 1965 | Independence from the United Kingdom |
| Ghana | 6 March 1957 | Independence from the United Kingdom |
| Guinea | 2 October 1958 | Independence from France |
| Guinea-Bissau | 24 September 1973 10 September 1974 (recognised) 5 July 1975 |
Independence from Portugal declared |
| Ivory Coast | 4 December 1958 | Autonomous republic within French Community |
| Ivory Coast | 7 August 1960 | Independence from France |
| Kenya | 12 December 1963 | Independence from the United Kingdom |
| Lesotho | 4 October 1966 | Independence from the United Kingdom |
| Liberia | 26 July 1847 | Independence from American Colonization Society |
| Libya | 24 December 1951 | Independence from UN Trusteeship (British and French administration after Italian governance ends in 1947) |
| Madagascar | 14 October 1958 | The Malagasy Republic was created as autonomous state within French Community |
| 26 June 1960 | France recognizes Madagascar's independence | |
| Malawi | 6 July 1964 | Independence from the United Kingdom |
| Mali | 25 November 1958 | French Sudan gains autonomy |
| 24 November 1958 4 April 1959 20 June 1960 20 August 1960 22 September 1960 |
Independence from France | |
| Mauritania | 28 November 1960 | Independence from France |
| Mauritius | 12 March 1968 | Independence from the United Kingdom |
| Morocco | 7 April 1956 | Independence from France and Spain |
| Mozambique | 25 June 1975 | Independence from Portugal |
| Namibia | 21 March 1990 | Independence from South African rule |
| Niger | 4 December 1958 | Autonomy within French Community |
| 23 July 1900 13 October 1922 13 October 1946 26 July 1958 20 May 1957 25 February 1959 25 August 1958 3 August 1960 8 November 1960 10 November 1960 |
Independence from France | |
| Nigeria | 1 October 1960 | Independence from the United Kingdom |
| Rwanda | 1 July 1962 | Independence from Belgium |
| São Tomé and Príncipe | 12 July 1975 | Independence from Portugal |
| Senegal | 25 November 1957 24 November 1958 4 April 1959 4 April 1960 20 August 1960 20 June 1960 22 September 1960 18 February 1965 30 September 1989 |
Independence from France |
| Seychelles | 29 June 1976 | Independence from the United Kingdom |
| Sierra Leone | 27 April 1961 | Independence from the United Kingdom |
| Somalia | 20 July 1887 26 May 1925 1 June 1936 3 August 1940 19 August 1940 8 April 1941 25 February 1941 10 February 1947 1 April 1950 26 June 1960 1 July 1960 |
Union of Trust Territory of Somalia (former Italian Somaliland) and State of Somaliland (formerly British Somaliland) |
| South Africa | 11 December 1931 | Statute of Westminster, which establishes a status of legislative equality between the self-governing dominion of the Union of South Africa and the UK |
| 31 May 1910 | Creation of the autonomous Union of South Africa from the previously separate colonies of the Cape, Natal, Transvaal and Orange River | |
| South Sudan | 1 January 1956 | Independence from Egyptian and British joint rule |
| Sudan | 1 January 1956 | Independence from Egyptian and British joint rule |
| Tanzania | 9 December 1961 | Independence of Tanganyika from the United Kingdom |
| Togo | 30 August 1958 | Autonomy within French Union |
| 27 April 1960 | Independence from France | |
| Tunisia | 20 March 1956 | Independence from France |
| Uganda | 1 March 1962 | Self-government granted |
| 9 October 1962 | Independence from the United Kingdom | |
| Zambia | 24 October 1964 | Independence from the United Kingdom |
| Zimbabwe | 11 November 1965 | Unilateral declaration of independence by Southern Rhodesia |
| 18 April 1980 | Recognized independence from the United Kingdom as Zimbabwe |