Decolonisation of Africa
Based on Wikipedia: Decolonisation of Africa
In February 1960, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan stood before the South African Parliament and delivered what became known as the "Wind of Change" speech. "The wind of change is blowing through this continent," he told an audience that largely didn't want to hear it. Within eight years, nearly every British colony in Africa would be independent. Macmillan wasn't predicting the future—he was describing an avalanche already in motion.
The decolonization of Africa compressed centuries of political transformation into roughly two decades. Between the mid-1950s and 1975, more than fifty nations emerged from European rule, redrawing the map of an entire continent. Some transitions happened peacefully at conference tables. Others were forged in blood—in Algeria's mountains, Kenya's forests, and the jungles of Angola. This wasn't simply a transfer of power. It was the violent unwinding of a system that had treated an entire continent as raw material for European prosperity.
The Scramble and Its Consequences
To understand how Africa decolonized, you first have to understand how it was colonized in the first place.
Between 1870 and 1914, European powers carved up Africa with astonishing speed and breathtaking arrogance. This period, known as the Scramble for Africa, saw nearly the entire continent claimed as colonial territory. The Berlin Conference of 1885 formalized the partition—European diplomats drawing lines on maps with no regard for existing African kingdoms, ethnic boundaries, or political structures. It was as if someone had taken a jigsaw puzzle, thrown away the original pieces, and cut new ones with a straight edge.
Almost every precolonial African state lost its sovereignty. Only two exceptions existed. Liberia, settled in the early nineteenth century by formerly enslaved African Americans, maintained its independence—though European powers essentially viewed it as falling within America's sphere of influence. Ethiopia successfully defended itself at the Battle of Adwa in 1896, becoming the only African nation to defeat a European colonial army. Italy would later occupy Ethiopia in 1936, but that occupation lasted only until World War II.
Britain and France claimed the largest territories, but Germany, Spain, Italy, Belgium, and Portugal all grabbed what they could. The logic was simple: resources. Colonial economic exploitation meant funneling the profits from mining, agriculture, and other extraction directly to European shareholders. Internal development for African populations was, at best, an afterthought.
The Seeds of Change
Nationalism, as a political force, began gaining momentum globally in the early twentieth century. After World War I, American President Woodrow Wilson championed the principle of self-determination in his famous Fourteen Points. Anti-colonial intellectuals across Africa and Asia saw potential in Wilson's rhetoric. Here, finally, was a Western leader articulating what they'd long believed: peoples had the right to govern themselves.
Wilson had no intention of applying this principle to European colonies.
When Egyptian and Tunisian leaders requested independence, their appeals went nowhere. Self-determination, it turned out, was reserved for the territories of defeated powers—Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire. The victorious Allies had no plans to give up their own colonial holdings. After 1919, disillusioned anti-colonial leaders increasingly looked toward the Soviet Union and its philosophy of proletarian internationalism as an alternative framework for liberation.
World War I also planted seeds of change in a more direct way. Africans fought and labored in European armies. On the Western Front, African workers were essential to the war effort. African soldiers served in campaigns from Sinai to Palestine. Many weren't permitted to bear arms or serve on equal terms with white soldiers, but they served nonetheless. The sinking of the SS Mendi in 1917 killed 607 Black South Africans—a tragedy that revealed both African sacrifice and African expendability in European eyes.
World War II accelerated everything. Approximately one million sub-Saharan Africans served in European armies in some capacity during that conflict. Some were conscripted, forced into service by colonial regimes. Others enlisted voluntarily, seeking opportunities unavailable in civilian life. Whatever their reasons for serving, these soldiers returned home with new expectations. They had fought for freedom. They had defeated fascism. Now they expected greater respect and self-determination.
Those expectations went largely unfulfilled.
The Atlantic Charter's Broken Promise
In August 1941, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill met to discuss what the world should look like after the war. The resulting Atlantic Charter wasn't a formal treaty—neither the British Parliament nor the American Senate ever ratified it—but it became one of the most influential documents of the twentieth century.
Clause Three was the crucial passage. It affirmed "the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live" and pledged to "see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them."
Anti-colonial politicians immediately recognized the implications. Churchill, realizing his mistake, backpedaled in Parliament, arguing that the document referred only to "the States and nations of Europe now under the Nazi yoke." Roosevelt took the opposite view—he considered the Charter applicable worldwide. The disagreement foreshadowed tensions that would shape the postwar era.
The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights went further, recognizing all people as "born free and equal." In 1960, the United Nations issued its Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, stating explicitly that colonialism was a denial of human rights. The moral architecture supporting European empire was crumbling.
The African Elite
Colonial powers inadvertently cultivated their own opposition. During the 1930s, a small number of African leaders received educations at Western universities. There, they encountered the very ideas—self-determination, democracy, human rights—that would eventually dissolve colonial rule.
These figures became the faces of African nationalism: Kwame Nkrumah in the Gold Coast (later Ghana), Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya, Julius Nyerere in Tanganyika (later Tanzania), Léopold Sédar Senghor in Senegal, Nnamdi Azikiwe in Nigeria, Patrice Lumumba in the Belgian Congo. They were philosophers and organizers, prisoners and prime ministers. They transformed moral arguments into political movements.
World War II itself helped their cause in practical ways. German U-boats prowling the Atlantic disrupted shipping between Africa and Europe. Cut off from metropolitan supplies, local African industries expanded. Urban communities grew. Trade unions formed. Literacy improved. Pro-independence newspapers emerged. The infrastructure of resistance was being built.
By 1945, the Fifth Pan-African Congress demanded an end to colonialism outright. The delegates included future presidents of Ghana, Kenya, and Malawi. The movement had found its voice.
The Economics of Empire's End
European powers emerged from World War II exhausted. Britain was nearly bankrupt. France had been occupied and humiliated. The colonial empires that had seemed permanent just years earlier now appeared unsustainable.
Maintaining control of African colonies required money, soldiers, and political will. Europe had little of any. The resources and manpower of African colonies were needed for postwar reconstruction at home—but so was the capital that colonial administration consumed. The arithmetic no longer worked.
This economic reality enabled African nationalists to negotiate decolonization with surprising speed. When the metropolitan power can't afford to say no, negotiations tend to go quickly. Some territories achieved independence with minimal casualties. Others—Algeria, Kenya, Angola—paid in blood.
Ghana Shows the Way
On March 6, 1957, Ghana became the first sub-Saharan African country to gain independence from European colonization. The Gold Coast, as it was known under British rule, had been at the forefront of African nationalism for over a decade.
Kwame Nkrumah had made his position clear at the 1945 Pan-African Congress: "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."
The path to independence began with a protest march in 1948. Colonial police shot and killed three Ghanaian veterans. Riots erupted in Accra. Nkrumah and other leaders were temporarily imprisoned—but imprisonment only raised their profiles. After his release, Nkrumah founded the Convention People's Party with a simple slogan: "Self Government Now!"
In February 1951, the Convention People's Party, or CPP, won 34 of 38 elected seats in the colonial legislature. One of those seats belonged to Nkrumah—who was still in prison at the time. The British government, recognizing which way the wind was blowing, revised the Gold Coast Constitution to give Ghanaians a legislative majority. In 1956, Ghana requested independence within the Commonwealth. The request was granted peacefully. Nkrumah became prime minister. Queen Elizabeth II remained nominal sovereign.
Ghana's independence electrified the continent. If one African colony could negotiate its freedom peacefully, others could too.
Britain's Retreat
Harold Macmillan's "Wind of Change" speech in 1960 was part warning, part acceptance. He desperately wanted to avoid the kind of colonial war France was fighting in Algeria—a brutal conflict that was tearing France itself apart politically. Under Macmillan's leadership, British decolonization accelerated dramatically. By 1968, nearly all British colonies in Africa had gained independence.
But "nearly all" wasn't all, and the exceptions were violent.
Kenya's independence came only after eight years of the Mau Mau rebellion, an uprising that the British suppressed with concentration camps, torture, and mass executions. In Rhodesia, the white minority government issued a Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965 rather than accept majority rule. The resulting civil war lasted until 1979, when the Lancaster House Agreement finally set terms for recognized independence. The new nation, Zimbabwe, emerged in 1980.
Even now, Britain's African decolonization isn't quite complete. In 2025, Britain signed an agreement transferring sovereignty over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius—though the strategic atoll of Diego Garcia, home to a joint Anglo-American military base, will continue operating under special arrangements.
Belgium's Catastrophic Exit
Belgium controlled territories vastly disproportionate to its size. The Belgian Congo alone was seventy-six times larger than Belgium itself.
The colony's origins were uniquely brutal. Before 1908, the Congo wasn't even a Belgian colony—it was the personal property of King Leopold II. The Congo Free State, as it was called, became synonymous with atrocity. Officials used systematic violence against indigenous Congolese to extract rubber and other resources. International diplomatic pressure finally forced Belgium to take official control, transforming the king's private domain into a national colony.
Belgian rule operated on what officials called the "colonial trinity"—an alliance of state power, missionary activity, and private corporate interests. During the 1940s and 1950s, the Congo experienced rapid urbanization. Belgian administrators aimed to create a "model colony." They succeeded only in creating conditions for explosive decolonization.
A radical pro-independence movement emerged and grew rapidly. Belgium, unprepared and unwilling to fight, granted independence in 1960. The transition was catastrophic. Within days of independence, the army mutinied. The mineral-rich province of Katanga seceded. Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba appealed to both the United Nations and the Soviet Union for help—a decision that made him a target during the Cold War. He was assassinated in January 1961, almost certainly with Belgian and American complicity. The Congo Crisis that followed would destabilize the region for decades.
Belgium's other significant colony, Ruanda-Urundi, had been a German possession until World War I, when it was assigned to Belgium as a League of Nations mandate. Following the Rwandan Revolution, the territory split into two independent nations—Burundi and Rwanda—in 1962. The ethnic tensions that Belgian colonial policy had deliberately inflamed would eventually produce the Rwandan genocide of 1994.
France's Violent Resistance
France's approach to decolonization was contradictory from the start. Charles de Gaulle, who had relied on African colonies as bases for the Free French movement during World War II, felt genuine gratitude toward Africa. At a major conference in Brazzaville in early 1944, he made significant concessions: ending forced labor, eliminating discriminatory legal restrictions, establishing elected territorial assemblies, granting representation in Paris.
But one thing was explicitly rejected: independence. De Gaulle, like most French citizens, remained committed to preserving the empire, even if under a new name. The "French Union," created by the 1946 constitution, nominally replaced the colonial empire but changed little in practice. Officials in Paris remained firmly in control.
France's resistance to decolonization produced some of the era's worst violence. In Algeria, demonstrations in May 1945 were met with mass reprisals—estimates of Algerian dead range from 20,000 to 45,000. In Madagascar, the 1947 uprising was brutally suppressed. The Algerian War of Independence, which lasted from 1954 to 1962, killed hundreds of thousands and nearly toppled the French government itself.
The war in Algeria wasn't just a colonial conflict—it was an existential crisis for France. Unlike other colonies, Algeria was legally considered part of France itself. Over a million European settlers, known as pieds-noirs, lived there. French generals in Algeria eventually attempted a coup against their own government rather than accept Algerian independence. De Gaulle survived, Algeria became independent, and the pieds-noirs fled to France.
Portugal's Long Goodbye
While other European powers were withdrawing from Africa in the 1960s, Portugal held on. The dictatorship in Lisbon refused to contemplate decolonization, viewing its African territories—Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau—as integral parts of Portugal rather than colonies.
The result was prolonged guerrilla warfare. The Angolan War of Independence began in 1961. Similar conflicts erupted in Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau. Portugal, one of Western Europe's poorest countries, poured resources into unwinnable wars while its young men died or fled abroad to avoid conscription.
Portuguese Africa didn't gain independence until 1974-1975, and only because the wars finally brought down the dictatorship itself. The Carnation Revolution of April 1974 overthrew the Portuguese government. The new democratic leadership moved quickly to end the colonial wars. Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau all achieved independence within months—but they inherited countries devastated by years of conflict and immediately plunged into civil wars that lasted decades.
America's Ambiguous Role
The United States occupied an awkward position during African decolonization. American rhetoric celebrated self-determination and freedom. American strategic interests, however, often pointed in the opposite direction.
Historian James Meriweather characterizes American policy as a "middle road approach"—supporting African independence in principle while reassuring European allies that their colonial holdings weren't threatened. Washington wanted the "right type" of African groups to lead newly independent states. By "right type," American policymakers meant anti-communist and not especially democratic.
Cold War considerations shaped everything. When Patrice Lumumba, the Congo's first prime minister, sought Soviet assistance during the chaos following independence, he signed his own death warrant. The Central Intelligence Agency, or CIA, was deeply involved in the events leading to his assassination. Throughout the continent, the United States backed anti-communist leaders regardless of their commitment to democracy or human rights.
American civil society sometimes pushed in different directions. Nongovernmental organizations pressured state governments and private institutions to divest from nations not ruled by their majority populations. These efforts contributed to changing American policy toward South Africa, culminating in the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986—legislation passed over President Reagan's veto.
The Legacy
By 1977, fifty African countries had gained independence from European colonial powers. The map of Africa had been completely redrawn in barely two decades.
But independence didn't mean freedom from exploitation. Colonial borders, drawn without regard for ethnic or cultural realities, remained. Economic structures designed to extract resources for European benefit persisted, now often serving new masters. Cold War rivalries turned newly independent nations into proxy battlegrounds. Military coups became endemic—often backed by former colonial powers or Cold War superpowers.
The leaders who had fought for independence faced impossible challenges. They inherited arbitrary borders, underdeveloped economies, divided populations, and empty treasuries. Some became democrats. Some became dictators. Some were assassinated before they could become either.
What changed was sovereignty—the formal recognition that African peoples had the right to govern themselves, make their own mistakes, and chart their own futures. The colonial assumption that European rule was natural, permanent, and beneficial had been decisively rejected. Whatever came next, Africans would face it as citizens of their own nations rather than subjects of distant empires.
The wind of change that Macmillan described in 1960 had indeed blown through the continent. What it left behind was complicated, often tragic, but undeniably transformed. Africa's nations were young, fragile, and struggling—but they were, finally, Africa's own.