In the 1950s, the colonialists felt the wind of change blowing over Africa. They realised that despite their best efforts they would not hold the boot pressed on the African’s throat indefinitely. Capitalism has a tin ear for the hoi poloi, so the colonialist chameleon changed colour and “magnanimously” granted independence to 90 percent of the colonies in Africa in a period from 1956 to 1970. There were a few holdouts in Southern Rhodesia, South Africa, South West Africa, Angola and Mozambique.

But what factors and pressures led to abandonement of colonialism “granting” independence and adopting neocolonialism? For sure it was not because of a Road-to-Damascus-like epiphany, nope.

The reasons below, forced the colonialists to grant independence to their long-suffering African dominions.

1. Exposure to high standard of living in Europe by African soldiers
2. Diminished fear of the white man
3. Non-violent pressure from Africans
4. Violent pressure from Africans

 

THE 20th CENTURY WORLD WARS

WORLD WAR I — WWI

In Africa the duelling Europeans fought pitched battles trying to take over “each others land.” The French, British, German, Belgian and Portuguese had arrogated themselves vast stretches of land in Africa. As WWI broke out the British, French, Belgian and Portuguese on one hand fought vicious battles with the Germans, in Africa to expand their colonial reach. Guess what, the Europeans used hundreds of thousands of African soldiers to fight these proxy wars, and hundreds of thousands of Africans fought each other and died, on behalf of their colonisers. The Germans even used scorched earth tactics against Africans deemed to be in the enemy camp. This forced sacrifice fuelled serious resentment in Africans.

Apart from the Africans fighting on Africa, others, especially from French colonies, fought in Europe. After the war, Africans returning to their home countries were changed men. Changed not just by the war, but also by the living standards they had been exposed to. And as they watched the white soldiers beside them die or pee or shit on themselves the Africans realised that the whites were just mortal beings like them. Some of the fear of white people began to dissipate.

 

 

WORLD WAR TWO — WWII

• In 1942, Churchill and Roosevelt signed the Atlantic Charter, supporting the right of all people to freedom and the right to choose their own government. After the war, Britain’s Churchill, a member of Galton’s Eugenics Society, and consistently voted by the British as the greatest Briton ever, recanted on the Atlantic Charter. Churchill insisted that what the Charter meant was that only the European nations had this right to freedom and the right to choose their own destiny, and not Africans and other dominions of the British Empire. He believed earnestly that this right should not be extended to Africans. This was after hundreds of thousands – if not millions of Africans – died for the cause of the Allies. Churchill saw this sacrifice of African blood as meant for the white man’s benefit and not for the Africans! It is baffling for such an apparently great thinker to sink so low. On deeper reflection, perhaps it is not so baffling, as Churchill was a member of a eugenics society and an overt racist. To Churchill, Africans were good enough to shed blood for the Empire but were not good enough to sup with at the same table. To Africans, this betrayal was painful and fed into the gathering Wind of Change.
• Roosevelt and the Americans, to their credit, were having none of that and told Churchill so. Uncle Sam had also inserted in the Atlantic Charter that there should be free access to all lands and all peoples of the world. This was with an eye, no doubt, for the USA to have access, after the war, to markets and resources that were by then sewn up by the countries with colonies. It is fair to assume that both the British and the French must have been mightily relieved when Roosevelt, fondly known as FDR by Americans, suddenly died of a stroke in April 1945. For Churchill and Charles de Gaulle, what was sauce for the goose was obviously not sauce for the gander! Churchill had said, and I quote: History shall be fair to me because I shall write the damn history myself! Well, other people are now researching and writing his racist history.
• The Africans fighting all over the world in WWII — in hundreds of thousands from Sub-Sahara Africa and up to one million four hundred thousand if the North Africans are included — ended up with expectations once they learnt of what other areas like India were expecting after the war. When they returned to their countries, all they got was short thrift. They had poor war pensions, and only a few jobs were available. They got poor wages if they got jobs, and all around was discrimination, discrimination, discrimination! Overall, the Africans’ sacrifice did not seem to have been appreciated by the Allies. As a result, an unstoppable groundswell of discontent led to the further fueling of the famous wind of change.
• Like in WWI, in WWII, during combat all over the globe, the Africans saw that the white men who terrorised them in Africa were just ordinary human beings. Things were never the same again as some of the shine definitely wore off the invincibility of the white man. The Japanese experienced a similar revelation. After defeating the Europeans decisively in the early stages of WWII, the fear and respect the Japanese had for the Europeans evaporated. They knew that they could stand up to them. Up to now, this has given the Asians confidence that the Africans lacked when dealing with the white man.

 

 

PART II

 

• After WWII, Africans coming back from Abyssinia — now Ethiopia — were puzzled to have been made by the British to fight and die to free Africans from Italian misrule, so they could rule themselves. But, when they went back to their home countries, these African soldiers were still under British colonial rule! This created disenchantment.
• After WWII calls for independence or more freedom all over Africa increased exponentially. The talk of independence surreptitiously took on a life of its own and loomed larger and larger in the minds of the Africans who had gleaned life on the other side of the cultural and geographical divide. On realising that for their independence, the Africans were prepared to take the bit between their teeth, the major powers of Britain and France dealt with the problem differently.
  • France opted for incorporating a few Africans in their National Assembly in Paris and gave some powers to local elites in both French West Africa, French Equatorial Africa and French North Africa. This led to some prominent Africans – nick named Afropeans – like Félix Houphouët-Boigny of Ivory Coast and Léopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal – becoming ministers in the French government. Senghor became a super-assimilés, even writing poems in French. Mauritania was ruled from Senegal while Morocco and Tunisia had some minor freedoms. Algeria was considered part of France. Christians ruling the Moslem majority in North Africa led eventually to massive revolts. Only a few locals in these Muslim majority countries in the North considered French rule acceptable. The result was inevitable: mounting violence from both sides, one to keep the hegemony, the other to remove the shackles of colonial rule.
  • Britain opted for ignoring the rising tide of nationalism. In Kenya and the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, they used hard power. The discontent in Kenya over land and agricultural policies reached such pernicious heights as to lead to a full-scale rebellion, the Mau Mau uprising from 1952 to 1960. This led to a massive show of strength and abuse of due process by the British. There was torture and executions of freedom fighters, leaving a permanent stain on the fabled British character of fair play. Between 50,000 – 80,000 troops and police were used to fight the Mau Mau rebellion. Many thousands of Africans, both loyalists (to Britain) and ordinary Kenyans, were caught-up in the cross-fire, as were some white residents. This violent fight back by Africans had Whitehall rethinking their colonial enterprise as the Wind of Change gathered galeforce strength.
  • Rhodesia and Nyasaland – The three countries of Nyasaland, Northern Rhodesia and Southern Rhodesia were forcibly combined into one in 1953. The headquarters was in  Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia. All the natives rebelled against this union. Eventually, the cost of trying to enforce the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland was too high for Britain. The whites wanted to retain white supremacy, at the same time pretending to formulate a Black-White partnership. That did not fool the Africans.
  • The Africans in the Federation were wary of the colonial office handing over control of the colonies to the hard-core racists based in Salisbury in Southern Rhodesia. The Rhodesian whites were only interested in one thing, and one thing only. As the first Federation Prime Minister, Godfrey Martin Huggins (Later Lord Malvern), famously put it: a relationship like that of ‘the rider and a horse’. No marks for guessing who the horse was supposed to be and who was to be the rider. An American defender of slavery, George Fitzhugh, said ‘some men are born with saddles on their backs and others booted and spurred to ride them, and the riding does them good’
• As the Hurricane of Change made landfall Britain  granted Independence to Sudan in 1956, then in 1957, it started to let go of its Sub-Sahara African colonies, starting with the Gold Coast, now known as Ghana. In 1960, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, after touring Ghana, Nigeria, Southern Rhodesia and South Africa, formally acknowledged ‘the wind of change blowing through Africa and the need to take this into consideration’. In the space of a decade, all the British African colonies gained their independence, except Southern Rhodesia.

PART III

• France, meanwhile, let go of Tunisia and Morocco in 1956. After a referendum in 1957, the Afrique-Noire countries formed a union under Charles de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic. Guinea Conakry was the only country that opted out of the union. De Gaulle was furious, and Guinea was immediately hung out to dry. The French withdrew all support and ordered all civil servants to leave within 3 days of the decision not to be tied to France. The French then destroyed as much soft and hard infrastructure as they could. They even took drugs from hospitals! That’s how petulantly civilised they behaved. The French then gave the Guineans a hospital pass type of independence. The Guinean leader, Sekou Toure, sought help from the Soviet Union.
• All the other French African colonies joined a union with France in which the French sent civil servants, and French presidential aides to help African leaders. In these countries, France also controlled defence, foreign affairs, and the economy, with the French franc as the currency in use. The African leaders of these countries were mostly admirers of the French civilisation, more interested in power, wealth and status than in the well-being of their African peoples. This union or community lasted only 2 years. After that, there was more agitation until France too started giving independence to its Afrique-Noire – Black-Africa – colonies starting from 1960.
• After deciding to hold on to Algeria in 1953, and declaring it a part of France, the country descended into internecine violence. By 1962, the violence had led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Algerians, thousands of French troops, and thousands of colons or French colonists. Eventually, the French realised that the cost of keeping Algeria was too high, and they withdrew honourably. This they did, by destroying as much of the hard and soft infrastructure as they could. This act mirrored their petulant actions in Guinea Conakry, and once again showed their true civility and civilisation credentials
• For Algeria, Angola, South West Africa, Mozambique, Southern Rhodesia, and South Africa, the colonialists did not heed the wind of change and ended up with more like a cloud of poisonous gas that left mayhem and death in its wake. In total, the freedom struggles in these countries cost millions of lives before independence was ‘granted’: 1962 for Algeria, 1975 for Angola and Mozambique, 1980 for Zimbabwe, 1990 for Namibia and 1994 for South Africa.
• Egypt, meanwhile, had been nominally free, under an Ottoman khedive and later kings. But real power was shared between the French and the British, until around 1885. In this year the French were dribbled, and the British retained overall control. The French were mighty upset, because this British manoeuvre was for the control of the Suez Canal, opened in 1869. France and French capital supported the building of the Suez Canal. When first mooted, the British had thought the canal was not a very viable venture. When it opened, the British were the main beneficiaries with their trade with the Asian countries. Then the British outmanoeuvred France to control Egypt on their own, an act of betrayal, according to the French. When the British were unhappy with a decision of the Egyptian government, they would force the issue. On several occasions, the British representatives in Egypt took a letter of resignation to the king, for him to sign on the famous dotted line and resign. In all cases, the king capitulated and did what the British wanted, otherwise he would have been forced to abdicate. Eventually, discontent in Egypt led to a coup that removed King Farouk, an inveterate gambler and womaniser, and ushered in military rule under Gamal Abdel Nasser.
• Sudan was quilted together by Britain from the Arab north and the black south. This was after Britain refused the desire by Egypt for the country to be given to it to exploit. Up to now, the British pretend not to know why they left the Africans to continue being enslaved by the Arabs in the new Sudan. But we historians know that this is something the British had done to black Africans in South Africa, in Southern Rhodesia, and in Nigeria: left them at the mercy of their sworn enemies. These enemies of the Africans were the Afrikaners in South Africa and the Brits in Southern Rhodesia. In a similar feat of reckless disregard for African lives, the British left the Muslims of Northern Nigeria to fight it out with the Christian South and the Anglophone Cameroonians to battle it out with the Francophone Cameroonians. All these poor, inconsiderate – and some would argue deliberate – decisions by Colonial Britain has led, and continues to lead, to the deaths of millions of Africans. Add to this litany of betrayals that of the Negroes who were left by the Brits to be re-enslaved by Americans after fighting for the Crown in the American Revolution
• Sudan was especially brutal, with the Arabs there issuing fatwas for Muslim soldiers to kill black Africans. Their mantra was: ‘Aktul ab-ibid; bil abid,’ meaning ‘kill the slave through the slave’. They proceeded to do this by fomenting divisions among black African Sudanese. The Arab Sudanese would arm some factions to ensure that this killing was done. Up to date, in the 21st Century, this is what the Arab Sundanese practise
• Black Africans being left to the mercy of slaving Arabs in Sudan was, therefore, par for the course for British behaviour regarding black Africans.
• When Independence came, a bit sooner than the colonialists and the colonised had thought, few, if any, African governments could be said to have hit the ground running. Nearly all depended on a multitude of colonial left-over civil servants and senior military personnel for several years. Some, like Guinea Conakry, hit the ground tottering after France pulled the plug and hoped that the country would go down the drain. An African country turning down the hand of the great Charlie de Gaulle, was unacceptable!

So, there were many factors that made the colonial powers to hasten the granting of independence to their African colonies. The Europeans did not do this because of the love they had for their colonized Africans; NO. They were forced to. But in the process, they plotted and from their stronger position, they made African countries give numerous concessions in order to be free.