Decolonisation of Africa
The decolonisation of Africa took place in the mid-to-late 1950s to 1975, with sudden and radical regime changes on the continent as colonial governments made the transition to independent states; this was often quite unorganized and marred with violence and political turmoil. There was widespread unrest, with organized revolts in both northern and sub-Saharan colonies including the Algerian War in French Algeria, the Angolan War of Independence in Portuguese Angola, the Congo Crisis in the Belgian Congo, and the Mau Mau Uprising in British Kenya.
Background
The "Scramble for Africa" between 1870 and 1900 ended with almost all of Africa being controlled 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. By 1905, control of almost all African soil was claimed by Western European governments, with the only exceptions being Liberia and Ethiopia. Britain and France had the largest holdings, but Germany, Spain, Italy, Belgium, and Portugal also had colonies. As a result of colonialism and imperialism, a majority of Africa lost sovereignty and control of natural resources such as gold and rubber. The introduction of imperial policies surfacing around local economies led to the failing of local economies due to an exploitation of resources and cheap labor. Progress towards independence was slow up until the mid-20th century. By 1977, 54 African countries had seceded from European colonial rulers.Causes
External causes
During the world wars, African soldiers were conscripted into imperial militaries. This led to a deeper political awareness and the expectation of greater respect and self-determination, which was left largely unfulfilled. During the 1941 Atlantic Conference, the British and the US leaders met to discuss ideas for the post-war world. One of the provisions added by President Roosevelt was that all people had the right to self-determination, inspiring hope in British colonies.On February 12, 1941, United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill met to discuss the postwar 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 provisions, introduced by Roosevelt, was the autonomy of imperial colonies. 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 universal applicability of self-determination for subject nations. He also stated that the Charter was only applicable to German occupied states, not to the British Empire.
Furthermore, colonies such as Nigeria, Senegal and Ghana pushed for self-governance as colonial powers were exhausted by war efforts.
Internal causes
For early African nationalists, decolonisation was a moral imperative. In 1945 the Fifth Pan-African Congress demanded the end of colonialism. Delegates included future presidents of Ghana, Kenya, Malawi and national activists.Colonial economic exploitation led to European extraction of Ghana’s mining profits to shareholders, instead of internal development, causing major local socioeconomic grievances. Nevertheless, local African industry and towns expanded when U-boats patrolling the Atlantic Ocean reduced raw material transportation to Europe. In turn, urban communities, industries and trade unions grew, improving literacy and education, leading to pro-independence newspaper establishments.
Indeed, in the 1930s, the colonial powers had cultivated, sometimes inadvertently, a small elite of leaders educated in Western universities and familiar with ideas such as self-determination. In some cases where the road to independence was fought, settled arrangements with the colonial powers were also being placed. These leaders came to lead the struggles for independence, and included leading nationalists such as Jomo Kenyatta, Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Nnamdi Azikiwe, and Félix Houphouët-Boigny.
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 an adverse and persistent impact of colonialism.The economic legacy of colonialism is difficult to quantify but is likely to have been negative. Modernisation theory emphasises 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 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, Miraftab and Bamgbose 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 has led to conflicts and tensions between African nations.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 for 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.
British Empire
Ghana
On 6 March 1957, Ghana became the first sub-Saharan African country to gain its independence from European colonisation. Starting in 1945 Pan-African Congress, Gold Coast’s British- and American-educated 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 1949, the conflict would ramp up when British troops opened fire on African protesters. Riots broke out across the territory and while Nkrumah and other leaders ended up in prison, the event became a catalyst for the independence movement. After being released from prison, Nkrumah founded the Convention People’s Party, which launched a mass-based campaign for independence with the slogan ‘Self Government Now!’” Heightened nationalism within the country grew their power and the political party widely expanded. In February of 1951, the Convention People's Party gained political power by winning 34 of 38 elected seats, including one for Nkrumah who was imprisoned at the time. London revised the Gold Coast Constitution to give Blacks a majority in the legislature in 1951. In 1956 they 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.
French colonial empire
The French colonial empire began to fall during the Second World War when the Vichy France regime controlled the Empire. But one after another most of the colonies were occupied by foreign powers. However, control was gradually reestablished by Charles de Gaulle, who uses colonial base as a launching point to expel Vichy from Metropolitan France. De Gaulle together with most Frenchmen was committed to preserving the Empire in the 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. There emerged a group of elites, known as evolués, who were natives of the overseas territories but lived in metropolitan France.De Gaulle assembled a major conference of Free France colonies in Brazzaville, in Africa, in January–February, 1944. The survival of France depended on support from these colonies, and De Gaulle made numerous concessions. They included the end of forced labor, the end of special legal restrictions that apply 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:
Conflict
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 another warship bombarding the city. Paul Ramadier's cabinet repressed the Malagasy Uprising in Madagascar in 1947. French officials estimated the number of Malagasy killed from a low of 11,000 to a French Army estimate of 89,000.In France's African colonies, Cameroun, the Union of the Peoples of Cameroon's insurrection, started in 1955 and headed by Ruben Um Nyobé, was violently repressed over a two-year period, with perhaps as many as 100 people killed.
Algeria
French involvement in Algeria stretched back a century. Ferhat Abbas and Messali Hadj's movements had 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". 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 1958, the FLN was able to negotiate peace accord with French President Charles de Gaulle and nearly 90% of all Europeans had left the territory.French Community
The French Union was replaced in the new 1958 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 in the midst of the Algerian War; almost all of the other African colonies were granted independence in 1960, following local referendums. Some few colonies chose instead to remain part of France, under the status of overseas départements. 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, 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.
Timeline
This table is the arranged by the earliest date of independence in this graph; 58 countries have seceded.| Rank | Country | Colonial name | Colonial power | Independence date | First head of state | Independence won through |
| 1 | Liberia | 26 July 1847 | Joseph Jenkins Roberts | Liberian Declaration of Independence | ||
| 2 | Cape Colony Colony of Natal Orange River Colony  Transvaal Colony | 31 May 1910 | Louis Botha | South Africa Act 1909 | ||
| 3 | Sultanate of Egypt | 28 February 1922 | Fuad I | Egyptian revolution of 1919 | ||
| 4 | Italian Eritrea | 10 February 1947 | Haile Selassie | - | ||
| 5 | Italian Libya | 24 December 1951 | Idris | Treaty of Peace with Italy, 1947 U.N. General Assembly Resolution 289 | ||
| 6 | Anglo-Egyptian Sudan | Republic of Egypt | 1 January 1956 | Ismail al-Azhari | - | |
| 7 | Anglo-Egyptian Sudan | Republic of Egypt | 1 January 1956 | Ismail al-Azhari | - | |
| 8 |  French Protectorate of Tunisia | 20 March 1956 | Muhammad VIII al-Amin Habib Bourguiba | - | ||
| 9 |  French Protectorate in MoroccoTangier International Zone Spanish Protectorate in Morocco Spanish West Africa Ifni | 2 March 1956 7 April 1956 10 April 1958 4 January 1969 | Mohammed V | Ifni War | ||
| 10 | 6 March 1957 | Kwame Nkrumah | 1956 Gold Coast legislative election | |||
| 11 | 2 October 1958 | Ahmed Sékou Touré | 1958 Guinean constitutional referendum | |||
| 12 | French Cameroons | 1 January 1960 | Ahmadou Ahidjo | - | ||
| 13 | French Togoland | 27 April 1960 | Sylvanus Olympio | - | ||
| 14 | French West Africa | 20 June 1960 | Modibo Keïta | - | ||
| 15 | French West Africa | 20 June 1960 | Léopold Sédar Senghor | - | ||
| 16 | French Madagascar | 26 June 1960 | Philibert Tsiranana | - | ||
| 17 | 30 June 1960 | Patrice Lumumba | Belgo-Congolese Round Table Conference | |||
| 18 | Trust Territory of Somaliland | 26 June 1960 1 July 1960 | Muhammad Haji Ibrahim Egal Aden Abdullah Osman Daar | - | ||
| 19 | 1 August 1960 | Hubert Maga | - | |||
| 20 | 3 August 1960 | Hamani Diori | - | |||
| 21 | 5 August 1960 | Maurice Yaméogo | - | |||
| 22 | 7 August 1960 | Félix Houphouët-Boigny | - | |||
| 23 | 11 August 1960 | François Tombalbaye | - | |||
| 24 | 13 August 1960 | David Dacko | - | |||
| 25 | 15 August 1960 | Fulbert Youlou | - | |||
| 26 | 17 August 1960 | Léon M'ba | - | |||
| 27 | Colony and Protectorate of Nigeria British Cameroons | 1 October 1960 1 June 1961 1 October 1961 | Nnamdi Azikiwe | - | ||
| 28 | 28 November 1960 | Moktar Ould Daddah | - | |||
| 29 | Colony and Protectorate of Sierra Leone | 27 April 1961 | Milton Margai | - | ||
| 30 | Tanganyika Territory | 9 December 1961 | Julius Nyerere | - | ||
| 31 | Ruanda-Urundi | 1 July 1962 | Mwambutsa IV of Burundi | - | ||
| 32 | Ruanda-Urundi | 1 July 1962 | Grégoire Kayibanda | Rwandan Revolution | ||
| 33 | French Algeria | 5 July 1962 | Ahmed Ben Bella | Algerian War Évian Accords | ||
| 34 | Protectorate of Uganda | 9 October 1962 | Milton Obote | - | ||
| 35 | Colony and Protectorate of Kenya | 12 December 1963 | Jomo Kenyatta | - | ||
| 36 | Sultanate of Zanzibar | Sultanate of Zanzibar | 10 December 1963 | Jamshid bin Abdullah | - | |
| 37 | 6 July 1964 | Hastings Banda | - | |||
| 38 | 24 October 1964 | Kenneth Kaunda | - | |||
| 39 | Gambia Colony and Protectorate | 18 February 1965 | Dawda Jawara | - | ||
| 40 | ' | 11 November 1965 17 April 1980 | Ian Smith Robert Mugabe | Rhodesia's Unilateral Declaration of Independence Lancaster House Agreement | ||
| 41 | Bechuanaland Protectorate | 30 September 1966 | Seretse Khama | - | ||
| 42 | Territory of Basutoland | 4 October 1966 | Leabua Jonathan | - | ||
| 43 | Mauritius | 12 March 1968 | Seewoosagur Ramgoolam | - | ||
| 44 | Swaziland | 6 September 1968 | Sobhuza II | - | ||
| 45 | Spanish Territories of the Gulf of Guinea | 12 October 1968 | Francisco Macías Nguema | - | ||
| 46 | Overseas Province of Guinea | 10 September 1974 | Luís Cabral | Guinea-Bissau War of Independence | ||
| 47 | State of Mozambique | 25 June 1975 | Samora Machel | Mozambican War of Independence | ||
| 48 | Overseas Province of Cape Verde | 5 July 1975 | Aristides Pereira | Guinea-Bissau War of Independence | ||
| 49 | French Comoros | 6 July 1975 | Ahmed Abdallah | 1974 Comorian independence referendum | ||
| 50 | Overseas Province of São Tomé and Príncipe | 12 July 1975 | Manuel Pinto da Costa | - | ||
| 51 | State of Angola | 11 November 1975 | Agostinho Neto | Angolan War of Independence | ||
| 52 | Seychelles | 29 June 1976 | James Mancha | - | ||
| 53 | French Territory of the Afars and the Issas | 27 June 1977 | Hassan Gouled Aptidon | 1977 Afars and Issas independence referendum | ||
| 54 | ' | Spanish Sahara Southern Provinces | 27 February 1976 independence not yet effectuated | El-Ouali Mustapha Sayed Mohamed Abdelaziz | Western Sahara War Western Sahara conflict | |
| 55 | 21 March 1990 | Sam Nujoma | U.N. Security Council Resolution 269 South African Border War |