

African independence in 1960


Freedom from empire: an assessment of postcolonial Africa


A giant billboard in Kinshasa proudly proclaims the 50th anniversary of the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s independence from Belgium as a crowd of Congolese spectators watch a military parade in June 2010 commemorating the occasion.Dai Kurokawa—EPA/LandovA 50-m (164-ft) bronze statue of a man, woman, and child—intended as a monument to Africa’s renaissance—is unveiled in Dakar, Senegal, in April 2010 as part of the celebration of the 50th anniversary of Senegal’s independence from France.Rebecca Blackwell/APThe currency of the tag postcolonial as a cognomen for countries that once laboured under various forms of European colonial rule tends to obscure the fact that it is at the same time a hotly disputed label. Scholars who embrace it (which is not to say that they are not at the same time critical of it) argue that it is a convenient term for referring to those societies (whether in Africa, Asia, or Latin America) that, being former colonies, continue in different ways to display the imprints of European colonialism. To deploy postcolonial in this sense is to account for the subsisting maladies in those places against the background of the exceptional severity of the colonial impact. At the same time, those who refuse to touch the term with a barge pole insist, no doubt with some merit, that behind what is presented as an innocent attempt at periodization often lurks a derogatory tendency to totalize those societies in an apparent attempt to describe the unique pathologies that they are presumed to embody. In this alternative sense, postcolonial refers not merely to the simple fact that a group of countries share certain characteristics on account of their status as former colonies; it is about the seeming intractability of those problems because they are rooted in a vaguely defined postcolonial culture.




Ghanaian Pres. Kwame Nkrumah, who was known for his eloquent oratory, addresses a White House press conference on March 8, 1961, after meeting with U.S. Pres. John F. Kennedy to discuss the prospects of Ghana and other newly independent African countries.APKwame Nkrumah, 1962.Marc and Evelyne Bernheim/Woodfin Camp and AssociatesAt the dawn of independence in these countries, the thrill of autonomous nationhood was matched by the anticipation of material elevation. There was understandable expectation that political freedom would translate into instant economic dividends. The giddiness of those days was most famously rendered in the soaring rhetoric of Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, who boldly proclaimed that once African countries realized “the political kingdom” for which they had so valiantly struggled, it was only a matter of time before “all things shall be added.”









Members of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta arm themselves in preparation for an operation against the Nigerian army in September 2008.Utomi Ekpai—AFP/Getty ImagesBut the pattern in South Africa—of stupendous poverty in the midst of plenty—is hardly unique. The pattern is the sociological backdrop to the angry militarism of young “emancipation fighters” in the oil-producing Niger Delta, the material underpinning of the turn to religious essentialism on sundry college campuses across western Africa, and easily the most important factor behind the ceaseless hemorrhage of highly skilled people from every region of the continent to Europe, North America, and increasingly Asia.


Reflections from 1960




March Toward Independence








The Congo






Other developments







(W. So.)

Key players in 1960

The following list includes selected biographies of individuals who were champions of African nationalism or were involved in the governing of the newly independent African countries in 1960.

Table of African independence dates

This table provides a list of African countries and the year in which they achieved independence.

African independence dates
country year of formation
or independence
Algeria 1962
Angola 1975
Benin 1960
Botswana 1966
Burkina Faso 1960
Burundi 19621
Cameroon 19602
Cape Verde 1975
Central African Republic 1960
Chad 1960
Comoros 1975
Congo, Democratic Republic of the 1960
Congo, Republic of the 1960
Côte d’Ivoire 1960
Djibouti 1977
Egypt 19223
Equatorial Guinea 1968
Eritrea 1993
Ethiopia 4
Gabon 1960
Gambia, The 1965
Ghana 1957
Guinea 1958
Guinea-Bissau 1974
Kenya 1963
Lesotho 1966
Liberia 18475
Libya 1951
Madagascar 1960
Malawi 1964
Mali 1960
Mauritania 1960
Mauritius 1968
Morocco 19566
Mozambique 1975
Namibia 1990
Niger 1960
Nigeria 1960
Rwanda 19627
Sao Tome and Principe 1975
Senegal 1960
Seychelles 1976
Sierra Leone 1961
Somalia 1960
South Africa 19108
Sudan 1956
Swaziland 1968
Tanzania 19619
Togo 1960
Tunisia 1956
Uganda 1962
Western Sahara 10
Zambia 1964
Zimbabwe 198011
1The kingdom of Burundi came under colonial rule in the late 19th century. Independence was regained in 1962.
2French Cameroun gained independence in 1960 and was joined by the southern portion of British Cameroons in 1961; the northern portion of British Cameroons joined with Nigeria in 1961.
3Egypt is one of the world’s oldest continuous civilizations, spanning many millennia. Throughout its vast and varied history, it has enjoyed independence as well as been subject to other ruling powers. The kingdom of Egypt was declared in 1922, although it was still subject to the influence of Great Britain, its former colonial administrator. It was replaced by the modern-day republic in 1952.
4One of the world’s oldest countries, Ethiopia maintained its independence until the 20th century, when it was briefly occupied by Italy (1936–41).
5Liberia is the only black state in Africa that was never subjected to colonial rule. It was declared an independent republic in 1847.
6The Kingdom of Morocco regained independence from France in 1956; Spanish possessions were returned to Morocco in 1956, 1958, and 1969.
7The kingdom of Rwanda came under colonial rule in the late 19th century. Independence was regained in 1962.
8The Union of South Africa, a dominion within the British Commonwealth that was ruled by the country’s white minority, was formed in 1910. Black majority rule was achieved in a new, nonracial government in 1994.
9Tanzania was formed as a sovereign state in 1964 through the union of the theretofore separate states of Tanganyika (independent in 1961) and Zanzibar (independent in 1963).
10Western Sahara is claimed by neighbouring Morocco, although that claim is not internationally recognized. In 1976 the Polisario Front (a group of the Western Sahara’s indigenous inhabitants fighting for independence) declared a government-in-exile of what it called the Saharan Arab Democratic Republic.
11Zimbabwe’s white minority government unilaterally declared independence from Great Britain in 1965, but Great Britain did not accept it. Independence was granted with black majority rule in 1980.

Colonial presence in Africa: a brief background

The following selection is taken from Britannica’s article on Western colonialism.

Partition of Africa

Map of Africa from the 10th edition of Encyclopædia Britannica, published in 1902.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.By the turn of the 20th century, the map of Africa looked like a huge jigsaw puzzle, with most of the boundary lines having been drawn in a sort of game of give-and-take played in the foreign offices of the leading European powers. The division of Africa, the last continent to be so carved up, was essentially a product of the new imperialism, vividly highlighting its essential features. In this respect, the timing and the pace of the scramble for Africa are especially noteworthy. Before 1880 colonial possessions in Africa were relatively few and limited to coastal areas, with large sections of the coastline and almost all of the interior still independent. By 1900 Africa was almost entirely divided into separate territories that were under the administration of European nations. The only exceptions were Liberia, generally regarded as being under the special protection of the United States; Morocco, conquered by France a few years later; Libya, later taken over by Italy; and Ethiopia.

The second feature of the new imperialism was also strongly evident. It was in Africa that Germany made its first major bid for membership in the club of colonial powers: between May 1884 and February 1885, Germany announced its claims to territory in South West Africa (now Namibia), Togoland, Cameroon, and part of the East African coast opposite Zanzibar. Two smaller nations, Belgium and Italy, also entered the ranks, and even Portugal and Spain once again became active in bidding for African territory. The increasing number of participants in itself sped up the race for conquest. And with the heightened rivalry came more intense concern for preclusive occupation, increased attention to military arguments for additional buffer zones, and, in a period when free trade was giving way to protective tariffs and discriminatory practices in colonies as well as at home, a growing urgency for protected overseas markets. Not only the wish but also the means were at hand for this carving up of the African pie. Repeating rifles, machine guns, and other advances in weaponry gave the small armies of the conquering nations the effective power to defeat the much larger armies of the peoples of Africa. Rapid railroad construction provided the means for military, political, and economic consolidation of continental interiors. With the new steamships, settlers and materials could be moved to Africa with greater dispatch, and bulk shipments of raw materials and food from Africa, prohibitively costly for some products in the days of the sailing ship, became economically feasible and profitable.

Penetration of Islamic North Africa was complicated, on the one hand, by the struggle among European powers for control of the Mediterranean Sea and, on the other hand, by the suzerainty that the Ottoman Empire exercised to a greater or lesser extent over large sections of the region. Developments in both respects contributed to the wave of partition toward the end of the 19th century. First, Ottoman power was perceptibly waning: the military balance had tipped decisively in favour of the European nations, and Turkey was becoming increasingly dependent on loans from European centres of capital (in the late 1870s Turkey needed half of its government income just to service its foreign debt). Second, the importance of domination of the Mediterranean increased significantly after the Suez Canal was opened in 1869.

France was the one European nation that had established a major beachhead in Islamic North Africa before the 1880s. At a time when Great Britain was too preoccupied to interfere, the French captured the fortress of Algiers in 1830. Frequent revolts kept the French Army busy in the Algerian interior for another 50 years before all Algeria was under full French rule. While Tunisia and Egypt had been areas of great interest to European powers during the long period of France’s Algerian takeover, the penetration of these countries had been informal, confined to diplomatic and financial maneuvers. Italy, as well as France and England, had loaned large sums to the ruling beys of Tunisia to help loosen that country’s ties with Turkey. The inability of the beys to service the foreign debt in the 1870s led to the installation of debt commissioners by the lenders. Tunisia’s revenues were pledged to pay the interest due on outstanding bonds; in fact, the debt charges had first call on the government’s income. With this came increased pressure on the people for larger tax payments and a growing popular dissatisfaction with a government that had “sold out” to foreigners. The weakness of the ruling group, intensified by the danger of popular revolt or a military coup, opened the door further for formal occupation by one of the interested foreign powers. When Italy’s actions showed that it might be preparing for outright possession, France jumped the gun by invading Tunisia in 1881 and then completed its conquest by defeating the rebellions precipitated by this occupation.

The Europeans in North Africa

The course of Egypt’s loss of sovereignty resembled somewhat the same process in Tunisia: easy credit extended by Europeans, bankruptcy, increasing control by foreign-debt commissioners, mulcting of the peasants to raise revenue for servicing the debt, growing independence movements, and finally military conquest by a foreign power. In Egypt, inter-imperialist rivalry, mainly between Great Britain and France, reached back to the early 19th century but was intensified under the circumstances of the new imperialism and the construction of the Suez Canal. By building the Suez Canal and financing Egypt’s ruling group, France had gained a prominent position in Egypt. But Britain’s interests were perhaps even more pressing because the Suez Canal was a strategic link to its empire and its other Eastern trade and colonial interests. The successful nationalist revolt headed by the Egyptian army imminently threatened in the 1880s the interests of both powers. France, occupied with war in Tunisia and with internal political problems, did not participate in the military intervention to suppress the revolt. Great Britain bombarded Alexandria in 1882, landed troops, and thus obtained control of Egypt. Unable to find a stable collaborationist government that would also pay Egypt’s debts and concerned with suppressing not only the rebellion but also a powerful anti-Egyptian Mahdist revolt in the Sudan, Britain completely took over the reins of government in Egypt.

The rest of North Africa was carved up in the early 20th century. France, maneuvering for possession of Morocco, which bordered on its Algerian colony, tried to obtain the acquiescence of the other powers by both secret and open treaties granting Italy a free hand in Libya, allotting to Spain a sphere of influence, and acknowledging Britain’s paramountcy in Egypt. France had, however, overlooked Germany’s ambitions, now backed by an increasingly effective army and navy. The tension created by Germany led to an international conference at Algeciras (1906), which produced a short-lived compromise, including recognition of France’s paramount interest, Spanish participation in policing Morocco, and an open door for the country’s economic penetration by other nations. But France’s vigorous pursuit of its claims, reinforced by the occupation of Casablanca and surrounding territory, precipitated critical confrontations, which reached their peak in 1911 when French troops were suppressing a Moroccan revolt and a German cruiser appeared before Agadir in a show of force. The resulting settlements completed the European partition of North Africa: France obtained the lion’s share of Morocco; in return, Germany received a large part of the French Congo; Italy was given the green light for its war with Turkey over control of Tripoli, the first step in its eventual acquisition of Libya; and Spain was enabled to extend its Río de Oro protectorate to the southern frontier of Morocco. The more or less peaceful trade-offs by the occupying powers differed sharply from the long, bitter, and expensive wars they waged against the indigenous peoples and rulers of Islamic North Africa to solidify European rule.

The race for colonies in sub-Saharan Africa

The partition of Africa below the Sahara took place at two levels: (1) on paper—in deals made among colonial powers who were seeking colonies partly for the sake of the colonies themselves and partly as pawns in the power play of European nations struggling for world dominance—and (2) in the field—in battles of conquest against African states and tribes and in military confrontations among the rival powers themselves. This process produced, over and above the ravages of colonialism, a wasp’s nest of problems that was to plague African nations long after they achieved independence. Boundary lines between colonies were often drawn arbitrarily, with little or no attention to ethnic unity, regional economic ties, tribal migratory patterns, or even natural boundaries.

Before the race for partition, only three European powers—France, Portugal, and Britain—had territory in tropical Africa, located mainly in western Africa. Only France had moved into the interior along the Sénégal River. The other French colonies or spheres of influence were located along the Ivory Coast (now Côte d’Ivoire) and in Dahomey (now Benin) and Gabon. Portugal held on to some coastal points in Angola, Mozambique (Moçambique), and Portuguese Guinea (now Guinea-Bissau). While Great Britain had a virtual protectorate over Zanzibar in East Africa, its actual possessions were on the west coast in the Gambia, the Gold Coast, and the Sierra Leone—all of them surrounded by African states that had enough organization and military strength to make the British hesitate about further expansion. Meanwhile, the ground for eventual occupation of the interior of tropical Africa was being prepared by explorers, missionaries, and traders. But such penetration remained tenuous until the construction of railroads and the arrival of steamships on navigable waterways made it feasible for European merchants to dominate the trade of the interior and for European governments to consolidate conquests.

Once conditions were ripe for the introduction of railroads and steamships in western Africa, tensions between the English and French increased as each country tried to extend its sphere of influence. As customs duties, the prime source of colonial revenue, could be evaded in uncontrolled ports, both powers began to stretch their coastal frontiers, and overlapping claims and disputes soon arose. The commercial penetration of the interior created additional rivalry and set off a chain reaction. The drive for exclusive control over interior areas intensified in response to both economic competition and the need for protection from African states resisting foreign intrusion. This drive for African possessions was intensified by the new entrants to the colonial race who felt menaced by the possibility of being completely locked out.

Perhaps the most important stimulants to the scramble for colonies south of the Sahara were the opening up of the Congo River basin by Belgium’s king Leopold II and Germany’s energetic annexationist activities on both the east and west coasts. As the dash for territory began to accelerate, 15 nations convened in Berlin in 1884 for the West African Conference, which, however, merely set ground rules for the ensuing intensified scramble for colonies. It also recognized the Congo Free State (now Congo [Kinshasa]) ruled by King Leopold, while insisting that the rivers in the Congo basin be open to free trade. From his base in the Congo, the king subsequently took over mineral-rich Katanga region, transferring both territories to Belgium in 1908.

European penetration into western Africa in the late 19th century.From J. Fage, An Atlas of African History; Edward Arnold (Publishers) Ltd.In western Africa, Germany concentrated on consolidating its possessions of Togoland and Cameroon (Kamerun), while England and France pushed northward and eastward from their bases: England concentrated on the Niger region, the centre of its commercial activity, while France aimed at joining its possessions at Lake Chad within a grand design for an empire of contiguous territories from Algeria to the Congo. Final boundaries were arrived at after the British had defeated, among others, the Ashanti, the Fanti Confederation, the Opobo kingdom, and the Fulani; and the French won wars against the Fon kingdom, the Tuareg, the Mandingo, and other resisting tribes. The boundaries determined by conquest and agreement between the conquerors gave France the lion’s share: in addition to the extension of its former coastal possessions, France acquired French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa, while Britain carved out its Nigerian colony.

European penetration into Southern Africa in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.In Southern Africa, the intercolonial rivalries chiefly involved the British, the Portuguese, the South African Republic of the Transvaal, the British-backed Cape Colony, and the Germans. The acquisitive drive was enormously stimulated by dreams of wealth generated by the discovery of diamonds in Griqualand West and gold in Matabeleland. Encouraged by these discoveries, Cecil Rhodes (heading the British South Africa Company) and other entrepreneurs expected to find gold, copper, and diamonds in the regions surrounding the Transvaal, among them Bechuanaland, Matabeleland, Mashonaland, and Trans-Zambezia. In the ensuing struggle, which involved the conquest of the Nbele and Shona peoples, Britain obtained control over Bechuanaland and, through the British South Africa Company, over the areas later designated as the Rhodesias and Nyasaland. At the same time, Portugal moved inland to seize control over the colony of Mozambique. It was clearly the rivalries of stronger powers, especially the concern of Germany and France over the extension of British rule in southern Africa, that enabled a weak Portugal to have its way in Angola and Mozambique.

Eastern Africa as partitioned by the imperial powers, c. 1914.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.The boundary lines in East Africa were arrived at largely in settlements between Britain and Germany, the two chief rivals in that region. Zanzibar and the future Tanganyika were divided in the Anglo-German treaty of 1890: Britain obtained the future Uganda and recognition of its paramount interest in Zanzibar and Pemba in exchange for ceding the strategic North Sea island of Heligoland (Helgoland) and noninterference in Germany’s acquisitions in Tanganyika, Rwanda, and Urundi. Britain began to build an East African railroad to the coast, establishing the East African Protectorate (later Kenya) over the area where the railroad was to be built.

Rivalry in northeastern Africa between the French and British was based on domination of the upper end of the Nile. Italy had established itself at two ends of Ethiopia, in an area on the Red Sea that the Italians called Eritrea and in Italian Somaliland along the Indian Ocean. Italy’s inland thrust led to war with Ethiopia and defeat at the hands of the Ethiopians at Adwa in 1896. Ethiopia, surrounded by Italian and British armies, had turned to French advisers. The unique victory by an African state over a European army strengthened French influence in Ethiopia and enabled France to stage military expeditions from Ethiopia as well as from the Congo in order to establish footholds on the Upper Nile. The resulting race between British and French armies ended in a confrontation at Fashoda in 1898, with the British army in the stronger position. War was narrowly avoided in a settlement that completed the partition of the region: eastern Sudan was to be ruled jointly by Britain and Egypt, while France was to have the remaining Sudan from the Congo and Lake Chad to Darfur.

Germany’s entrance into southern Africa through occupation and conquest of South West Africa touched off an upsurge of British colonial activity in that area, notably the separation of Basutoland (Lesotho) as a crown colony from the Cape Colony and the annexation of Zululand. As a consequence of the South African (Boer) War (1899–1902) Britain obtained sovereignty over the Transvaal and the Afrikaner Orange Free State.


North Africa

The following selection was taken from Britannica’s article on North Africa.

Idris ICentral Press/Pictorial ParadeHabib Bourguiba.StuartWorld War II brought major changes to North Africa, promoting the cause of national independence. A reaction to years of colonialism had set in and was erupting into strong nationalist tendencies in each of the four countries of the region. The Sanūsī leader Sīdī Muḥammad Idrīs al-Mahdī al-Sanūsī, exiled in Cairo during the war, was restored to power in Cyrenaica by the British and became King Idris I of a united Libya in 1951. Tunisian nationalism formally emerged with the influential Young Tunisians in 1907. It developed further when the Destour (Constitution) Party was founded in 1920 and the Neo-Destour Party under Habib Bourguiba in 1934. In Morocco the strong nationalist movement of the 1930s culminated in the foundation of the Independence (Istiqlāl) Party in 1943. In Algeria the French refusal of demands for French citizenship by the reform-minded Young Algerians cleared the way for the radical separatist movement of Ahmed Messali Hadj and the Arab Islamic nationalist movement of Sheik ʿAbd al-Hamid Ben Badis. After the war the French were on the defensive, conceding independence to Tunisia and Morocco in 1956 in order to concentrate their efforts on Algeria, where a full-scale rebellion led by the National Liberation Front (FLN) broke out in 1954. This prolonged and costly “savage war of peace” led to Algerian independence in 1962 and, afterward, to the mass exodus of Algeria’s European population.

The discovery of oil in Libya in the 1950s presaged further transformations there. The Libyan monarchy was overthrown by a military coup in 1969 and replaced by the popular republicanism of Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi. Oil also came to dominate the economy of Algeria, where agriculture was neglected in favour of a program of industrialization based on the country’s huge petroleum and gas reserves. This policy, however, was disappointing, and popular disillusionment led to the end of the one-party presidential regime of the FLN in the 1990s. In Tunisia the pro-Western Bourguiba survived as president until 1987, when he was deposed by his prime minister, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. Tunisia’s heavy economic reliance on tourism since the mid-1960s, moreover, has been a questionable and precarious substitute for an emphasis on agricultural exports. Like Tunisia, Morocco—dominated by the ʿAlawite monarchy since independence—has almost no oil, but it does possess greater reserves of phosphates and a more prosperous agricultural sector. In 1976 Morocco annexed part of the former Spanish territory of Western Sahara, after which it became involved in a protracted guerrilla war with Polisario, a Sahrawi nationalist organization.

Western Africa

The following selection was taken from Britannica’s article on western Africa.

There thus developed a general feeling among the intelligentsia that the colonies were being deliberately exploited by ever more firmly entrenched European political and economic systems and that there had developed a new, wider, and mobilizable public to appeal to for support. In 1946 politicians in French West Africa organized a federation-wide political association, the African Democratic Rally (RDA). The RDA and its members in the French National Assembly aligned themselves with the French Communist Party, the only effective opposition to the governments of the Fourth Republic. The result, during 1948–50, was the virtual suppression of the RDA in Africa by the colonial administrations.

In British West Africa the tensions were greatest in the Gold Coast. In 1947 the established politicians brought in Kwame Nkrumah, who had studied in the United States and Britain and had been active in the Pan-African movement, to organize a nationalist party with mass support. In 1948 European trading houses were boycotted, and some rioting took place in the larger towns. An official inquiry concluded that the underlying problem was political frustration and that African participation in government should be increased until the colony became self-governing. In 1951, therefore, a new constitution was introduced in which the legislative council gave way to an assembly dominated by African elected members, to which African ministers were responsible for the conduct of much government business. By this time Nkrumah had organized his own mass political party, able to win any general election, and during the following years he negotiated with the British a series of concessions that resulted in 1957 in the Gold Coast becoming the independent state of Ghana.

Once the British had accepted the principle of cooperating with nationalist politicians, their other western African colonies began to follow the example set by the Gold Coast. But Nkrumah had been greatly aided by the high price for cocoa in the 1950s (which meant that by 1960 Ghana’s trade was worth $630 million a year and that government revenue, at more than $280 million, was broadly adequate to give the people what they wanted in the way of modernizing programs) and by the comparatively high level and generally wide spread of education in a sizable yet compact territory that was without too serious ethnic divisions. The other colonies were not so well placed.

The small size of The Gambia was the principal factor contributing to the delay of its independence until 1965. Sierra Leone was a densely populated country that was appreciably poorer than Ghana (its GNP per capita, at about $70, being approximately one-third of Ghana’s) and in which there was a wide disparity in levels of education and wealth between the Creoles—the descendants of liberated slaves who lived in and around Freetown—and the rest of the people. When independence was achieved in 1961, these deeply rooted problems had been papered over rather than solved.

Nigeria presented the greatest challenge to British and African policymakers alike. In the south two nationalist parties emerged, the Action Group (AG), supported primarily by the Yoruba of the west, and the National Convention of Nigerian Citizens (NCNC), whose prime support came from the Igbo of the east. These parties expected the whole country quickly to follow the Ghanaian pattern of constitutional change. But any elective central assembly was bound to be dominated by the north, which had some 57 percent of the population and whose economic and social development had lagged far behind. The north’s political leaders—most of whom were conservative Muslim aristocrats closely allied with the British through indirect rule—were not at all eager to see their traditional paramountcy invaded by aggressive and better-educated leaders from the south.

The first political expedient was to convert Nigeria into a federation of three regions. In 1957 this allowed the east and the west to achieve internal self-government without waiting for the north, but it left open the questions of how politics were to be conducted at the centre and how Nigerian independence was to be secured. At this juncture it occurred to the northern leaders that by allying themselves to one of the southern parties they might maintain their local monopoly of power and gain prestige in the country as a whole by asking for its independence. The problem of central politics was thus resolved when the northern leaders entered a coalition federal government with the NCNC, and in 1960 Nigeria became independent.

Félix Houphouët-Boigny.Courtesy of the Cote d’Ivoire Information ServiceMeanwhile, in French West Africa the RDA, led by Félix Houphouët-Boigny, broke with the Communist Party. The votes of a small bloc of African deputies in the French National Assembly were of considerable value to the shifting coalitions of non-Communist parties that made up the unstable French governments of the 1950s, and the RDA began to seek to influence these governments to allow greater freedom to the colonies.

Léopold Senghor addressing the United Nations General Assembly, 1961.United Nations PhotographBy 1956 Houphouët-Boigny’s policy had secured a widening of the colonial franchises and the beginnings of a system by which each colony was on the way to becoming a separate unit in which African ministers would be responsible for some of the conduct of government. The implications of this approach, however, did not meet with the approval of some other African leaders, most notable among them Léopold Sédar Senghor in Senegal and Ahmed Sékou Touré in Guinea. Senghor had stood outside the RDA since the days of its alliance with the Communists, which he had thought could only bring disaster. Together with Sékou, who had remained within the RDA, he argued that Houphouët’s policy would split up the western African federation into units that would be too small and poor to resist continued French domination.

In 1958 the French Fourth Republic collapsed and de Gaulle was returned to power. On Sept. 28, 1958, in a referendum, the colonies were offered full internal self-government as fellow members with France of a French Community that would deal with supranational affairs. All of the colonies voted for this scheme except Guinea, where Sékou Touré led the people to vote for complete independence. Senegal and the French Sudan were then emboldened in 1959 to come together in a Federation of Mali and to ask for and to receive complete independence within the community. These two territories separated in the following year, but all the others now asked for independence before negotiating conditions for association with France, and by 1960 all the former French colonies were de jure independent states.

By that time only the excessively conservative regimes of Portugal and Spain sought to maintain the colonial principle in western Africa. Encouraged and aided by independent neighbours, Guinean nationalists took up arms in 1962 and after 10 years of fighting expelled the Portuguese from three-quarters of Portuguese Guinea. In 1974 the strain of this war and of wars in Mozambique and Angola caused the Portuguese people and army to overthrow their dictatorship. Independence was quickly recognized for Guinea-Bissau in 1974 and for the Cape Verde Islands and Sao Tome and Principe in 1975. Spain concluded in 1968 that the best way to preserve its interests in equatorial Africa was to grant independence to its people without preparing them for it. The result was chaos.

Central Africa

The following selection was taken from Britannica’s article on Central Africa.


Eastern Africa

The following selection was taken from Britannica’s article on eastern Africa. It discusses the colonial activity that followed decades of missionary activity in the region.



Southern Africa

The following selection was taken from Britannica’s article on Southern Africa.

After World War II the imperial powers were under strong international pressure to decolonize. In Southern Africa, however, the transfer of power to an African majority was greatly complicated by the presence of entrenched white settlers. After an initial phase from 1945 to about 1958, in which white power seemed to be consolidated, decolonization proceeded in three stages: first, the relatively peaceful achievement by 1968 of independence by those territories under direct British rule (the High Commission territories became Lesotho, Botswana, and Swaziland, and Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland became Zambia and Malawi); second, the far bloodier struggle for independence in the Portuguese colonies and in Southern Rhodesia (from 1965 Rhodesia, which achieved independence as Zimbabwe in 1980); and, third, the denouement in South West Africa (which in 1990 achieved independence as Namibia) and in South Africa, where the black majority took power after nonracial democratic elections in 1994. While at the end of the colonial period imperial interests still controlled the economies of the region, by the end of the 20th century South Africa had become the dominant economic power. The beginning of the 21st century ushered in attempts to finally create unity among all the countries in Southern Africa. Despite the spread of multiparty democracy, however, violence, inequality, and poverty persisted throughout the region.