African Decolonisation, 1945 – 1994

This course offers a continent-wide survey of decolonization in the second half of the twentieth century. In the wake of the Second World War colonized peoples took advantage of metropolitan weakness to challenge European colonial oppression. At first, imperial policy-makers attempted to use military suppression and economic development to prop up colonial rule in the 1940s and 1950s. But as last-ditch efforts became increasingly costly and politically embarrassing they were superseded by a policy of scuttle in most parts of the continent by the early-1960s. Within a decade the sun had set on Europe’s long age of empire in Africa.  

But beyond the rapid spectacle of constitutional ‘flag decolonization’ lay the complexities of political, social, economic and cultural disentanglement. Historians even ask whether using the term ‘decolonization’ to describe the changes of this period is an oversimplification, and perhaps even a fiction constructed by the departing colonial powers. In recent years this debate has gained a greater urgency thanks to the impact of campaigns such as Rhodes Must Fall and #BlackLivesMatter which have led to a renewed interest in decolonising academia and contemporary society in Britain, USA and the ‘West’. On the African continent the legacy of the colonial past profoundly shaped the postcolonial era and newly-independent nations found that they were vulnerable to ongoing influence from colonial metropoles and the new Cold War superpowers. Meanwhile liberationist politicians promised structural change but often entrenched continuity. In areas of significant white settlement, particularly in southern Africa, independence came much later and meaningful decolonization – in any sense of the term – remained a distant dream for many Africans until the 1990s.