Istwa Nou

Allied flags flew between Cairo and Casablanca in 1945, and none of the powers holding them had a secure future in North Africa. Moroccans expected full sovereignty once the war was won, on a promise reported to have come from Roosevelt himself. France answered by suppressing the new nationalist party Istiqlal, and the sultan Sidi Mohammad became the central figure of the struggle over the rest of the decade. In Algeria the American landings gave nationalism a push. Ferhat Abbas and other men schooled in French put their names to a Manifesto of the Algerian People that demanded reform. Abbas then set up the AML to argue for a republic federated with France. He was attacked by the settlers on one flank and by Ahmed Messali's PPA on the other for asking too little. Protest turned violent in 1945 and was put down with great brutality, and the years that followed brought French backing for the settlers and rigged elections. Tunisia lost its reforming monarch Moncef Bey to exile while Bourguiba held to the Free French. In Egypt the Muslim Brotherhood turned nationalist while London thought about the canal.

French territories south of the Sahara had been decisive for Charles de Gaulle during the war. They supplied soldiers, and they supplied the land and air routes across the continent that made a Free French war effort possible at all. African nationalists knew what that was worth. At Brazzaville in 1944 de Gaulle was obliged to promise political reform once the fighting ended, a package of concessions that African military and economic contributions had forced and that also acknowledged how much France would need its colonies to rebuild. The promise was aimed at keeping the empire steady and intact. Meanwhile inflation, broken trade routes and low export prices piled onto hardship left over from the 1930s. African workers had discovered their own leverage and were using strikes and new trade unions to real effect, above all in the mining zones. The British answered with film, radio, newspapers and pamphlets, which required presenting the colonial state as good and its enemies as evil. An empire that had demanded obedience now had to ask, and a request can be refused.