Istwa Nou

In August 1941 Churchill and Roosevelt issued the Atlantic Charter, proclaiming the right of all peoples to choose their own government and to be protected from aggression. Educated Africans read it and asked the obvious question. Churchill was obliged to reply that Britain already looked after its imperial subjects perfectly well. The reply did not hold.African newsletters multiplied through the 1940s and their contents travelled further by word of mouth than by print, and the comparison being drawn everywhere was between fascism in Europe and colonial rule in Africa. Organisers took the charter as evidence that the system was weak and the philosophy behind it bankrupt. Roosevelt, anti-imperial by instinct, pressed his ally for a postwar timetable. By the end of the war a generation of young Africans educated in Europe and the United States had gathered around pan-Africanism, and at the fifth Pan-African Congress at Manchester in 1945 they stopped submitting petitions. The demand was the dismantling of the colonial empires and total independence.

The war produced demands for independence, and it also produced stronger colonial states. For Britain, France, Portugal and Belgium the African territories mattered more after 1945 than they had before, and interventionist policy was pushed with new energy. Laissez-faire economics had governed until the early 1930s, the depression brought state management in its place, and the war settled the argument in favour of intervention. Africa's contribution to European recovery was judged essential, which meant European governments running colonial economies directly. In the British territories this is called the second colonial occupation, running from about 1945 into the early 1950s. The postwar lines were drawn accordingly. African nationalism became a serious force at the precise moment colonial administrations became most determined to invest in, develop and defend what they held. In many places colonial rule had lasted little more than two generations. The empires assembled in the 1890s were meant to last considerably longer than they did, and by the 1950s London and Paris had worked out that economic influence could outlive political administration.