Istwa Nou

In September 1939, when Britain and France declared war on Germany, no European government imagined leaving Africa. There had been trouble. Political movements were forming that pointed toward later nationalism, the countryside protested, workers in the towns organised, Islamic and Christian movements rejected the assumptions colonial rule rested on, and African voices were getting louder. None of it threatened the structure, and no colonial power had given serious thought to retreat. Twenty years later Britain and France had begun programmes of withdrawal that could not be reversed, Belgium was about to lose the Congo, and only Portugal and the settler regimes of Southern Rhodesia and South Africa were digging in, at a cost paid out over the following decades. Europe left Africa in roughly the span of time it had taken to seize it. The change came from two directions, from what European governments needed at home and abroad, and from African movements altering the facts on the ground. Grievances accumulated through the Depression and the war hardened after 1945 into parties.

The world of 1945 was a different place. Indian nationalist advances suggested an empire in retreat and encouraged movements on both sides of the Sahara. Japan, during the war, had beaten European powers across Southeast Asia and taken Singapore from the British with startling ease, showing that a non-European state could humble them, though Japanese conduct toward occupied populations destroyed any standing it had as a liberator. The United States mattered most. Franklin Roosevelt disliked European empire and pressed for a decolonisation timetable. After his death that priority slid down the American agenda as the Cold War took over. Washington's concern became keeping poor countries out of communist hands, and European empire could be recast as protection for peoples thought vulnerable to it. The United States went on preaching against colonialism while supplying military aid to Portugal's fascist government fighting Marxist guerrillas in Angola and Mozambique. The Soviet Union declared itself anti-colonial by nature and from the 1960s offered African movements diplomatic backing and weapons.