Download Conclusion: The Limits of Decolonization

DECOLIONIZATION
Peter Stearns, World Civilizations
WORLD WAR I AND THE POST-WAR CRISIS OF THE EUROPEAN EMPIRES
:.: The nationalist struggle against European colonial domination was given a great boost by the long,
devastating war between the European great powers that broke out in 1914. Although the European
colonizers had often quarreled over colonial possessions in the late 19th century, during the war they
actually fought each other in the colonies for the first time. Major theaters of conflict developed during
the war in west and east Africa and especially in the Middle East. British naval supremacy denied the
Germans access to their colonies in Africa and the Pacific. With the blockade on their side) the British,
French, and Belgians were able to draw heavily on their colonies for soldiers, laborers, and raw materials.
African and Asian soldiers in the hundreds of thousands served both on the Western Front and in the tarflung theaters of war from Egypt, Palestine, and Mesopotamia to east Africa. The French recruited tens of
thousands of African and Asian laborers to replace workers in French industrial centers who had been
conscripted into the armies fighting on the Western Front. The colonies also supplied food for the home
populations of the Entente allies, as well as vital raw materials such as oil, jute, and cotton. Contrary to
long-standing colonial policy, the British even encouraged expansion of industrial production in India to
supplement the output of their overextended home factories. Thus, the war years contributed to the
development in India of the largest industrial sector in the colonized world.
World War I showed the subjugated peoples of Africa and Asia the spectacle of the self-styled civilizers
of humankind sending millions of young men to be slaughtered in the trench stalemate on the Western
front. For the first time, African and Asian soldiers were ordered by their European officers to kill other
Europeans. In the process, the vulnerability of the seemingly invincible Europeans and the deep divisions
between them were revealed. During the war years, European troops in the colonies were withdrawn to
meet the need tor soldiers on the many war fronts. The garrisons that remained were dangerously understaffed. The need to recall administrative personnel from both British and French colonies meant that
colonial officials were compelled to fill their vacated posts with African and Asian administrators, many
of whom enjoyed real responsibility for the first time.
To maintain the loyalty of their traditional allies among the colonized and to win the support of the
Western-educated elites or new allies such as the Arabs, the British and French made many promises
about the postwar settlement. Because these concessions often compromised their prewar dominance or
their plans tor further colonial expansion, the leaders of the victorious Allies repeatedly reneged on them
after the war. The betrayal of these pledges contributed to postwar agitation against the continuation and
spread of European colonial domination.
India: Gandhi and the Nationalist Struggle
In the months after the outbreak of the war, the British could take great comfort from the way in which
the peoples of the empire rallied to their defense. Though already well on the way to independence, their
subjects in the White Dominions-Canada, Australia, and New Zealand-lost no time in declaring war on
the Central Powers and raising armies. Botched campaigns such as at Gallipoli and the costly offensives
on the Somme severely strained relations between the British high command and the colonials. Of the
many colonies among the tropical dependencies, none played as critical a role in the British war effort as
India. The Indian princes offered war loans, Indian soldiers bore the brunt of the war effort in east Africa
and the Middle East, and nationalist leaders, including Gandhi and Tilak, toured India selling British war
bonds. But as the war dragged on and Indians died on the battlefields or went hungry at home to sustain a
conflict that had little to do with them, signs of unrest spread throughout the subcontinent.
Wartime inflation adversely affected nearly all segments of the Indian population. Indian peasants were
angered at the ceilings set on the price of their market produce, despite rising costs. They were often upset
by their inability to sell what they had produced because of shipping shortages linked to the war. Indian
laborers saw their already meager wages drop steadily in the face of rising prices. Many localities
suffered from famines, worsened by wartime transport shortages that impeded relief efforts.
After the end of the war in 1918, moderate Indian politicians were frustrated by the British refusal to
honor wartime promises. British leaders had promised the Indians that if they continued to support the
war effort, India would move steadily to self-government within the empire once the conflict was over.
Indian hopes for the fulfillment of these promises were raised by the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms of
1919. These measures increased the powers of Indian legislators at the all-India level and placed much of
the provincial administration of India under their control. But the concessions granted in the reforms were
offset by the passage later in the same year of the Rowlatt Act, which placed severe restrictions on key
Indian civil rights such as the freedom of the press. These conditions fueled local protest during and
immediately after the war. At the same time, a new leader, Mohandas Gandhi, emerged who soon forged
this localized protest into a sustained all-India campaign against the policies of the colonial overlords.
Gandhi's remarkable appeal to both the masses and the Western-educated nationalist politicians resulted
from a combination of factors. Perhaps the most important was the strategy for protest that he had worked
out a decade earlier as the leader of a successful movement of resistance to the restrictive laws imposed
on the Indian migrant community in South Africa. Gandhi's stress on nonviolent but aggressive protest
tactics endeared him both to the moderates and to more radical elements within the nationalist movement.
His advocacy of peaceful boycotts, strikes, noncooperation, and mass demonstrations which he labeled
collectively satyagraha, or truth force-proved an effective way to weaken British control while limiting
opportunities for violent reprisals that would allow the British to make full use of their superior military
strength.
It is difficult to separate Gandhi's approach to mass protest from Gandhi as a person and thinker. Though
physically unimposing, he had an inner confidence and sense of moral purpose that sustained his
followers and wore down his adversaries. He combined the career of a Western-educated lawyer with the
attributes of a traditional Hindu ascetic and guru. The former had exposed him to the world beyond India
and gave him an understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the British colonizers. These qualities
and his soon legendary skill in negotiating with the British made it possible for Gandhi to build up a
strong following among middle-class, Western-educated Indians, who had long been the dominant force
behind the nationalist cause. But the success of Gandhi's protest tactics also hinged on the involvement of
ever-increasing numbers of the Indian people in anti-colonial resistance. The image of a traditional mystic
and guru that Gandhi projected was critical in gaining mass support from peasants and laborers alike.
Many of these "ordinary" Indians would walk for miles when Gandhi was on tour. Many did so to honor a
saint rather than listen to a political speech. Gandhi's widespread popular appeal, in turn, gave him even
greater influence among nationalist politicians. The latter were very aware of the leverage his mass
following gave to them in their ongoing contests with the British overlords.
As this photo of Mahatma Gandhi beside his spinning wheel suggests, he played many roles in the Indian
nationalist struggle. The wheel evokes India's traditional status as a textile center and the economic boycotts of
British machine-made cloth that were central to Gandhi's civil disobedience campaigns. Gandhi's meditative position
projects the image of a religious guru that appealed to large segments of the Indian populace. The simplicity of his
surroundings evokes the asceticism and detachment from the material world that had long been revered in Indian
culture.
The Beginnings of Political Fragmentation in India
Gandhi's mystical ascetic side hampered his efforts to reach out to all Indians. Despite his constant stress
on religious tolerance and communal harmony, some Muslim leaders mistrusted this Hindu guru and the
Congress party politicians who organized his civil disobedience campaigns. Even though Muslims had
been and continued to be prominent leaders in the Congress party, a number of leaders of the Islamic
community warned that the party was dominated by Hindus, who had taken much greater advantage of
opportunities for higher education and political advancement. To better support their demands for
separate electorates and legislative seats, several mostly well-educated and well-to-do Muslims followed
a rival party, the Muslim League, in 1906. Although the League represented only a small percentage of
even the Muslim minority until the 1940s, its presence signified a potentially dangerous potential division
within the Indian national movement.
The League's stubbornness was matched on the Hindu side by a number of extremist, communalist parties
that were vehemently opposed to Gandhi's call for tolerance and Hindu power sharing with minority
religious groups. All the charisma and wisdom Gandhi could muster were not sufficient to bring these
fringe groups into the Congress party's mainstream. Leaders of the Muslim League would destroy his
vision of a united India; a Hindu extremist eventually took his life.
The success of Gandhian satyagraha tactics in local protest movements paved the way for his sudden
emergence as the central figure in the all-Indian nationalist struggle. The India-wide campaign to repeal
the Rowlatt Act demonstrated both the strengths and the weaknesses of Gandhi's approach. Congress
party organizers rallied mass support for boycotts, noncooperation, and civil disobedience throughout the
subcontinent. In fact, the response was so widespread and rapid that it stunned the British and put them on
the defensive. But a lack of time and sufficient numbers of trained followers to instruct protesters in the
discipline of nonviolent resistance led to violent reprisals for police repression. Convinced that saryagraha
could not be truly carried out under these conditions, Gandhi called off the anti- Rowlatt campaign. His
decision delighted the British, who were fearful that it was about to succeed. But it
angered many other nationalist politicians, including Jawaharlal Nehru, who like
Gandhi was then emerging as one of the foremost leaders of the ant colonial struggle.
Gandhi's withdrawal allowed the British to round up and imprison much of the
nationalist leadership, including Nehru and Gandhi himself.
Although it was nearly a decade before Gandhi and the Congress party could launch a
campaign on a scale comparable to the postwar Satyagraha, British relief at the
successful repression of dissent was short-lived. Throughout the 1920s, urban lawyers
and peasant associations used Gandhian tactics to protest colonial policies and local
abuses by both British and Indian officials. By the early 1930s, British insensitivity
and the mounting effects of the global Great Depression paved the way for a revival of the civil disobedience campaign on an all-India basis. Growing dissent prompted the British to set up the Simon
Commission in 1927 to consider future government responses to nationalist demands. Made up entirely
of British officials and politicians and focused on tactics of repression, the commission simply aroused
greater unrest. For a brief period, hostility to it unified nationalist politicians on both the left: and the right
and those representing Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs. The depression created new openings for the revival
of the mass struggle for decolonization. In the early 1930s, a sharp fall in the price of agricultural
products hit nearly all segments of the rural population, which made up more than 80 percent of the
Indian total. The Simon Commission led to representative government in India and the Government of
India Act.
Astutely gauging the mood of the Indian masses, Gandhi launched another round of all-India civil disobedience campaigns with the dramatic Salt March and satyagraha in early 1931. The British alternated
between mass jailing, forcible repression, and roundtable negotiations with nationalist leaders, especially
Gandhi, in the next half decade. They ended by making major concessions to nationalist demands. These
were embodied in the Government of India Act of 1935. Though retaining control of the central administration, the British agreed to turn the provincial governments over to Indian leaders, who would be
chosen by a greatly expanded electorate. The nationalists' assumption of office in 1937 ended the already
diminished civil disobedience agitation. This ushered in a period of British-nationalist accommodation
that lasted until another global war shook the foundations of the European colonial order.
The Winning of Independence in South Asia
The outbreak of World War II soon put an end to the accommodation between the Indian National Congress and the British in the late 1930s. Congress leaders offered to support the Allies' war effort if the
British would give them a significant share of power at the all-India level and commit themselves to
Indian independence once the conflict was over. These conditions were rejected both by the viceroy in
India and at home by Winston Churchill, who headed the coalition government that led Britain through
the war. However, Labour members of the coalition government indicated that they were willing to
negotiate India's independence. As tensions built between nationalist agitators and the British rulers, Sir
Stafford Cripps was sent to India in early 1942 to see whether a deal could be struck with the Indian
leaders. Indian divisions and British resistance led to the collapse of Cripps's initiative and the renewal of
mass civil disobedience campaigns under the guise of the Quit India movement, which began in the
summer of 1942.
The British responded with repression and mass arrests, and for much of the remainder of the war,
Gandhi, Nehru, and other major Congress politicians were imprisoned. Of the Indian nationalist parties,
only the Communists-who were committed to the anti-Fascist alliance-and, more ominously, the Muslim
League rallied to the British cause. The League, now led by a former Congress party politician, the dour
and uncompromising Muhammad Ali Jinnah, won favor from the British for its wartime support. As
their demands for a separate Muslim state in the subcontinent hardened, the links between the British and
Jinnah and other League leaders became a key factor in the struggle for decolonization in south Asia.
Winston Churchill's defeat in the first postwar British election in 1945 brought a Labour government to
power that was ready to deal with India's nationalist leaders. The decolonization process between 1945
and 1947 focused on what sort of state or states would be carved out of the subcontinent after the British
withdrawal. Jinnah and the League had begun to build a mass following among the Muslims. To rally
support they played on widespread anxieties among the Muslim minority that a single Indian nation
would be dominated by the Hindu majority and that the Muslims would become the targets of increasing
discrimination. It was therefore essential, they insisted, that a separate Muslim state called Pakistan be
created from the areas in northwest and east India where Muslims were the most numerous.
As communal rioting spread throughout India, the British and key Congress party politicians reluctantly
concluded that a bloodbath could be averted only by partition, or the creation of two nations in the
subcontinent: one secular, one Muslim. Thus, in the summer of 1947, the British handed power over to
the leaders of the majority Congress party, who headed the new nation of India, and to Jinnah, who
became the first president of Pakistan. In part because of the haste with which the British withdrew their
forces from the deeply divided subcontinent, a bloodbath occurred anyway. Vicious Hindu-Muslim and
Muslim-Sikh communal rioting, in which neither women nor children were spared, took the lives of
hundreds of thousands. Whole villages were destroyed; trains pulled into railway stations that were
packed with corpses hacked to death by armed bands of rival religious adherents. The losses of partition
were compounded by the fact that there was soon no longer a Gandhi to preach tolerance and communal
coexistence. On January 30, 1948, he was shot by a Hindu fanatic while on his way to one of his regular
prayer meetings.
South East Asia
Burma (known today as Myanmar) and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) won their independence peacefully in the
years that followed. India's independence and Gandhi's civil disobedience campaigns, which had done so
much to win a mass following for the nationalist cause, also inspired successful struggles for
independence in Ghana, Nigeria, and other African colonies in the 1950s and 1960s.
The loyalty to the Americans that most Filipinos displayed during the war, as well as the stubborn
guerrilla resistance they put up against the Japanese occupation, helped bring about the rapid granting of
independence to the Philippines once the war was ended. The Dutch and French were less willing to follow the British example and relinquish their colonial possessions in the postwar era. From 1945 to 1949,
the Dutch fought a losing war to destroy the nation of Indonesia, which nationalists in the Netherlands
Indies had established when the Japanese hold over the islands broke down in mid-1945. The French
struggle to retain Indochina focuses on the successful communist revolutions in East Asia in the postwar
period.
The Middle East: Betrayal and the Growth of Arab Nationalism
After World War I, resistance to European colonial domination, which had been confined largely to Egypt
in the prewar years, spread to much of the rest of the Middle East. With Turkish rule in the area ended by
defeat in the war, Arab nationalists in Beirut, Damascus, and Baghdad turned to face the new threat
presented by the victorious Entente powers, France and Britain. Betraying promises to preserve Arab
independence that the British had made in 1915 and early 1916, French and British forces occupied much
of the Middle East in the years after the war. Hussein, the Sherif of Mecca, had used these promises to
convince the Arabs to rise in support of Britain's war against the Turks, despite the fact that the latter
were fellow Muslims. Consequently, the Allies' postwar violation of these pledges humiliated and
angered Arabs throughout the Middle East. The occupying European powers faced stiff resistance from
the Arabs in each of the mandates they carved out in Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon under the auspices of the
League of Nations. The Arabs' sense of humiliation and anger was intensified by the disposition of
Palestine, where British occupation was coupled with promises of a Jewish homeland.
The fact that the British had appeared to promise Palestine, for which they received a League of Nations
mandate in 1922, to both the Jewish Zionists and the Arabs during the war greatly complicated an already
confused situation. Despite repeated assurances to Hussein and other Arab leaders that they would be left
in control of their own lands after the war, Lord Balfour, the British foreign secretary, promised Zionist
leaders in 1917 that his government would promote the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine
after the war. This pledge fed existing Zionist aspirations for the Hebrew people to return to their ancient
Middle Eastern lands of origin, which had been nurtured by the Jews of the diaspora for millennia. In the
decades before World War I, these dreams led to the formation of a number of organizations. Some of
them were dedicated to promoting Jewish emigration to
Palestine; others were committed to establishing a Jewish state there.
These early moves were made in direct response to the persecution of the Jews of Eastern Europe in the
last decades of the 19th century. Particularly vicious pogroms, or violent assaults on the Jewish
communities of Russia and Romania in the 1860s and 1870s, convinced Jewish intellectuals such as Leon
Pinsker that assimilation of the Jews into, or even acceptance by, Christian European nations was
impossible. Pinsker and other thinkers called for a return to the Holy Land. Zionist communities were
established on lands purchased in the area.
Until the late 1890s, the Zionist effort was generally opposed by Jews in Germany, France, and other
parts of Western Europe who enjoyed citizenship and extensive civil rights. In addition, many in these
communities had grown prosperous and powerful in their adopted lands. But a major defection to the
Zionists occurred in 1894. Theodor Herzl, an established Austrian journalist, was stunned by French
mobs shouting "death to the Jews" as they taunted an army officer named Alfred Dreyfus. Dreyfus was a
French Jew who had been falsely accused of passing military secrets to the Germans. His subsequent
mistreatment, including exile to the penal colony on Devil’s Island, became the flashpoint for years of
bitter debate between the left and right in France. Soon after this incident in 1897, Herzl and other
prominent western European Jews joined with Jewish leaders from Eastern Europe to form the World
Zionist Organization. As Herzl made clear in his writings, the central aim of this increasingly wellfunded organization was to promote Jewish migration to and settlement in Palestine until a Zionist state
could be established in the area. Herzl's nationalist ambitions, as well as his indifference to the Arabs
already living in the area, were captured in the often-quoted view of one of his close associates that
Palestine was "a land without people for a people [the Jews] without a land."
Lord Balfour's promises to the Zionists and the British takeover of Palestine struck the Arabs as a double
betrayal of wartime assurances that Arab support for the Entente powers against the Turks would
guarantee them independence after the war. This sense of betrayal was a critical source of the growing
hostility the Arabs felt toward Jewish emigration to Palestine and their purchase of land in the area. Rising Arab opposition convinced many British officials, especially those who administered Palestine, to
severely curtail the open-ended pledges that had been made to the Zionists during the war. This shift led
to Zionist mistrust of British policies and open resistance to them. It also fed the Zionists' determination
to build up their own defenses against the increasingly violent Arab resistance to the Jewish presence in
Palestine.
A major Muslim revolt swept Palestine between 1936 and 1939. The British
managed to put down this uprising but only with great difficulty. It
decimated the leadership of the Palestinian Arab community and further
strengthened the British resolve to stem the flow of Jewish immigrants to
Palestine. Government measures to keep out Jewish refugees from Nazi
oppression led in turn to violent Zionist resistance to the British presence in
Palestine. The Zionist assault was spearheaded by a regular Zionist military
force, the Haganah, and several underground terrorist organizations.
By the end of World War II, the major parties claiming Palestine were
locked in a deadly stalemate. The Zionists were determined to carve out a
Jewish state in the region. The Palestinian Arabs and their allies in
neighboring Arab lands were equally determined to transform Palestine into
a multi-religious nation in which the position of the Arab majority would be
ensured. The British wanted more than anything else to scuttle and run.
The 1937 report of a British commission of inquiry supplied a possible
solution: partition. After World War II, the newly created United Nations
provided an international body that could give a semblance of legality to the
proceedings. In 1948, with sympathy for the Jews running high because of
the postwar revelations of the horrors of Hitler's "final Solution," the
member states of the United Nations, with the United States and the
Soviet Union in rare agreement, approved the partition of Palestine into
Arab and Jewish countries.
The Arab states that bordered the newly created nation of Israel had vehemently opposed the United
Nations' action. Soon the two sides were engaged in all out warfare. Though heavily outnumbered, the
Zionists proved to be better armed and much better prepared to defend themselves than almost anyone
expected. The brief but bloody war that ensued created hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arab
refugees. It also sealed the persisting hostility between Arabs and Israelis that has been the all-consuming
issue in the region and a major international problem throughout the post-independence era.
Revolt in Egypt, 1919
During World War I, the defense of the Suez Canal was one of the top priorities for the British. To guard
against possible Muslim uprisings in response to Turkish calls for a holy war martial law was declared
soon after hostilities began. Throughout the war, large contingents of Entente and empire forces were
garrisoned in Egypt. They drained the increasingly scarce food supplies of the area. Forced labor and
confiscations by the military of the precious draft animals of the peasantry also led to widespread
discontent. As the war dragged on, this unrest was further inflamed by spiraling inflation as well as food
shortages and even stagnation in some areas.
By the end of the war, Egypt was ripe for revolt.
Mass discontent strengthened the resolve of the educated nationalist elite to demand a hearing at
Versailles, where the victorious Allies were struggling to reach a postwar settlement. When a delegation
(Wafd in Arabic) of Egyptian leaders was denied permission to travel to France to make the case for
Egyptian self-determination, most Egyptian leaders resigned from the government and called for mass
demonstrations. What followed shocked British officials. Student-led riots touched off outright insurrection over much of Egypt. Although the British army was able to restore control, at the cost of scores of
deaths, it was clear that some hearing had to be given to Egyptian demands. The emergence of the newly
formed Wafd party under its hard-driving leader Sa’d Zaghlul provided the nationalists with both a focus
for unified action and a mass base that far excelled any they had attracted before the war.
When a special British commission of inquiry into the causes of the upheaval in Egypt met with
widespread civil disobedience and continuing violent opposition, it recommended that the British begin
negotiations for an eventual withdrawal from Egypt.
Although the British pulled out of Egypt proper, they reserved the right to reoccupy Egypt should it
[meaning the Suez Canal]be threatened by a foreign aggressor.
The new Egyptian government did little to address the suffering of the poor masses. Nearly 70 percent of
Egypt's cultivable land was owned by 6 percent of the population. 98 percent of the peasants were
illiterate; malnutrition was chronic among both urban and rural populations, and an estimated 95 percent
of rural Egyptians suffered from eye diseases. Such was the legacy of the very un-revolutionary process
of decolonization in Egypt. In 1952 Gamal Abdul Nasser led a military coup against the government.
He would install a communist leaning government that would rule Egypt until 1970.
The Beginnings of the Liberation Struggle in Africa
Most Western-educated Africans were loyal to their British and French overlords during World War I.
With the backing of both Western-educated Africans and the traditional rulers, the British and especially
the French were able to draw on their African possessions for labor and raw materials throughout the war.
But this reliance took its toll on their colonial domination in the long run. In addition to local rebellions in
response to the forcible recruitment of African soldiers and laborers, the war effort seriously disrupted
newly colonized African societies. African merchants and farmers suffered from shipping shortages and
the sudden decline in demand for crops such as cocoa. African villagers were not happy to go hungry so
that their crops could feed the armies of the Allies. As Lord Lugard, an influential colonial administrator,
pointed out, “the desperate plight of the British and French also forced them to teach tens of thousands of
Africans how to kill white men. Altogether [they have] acquired much knowledge that might be put to
uncomfortable use someday.”
Throughout colonized Africa, protest intensified in the 1930s in response to the economic slump brought
on by the Great Depression.
Although Western-educated politicians did not link up with urban workers or peasants in most African
colonies until the 1940s, disenchanted members of the emerging African elite began to organize in the
1920s and 1930s. In the early stages of this process, charismatic African-American political figures such
as Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. Du Bois had a major impact on emerging African nationalist leaders. In
the 1920s, attempts were made to arouse all-Africa loyalties and build pan-African organizations. The fact
that the leadership of these organizations was mainly African-American and West Indian, and that
delegates from colonized areas in Africa itself faced very different challenges under different colonial
overlords, had much to do with the fact that pan-Africanism proved unworkable. But its well-attended
conferences, especially the early ones in Paris, did much to arouse anti-colonial sentiments among
Western-educated Africans.
By the mid-1920s, nationalists from French and British colonies were going separate
ways. Because of restrictions in the colonies and because small but well-educated
groups of Africans were represented in the French Parliament, French-speaking West
Africans concentrated their organizational and ideological efforts in Paris in this
period. The negritude literary movement nurtured by these exiles did much to
combat the racial stereotyping that had so long held the Africans in psychological
bondage to the Europeans. Writers such as L. S. Senghor, Leon Damas, and the West
Indian Aime Cesaire celebrated the beauty of black skin and the African physique.
They argued that in the pre-colonial era African peoples had built societies where
women were freer, old people were better cared for, and attitudes toward sex were
far healthier than they had ever been in the so-called civilized West.
In the post-World War I era, African and African-American intellectuals such as
Leopold Sedar Senghor (pictured here), WE.B. Du Bois, and Aime Cesaire explored in their writings the
ravages wrought by centuries of suffering inflicted on the people of Africa by the slave trade and the
forced diaspora that resulted. These intellectuals worked to affirm the genius of African culture
[negritude] and African patterns of social interaction.
In the 1930s, a new generation of leaders made much more vigorous attacks on British policies. Through
their newspapers and political associations, they also reached out to ordinary African villagers and the
young, who had hitherto played little role in nationalist agitation. Their efforts to win a mass following
would come to full fruition only after European divisions plunged humanity into a second global war.
ANOTHER GLOBAL WAR AND THE COLLAPSE OF THE EUROPEAN WORLD ORDER
The effects of a second global conflict, brought on by the expansionist ambitions of Hitler’s
Germany and imperial Japan, proved fatal to the already weakened European colonial empires.
The sobering casualties of yet another war between the industrialized powers sapped the will of the
Western colonizers to engage in further conflicts that would clearly be needed to crush resurgent
nationalist movements throughout Africa and Asia. From India and Pakistan to West Africa,
independence was won in most of the non-settler colonies with surprisingly little bloodshed and
remarkable speed. But in areas such as Algeria, Kenya, and South Africa, where large European settler
communities tried to block nationalist agitation, liberation struggles were usually violent and costly and
at times far from complete.
The Nazi rout of the French and the stunningly rapid Japanese capture of the French, Dutch, British, and
U.S. colonies in Southeast Asia put an end to whatever illusions the colonized peoples of Africa and Asia
had about the strength of their colonial overlords. Because the Japanese were non-Europeans, their early
victories over the Europeans and Americans played a particularly critical role in destroying the myth of
the white man's invincibility. The fall of the "impregnable" fortress at Singapore on the southern tip of
Malaya, and the U.S. setbacks at Pearl Harbor and in the Philippines proved to be blows from which the
colonizers never quite recovered, even though they went on to defeat the Japanese. The sight of tens of
thousands of British, Dutch, and American troops, struggling under the supervision of the victorious
Japanese to survive the death marches to prison camps in their former colonies, left an indelible
impression on the Asian villagers who saw them pass by. The harsh regimes and heavy demands the
Japanese conquerors imposed on the peoples of southeast Asia during the war further strengthened
their determination to fight for self-rule and to look to their own defenses after the conflict was over.
The war also greatly increased the power and influence of the two giants on the European periphery: the
United States and the Soviet Union. In Africa and the Middle East, as well as in the Pacific, the United
States approached the war as a campaign of liberation. American propagandists made no secret of
Franklin Roosevelt's hostility to colonialism in their efforts to win Asian and African support for the
Allied war effort. In fact, American intentions in this regard were enshrined in the Atlantic Charter of
1941. This pact sealed an alliance between the United States and Great Britain that the latter desperately
needed to survive in its war with Nazi Germany. In it Roosevelt persuaded a reluctant Churchill to include
a clause that recognized the "right of all people to choose the form of government under which they live."
The Soviets were equally vocal in their condemnation of colonialism and were even more forthcoming
with material support for nationalist campaigns after the war.
The Liberation of Non-Settler Africa
The wartime needs of both the British and the free French led to major departures from longstanding
colonial policies that had limited industrial development throughout Africa. Factories to process urgently
needed vegetable oils, foods, and minerals were established in western and south central Africa. These in
turn contributed to a growing migration on the part of African peasants to the towns and a sharp spurt in
African urban growth. The inability of many of those who moved to the towns to find employment
made for a reservoir of disgruntled, idle workers that was skillfully tapped by nationalist politicians in the
postwar decades.
There were two main paths to decolonization in non-settler Africa in the postwar era. The first was pioneered by Kwame Nkrumah and his followers in the British Gold Coast colony, which, as the nation of
Ghana, became the first independent black African state in 1957. Nkrumah epitomized the more radical
sort of African leader that emerged throughout Africa after the war. Educated in African missionary
schools and the United States, he had established wide contacts with nationalist leaders in both British
and French West Africa and civil rights leaders in America before his return to the Gold Coast in the late
1940s. He returned to a land in ferment. The restrictions of government-controlled marketing boards and
their favoritism for British merchants had led to widespread but nonviolent protest in the coastal cities.
But after the police fired on a peaceful demonstration of ex-soldiers in 1948, rioting broke out in many
towns.
Although both urban workers and cash crop farmers had supported the unrest, Western-educated African
leaders were slow to organize these dissident groups into a sustained mass movement. Their reluctance
arose in part from their fear of losing major political concessions, such as seats on colonial legislative
councils that the British had just made. Rejecting the caution urged by more established political leaders.
In the mid-1950s, Nkrumah's mass following, and his growing stature as a leader who would not be
deterred by imprisonment or British threats, won repeated concessions from the British. Educated
Africans were given more and more representation in legislative bodies, and gradually they took over
administration of the colony. The British recognition of Nkrumah as the prime minister of an independent
Ghana in 1957 simply concluded a transfer of power from the European colonizers to the Westerneducated African elite that had been under way for nearly a decade.
The peaceful transfer of power to African nationalists led to the independence of the British non-settler
colonies in black Africa by the mid-1960s.
The slow French retreat ensured that moderate African leaders, who were eager to retain French
economic and cultural ties, would dominate the nationalist movements and the post-independence period
in French West Africa. Between 1956 and 1960, the
French colonies moved by stages toward
nationhood, a process that sped up after de Gaulle's
return to power in 1958. By 1960, all of France’s
West African colonies were free.
In the same year, the Belgians completed a much
hastier retreat from their huge colonial possession in
the Congo. There was little in the way of an organized nationalist movement to pressure them into
concessions. In fact, by design there were scarcely
any well-educated Congolese to lead resistance to
Belgian rule. At independence in 1960, there were
only 16 African college graduates in a Congolese
population that exceeded 13 million.
Repression and Guerrilla War: The Struggle for the Settler-Colonies
The pattern of peaceful withdrawal by stages that characterized decolonization in most of Asia and Africa
proved unworkable in most of the settler colonies. These included areas such as Algeria, Kenya, and
Southern Rhodesia, where substantial numbers of Europeans had gone to settle permanently in the 19th
and early 20th centuries.
Because the settlers regarded the colonies to which they had emigrated as their permanent homes, they
fought all attempts to turn political control over to the African majority or even to grant them civil rights.
They also doggedly refused all reforms by colonial administrators that required them to give up any of the
lands they had occupied. Unable to make headway through nonviolent protest tactics, which were
forbidden, or negotiations with British or French officials, who were fearful of angering the highly vocal
settler minority, many African leaders turned to violence.
The first of these erupted in Kenya in the early 1950s (Map 33.4). Impatient with the failure of the
nonviolent approach adopted by Jomo Kenyatta and the leading nationalist party. After forming the
Land Freedom Army in the early 1950s, the radicals mounted a campaign of terror and guerrilla warfare
against the British, the settlers, and Africans who were considered collaborators. The British responded
with an all-out military effort to crush the guerrilla movement, which was dismissed as an explosion of
African savagery and labeled by the colonizers, not the rebels, the Mau Mau. At the settlers' insistence,
the British imprisoned Kenyatta and the KAU organizers, thus eliminating the nonviolent alternative to
the guerrillas.
The rebel movement was defeated militarily by 1956, at the cost of thousands of lives. But the British
were now in a mood to negotiate with the nationalists, despite strong objections from the European
settlers. Kenyatta was released from prison, and he emerged as the spokesperson for the Africans of
Kenya. By 1963, a multiracial Kenya had won its independence. Under what was in effect Kenyatta's oneparty rule, it remained until the mid-1980s one of the most stable and more prosperous of the new African
states.
Algeria
The struggle of the Arab and Berber peoples of Algeria for independence was longer and even more
vicious than that in Kenya. For decades Algeria had been regarded by the French as an integral part of
France, a department just like Provence or Brittany. The presence of more than a million European
settlers in the colony only strengthened the resolve of French politicians to retain it at all costs. But in the
decade after World War II, sporadic rioting grew into sustained guerrilla resistance. By the mid-1950s,
the National Liberation Front (FLN) had mobilized large segments of the Arab and Berber population
of the colony in a full-scale revolt against French. As in Kenya, the rebels were defeated in the field. But
they gradually negotiated the independence of Algeria after Charles de Gaulle came to power in 1958.
The French people had wearied of the seemingly endless war, and de Gaulle became convinced that he
could not restore France to great power status as long as its resources
continued to be drained by the Algerian conflict.
The Persistence of White Supremacy in
South Africa
To begin with, the white population of
South Africa, roughly equally divided
between the Dutch-descended Afrikaners
and the more recently arrived English
speakers, was a good deal larger than that
of any of the other settler societies.
Although they were only a small minority
in a country of 23 million black Africans
and 3.5 million East Indians and mulattos, by the mid-1980s, South Africa's settler-descended population
had reached 4.5 million. Unlike the settlers in Kenya and Algeria, who had the option of retreating to
Europe as full citizens of France or Great Britain, the Afrikaners in particular had no European
homeland to tall back on.. Over the centuries, the Afrikaners had also built up what was for them a persuasive ideology of white racist supremacy.
Not surprisingly, the continued subjugation of the black Africans became a central aim of the Afrikaner
political organizations that emerged in the 1930s and 1940s, culminating in the Afrikaner National Party.
From 1948, when it emerged as the majority party in the all-white South African legislature, the National
party devoted itself to winning complete independence from Britain (which came without violence in
1961), and to establishing lasting white domination over the political, social, and economic life of the new
nation.
A rigid system of racial segregation, called apartheid by the Afrikaners, was established after 1948
through the passage of thousands of laws. Among other things, this legislation reserved the best jobs for
whites and carefully defined the sorts of contacts permissible between different racial groups. The vote
and political representation were denied to the black Africans, and ultimately to the coloreds and Indians.
These restrictions, combined with very limited opportunities
for higher education for black Africans, hampered the growth
of black African political parties and their efforts to mobilize
popular support for the struggle for decolonization. The
Afrikaners' establishment of a vigilant and brutal police state
to uphold apartheid and their opportunistic cultivation of
divisions between the diverse peoples in the black African
population also contributed to their ability to preserve a bastion
of white supremacy in an otherwise liberated continent.
In 1991, due mainly to economic pressure from the rest of the
world, South Africa’s last white President, de Klirk, would free Nelson Mandela and pave the way for
black rule in the nation to occur peacefully.
Conclusion: The Limits of Decolonization
Given the fragile foundations on which it rested, the rapid demise of the European colonial order is not
surprising. The winning of political freedom in Asia and Africa also represented less of a break with the
colonial past than the appearance of many new nations on the map of the world might lead one to assume.
The decidedly non-revolutionary, elite-to-elite transfer of power that was central to liberation in most
colonies, even those where there were violent guerrilla movements limited the extent of the social and
economic transformation that occurred. The Western-educated African and Asian chasses moved into the
offices and took the jobs-and often the former homes-of the European colonizers. But social gains for the
rest of the population in most new nations were minimal or nonexistent. In Kenya, Algeria, and
Zimbabwe, abandoned European lands were distributed to Arab and African peasants and laborers. But in
most former colonies, especially in Asia, the big landholders that remained were indigenous, and they
have held their land tenaciously. Educational reforms were carried out to include more sciences in school
curricula and the history of Asia or Africa rather than Europe. But Western cultural influences have
remained strong in almost all of the former colonies. Indians and many West Africans with higher
educations continue to communicate in English. Some of the most prominent of the leaders of former
French colonies continue to pride themselves on their impeccable French, decorate their presidential
palaces with French antiques, and keep closely in touch with trends in French intellectual circles.
The liberation of the colonies also did little to disrupt Western dominance of the terms of international
trade or the global economic order more generally. In fact, in the negotiations that led to decolonization,
Asian and African leaders often explicitly promised to protect the interests of Western merchants and
businesspeople in the post-independence era. These and other limits that sustained Western influence and
often dominance, even after freedom was won, greatly reduced the options open to nationalist leaders
struggling to build viable and prosperous nations. Although new forces have also played important roles,
the post-independence history of colonized peoples cannot be understood without a consideration of the
lingering effects of the colonial interlude in their history.
Legacy of Colonization: Lines drawn in Berlin Conference remain and cause unrest. Most
countries ill prepared for self governance. Most suffered from military coups and repressive
governments like Idi Amin in Uganda. Poor infrastructure left by colonizers. Poor education
system left by colonizer. Economies often remained dominated by western powers…Shell oil in
Niger Delta, foreign mining companies are in charge of much of the mineral wealth in African
nations.