Beginning in the late 1950s, the main western colonial powers started shedding their African colonies very rapidly. Between 1957 and 1965, Britain granted independence of varying quality to thirteen of its African colonies, from Ghana in 1957 to Swaziland in 1968. France granted independence to eleven of its colonies in 1960 alone. Morocco and Tunisia had got theirs peacefully in 1956. Algeria fought it out on the battlefield to win its independence in 1962. It was the great African independence decade.
That this came about so rapidly and relatively smoothly was not due to any sudden change of heart by the western powers towards the colonized peoples. Exhausted by World War II, and having tasted what lay ahead if they tried to defend each colony by force of arms, they decided to cut their losses. Britain had had a taste of it in Malaysia and to a certain extent in Kenya. France had had its experience in Indochina and was already bogged down again in Algeria. "Get out but save what's possible" was the mood in Britain and France as the 1950s drew to a close. So the quality of independence differed from colony to colony as the Union Jacks and Tricolours were hauled down and those of the newly born states were hoisted in their place.
The term neo-colonialism was born together with the new states. This was teleguided colonialism in which the occupation force was replaced by local security services; the expensive colonial administration replaced by local bureaucrats-whose loyalty to the "mother-country" could usually be taken for grantedanda few strategically placed advisers to ensure that maximum privileges were preserved with minimum investment and upkeep.
Thus a number of new governments which seemed to have got off to a good start soon found themselves overthrown by armed forces trained and put in place by the colonial power and left intact after the takeover. It was not always the case and there was no set pattern, but by such devices as the British Commonwealth and the Comminute Francaise and various types of currency zones and other special arrangements, the freed colonies were often bound to the former colonial powers by myriads of visible and invisible threads. And the people often found that they were being exploited by black factory and plantation owners as intensively as by the former white owners. A change of skin colour at the top did not change the quality of exploitation!
However, they had got rid of that humiliating status of second-class citizens in their own country. Even if it was only the outward trappings of colonialism that had disappeared in some cases, it was still a great improvement. A modicum of human dignity had been restored even in the worst cases.
There was another element in the rapidity with which Britain and France divested themselves of their colonies. After their own traumatic experiences in World War II, there was a good deal of sympathy by the man-in-the-street in Britain and France for the sufferings of the people in the colonies, many of whom had served on the battlefields. The idea that victory and freedom were indivisible began to take hold. Those being repressed for advocating independence for their own countries found staunch advocates in the parliaments of Britain and France. Their cause was championed by parliamentarians of fame and talent. There were prestigious lawyers ready to hasten to the most far-flung corners of the Empire to defend victims of colonial persecution. Colonialism started to become a "dirty word." To a certain extent an anti-colonialist public conscience was created and the merits of parliamentary democracy were well utilized.
The further the waves of independence reached south, how-ever, where white racism was most strongly entrenched, the more perverse was the leadership resistance to change. This was the case in the African colonies which Portugal had held for nearly 500 years. A totalitarian, fascist regime in Lisbon nullified any possibility of support in the "mother country" for those who agitated for independence. There was no way in which public sympathy could be aroused through parliamentary debate or through the press. It was the case in South Africa where a type of internal colonialism held sway, where a white minority exercised a harsh dictatorship over an overwhelming majority of blacks, coloreds (the official designation of people of mixed race) and Asians. It was the case in Namibia (South West Africa) illegally ruled as a colony of South Africa under the same racist laws. It was the case in the British colony of Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), where a white, racist minority had illegally seized power and isolated the black majority from all channels of support which independence movements in other British colonies had received.
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