ABSTRACT
Decolonization was not a process but a clutch of fitful activities and events, played out in conference rooms, acted out in protests mounted in city streets, fought over in jungles and mountains. Its results pleased no one. It was too hastily done for some, too slowly carried out for others, too incomplete in effect for most. The subject is historically loose-ended; there is no end to discussion of it. Not only does the old historical problem of mechanical physics here arise again – the question of whether the European colonial empires were overthrown or collapsed because of their own weight – but continuing problems of political and social unrest, economic exploitation and cultural dissatisfaction beg this question: in what manner are these the outcomes of decolonization as an incomplete or failed exercise in the transfer of power and nation-building?
