ABSTRACT
Beginning in the late 1950s and continuing into the 1960s, European-ruled African colonies were transformed into independent states. This was a sudden process brought on by the rise of African nationalism that became popular in Africa’s expanding cities, the changing international context of a bipolar world dominated by two superpowers (the United States and the Soviet Union) and the growth of an anti-colonial block of newly independent Asian countries such as India. While most African countries became independent through a process of negotiation between colonial rulers and African nationalists, warfare played a prominent role in encouraging European powers to abandon their African empires. At the start of the 1950s, the British and French were set to stay in much of Africa for the foreseeable future, but the events of the 1956 Suez Crisis, the Kenyan Emergency of 1952 to 1960 and the independence war in Algeria from 1954 to 1962 informed a rapid decolonization. Inspired by the independence of much of the continent, African nationalists used armed force to challenge the stubborn regimes of colonial Portugal and the white minority states of Southern Africa from the 1960s to 1980s. From the 1960s, these anti-colonial wars became proxy conflicts of the global Cold War as African nationalist insurgents were backed by the Eastern Block and the remaining colonial/settler powers were supported by the Western powers.
