ABSTRACT
The liberated peoples thought that “a new order would rise from the ruins” and that the instability arising from their struggles for freedom would cease. But “the violence of the soldiers and of the officers, the heroes of victory, their pride, their lust for power culminated in a militarization of power whose victims happened to be the urbanized classes…”. “Even though this movement terminated in a relative democratization of the local political system…, the inequalities of the past made room for others, ensuring at the same time the promotion of a few…” On the whole the regimes that were instituted were such “that they cast discredit upon those who had advocated change, upon the elites and the urban middle classes who had generated the political awareness that finally led to independence”.
