General

In the 1950s and 1960s Africa produced a phenomenon of unparalleledextent: the emancipation from foreign rule of enormous areas. This was on the whole unexpected. When the Second World War ended there were only three fully independent states in Africa: Ethiopia, Liberia and South Africa. The next ten years were a decade of preparation for the liquidation of the French, British and Belgian empires, and a further ten years later most of Africa was free. Since France, Britain and Belgium came to accept with versatile swiftness the need to go, these decades witnessed struggles over timetables rather than principles. Compelled by calculation rather than by force, the imperial powers abandoned with unexpected ease vast areas whose governance they had acquired in the previous century with equal facility. The process of decolonization was, however, halted in the southern tip of the continent by the stubbornness of the Portuguese in Angola and Mozambique and by the ruthless determination of the semi-independent white settlers of Southern Rhodesia. The self-preservative resistance of the latter, and the refusal of the former to calculate in the same way as the French, the British and the Belgians, were decisively influenced by the existence still further south of the South African stronghold of white supremacy, where the white minority was comparatively much larger (one in four) than elsewhere and was fortified by riches, by modern technical power, by having nowhere else to go, and by a doctrinaire racialism which permitted extremities of repressive injustice and cruelty.