ABSTRACT
Africa's history of nonviolent struggle disproves the idea that nonviolent action was invented in India or the West. Research on Africa shows an extensive pre-colonial repertoire of traditional methods of protest, noncooperation, and ridicule that continued to influence protest in the colonial period. During and after the colonial period, African societies introduced labor strikes and boycotts, student protests, noncooperation by officials, and many other methods in their struggles with colonial and indigenous powers. The level of political innovation of methods is high, for example in NIGERIA, where market women conducted a campaign of tax refusal against the British and especially in SOUTH AFRICA'S century-long struggle against the racial system in that country. It was also in SOUTH AFRICA that Mohandas K. Gandhi, the leader of the twentieth-century independence movement in India, began his experiments in nonviolent politics. Gandhi's example and ideas continued to influence African independence movements into the 1960s, sometimes under the concept of “positive action.”
