ABSTRACT
If Britain's withdrawal of colonial control from West Africa came with little violence and often with goodwill, the story in East and Central Africa was a harsh one. This was not because East and Central Africans asked for different and more difficult things, nor was it because they were essentially different kinds of people. Many contrasts of history, culture and ecology lay between these two great African populations in West and East; but these were not the contrasts that counted now. The bitter and often violent story of decolonisation in East and Central Africa came from one over-riding difference. In East Africa there were large white-settler minorities. In British West Africa there was none.
