In October 1945, a conference of black politicians meeting in Manchester, England, issued a ringing declaration: "We affirm the rights of all colonial peoples to control their own destiny. . . . The long, long night is over. . . . Colonial and subject peoples of the world—UNITE!" Such talk had been commonplace from Communist powers for decades; but these men, forming the Fifth Pan-African Congress, were claiming to speak for black Africa.
Few British officials took the words seriously. Less than a century before, most of Africa south of the Sahara had been regarded as the Dark Continent by Europeans, and only a generation or so previously, the subcontinent had been divided among European powers; now, all at once, a few hotheads were talking of independence.
Yet their message proved to be prophetic. Within two decades, Britain and France, two of the principal colonizing powers, would be gone, to be followed a few years later by the third, the Portuguese. But independence was not to be the end of the story. The hasty departure of the Europeans would unleash a wholly new set of events and problems, largely unforeseen at mid-century, when no one had a clear idea of what independence might involve.
Complex crosscurrents shaped the process of decolonization. The British, French, and Portuguese empires each dissolved differently. Colonies with few European residents achieved independence far more easily than those with established communities of white settlers. Varying geographical patterns emerged in the east, west, and center of the continent; while in the south, the Republic of South Africa, economically powerful and intransigently white-ruled, held out stubbornly, affecting the attitude of all the emergent nations and dominating the evolution of the whole southern half of Africa. The search for genuine nationhood—the struggle to unite disparate peoples, languages, and traditions within largely artificial frontiers inherited from the colonial past—would pose intractable problems that were still unresolved as the century drew to a close.
At a political rally in Accra, a woman's dress doubles as an electioneering poster. Under the leadership of Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana was the first sub-Saharan African nation to win inde[)endence in the post-World War II wave of decolonization. Proclaimed independent within the British Commonwealth in 1957, it became a republic three years later. President Nkrumah subsequently became the subject of a personality cult; his supporters took to calling him the Redeemer. Deposed after a military coup in 1966, he died in exile.
In 1945, few Britons had even heard of the Manchester declaration's principal author, a thirty-six-year-old activist from the West African colony of the Gold Coast called Kwame Nkrumah. Equally unfamiliar was another speaker, Nnamdi Azikiwe of Nigeria, who set a deadline for independence in British Africa: fifteen years. Nor was the British empire the only one to be targeted. The conference also demanded independence for all the other white-ruled territories: the French colonies (which meant most of the west and center of the continent), the Belgian Congo, Portuguese Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and Angola, self-governing white-ruled South Africa with its black majority, and South Africa's own virtual colony, South-West Africa.
The African nationalists were appealing to principles long accepted in the West.
World History
