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At the selected date, the colour of each place shows who held it. To learn its story, click or tap a country or marker.
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In 1945, almost all of Africa was ruled from Europe. London, Paris, Lisbon, Brussels, Madrid and Rome governed territories marked in blues, tans and greys on the colonial map. Yet a few thousand administrators held those territories more thinly than the map suggests. Fifty years later, red reaches from the Mediterranean to the Cape: a continent that had contained only a handful of sovereign states now has fifty-odd. This atlas follows that transformation, the fastest redrawing of the political world in modern history.
Its twelve chapters trace the change from the colonial map of 1945 to South Africa’s first free vote in April 1994. Ghana opens the door; Algeria fights a terrible war; seventeen states emerge in 1960. The Congo crisis, the end of the last Portuguese empire, the settler redoubt and apartheid’s long fall carry the story onward. Africans—Nkrumah, Cabral, Nyerere, Ben Bella, Machel and Mandela—drive these events, while the empires respond. Follow the guided tour, or scrub the timeline yourself to see the continent change.
Keys: ←→ chapters · space play time · +− zoom · ⌘K search · ? all keys.
You can return to the library of twenty-one atlases at any time: select the balloon at the top left.