Decolonization of Africa · CHAPTER 1 ·
Colonial Africa after World War II
Chapter 1 of The Decolonization of Africa, 1945–1994: “How Thin the Empire Really Was”
In 1945 nearly all of Africa was ruled from Europe, yet colonial states were thin: Britain governed Nigeria’s roughly thirty million people through about 1,200 officials. Around a million Africans served in the Second World War, and the 1945 Pan-African Congress in Manchester demanded independence outright.
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The map above is the world of Africa, 1945 — The colonial map.
Every state on the map that year: The world in 1945 · Europe in 1945.
Part of IB History: The Decolonization of Africa →
SHORT EXPLANATION
In 1945, European colors covered almost the whole map of Africa. Yet Britain administered roughly thirty million Nigerians with about 1,200 officials. The map does not show the chiefs, clerks, soldiers and laborers who made that small administration effective. European rule was cheap partly because Africans did much of its work; it depended, in turn, on their continuing participation.
The Second World War changed the circumstances in which that participation was secured. Around a million Africans served in imperial armies, seeing European armies defeated and European soldiers die. The imperial economies emerged exhausted, while the Atlantic Charter gave nationalists the Allies’ own words about peoples choosing their government. Pan-African organizers brought grievances into mass politics. The empires still appeared intact on the map, but their money, prestige and moral authority had all been weakened.
The full story
Britain could not have administered Nigeria’s roughly thirty million people with about 1,200 officials had those officials tried to govern alone. Chiefs and emirs did much of the daily work under indirect rule. This arrangement made a large territory comparatively cheap to administer, but it also left European authority dependent on African intermediaries.
The transport system reveals another purpose of colonial government. Roads and railways linked mines and plantations to ports more readily than they connected African towns. Gold Coast cocoa, Rhodesian and Katangan copper, Congolese rubber and uranium, and South African gold went outward; European manufactures came back. With little investment in African industry or higher education, colonies remained suppliers while much of the profit accumulated in Europe.
War placed these arrangements under new strain. African troops fought in Asia and Europe and returned with wider expectations; the imperial powers emerged defeated, occupied or bankrupt. African editors took up the Atlantic Charter’s principle that peoples should choose their government and asked the Allies to honor it. France’s Brazzaville conference promised reform in 1944 while excluding autonomy. At Manchester the next year, a Pan-African Congress attended by future leaders including Nkrumah and Kenyatta demanded independence outright.
The leaders who pursued that demand had been formed in different settings: the King’s African Rifles, the Sorbonne, Lincoln University and the London rooms of Pan-African organizers. They brought political experience and a developed idea of the nation-state to the struggle. The weakening of European power created an opportunity; this generation organized to use it.
FULL EXPLANATION
How a Handful of Officials Ruled Millions
A colonial government could use force without having a European official at every point where an order was carried out. British indirect rule relied on chiefs and emirs to collect taxes and enforce policy. French and Belgian administrations claimed tighter central control, but they too relied heavily on African soldiers and clerks. Delegation extended authority into villages and kept costs low. It also made the continued participation of those doing the work necessary to European rule. That participation had several meanings. A chief, clerk or soldier might act under coercion, seek local advantage or use colonial institutions for purposes of his own. Nationalist movements threatened the arrangement when they connected scattered actors in coordinated refusal. We can call the resulting condition brittle stability: rule could last for decades while people expected it to continue, yet become vulnerable when expectations and cooperation changed. The same small administration that made empire affordable could find it difficult to replace the work of those who refused.
What Colonial Economies Left Behind
The new states inherited economies with roads, railways and other investments, but those investments had been made for particular purposes. A line from a plantation or mine to a port helped move exports; it did less to connect domestic markets. Taxes pushed households toward wage labor and cash crops, while education and African promotion were restricted, especially severely in the Belgian Congo. Europe received raw materials and revenue, and future states became dependent on a narrow range of commodities priced in London and New York. The inheritance included institutions as well. Colonial states had been built for extraction, coercion and territorial control rather than public services or democratic bargaining. An independent government could try to put them to different uses, but that required trained staff, steady revenue and time that many lacked. A change of rulers could come much faster than a change in what the state and economy were equipped to do.
Key places on the map
Why it happened
Rule by a handful, through intermediaries. Frederick Lugard’s doctrine of indirect rule placed existing chiefs and emirs between British officials and the people they governed. Their work made a small, inexpensive administration possible. It also meant that officials depended on intermediaries who might cooperate under coercion or for local advantage. Organized refusal could make colonial decisions much harder to enforce.
An economy built for extraction, not development. A railway from a mine to a port was useful to an economy exporting raw materials and importing finished goods, even if it left African towns poorly connected. Investment in African education and industry was limited. At independence, the Belgian Congo had only a handful of African university graduates for thirteen million people. The demand for change therefore concerned the organization of the economy as well as political authority.
The war as solvent. The war of 1939–45 mobilized African soldiers, cash crops and forced labor. The fall of France and Singapore exposed the vulnerability of European powers; veterans returned having seen that weakness and having killed white men. The Atlantic Charter gave nationalists a further resource: a language of self-determination taken from the Allies’ own statement of their aims.
Pan-Africanism finds its leaders. The Manchester Congress of 1945 carried the inheritance of Du Bois, Padmore and Garvey into a political program for independence. Among its delegates were Nkrumah, Kenyatta and Hastings Banda, who would later govern. Ideas developed across borders could now be taken into struggles for power at home.
THE TURNING POINT
Brazzaville, January 1944. De Gaulle’s Free French depended on African territory and troops during the war. At Brazzaville in January 1944 they planned reforms to the postwar empire, promising citizenship, representation and an end to forced labor. But the conference declared that “any idea of autonomy, any possibility of evolution outside the French bloc, is to be discarded.” France proposed to change how empire was governed while keeping its ultimate authority. That settlement would come under growing pressure over the next fifteen years.
What it changed
A generation of leaders in waiting. The generation that would lead independent states had acquired experience in places as different as the King’s African Rifles, the Sorbonne, Lincoln University and London’s Pan-African circles. Its members entered the independence struggles with political experience and an idea of the nation-state.
Two roads out of empire. The route to independence depended in part on who stood to lose power. In Ghana and Nigeria, where relatively few white settlers lived, independence could be negotiated. In Algeria, Kenya, Rhodesia and South Africa, settlers with homes and property to defend formed an entrenched source of resistance.
The colonizers underestimate the clock. In 1945, leaders in London and Paris expected reform to stretch over generations. Fifteen years later the map looked radically different. Few people on either side of colonial rule had anticipated such speed, and both sides were poorly prepared for the changes that followed.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — If colonial rule was so thin and cheap, why did it endure before 1945, and why did it unravel so quickly afterward?
Small administrations could endure because chiefs, clerks, soldiers and others carried out their orders, while European power seemed difficult to defeat. Before 1945 no coordinated challenge had overturned that arrangement. The war weakened several supports at once: it consumed imperial resources, mobilized and radicalized African populations, and exposed European defeats that challenged claims of white supremacy. Nationalists could invoke self-determination and look to the United States and the USSR, both of which had reasons to encourage them. The machinery still depended on cooperation, but the conditions that sustained it had changed.
An interesting fact
W. E. B. Du Bois, who organized the first Pan-African Congress in 1919, chaired the Manchester Congress at seventy-seven. In a plain English town hall he met a younger generation that would go on to govern. Most delegates were trade unionists, workers and students, unlike the exiled intellectuals prominent at earlier congresses. The Atlantic Charter also reached an audience beyond the one Churchill intended: in 1941 he told the Commons that self-determination applied only to Nazi-occupied Europe. African editors nevertheless printed the words. Nnamdi Azikiwe’s West African Pilot in Lagos was among the papers that held the Allies to them.
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