IB History: The Decolonization of Africa — notes, maps and essay questions

Chapter 1: How Thin the Empire Really Was

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.

Chapter 2: The First Doors

The canal and Egyptian authority. Washington’s withdrawal of its Aswan Dam loan left Nasser seeking another source of money. Nationalizing the canal offered revenue for the project and asserted Egyptian authority over Egyptian territory. Britain and France saw their prestige, oil supplies and route to Asia at stake. Control of the waterway thus became a test of whether European powers could still command events in the postcolonial world by force.

Financial pressure on Britain. Eisenhower opposed an invasion that had been concealed from Washington, and feared it would drive Arab states toward Moscow. British forces could succeed in the field, but Britain needed support for sterling and emergency oil. As the pound came under speculative pressure, the United States withheld both. Faced with currency collapse, Britain folded within days. Military strength had not removed its financial dependence on its ally.

France concentrates on Algeria. France granted independence to Tunisia and Morocco in 1956 after relatively little struggle. Both were protectorates rather than settled French soil. Releasing them freed troops and legitimacy for the fight over Algeria, which Paris would not yield: it consisted of three French départements and housed a million pieds-noirs. French leaders gave up two possessions to concentrate on a third.

Nasser’s example travels. Three armies attacked Egypt, yet Nasser remained in power. His survival turned battlefield defeat into political victory and made him almost overnight a hero across the Arab and African world, and a model of militant, non-aligned nationalism. Radio Cairo’s “Voice of the Arabs” carried the example abroad. Egypt became a training ground and megaphone for liberation movements from Algeria to Angola.

Rwanda, April–July 1994. From April to July 1994 extremist leaders and militias organized genocide against the Tutsi. An estimated 800,000 people were murdered, including Hutu opponents of the killing, and international actors failed to stop it. Belgian colonial racial classification belongs to the history, but civil war, propaganda and postcolonial leaders’ decisions were also crucial. The Rwandan Patriotic Front’s advance ended the genocide. The later Congo wars need their own account, and those killed in Rwanda deserve remembrance in their own right.

Democracy and the 1990s. The 1990s produced grounds for questioning the view that Africa was a hopeless case. Apartheid ended, and multiparty elections took place in a number of former one-party states. Elections gave people opportunities to challenge governments, though their quality and consequences varied. Cold War proxy conflicts in Angola and Mozambique also moved toward an end as external support for proxy wars changed. None of this resolves every question about government or development, but the decade cannot be described by a single verdict of failure.

Follow a country. In Free Explore, move through the timeline and choose a country. The rising color records independence, while the markers open the histories behind it: Ghana’s early independence, Algeria’s war, the Congo’s crisis and South Africa’s long struggle against apartheid. Follow one route and see how much a single change of color contains.