The premise of universal suffrage had important repercussions in a number of territories where a numerically modest population had enjoyed colonial favor or relatively early access to the agencies of social ascension, especially schools. In Sierra Leone, the Freetown creoles, socially and economically ascendant in colonial times, became a marginal electoral factor. So also did the denizens of the four old communes of coastal Senegal (Gorée, Dakar, Rufisque, and Saint-Louis), precociously awarded citizenship in 1871. Buganda and southern Nigeria, regions that supplied the most colonial elites, found themselves outnumbered by suddenly enfranchised voters from other areas.
Political Parties
A corollary of the previous two elements was the centrality of political parties in the decolonization charter. The institution of the political party gave necessary structure to the African voice and provided a vital instrument for using representative institutions. Although other forms of African organization, trade unions in particular, assumed significance after 1945, once the battery of repressive legislation shackling the subject was loosened, the political party became the primordial site of nationalist organization. Through the party, leaders found a mechanism permitting activation of once-isolated rural populations. Indeed, in a number of instances a latent social anger at the innumerable vexations of alien domination crystallized in these populations that the leaders then struggled to channel and control.18
Until the decolonization moment, most contentious African politics unfolded at a more local level in the form of struggles within chieftaincies, competition in district councils, and resistance to particular colonial policies (for example, obligatory terracing). The rise of a territorial politics stimulated the creation of political parties. As independence approached, the melodrama of terminal political struggle tended to eclipse (though not erase) the visibility of more localized patterns of politics.
Sovereignty
Fifthly, the doctrine of sovereignty joined territoriality as a defining norm for the independent state. This element in the ideology of the modern state acquired its enduring importance, to which later chapters return, partly as a reaction to early metropolitan visions of colonial self-government as circumscribed by some version of a continuing membership in the imperial family. In the British case, though the dominion formula had eased the path to virtually unencumbered self-rule, the outer boundaries of sovereignty were unclear until 1949, when Ireland officially quit the commonwealth and India entered as a republic recognizing only the “symbolic” place of the British monarch as head of the commonwealth.19 India provided the model in combining undiluted sovereignty with commonwealth membership, proved in practice by the assertive nonaligned foreign policy pursued by New Delhi, which made commonwealth membership acceptable for all former British holdings in Africa except Sudan (and earlier Egypt). France first tried to contain Morocco and Tunisia within a nebulous French union and wrestled with various ill-defined “federal” formulas for the sub-Saharan territories that were intended to integrate them into an incorporated French family without France having to accept the full consequences of an assimilation doctrine that would have produced a parliamentary majority for the colonized. Algeria, on the other hand, was claimed as an integral part of the French Republic until late in the independence war. In the Belgian instance, in the early 1950s before a nationalist voice was audible, there were vague ruminations of incorporation of the colonial Congo as a tenth province of Belgium or of a fashioning of a permanent partnership through a Belgo-Congolese community, with the colony as a subordinate partner. But at the end of the day, undiluted formal sovereignty for the new African state was a bedrock demand; only after its acknowledgement could mechanisms such as the commonwealth or the informal ties of intimacy linking most sub-Saharan former French territories to Paris be accepted as means of maintaining an association between former colonizer and colonized in the postcolonial period.20
Speed
Finally, speed became of the essence. Acceptable timetables were steadily foreshortened. The first decolonization constitutions in Ghana, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone in the 1940s presumed an extended period of tutelage and adaptation; however, the rise of nationalism compelled an abbreviation of the transitions. By 1960, the code of decolonization would tolerate no delays; “immediate independence” became the war cry. In 1958, France held referendums on membership in the French Community proposed by President Charles de Gaulle's Fifth Republic constitution obliging the African territories to choose between instant independence and continued French assistance; only Guinea paid the ransom for immediate sovereignty at that juncture. A mere two years later nearly all others found an escape clause permitting independence with aid. In 1956, the first Congolese political party, the Alliance des Bakongo (ABAKO), seemed extremist in making “immediate emancipation” the centerpiece of its manifesto.21 In January 1960, Belgium agreed to the instant transfer of power by then demanded by nearly all Congolese parties.22 By this time, those colonizers accepting negotiated decolonization had lost all appetite for delay.
CONTRAST WITH EARLIER DECOLONIZATIONS
The significance of the code of decolonization is illustrated by the contrast between power transfers after the mid-1950s, by which time it had congealed, and those that occurred earlier.23 In unifying the English and Afrikaner territories of South Africa and granting them dominion status in 1910, Britain applied the political reason derived from Canada (the Durham Report of 1839 and the British North American Act of 1867), creating the self-governing dominion formula that was subsequently applied to Australia and New Zealand. However, the analogy was incomplete; indigenous populations, mostly overlooked in the new dispensation, were small minorities in Canada and Australia and of modest numbers in New Zealand. In South Africa, the negotiations acknowledged as legitimate claimants only the 25% of the population composed either of British immigrants or the older Afrikaner European population, whose subjugation in the ferocious Boer War between1899 and 1902 required nearly half a million British (and imperial) troops. The virtual independence within an empire sovereignty gave unrestricted internal power to the white communities, entirely without consideration for the views or rights of the large African majority. The forebodings of that majority were at once validated by the 1913 Land Act, restricting African land rights to 7.3% of the country's total area. The same path was followed in the grant of virtually unrestricted “responsible government” to a proportionally much smaller European settler population in Southern Rhodesia (less than twenty-four thousand) in 1923, who quickly consolidated their seizure of over half the land through the infamous 1930 Land Apportionment Act. Though Southern Rhodesia never achieved dominion status, white minority rule was in practice unencumbered by residual imperial sovereignty; Britain never used its veto power over territorial laws passed by the settler regime.24
The other pre-World War II decolonization example was Egypt.25 It had been occupied and administered by Britain with unreserved imperial suzerainty since 1882, but until 1914 the fiction of ultimate Ottoman sovereignty remained. War with the Ottoman state eviscerated this fig leaf, and Egypt was brought officially within the empire as a protectorate. Egyptian nationalism, spearheaded by the Wafd party, swiftly reacted, and by the end of the war it demanded independence. Serious rioting in 1919 shook the British establishment in Cairo; however, unwilling to concede the demands of the dominant Wafd party for full sovereignty, the British in 1922 unilaterally imposed a nominal independence, denatured by reserved imperial discretionary powers to control defense, to ensure the security of British communications, to protect foreign interests and minorities, and to oversee Sudan. Though a 1936 treaty somewhat diluted London's reserved powers, Britain retained the Suez Canal garrison and dominance in Sudan. Nationalist sentiment was far from assuaged; not until the 1954 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty was the conquest of sovereignty completed in many Egyptian eyes with the final withdrawal of British troops.26
Libya is a particularly illuminating example of a postwar decolonizati
on accomplished under an older normative framework. Roger Louis convincingly asserts that the Libyan state at the moment of its 1951 independence was a mere “British creation within the context of Anglo-American collaboration and United Nations sponsorship."27 By the end of World War II, British forces occupied the north and French the south. After a prolonged postwar stalemate on disposition of the former Italian colonies, the future of Libya was placed in the hands of the UN in 1948.28 An initial scheme in 1949 provided for division of the country into three separate trusteeships: Cyrenaica (Britain), Tripolitania (Italy), and Fezzan in the southwest (France). This partition plan failed by only one vote in the General Assembly. The Libyan voice divided into two distinct currents: a conventional Arab unitarian nationalist orientation in Tripolitania, led by Beshir Saddawi, and a Cyrenaica-centered religionationalist outlook embodied by the Senussi Sufi order, led by Sayyid Idris. But both confronted a struggle of competing imperial visions conducted at the level of high global diplomacy and could play only subsidiary roles in shaping the outcomes. Great-power strategic interests were paramount in the negotiations: air base rights for the United States, a secure strategic foothold for Britain in Cyrenaica, a territorial foothold for the French in Fezzan. Immediate independence eventually emerged as the international least common denominator; in late 1949, a UN agreement took shape by which Libya would become independent by the end of 1951 as a single state. An American, Adrian Pelt, was appointed as UN impresario of decolonization; he cobbled together a federated state, but it was one in which Libyans would be only secondary actors and in which Senussi leader Idris would be the internationally designated monarch. Virtually bereft of resources at that time, the precarious independent state initially relied largely on rents from the giant American Wheelus air base near Tripoli and a small British subsidy. Its total budget at the time was a mere $16.6 million, its exports being worth only a little over $6 million.29 Never again did independence occur with nationalism and decolonization norms playing so small a role.
In the dialectic of decolonization in the large majority of cases in which negotiation prevailed, one may observe a constant tension between combative mobilization and bargained cooperation. Although nationalist forces gradually gained the upper hand in forcing the pace, paradoxically the withdrawing colonial state was simultaneously strengthening in numbers and governmental capacity even while its authority over the subject populace was weakening. The abundant postwar revenue flow made possible a dramatic growth in state activity, especially in the domain of social and economic infrastructure. Technical and specialized services expanded swiftly, amounting to what John Hargreaves calls “a second colonial occupation,” in the form of “a large-scale infusion of technical experts, whose activities not only increased the ‘intensity’ of colonial government, but seemed to imply its continuance in some form until the new policies had an opportunity to mature."30 Many of the postwar recruits to colonial service perceived their role to be more as technicians of development than as the agents of command who dominated the prewar ranks. As Cooper argues, “The colonial state that failed in the 1950s was colonialism at its most intrusively ambitious."31
PATHWAYS
There was substantial variation in the pathways to independence, which shaped the initial postcolonial physiognomy of the African states. In different ways, the British and French systems alone permitted emergent African elites to acquire a degree of experience and responsibility in the exercise of political power. The phase of “responsible government” in the British case, lasting several years in Ghana but much less time in later power transfers, placed most organs of state (with the significant exception of security agencies) in African hands. In francophone sub-Saharan Africa, from 1946 on modest numbers of political leaders won election to the French National Assembly, and serving in this capacity enabled them to develop networks of intimacy with diverse milieux in Paris that paved the way for the close postcolonial ties of many former French territories with the metropole. The autonomous territorial representative governments created by the 1956 loi-cadre soon (except for Guinea) became semi-independent members of the French Community created by the 1958 Fifth Republic constitution, with large majorities approving referendums on membership. By 1960, Ivory Coast under Houphouët-Boigny uncovered a safe path to independence by asking France to transfer to the territories residual sovereign powers in the domains of finance, defense, and law while retaining the levels of aid that France previously pledged to the French Community as inducement for membership.32
In both the British and French instances, decolonization left in its wake sufficiently functional state institutions to permit immediate postcolonial stability. Even in the case of Guinea, whose charismatic leader Sékou Touré defied France by rejecting the French Community in favor of instant independence, the territorial government already in place was sufficiently robust to survive the vindictive response of President de Gaulle, who at once carried out the threat to cut off of all French assistance and to withdraw French personnel and assets. However, the flawed Belgian scheme of instant decolonization was a different story and did lasting damage to the postcolonial polity.
The first overt nationalist manifesto in Belgian Congo did not appear until 1956.33 However, the colonial establishment was aware of an undercurrent of discontent among the still-small, educated elite, whose initial grievances focused on the innumerable affronts they endured owing to the racism that saturated the colonial situation and on the need for a personal status consonant with their educational attainments. “What will be our place in the world of tomorrow,” plaintively asked Paul Lomami-Tshibamba in 1945 in a newly launched colonial journal for supervised expression of Congolese opinion; their wartime loyalty and mastery of European cultural norms called for treatment different from that which might be appropriate for an “ignorant and backward” mass.34 Thus the initial focus was on defining a special legal status for elites, which proved long past its sell-by date when an edict finally emerged nearly a decade later. A second shibboleth, the need for a cautious, gradual construction of institutions for African participation from the ground up with careful tutelage, led to limited elected urban government in a few cities by 1957. But by then the nationalist genie was out of the bottle, and the pace of political mobilization quickly outstripped the capacity of the ponderous colonial behemoth to adapt. The first official promise of independence was made by King Baudouin in January 1959 but only after several days of tumultuous riots in the colonial capital of Kinshasa just prior dramatized the progressive loss of control by a once omnipotent Belgian administration, popularly known as bula matari, or “crusher of rocks."35 In the months following, the formerly comprehensive administrative control evaporated in several key regions. At home, the Belgian state was much too weak and divided politically to contemplate a repressive response by the dispatch of metropolitan troops to reinforce the badly strained colonial constabulary. The incubus of the Algerian war in France weighed heavily on Belgian policy.
Thus by January 1960, Brussels saw no option but to summon a decolonization conference with the fractious Congolese political parties; to Belgian astonishment, they at once united around the slogan of immediate independence. To create an equivalent bargaining partner, Belgium was represented not only by its government but also by the leading political parties.36 Though the Congolese representatives were divided in the intensity of their radicalism, in their ethnic and regional attachments, and over issues such as federalism versus unitarism, their unified demand for immediate independence triumphed over divided Belgian views. The final Belgian calculus—the essence of what became known as the pari congolais (the Congolese gamble)—was that the goodwill purchased through acceptance of immediate independence would permit a transition process after transfer of sovereignty.37 At the time, only three of the nearly forty-seven hundred top posts in the colonial bureaucracy were held by Congolese (and they had only been recently named), and the thousand officers of the colonial army were all European.38 With conti
nued total control of the key armature of the state—its bureaucracy and security forces—Belgian effective tutelage would continue ran the reasoning, while the new Congolese political class would be distracted by the status and perquisites associated with ministerial and parliamentary posts.39 This precarious formula collapsed within five days of independence, when the army mutinied against its European officers; within a week, most Belgian administrators and officers had fled in panic and the richest province, Katanga, had seceded. A dramatic deflation of state authority ensued, only gradually remedied under veritable UN trusteeship.
EUROPEAN AUTOCRACY AND FAILED DECOLONIZATION
The law of territorial possessiveness examined at the outset of this chapter applied with particular force to the two colonial powers with autocratic regimes at the hour of decolonization, Spain and Portugal. In both cases, the instinctive first response to nationalist challenge was the pretense of complete incorporation of the overseas territories into the metropolitan domain, accompanied by repression. Autocracy insulated the official mind from internal debate on the wisdom of this course and limited the impact of external pressures, especially for Portugal. In different ways, these blockages that dictatorship placed on the course of decolonization had disastrous consequence, and underlined a striking incapacity of authoritarian regimes to manage power transfer.
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