In the Spanish case, Madrid was first forced to accept decolonization in its Moroccan territory; when France agreed to restore sovereignty in 1956 to the Sharifian monarchy that France had divided with Spain in 1912 there was little option but to accept the unity of the Moroccan territory. At this juncture as well, Spain was seeking an end to the international isolation to which its fascist regime and Axis World War II sympathies had led; only in 1955 did Spain win admission to the UN.40 In its other main African territories (Western Sahara and Equatorial Guinea), when confronted in the late 1950s by more sustained international pressures and, in Western Sahara, the beginnings of a guerrilla challenge, the first defensive response was assimilation; in 1958 the Spanish African territories were declared integral parts of the Spanish Republic.41 Thus, Spain informed an incredulous UN that the country no longer had any African colonies subject to article 73. By 1963, however, Spain permitted Equatorial Guinea to become an autonomous territory, still confident of its ability to control its politics in alliance with colonial interests. This illusion evaporated by 1968, under intensified UN pressure and a more assertive nationalist voice, especially from the mainland Rio Muni enclave. A hastily arranged independence soon turned to catastrophe, as the new ruler, Francisco Macias Nguema, soon proved to be a psychopathic and murderous tyrant.42 However, no disposition was made regarding Western Sahara until long-time despot General Francisco Franco faced imminent death in 1975, at which point Spain faced an uncertain and unsettled political future. A “Green March” (after the color of Islam) to occupy the territory organized by Moroccan king Hassan, which drew over a half million volunteers swarming across the border, led Spain to surrender Western Sahara to Morocco (and Mauritania), even though the International Court of Justice had rejected a Moroccan claim of historical title to the region and a UN mission had called for independence for it after consulting Saharoui opinion.43
Far more than Spain, Portugal had elevated its African territories into defining elements in the national mystique, especially following the launching of the Estado Novo (New State) under dictator António Salazar in 1933, perpetuated by his successor Marcelo Caetano from 1968 to 1974. The overseas territories were viewed, much more than in the French case, as integral components of a global Lusitanian polity; in 1961, African subjects became theoretical citizens, even if this status in an authoritarian corporatist framework comported few political rights and practices such as forced labor remained everyday fare on the ground. Innumerable delusional official statements illuminate the depth of Portuguese attachment to the mythology of a unique global multiracial nation. Caetano in 1936, speaking of the Estado Novo, invoked “the supreme flower of the Portuguese language, the symbol of the moral unity of the Empire whose discovery and conquest it sings in imperishable terms.” Another imperial bard, Jorge Ameal, sang of “the notion of vast territories over which... our flag flies.... It is the knowledge that our sovereignty as a small European state spreads prodigiously over three continents and is summed up in the magnificent certainty that we are the third colonial power in the world."44 As late as 1967, foreign minister Franco Nogueira was asserting that Portugal alone “practiced the principle of multi-racialism, which all now consider the most perfect and daring expression of human brotherhood and sociological progress."45 As the wars of liberation began in the Portuguese African territories in 1961, Salazar insisted that “we will not sell, we will not cede, we will not surrender, we will not share ... the smallest item of our sovereignty."46 Thus, for Portugal, decolonization long appeared an intolerable amputation, a severance of several limbs that would mutilate the polity and leave behind a shrunken state of secondary rank.
The normal corrosion of an imperial territorial will by the processes of democratic debate through which slowly accumulating doubts in the public square were reinforced by the dialogic interaction with an increasingly articulate anticolonial nationalism thus never took place in Portugal. Beginning in 1961, faced with Portuguese intransigence, Guinea-Bissau, Angola, and Mozambique nationalists made the difficult choice to engage in armed liberation struggle. A decade later, Portugal had committed over 90% of its available military forces to the three colonial wars, deploying more than two hundred thousand troops and auxiliaries. Kept at bay in Guinea-Bissau and stalemated in Angola and Mozambique, a demoralized army turned on the Estado Novo in 1974, overthrew the regime and acknowledged the necessity of a decolonization that could no longer be choreographed in British or French style. Although in four of the five territories under Portuguese domination clearly ascendant nationalist movements stood ready to assume power, in Angola an enfeebled Portugal was unable to broker a transition and (as with Spain in Western Sahara) simply abandoned the country. On 11 November 1975, the last Portuguese governor announced he was ceding the territory “to the Angolan people,” boarded a waiting ship and sailed away, leaving the country to a savage civil war that lasted nearly three decades.
DIFFERENTIATING FACTORS
In this extraordinary saga of decolonization, three other differentiating factors require note. First, there was a sharp difference in the capacity of the colonizing states to manage the process of imperial retreat. Second, a number of territories enjoyed particular legal status, either as “protectorates” or UN trust territories. Finally, in eight cases, blocked decolonization led to armed liberation struggles, fundamentally altering the independence settlement equation.
State Capacity
After a number of false starts, Britain and France at the end of the day developed a reasonable mastery of the statecraft of decolonization, with the major exceptions of Algeria, Egypt, and Zimbabwe. In Algeria, France had created an illusion of perpetuity of the colonial tie through departmentalization of the populous coastal regions and large-scale settlement that only the fierce eight-year independence war referenced in chapter 1 could dissolve. In Egypt, the ascendance of a British global reason of empire—the Suez lifeline to India—engendered a meddlesome mentality that constantly clashed with Egyptian sensibilities of sovereignty until 1954. In Zimbabwe, the premature grant of virtually unencumbered autonomy to a small settler minority in 1923 paved the way for a white regime in 1965 to declare unilateral independence; it took fifteen years and a bitter liberation war whose embers still glow for an ultimately negotiated Zimbabwean independence to be effected.
With the exceptions of British Somaliland and Sudan, Britain in its other thirteen African colonies was able to rely on the power transfer template first developed in the old dominions and then adapted for India and Ceylon in the interwar period. The gradual extension of representative institutions, culminating in “responsible government” with an African prime minister under the guidance of a British governor, and then finally independence within the commonwealth defined the pathway. Once the final decision in favor of accelerated independence was made, accumulated experience in power transfer politics facilitated the process.
Despite its increasingly feeble condition, the enduring strength of a state tradition enabled the weakening French Fourth Republic to negotiate its disengagement from Tunisia and Morocco in 1956. That same year, the Deferre loi-cadre provided a viable framework elsewhere for territorial autonomy under representative African leadership. Independence was not its intended purpose, but by the same token total sovereignty was not yet being demanded by most of the sub-Saharan African leaders. There proved an almost seamless transition from the fictive “federalism” of the French Community to the subsidized intimacy of francophonie, which the much more robust Fifth Republic was able to turn into an enduring French connection. But the Algerian war consumed the Fourth Republic, and its convulsions nearly overturned President Charles de Gaulle; in April 1961 a clique of mutinous generals and army units had seized Algiers and momentarily seemed on the verge of a move on Paris. De Gaulle was forced to plead to the public in a dramatic radio address, begging them to rally to his side and resist the putsch; the moment of peril passed and opened the door to a negotiated peace with the Algerian l
iberation movement, but it was a narrow escape.47 The often prickly relations with Algeria in the postcolonial years were largely offset, from a French perspective, by the construction of a large zone of enduring French influence in most of the sub-Saharan territories.
Belgium, however, proved too weak a state to gracefully organize its colonial exit. The underlying cleavages of language (Flemings versus Walloons), religion (Catholic versus anticlerical), and ideology (liberal versus socialist), long obscured by a unitary state dominated by a francophone elite, rose to the surface as the belated nationalist challenge in the colony gained momentum. Indeed, the colonial project and, from the 1920s on, its image as an imperial success had been an important unifying factor in sustaining a Belgian nationalism.48 However, as the perpetuity of the Belgian Congo came into question by the mid-1950s, imperial solidarity began to dissolve. Flemings demanded equal linguistic status in the colony, anticlerical liberals and socialists challenged the Catholic mission monopoly of the educational system, and the church itself whispered of emancipation. The trauma of an aborted decolonization corroded the exalting sense of triumphant colonial mission; the unitary Belgian state was on a federal path within months of Congo independence, the three major parties split into linguistic segments, and a slow, seemingly unstoppable decomposition of the polity was set into motion that has continued ever since.49
In sum, the incapacity of an autocratic state to carry out an effective decolonization is illustrated by the Spanish and Portuguese cases (and further reconfirmed by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and its postimperial fallout).50 The striking coincidence of a far-reaching state crisis resulting in regime change (France, Portugal) or fragmentation (Belgium) in the imperial centers that is linked to the traumatic effects of decolonization merits renewed underlining. Only Britain partly stands as a partial exception, though the 1956 fiasco of an Anglo-French-Israeli military effort to seize the Suez Canal, the final chapter in the prolonged and troubled disengagement from imperial entanglement with Egypt, forced the resignation of Prime Minister Anthony Eden.
Differences in Legal Status
The differences in formal colonial status of various territories played some part in the decolonization process. In the three cases where the formal institutions of a well-established precolonial state continued under imperial tutelage and control but with “protectorate” status (Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia), anticolonial nationalism enjoyed a crucial institutional advantage. Thus, within their respective imperial domains, the early exit of the colonial occupiers was no accident. In the three other polities that were lineal descendants of African states that had voluntarily accepted British rule to protect themselves against South African settler expansionism, Botswana, Lesotho, and Swaziland, decolonization was delayed until the 1960s when South Africa finally abandoned its ambitions to incorporate these territories. Once secure from the threat of annexation, deeply feared by the populations, independence came quickly. The minimalist British colonial presence in the three territories, whose role was essentially limited to preventing South African expansion, meant fewer sources of vexation and grievance for the subjugated, although it did leave the population with an enduring fear of South African aims.
The other important differentiated category of colonial territories were those erstwhile German possessions (Togo, Kamerun, German East Africa and South-West Africa) that became League of Nations mandates following World War I and then UN trust territories after 1945. League mandates were subject to minimal international scrutiny in an international system still dominated by the imperial powers. UN trust territory status, however, was an altogether different story. The UN Charter placed obligations on the mandatory powers that went far beyond the prewar commitment to rule in the best interests of the inhabitants. The UN trust system, devised under the leadership of African American diplomat and Africanist Ralph Bunche, was designed to foster self-government, with independence as an explicit goal.51 Beginning in 1948, the UN Trusteeship Council sent visiting missions every four years to review the performance of the colonizers and the progress in moving toward self-rule. In 1952, the visiting missions displayed growing impatience with the delays in the transition toward independence, and by 1956 their impatience had intensified.
Particularly in the Togo and Cameroon cases, nationalists made use of the trust territory status effectively to push forward the pace of evolution, in turn dragging in their wake the other sub-Saharan territories under French rule.52 UN oversight prompted Belgium to hold local elections in the Ruanda-Urundi trust territory before anything comparable could happen in the Belgian Congo. As René Lemarchand has noted, the Trusteeship Council's visiting missions “undoubtedly played a part in hastening the political awakening of the indigenous populations,” and “the repeated criticisms voiced against Belgium in the United Nations were equally instrumental in creating a climate of world opinion which had a direct influence on the pace and direction of its trust territory policy."53 Tanganyika, though initially politically less mobilized than neighboring British territories Uganda and Kenya, wound up securing its independence a year before Uganda, in some part as a consequence of its trust territory status, though primarily because of the effective popular mobilization by the Tanganyika African National Union. South Africa, which endeavored to reject UN trust territory status and annex South-West Africa as a fifth province, was unable in the end to elude the constraints of its international juridical standing. Unrelenting external pressures were placed on South Africa through the UN machinery, which employed as leverage the international legal status of Namibia; the General Assembly formally revoked the mandate in 1968, and then Security Council resolution 435 in 1975 charted a path to independence in spite of South Africa.54 Though fourteen more years were to pass before the goal was achieved, global jurisprudence and the diplomatic muscle it could evoke eventually overcame tenacious South African resistance.
Armed Liberation Struggle
The last pathway to sovereignty and majority rule to note, when colonial or white minority regime intransigence left no other choice, was armed liberation struggle, a critical factor in eight cases (Algeria, Guinea-Bissau, Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Namibia, South Africa, and Eritrea). In five other instances, a spiral of urban violence (Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco) or substantial though unsuccessful uprisings (Kenya, Cameroon) accelerated the achievement of independence. But the importance and impact of guerrilla insurrection went far beyond the modest number of actual cases; by tracing a grim portrait for the colonial official mind and metropolitan civil society of the potential costs and consequences of rejecting nationalist demands, armed liberation struggle foreshortened decolonization timetables throughout Africa.
When the nine original leaders ("historicals") launched the Algerian revolution with a series of coordinated raids on 1 November 1954, the odds against success seemed overwhelming. At this moment of symbolic beginning of the saga of armed liberation struggle in Africa, insurgents were few in number, devoid of arms or resources, and lacking in external support. The colonial state had disarmed the African subject. The revolution in rural communication that the cell phone and soon after social network technology would bring a half century later was just beginning with the advent of the transistor radio, but colonial control and censorship of available media made popular mobilization difficult, especially for the adventure of rebellion. Thus the Algerian FLN at first needed to achieve visibility through high-profile exploits, to secure arms by stealing them from security forces, and to fund the purchase of resources by robbing banks. Sustaining the venture was a sense of historic destiny drawing inspiration from the spectacular defeat of the French army by Vietnamese insurgents at Dienbienphu a few months earlier.
Nonetheless, the risks of failure were high. The colonial state in all the armed liberation movement cases except Guinea-Bissau (and Eritrea) could count on strong backing from substantial settler and immigrant populations and had fashioned a network of African intermediaries whose interests were
linked to the colonizer. Large numbers of indigenous troops or auxiliaries served the security forces. The older generation among the small numbers of African professionals often remained loyal to the colonial power until late in the game, as did many of the chiefly intermediaries; both were suspicious of the radical young nationalist leaders. However great the grievances, persuading (or forcing) the populace to participate was arduous. Norma Kriger offers compelling evidence that many Zimbabwe villagers had ambivalent feelings about the guerrilla armies and often resented the demands for food supply and other services.55 The conclusions of Patrick Chabal concerning the three liberation wars against Portuguese rule apply more broadly: “The nationalist movements in three colonies made it plain that they saw war as a last resort in the face of Portuguese intransigence and they were prepared for a cease fire as soon as genuine discussions on independence were offered."56
Liberation wars were never won, with the arguable exception of Eritrea, although the Partido africano da independência de Guiné e Cabo Verde (PAIGC) came close.57 However, with the passage of time, circumstances gradually became more favorable. Growing anticolonial majorities in international forums provided important platforms for generating external pressure. When the Algerian revolution began, only Egypt was available as a base for outside backing and supply. Soon Tunisian and Moroccan independence offered sanctuary for guerrilla fighters. Ghana and Guinea next joined the ranks of active backers of liberation wars; with the creation of the OAU in 1963, African liberation was proclaimed as core value of pan-African cooperation, and the OAU liberation committee became a channel for material and other backing. By 1964, Zambia and Tanzania became available as bases for guerrilla movements, and then with the demise of Portuguese colonialism a decade later the liberation frontier reached South Africa itself. Beyond sanctuary, guerrilla movements also received diplomatic passports for their leadership and funding for external offices, as well as other support.
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