Key Concepts - Decolonization 1. Analyze how some colonies negotiated their independence. (India, Gold Coast) 2. Analyze how some colonies achieved independence through armed struggle. (Algeria, Vietnam, Angola) 3. Analyze how nationalist leaders challenged imperial rule (Gandhi, Ho Chi Minh, Nkrumah) 4. Analyze how regional, religious, and ethnic movements challenged colonial rule and boundaries inherited from imr dal rule. (Jinnah, Biafra secessionist movement) 5. Analyze howtrÿr' it" ,aÿÿqovements ÿ,yto unite people across national boundaries (Communism, Pan-# "ÿ.bisr ÿ, Pan--ÿfricanism) 6. Analyze how the redi awing of cÿJ- nial boundaries led to population resettlements (India/Pakistan, Jewish settle ÿer;t of Palestine) 7. Analyze how former colonial subjects moved to imperial metropoles (South Asians to Britain, Algerians to France) 8. Analyze the role of the state in newly independent countries' economies.
Transcript
Key Concepts - Decolonization
1. Analyze how some colonies negotiated their independence. (India, Gold Coast)
2. Analyze how some colonies achieved independence through armed struggle. (Algeria, Vietnam,
Angola)3. Analyze how nationalist leaders challenged imperial rule (Gandhi, Ho Chi Minh, Nkrumah)
4. Analyze how regional, religious, and ethnic movements challenged colonial rule and boundaries
inherited from imr dal rule. (Jinnah, Biafra secessionist movement)
5. Analyze howtrÿr' it" ,aÿÿqovements ÿ,yto unite people across national boundaries
(Communism, Pan-# "ÿ.bisr ÿ, Pan--ÿfricanism)
6. Analyze how the redi awing of cÿJ- nial boundaries led to population resettlements
(India/Pakistan, Jewish settle ÿer;t of Palestine)
7. Analyze how former colonial subjects moved to imperial metropoles (South Asians to Britain,
Algerians to France)8. Analyze the role of the state in newly independent countries' economies.
Waÿ ] and WoHd Waÿ" ]] (Rev'iSW) {:i[] Millions of colonials fight in WW I in i:
exchange for promise of independence. 2":}( :/}Promises reneged.
[] Colonies administeredby locals and :Europeans return home because of .... ;
war.
[] Saw Europeans as vulnerable, "
tÿ Anger in Middle East over mandatesystem.
[] U.S. favors a policy of self-determination for colonies15[] The Philippines: 1st colony freed after WW II. BUT,
the US keeps large military bases - effect of the Co!dWar, these bases help to keep pro-U.S, forces in power,
[] The Peace Corps and Alliance for Progress are createdto influence developing nations to be pro-western,The U.S. props up authoritarian governments that arepro-western: Batista in Cuba, juntas in CentralAmerica, Chile.U,S .views domination of Eastern Europe as Sovietcolonization.
n6eI
U < < tt',: POV ot"t Decolo : {:::/: }:: ::......... ... :, IÿlZÿt I.
[] Most Soviet leaders expressed the ÿ,ifarxlst-Leainist )view that imperialism was the height of capitalism,: (and generated a class-stratified society ....
[] USSR opposes economic imperialism in places likeCuba and Nicaragua.USSR condenms seizure of Suez Canal so is seen asdefender of Arab nationalism.USSR sees its control of eastern Europe as a buffer, 'against Western expansion.USSR does not have the financial resources tocompete with the U,S. everywhere, so they focus onAfrica and the Middle East,USSR supports totalitarian states lfl<e Syria becausethey are anti-western. "
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[] The British had a model for non-violent transfer :ofpower to their colonies that worked for them(Canada). Although free, their colonies retainedties to Britain (Commonwealth). Independence
rÿ 1919 A]nritsar Massacre ÿi MassecFe I
[] 1919 Rowlatt Acts restricts Indian Rights[] India Act 1937 allowed legislature[] Muslim League and Jinnah proposed two states
[] Congress Party of Nehru and Gandhi urge iiiÿty[] Partition and violence (relocation of milli6ns):
[] From Mandates to independence, Arab statesgained their independence relatively violence-ree.
[] Palestine and Israel• Letter to Hussein 1915• Balfour Declaration of 1917= Zionism and Arab Nationalism
Limited Jewish migration, mostly: Conflict over land• UN wants to create two states, LLS. :, wl USSi ;ÿ,ÿq ÿ,• 1947, civil war, Bldtain withdraws from area
1948 Israel proclaimed, defeats Arab alÿnies1949 UN truce holds, many Arab refugees move to: ÿ;ÿank and other "Pal6stinian" areas controlled
ISILÿ,}ÿI, [
i
As soon asIsrael :ÿ':was created'
it was
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Unlike Britain, France and the Dutch aredetermined to hold many of their coloniesafter WW II.1945 Vietnamese Declaration ofIndependence (modeled on the U.S.'s)
[] France returns, fights from 1945-54, defeatat I)ielÿ Bicn Plm.
] Geneva Peace Talks divides Vietnam, USaides the South but withdraws in 1973.
[] VieInam War (civil wa0 ends in re-unification in 1975,
] 1945-49 Dutch fight Indonesia independeÿand lose.
No;i;h Aiÿ'icÿFrance is determined to hold many of hercolonies after WW If,Algeria -"settler colony" with 2 millionFrench.1945 French at Sefff fire into a crowdArabs killed 104 pieds-noirs ("Black FeetD• 8,000 die in the riots that follow
[] National Liberation Front (FLN) beginsguerilla war.War of Independence. 1954 -19621962 Algeria Independent after massiveof life.Justifies Frantz Fanon's ideology of violenÿrevobation against colonial oppressors:
[] EGYPT: Egyptians angeredwhen not allowed to attendParis Peace Conference in1918.
[] British withdraw butreserve right to return,
Monarchy and Wafd Partyoverthrown by Nasser
[] Caused "Suez Crisis" & wassuccessfu!
land reform (70% of landhad been owned by 6% ofpopulation.)
Video
[] "Negritude" or "Blackness" is celebrated.[] Old traditions and culture are revived.[] Sub-Saharan states slowly win independence; ÿ
some peacefully some violently. It ÿlepended Onthe number of European settlers.
[] Ghana is first. Nkrumah leads -peaceful
[] Kenya's independence violent-Man Mau uprisÿgl[] Racism: "Why the hell can't we fight these apes :
and worry about the survivors later?" -ÿa=[] British call rebels "conmmnists" to retainU.S.
support. Make concentration camps.[] 1963 Kenya negotiated independence.[] O.A.U. created in 1963 to attempt to solve problems
in Africa.
[] There were no African army officers, only threeAfrican managers in the entire civil service, andonly 30 university graduates.
[] Western investments in mineral resources (c0pper,gold, tin, cobalt, diamonds, manganese, zinc) werecolossal-the West was determined to keep €ontroiover the country beyondindependence, :i'"
[] Patrice Lumumba becomes president after 120 i:poUtical parties vied for power- called a "mad ddg'ÿby CIA - assassinated .
[] Opposition seized power with American badking ÿi:a bloodless coup- power passes t0 Mobuto SeseSeko (Rÿfer Io Stearns Reprhlt) " ,
DECOLIONIZATIONPeter Stearns, World Civilizations
WORLD WAR I AND THE POST-WAR CRISIS OF THE EUROPEAN EMPIRES
: The nationalist struggle against European colonial domination was given a great boost by the long,
devastating war between the European great powers that broke out in 1914. Although the Europeancolonizers had often quarreled over colonial possessions in the late 19th century, during the war they
actually fought each other in the colonies for the first time. Major theaters of conflict developed duringthe war in west and east Africa and especially in the Middle East. British naval supremacy denied theGermans access to their colonies in Africa and the Pacific. With the blockade on their side) the British,French, and Belgians were able to draw heavily on their colonies for soldiers, laborers, and raw materials.
African and Asian soldiers in the hundreds of thousands served both on the Western Front and in the tar-
flung theaters of war from Egypt, Palestine, and Mesopotamia to east Afi'ica. The French recruited tens of
thousands of African and Asian laborers to replace workers in French industrial centers who had been
conscripted into the armies fighting on the Western Front. The colonies also supplied food for the homepopulations of the Entente allies, as well as vital raw materials such as oil, jute, and cotton. Contrary to
long-standing colonial policy, the British even encouraged expansion of industrial production in India tosupplement the output of their overextended home factories. Thus, the war years contributed to the
development in India of the largest industrial sector in the colonized world.
World War I showed the subjugated peoples of Afi'ica and Asia the spectacle of the self-styled civilizersof humankind sending millions of young men to be slaughtered in the trench stalemate on the Westernfi'ont. For the first time, African and Asian soldiers were ordered by their European officers to kill other
Europeans. In the process, the vulnerability of the seemingly invincible Europeans and the deep divisionsbetween them were revealed. During the war years, European troops in the colonies were withdrawn to
meet the need tor soldiers on the many war fronts. The garrisons that remained were dangerously under-
staffed. The need to recall administrative personnel fi'om both British and French colonies meant that
colonial officials were compelled to fill their vacated posts with African and Asian administrators, many
of whom enjoyed real responsibility for the first time.¢
To maintain the loyalty of their traditional allies among the colonized and to win the support of theWestern-educated elites or new allies such as the Arabs, the British and French made many promises
about the postwar settlement. Because these concessions often compromised their prewar dominance or
their plans tor fm"cher colonial expansion, the leaders of the victorious Allies repeatedly reneged on them
after the war. The betrayal of these pledges contributed to postwar agitation against the continuation and
spread of European colonial domination.
The Beginnings of the Liberation Struggle in Africa
Most of Africa had come under European colonial rule only in the decades before World War I.
Nonetheless, pre-colonial missionary effolÿs had produced small groups of Western-educated Africans in
parts of west and south -central Africa by the end of the 19th century. Like their counterparts in india,
most Western-educated Afi'icans were loyal to their British and French overlords during World War I.
With the backing of both Western-educated Africans and the traditional rulers, the British and especiallythe French were able to draw on their African possessions for labor and raw materials throughout the war.
But this reliance took its toll on their colonial domination in the long run. In addition to local rebellions inresponse to the forcible recruitment of Afi'ican soldiers and laborers, the war effort seriously disrupted
newly colonized African societies. African merchants and farmers suffered from shipping shortages and
the sudden decline in demand for crops such as cocoa. African villagers were not happy to go hungry so
that their crops could feed the armies of the Allies. As Lord Lugard, an influential colonial administrator,pointed out, the desperate plight of the British and French also forced them to teach tens of thousands ofAfricans
how to kill white men, around whom [they had] been taught to we aye a web of sanctity of life. [They]also know how to handle bombs and Lewis guns and Maxims -- and [they have] seen the white men
budge when [they have] stood fast. Altogether [they have] acquired much knowledge that might be put touncomfortable use someday.
The fact that the Europeans kept few of the promises of better jobs and public honors, which they hadmade during the war to induce young Africans to enlist in the armed forces or serve as colonial admin-
istrations, contributed to the unrest of the postwar years. This was particularly true of the French colonies,
where opportunities for political organization, much less protest, were limited before, during, and after the
war. Major strikes and riots broke om in the interwar period. In the British colonies, where there was
more tolerance for political organization, there were also strikes and a number of rebellions. Throughout
colonized Africa, protest intensified in the 1930s in response to the economic slump brought on by theGreat Depression.
Although Western-educated politicians did not link up with urban workers or peasants in most Africancolonies until the 1940s, disenchanted members of the emerging African elite began to organize in the1920s and 1930s. In the early stages of this process, charismatic African-American political figures suchas Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. Du Bois had a major impact on emerging African nationalist leaders. In
the 1920s, attempts were made to arouse all-Africa loyalties and build pan-African organizations. The fact
that the leadership of these organizations was mainly African-American and West Indian, and that
delegates from colonized areas in Africa itself faced very different challenges under different colonialoverlords, had much to do with the fact that pan-Africanism proved unworkable. But its well-attended
conferences, especially the early ones in Paris, did much to arouse anti-colonial sentiments among
Western-educated Africans.
By the mid-1920s, nationalists from French and British colonies were going separate ways. Because of
restrictions in the colonies and because small but well-educated groups of Africans were represented in
the French Parliament, French-speaking West Africans concentrated their organizational and ideological
efforts in Paris in this period. The negritude literary movement nmÿured by these exiles did much tocombat the racial stereotyping that had so long held the Africans in psychological bondage to theEuropeans. Writers such as L. S. Senghor, Leon Damas, and the West Indian Aime Cesaire celebrated the
beauty of black skin and the African physique. They argued that in the pre-colonial era African peopleshad built societies where women were freer, old people were better cared for, and attitudes toward sex
were fax" healthier than they had ever been in the so-called civilized West.
Figure 33.4 In the post-World War I era, African and African-American intellectuals such as Leopold
Sedar Senghor (pictured here), WE.B. Du Bois, and Aime Cesaire explored in their writings the ravages
wrought by centuries of suffering inflicted on the people of Africa by the slave trade and the forceddiaspora that resulted. These intellectuals worked to affirm the genius of African culture and African
patterns of social interaction.
Except in settler colonies, such as Kenya and Rhodesia, Western-educated Africans
in British territories were given greater opportunities to build political associationswithin Africa itself. In the early stages of this process, African leaders sought tonurture organizations that linked the emerging nationalists of different Britishcolonies, such as the National Congress of British West Africa. By the late 1920s,these pan-colony associations gave way to political groupings concerned primarily
with issues within individual colonies such as Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast, or
Nigeria. After the British granted some representation in colonial advisory councilsto Western-educated Africans in this period, emphasis on colony-specific political
mobilization became even more pronounced.
Although most of these early political organizations were too loosely structured tobe considered true political parties, there was a growing recognition by some leaders of the need to builda mass base. In the 1930s, a new generation of leaders made much more vigorous attacks on British
policies. Through their newspapers and political associations, they also reached out to ordinary Africanvillagers and the young, who had hitherto played little role in nationalist agitation. Their efforts to win amass following would come to full fruition only after European divisions plunged humanity into a secondglobal war.
In DEPTH: Women in Asian and African NationalistMovements
One important but often neglected dimension of the liberation struggles that Asian and African peopleswaged against their colonial overlords was the emergence of educated, articulate, and politically activewomen in most colonial societies. The educational opportunities provided by the European colonizersoften played as vital a role as they had in the formation of male leadership in nationalist movements.Missionary gMs' schools were confined in the early stages of European involvement in Africa and Asia tothe daughters of low-class or marginal social groups. But by the end of the 19th century they had becomerespectable for women from the growing Westernized business and professional classes. In fact, in manycases some degree of Western education was essential if Westernized men were to find wives with whomthey could share their career concerns and intellectual pursuits.The seemingly insurmountable barriers that separated Westernized Asian and African men from theirtraditional-and thus usually without formal education-wives became a stock theme in the novels and shortstories of the early nationalist era. This concern was perhaps best exemplified by the works ofRabindranath Tagore. The problem was felt so acutely by the first generation of Indian nationalist leadersthat many took up the task of teaching their wives English and Western philosophy and literature at home.Thus, for many upper-class Asian and African women, colonization proved a liberating force. This trendwas often offset by the male-eentric nature of colonial education and the domestic focus of the curriculumin women's schools.
Although women played little role in the early, elitist stages of Asian and African nationalist movements,they often became more and more prominent as the early study clubs and political associations reachedout to build a mass base. In India, women who had been exposed to Western education and European
ways, such as Tagore's famous heroine in the novel The Home and the World, came out of seclusion andtook up supporting roles, although they were still usually behind the scenes. Gandhi's campaign tosupplant imported, machine-made British cloth with homespun Indian cloth, for example, owed much ofits success to female spinners and weavers. As nationalist leaders moved their anti-colonial campaignsinto the streets, women became involved in mass demonstrations. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s,Indian women braved the lathi, or billy club, assaults of the Indian police; suffered the indignities ofimprisonment; and launched their own newspapers and lecture campaigns to mobilize female support forthe nationalist struggle.In Egypt, the British made special note of the powerful effect that the participation of both veiled womenand more Westernized upper-class women had on mass demonstrations in 1919 and theearly 1920s.These outpourings of popular support did much to give credibility to the Ward's demands forBritish withdrawal. In both India and Egypt, female nationalists addressed special appeals to British andAmerican suffragists to support their struggles for political and social liberation. In India in particular,their causes were advanced by feminists such as the English champion of Hinduism, Annie Besant, whobecame a major figure in the nationalist movement both before and after World War I.When Afi'ican nationalism became popularly supported after World War II, women, particularly theoutspoken and fearless market women in West Afi'ica, emerged as a major political force. In settlercolonies such as Algeria and Kenya, where violent revolt proved necessary to bring down deeplyentrenched colonial regimes, women took on the dangerous tasks of messengers, bomb carriers, andguerrilla fighters. As Frantz Fanon argued decades ago, and as was later beautifully dramatized in the fihnThe Battle of Algiers, this transformation was pmÿicularly painful for women who had been in seclusionright up to the time of the revolutionary upsurge. The cutting of their hair, as well as the wearing oflipstick and Western clothes, often alienated them fi'om their own fathers and brothers, who equated suchpractices with prostitution.In many cases, women's participation in struggles for the political liberation of their people was paralleledby campaigns for female rights in societies dominated by men. Upper-class Egyptian women foundednewspapers and educational associations that pushed for a higher marriage age, educational opportunitiesfor women, and an end to seclusion and veiling. Indian women took up many of these causes and alsodeveloped programs to improve hygiene and employment opportunities for lower-caste women. Theseearly efforts, as well as the prominent place of women in nationalist struggles, had much to do with thegranting of basic civil rights to women. These included suffrage and legal equality that were key featuresof the constitutions of many newly independent Asian and African nations. The majority of women in thenew states of Afi'ica and Asia have yet to enjoy most of these rights. Yet their inclusion in constitutionsand post-independence laws provides crucial backing for the struggles for women's liberation in thenations of the postcolonial world.
The Liberation of Non-Settler Africa
World War II was even more disruptive to the colonial order imposed on Africa than World War I. forcedlabor and confiscations of crops and minerals returned, and inflation and controlled markets again
reduced African earnings. Afi'ican recruits in the hundreds of thousands were drawn once more into the
conflict and had even greater opportunities to use the latest European weapons to destroy Europeans.
African soldiers had witnessed British and french defeats in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, and theyfought bravely only to experience renewed racial discrimination once they returned home. Many were
soon staunch supporters of postwar nationalist campaigns in the African colonies of the British and
french. The swift and humiliating rout of the fi'ench and Belgians by Nazi armies in the spring of 1940shattered whatever was left of the colonizers' reputation for milital3, prowess, it also led to a bitter and, in
the circumstances, embarrassing struggle between the forces of the puppet Vichy regime and those of de
Gaulle's free fi'ench, who continued fighting the Nazis mainly in fi'ance's nos"ÿh and west African colonies.
The wartime needs of both the British and the free french led to major depmÿures from longstandingcolonial policies that had limited industrial development throughout Africa. Factories to process urgentlyneeded vegetable oils, foods, and minerals were established in western and south central Africa. These in
turn contributed to a growing migration on the part of Afi'ican peasants to the towns and a sharp spurt in
African urban growth. The inability of many of those who moved to the towns to find employment madefor a reservoir of disgruntled, idle workers that was skillfully tapped by nationalist politicians in the
postwar decades.
There were two main paths to decolonization in non-settler Afi'ica in the postwar era. The first was pio-
neered by Kwame Nkrumah and his followers in the British Gold Coast colony, which, as the nation ofGhana, became the first independent black African state in 1957. Nlÿ'umah epitomized the more radicalsort of African leader that emerged throughout Africa after the was'. Educated in African missionmT
schools and the United States, he had established wide contacts with nationalist leaders in both Britishand French West Africa and civil rights leaders in America before his return to the Gold Coast in the late1940s. He returned to a land in ferment. The restrictions of government-controlled marketing boards and
their favoritism for British merchants had led to widespread but nonviolent protest in the coastal cities.But after the police fired on a peaceful demonstration of ex-soldiers in 1948, rioting broke out in many
towns.
Although both urban workers and cash crop farmers had supported the unrest, Western-educated Afi'ican
leaders were slow to organize these dissident groups into a sustained mass movement. Their reluctance
arose in part from their tear of losing major political concessions, such as seats on colonial legislative
councils that the British had just made. Rejecting the caution urged by snore established political leaders,N1;xumah resigned his position as chair of the dominant political party in the Gold Coast and establishedhis own Convention Peoples Party (CPP). Even before the formal break, he signaled the arrival of a newstyle of politics by organizing mass rallies, boycotts, and strikes.
In the mid-1950s, Nkrumah's mass following, and his growing stature as a leader who would not be
deterred by imprisonment or British threats, won repeated concessions from the British. Educated
Africans were given more and more representation in legislative bodies, and gradually they took over
administration of the colony. The British recognition of Nkxumah as the prime minister of an independent
Ghana in 1957 simply concluded a transfer of power from the European colonizers to the Western-
educated Afi'ican elite that had been under way for nearly a decade.
The peaceful transfer of power to African nationalists led to the independence of the British non-settler
colonies in black Afi'ica by the mid-1960s.
Independence in the comparable areas of the French and Belgian empires in Africa came in a somewhat
ditlcrent way. Hard pressed by costly military struggles to hold on to their colonies in Indochina andAlgeria, the french took a much more conciliatoÿ3, line in dealing with the many peoples they ruled inWest Africa. Ongoing negotiations with such highly Westernized leaders as Senegal's Senghor and theIvory Coast's Felix Houphouat-Boigny led to reforms and political concessions. The slow French retreat
ensured that moderate African leaders, who were eager to retain fi'ench economic and cultural ties, would
dominate the nationalist movements and the post-independence period in French West Africa. Between
1956 and 1960, the French colonies moved by stages toward nationhood, a process that sped up after deGaulle's return to power in 1958. By 1960, all of france's west African colonies were free.
In the same year, the Belgians completed a much hastier retreat from their huge colonial possession in the
Congo. There was little in the way of an organized nationalist movement to pressure them into
concessions. In fact, by design there were scarcely any well-educated Congolese to lead resistance to
Belgian rule. At independence in 1960, there were only 16 African college graduates in a Congolesepopulation that exceeded 13 million. Although the Portuguese still dung to their impoverished andscattered colonial territories, by the mid-1960s the European colonial era had come to an end in all but the
settler societies of Africa. Scenes such as the one in this photo were played out tens of times in the
decades after World War II. British Home Secretary R. A. Butler is greeted by Kwame Nkrumah, whom
Butler will soon swear in as the leader of the first independent nation, Ghana, to be carved out of Britain's
African colonies.
Repression and Guerrilla War: The Struggle for the Settler-Colonies
The pattern of peaceful withdrawal by stages that characterized decolonization in most of Asia and Africaproved unworkable in most of the settler colonies. These included areas such as Algeria, Kenya, and
Southern Rhodesia, where substantial numbers of Europeans had gone to settle permanently in the 19th
and early 20th centuries. South Africa, which had begun to be settled by Europeans centuries earlier, pro-
vided few openings for nationalist agitation except that mounted by the politically and economicallydominant colonists of European descent. In each case, the presence of European settler communities,
varying in size from over a million in South Africa
and Algeria to tens of thousands in Kenya andSouthern Rhodesia, blocked both the rise ofindigenous nationalist movements and concessions
on the pal"ÿ of the colonial overlords.
Because the settlers regarded the colonies to which
they had emigrated as their permanent homes, they
fought all attempts to turn political control over tothe African majority or even to grant them civilrights. They also doggedly refused all reforms by
colonial administrators that required them to give up any of the lands they had occupied, often at theexpense of indigenous African peoples. Unable to make headway through nonviolent protest tactics,
which were forbidden, or negotiations with British or french officials, who were fearful of angering thehighly vocal settler minority, many African leaders turned to violent, revolutionary struggles to win theirpeoples' independence.
The first of these erupted in Kenya in the early 1950s (Map 33.4). Impatient with the failure of thenonviolent approach adopted by Jomo Kenyatta and the leading nationalist party, the Kenya AfricanUnion (ICAU), an underground organization, coalesced around a group of more radical leaders. After
forming the Land Freedom Army in the early 1950s, the radicals mounted a campaign of terror andguerrilla warfare against the British, the settlers, and Africans who were considered collaborators. At the
height of the struggle in 1954, some 200,000 rebels were in action in the capital at Nairobi and in theforest reserves of the central Kenyan highlands. The British responded with an all-out military effort tocrush the guerrilla movement, which was dismissed as an explosion of African savagery and labeled by
the colonizers, not the rebels, the Mau Mau. At the settlers' insistence, the British imprisoned Kenyatta
and the KAU organizers, thus eliminating the nonviolent alternative to the guerrillas.
The rebel movement was defeated militarily by 1956, at the cost of thousands of lives. But the Britishwere now in a mood to negotiate with the nationalists, despite strong objections from the European
settlers. Kenyatta was released from prison, and he emerged as the spokesperson for the Africans of
Kenya. By 1963, a multiracial Kenya had won its independence. Under what was in effect Kenyatta's one-
pal"ty rule, it remained until the mid-1980s one of the most stable and more prosperous of the new African
states.
The struggle of the Arab and Berber peoples of Algeria (see Map next page) for independence was longerand even more vicious than that in Kenya. For decades Algeria had been regarded by the French as an
integral pal"c of France, a department just like Provence or Brittany. The presence of more than a million
European settlers in the colony only strengthened the resolve of French politicians to retain it at all costs.
But in the decade after World War II, sporadic rioting grew into sustained guerrilla resistance. By the
mid-1950s, the National Liberation Front (FLN) had mobilized large segments of the Arab and Berberpopulation of the colony in a full-scale revolt
against French rule and settler, or colon,
dominance. High-ranking French army officers
came to see the defeat of this movement as a way
to restore a reputation that had been badly tar-
nished by recent defeats in Vietnam. As in Kenya,
the rebels were defeated in the field. But theygradually negotiated the independence of Algeriaafter Charles de Gaulle came to power in 1958.The French people had wearied of the seeminglyendless war, and de Gaulle became convinced that
he could not restore France to great power status
as long as its resources continued to be drained by
the Algerian conflict.
In contrast to Kenya, the Aigerian struggle was prolonged and brutalized by a violent settler backlash.Led after 1960 by the Secret Army Organization (GAS), it was directed against the Arabs and Berbers aswell as French people who favored independence for the colony. With strong support from elements in
the French military, earlier resistance by the settlers had toppled the government in Paris in 1958, therebyputting an end to the Fourth Republic. In the early 1 960s, the OAS came close to assassinating de Gaulleand overthrowing the Fifth Republic, which his accession to power had brought into existence. In the end,however, the Algerians won their independence in 1962. After the bitter civil war, the multiracialaccommodation worked out in Kenya appeared out of the question as far as the settlers of Algeria were
concerned. More than 900,000 left the new nation within months after its birth. In addition, tens of
thousands of harms, or Arabs and Berbers who had sided with the French in the long war for indepen-
dence, fled to France. They and later migrants formed the core of the substantial Algerians celebrate in
Oran as French barricades are torn down by members of the local Arab militia and Arab civilians justafter independence is announced in July, 1962. The barricades were erected throughout the colony to
deny access to areas where Europeans were resident to the Arabs and Berbers, who made up the
overwhelming majority of the population. Although cities such as Oran and Algiers had long beensegregated into "native" and European quarters, the protracted and bloody war for independence fought
by the Arab and Berber peoples had resulted in full-scale occupation by the French army and the physicalseparation of settler and Arab-Berber areas.
