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Empress Victoria down in Guiana

In the eyes of their colonial subjects, Britain and France had lost prestige during World War II, as the United States and the Soviet Union won recognition as the world's two biggest powers. Moreover, the Atlantic Charter created by Roosevelt and Churchill in 1941 had stated that their principle in fighting World War II was to "respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live." Many colonized people, especially the educated African, wondered why this should not apply to them, and they wanted that freedom.

During the war, Africa benefited from demand in Europe for its exports. By the end of World War II, Africa had experienced considerable economic growth and social change. In greater numbers people were moving to cities. After the war came a temporary setback as the demand for African goods diminished. But by the 1950s prosperity was returning, and Africans were exporting more than ever before. They were building roads and harbors and dredging rivers. They were building more extensive rail and telegraphic networks. In 1951, Cocoa exports from Britain's Gold Coast colony rose to 230,000 tons, up from about 1,000 tons in 1901. In 1954, Uganda exported 398,000 bales of cotton, up from 500 in 1906. Africans were participating in this economic growth and benefiting from it. And they wanted to have a voice in maintaining and increasing their prosperity.

Independence South of the Sahara

Some who favored independence believed in individual enterprise, profits and incentives. Some African intellectuals held onto Leftist dreams, and they demonized capitalism. One of the Leftist dreamers was Kwame Nkrumah, a man Christianized by missionary schools. In 1939 he had graduated with a bachelor's degree in sociology and economics from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. Nkrumah returned to the Gold Coast after World War II and joined the independence movement there. In 1949 he led a split within the movement from the more conservative, middleclass adherents. Nkrumah was more interested in mobilizing the masses than were the conservative intellectuals, and Nkrumah formed his own political party, the Convention People's Party.

The Gold Coast was the first to win its independence, becoming an independent dominion in 1957. Britain had prepared the Gold Coast for independence, believing that independence was inevitable and seeing itself as living up to its duty and declared aim. The Gold Coast became Ghana, which emerged as a parliamentary democracy. Its leader was Nkrumah, who had personal ties with the British and kept some British around as advisors. Nkrumah wished to create a truly democratic state. In his speeches he was inclined to include references to such men as Edmund Burke and Aristotle. And he was admired. On the day of Ghana's independence crowds filled with joy cheered his speech and cheered him. Nkrumah was their hero.

With Ghana having won its independence, other African nations increased their demand for independence, putting more pressure on France and Belgium as well as Britain. While the French were heavily committed to their war in Algeria, a Leftist in Guinea, Sekou Touré, led a movement that sought independence outside "the French Community," and with hostility, the French pulled out of Guinea, taking all they could with them, including the phones from the walls of their offices. And the French gave up rule elsewhere south of Morocco and Algeria. In 1960 the French granted complete independence to Senegal, Niger, Togo, Dahomey, Gabon, Chad, Mauritania, Mali (east and south of Mauritania), the Ivory Coast, Ubangi-Shari, which became the Central African Republic, and the area that includes the cities of Brazzaville and Pointe Noire which became the Congo Republic.

In 1960 the British granted full independence to Nigeria. In 1961, the British granted independence to Tanganyika, which the British had been ruling under a United Nations mandate. In 1962, the British gave Uganda its independence. That year, Belgium granted independence to Rwanda and Burundi, former German colonial territory that Belgium had been administering as trust territories - just west of Lake Victoria.

Observers in the Kremlin had no illusions about Africa being on the verge of Communist revolution. They described African nationalist movements as "bourgeois" and thoroughly un-proletarian. But the Soviet Union did what it could to improve relations with the newly independent African states, including offering low interest loans for economic development. The Soviet Union opened an embassy in Ghana in 1959. Anti-Communists in the United States and Europe were alarmed - as Vice President Richard Nixon had been when he returned from a visit to Africa in 1957 and reported that Africa was a new area of conflict "between the forces of freedom and international Communism." The Eisenhower administration feared that nationalist movements in Africa would be dangerously Leftist, as had been the nationalist movements in Asia. The Eisenhower administration gave only unenthusiastic endorsement for independence in Africa. And when Sekou Touré, an avowed socialist, requested aide for economic assistance for Guinea, the Eisenhower administration ignored it.

The Belgian Congo

Abruptly in 1960 the Belgians pulled out of the Congo. They had done little to prepare the Congo for independence, and the Congo erupted into factional fighting, with the southeastern part of the Congo, Katanga, attempting separation. In Katanga were the copper mines owned by Belgium's Union Minière. The mining company and Belgian troops were backing Katanga's independence and Maurice Tshombe. The duly elected prime minister of the newly independent Congo was Patrice Lumumba, who opposed Katanga's breaking away. Lumumba sought help from the United Nations. He had the support of other African leaders, including Kwame Nkrumah. The United Nations dithered, leaving Lumumba frustrated. The United States offered no help. Lumumba sought the help offered from the Soviet Union. A CIA dispatch to Washington (18 august 1960) labeled Lumumba as "a commie playing the commie game." CIA chief, Lawrence Devlin, had close contacts with the Congolese commander Colonel Joseph Mobutu and the U.S. ambassador in the region, Clare Hayes Timerlake. Lumumba was taken prisoner by Mobuto's forces, degraded, beaten and murdered. And across Africa anti-American riots erupted.

The British in Kenya

Because of the greater number of white settlers in East Africa, working toward independence there was more difficult for the British. The whites were as opposed to handing a fair share of power to blacks and others as had been the whites in Algeria. In Kenya, frustration among the Kikuyu (about 20 percent of the population) led to rebellion in 1952 - known as the Mau Mau uprising. The Kikuyu were unhappy about their lack of power, their having been driven off much of their land and their unemployment and lives of poverty in the city of Nairobi and other towns.

The Mau Mau uprising was loosely organized, or perhaps it was more of a spontaneous rising of uncoordinated groups who hid in Kenya's jungles and struck at the fringes of white held areas. The British were able to crush the rebellion after five years of struggle - with about 90,000 Kikuyu having been put into concentration camps, more than a million Kikuyu and Embu civilians having been shifted into "secure" areas, and perhaps as many as 10,000 blacks killed. British firepower had proven supreme, the British losing only about 100 killed. They maintained their rule over 15 million blacks.

But Britain could not afford to keep a large force in Kenya to maintain its military victory, and it began to organize the turning over of power to the black Africans, to a government that would respect the minority white and Asian presence and maintain economic ties with Britain.

They found such a government under the leadership of Jomo Kenyatta, who had been the undisputed Kikuyu leader since the 1940s. Kenyatta had studied anthropology in Britain and had worked hard since the 1930s for reform, and he was revered by the Kikuyu. Kenyatta denounced Mau Mau terrorism, but the British had held him responsible for the uprising, had put him in prison in 1952 and had held him there for nine years. In 1963, the British granted Kenya its independence. Most of the Europeans - 50,000 of them - chose to remain in Kenya, confident that they could survive well enough under black rule. And Kenyatta entered Kenyan independence realistic about the difficulties that lay ahead. In his first speech as president he warned of the hard work which lay ahead and the need to save themselves from poverty, ignorance and disease, to educate their children and to have doctors, to build roads and to improve or provide all day-to-day essentials.

Rhodesia

Rhodesia had experienced impressive economic growth, the benefits of which were far from equally shared between Europeans and blacks - in 1961 the Europeans on average earning fifteen times that of blacks. In an effort to surrender more power to blacks and prevent more uprisings like that of the Mau Mau rebellion, Britain separated Southern Rhodesia from Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland. On July 6, 1964 Nyasaland became the independent state of Malawi. And on October 24 that same year, Northern Rhodesia became Zambia.

Southern Rhodesia remained a British colony, 250,000 persons of European descent there holding power over 16 times their number: 4,000,000 blacks. Europeans continued calling it simply Rhodesia. And in November 1965 the Europeans there, led by their prime minister, Ian Smith, unilaterally declared itself independent. - within the Commonwealth of Nations.

Nkrumah's Socialism

The Kremlin described "the imperialists" as having retained in Africa "their commanding position in economic, political and military affairs." Nkrumah, however, was determined to build a socialist society in Ghana, one that was Ghanaian in character and African in outlook, and he frequently spoke of the evils of "neo-colonialism."  The leftists around Nkrumah drummed out of office Nkrumah's able and responsible economics minister, who fled into exile, fearing for his life. Emergency measures in late 1957 were used in curbing political opposition. In 1960 Ghana became an independent republic, and by then it had become a one-party state, with an all-powerful head-of-state.

Nkrumah maintained ties with the West, including friendly ties with the Kennedy administration, Kennedy agreeing to join with Kaiser Aluminum in helping Nkrumah develop a hydroelectric facility on the Volta River. The Russians were willing to help Nkrumah where they could. They gave him a grand tour of their country and showed him their economic achievements. And Nkrumah was impressed. Nkrumah also visited Communist China and was impressed by China's program for economic advancement.

When Ghana had received its independence in 1957 there had been reason in that nation for hope. The British had helped develop a well-trained and literate citizenry. Ghana had led the world in the export of cocoa. It had been mining almost ten percent of the world's production of gold. Ghana was also rich in diamonds. And it had bauxite, manganese and hardwoods for export. But Nkrumah looked upon exports to the industrialized nations with disdain, calling Cocoa contaminated by capitalism. Nkrumah gave little importance to developing agriculture, equating agriculture with bondage. He wanted to a great leap to a modern, industrial economy. This, he believed, he could accomplish through socialism, not unlike the Soviet Union in the thirties.

Nkrumah described Ghana's socialism using a Marxist phrase: scientific socialism. He launched a seven-year economic plan, and he moved to collectivize agriculture - against the wishes of Ghana's independent farmers, who had been the tax base for the nation. Nkrumah created state run industries, in distilling, metallurgy, tire manufacturing, vegetable oil production, boat building, paper mills, cocoa processing, footwear manufacturing and pharmaceuticals. By 1963 he had set up over forty enterprises, hoping to gain profits from them that could be invested in further economic growth.

But much to Nkrumah's surprise his enterprises were losing money and eating up public funds. The state-run airline he had created, Ghana Airways, was racking up huge losses. Nkrumah tried saving money by cracking down on the import of luxuries from abroad, but this was not enough as his enterprises continued to cost more money than they made. Nkrumah's young party people, the Young Pioneers, were idling their time away on state farms or at other state enterprises. Ghana's economy was in decline. Labor unrest developed. Nkrumah's solution to growing economic problems was to nationalize: plantations, gold mines and laundries. With its foreign currency reserves low, Ghana was unprepared for the drop in cocoa prices in the mid-sixties. The value of its currency declined, and a loaf of bread cost one and a half days of labor at minimum wage.

Many of Ghana's farmers and middle class were looking back to colonial times as a golden age. University professors and medical doctors began leaving Ghana for work elsewhere. Grammar school teachers began migrating to Nigeria, which was booming economically and where there were better jobs.

A "black market" thrived. And with party hacks in lucrative positions, many Ghanaians were upset with what they saw as corruption. Nkrumah lived modestly but his party men were often seen with great new cars, often with a well-dressed, unwifely looking young woman in the passenger seat. Nkrumah's close colleague, Krobo Eduisei, owned twenty-seven houses and a gold bed.

Power to Africa's Military and More Decline

It did not take long for the military in Africa to realize their power. Colonel Gamel Abdul Nasser had grabbed power away from king Farouk (Faruq or Faruk) in Egypt in 1952. In 1963 the military took power in Togo. In Algeria, Ahmad Ben Bella's socialist schemes did not work well and created discontent, and in 1965 Algeria's leading military man, Houari Boumedienne, took power, Ben Bella returning to the imprisonment he had suffered under the French. In November 1965 in the Congo, the army, led by Mobutu, overthrew the Congo's president, Joseph Kasavubu, which started Mobutu on more than thirty years of corrupt rule. In January 1966, the military in the Central Africa Republic overthrew civilian rule. Three days later in Upper Volta the military took power. That same month the military took power in Nigeria. The coup in Nigeria encouraged many in Ghana who wanted Nkrumah out of office, and a month after the Nigerian coup the military in Ghana overthrew Nkrumah, with much rejoicing among the people of Ghana. In 1967 the military came to power in Sierra Leone. In 1969 Colonel Muammar Kadafi overthrew the monarchy in Libya, and, that year, army officers took power in Somalia.

South Africa and Apartheid, to 1963

As Africans were moving to self-rule elsewhere on the continent, whites in South Africa were determined that they were going to maintain their way of life, which to them meant maintaining power, in other words denying power to the majority Africans. The whites in South Africa - of British and Dutch descent - were roughly 20 percent of South Africa's population. Asians (mainly Indians) were roughly 2 percent. Blacks were about 70 percent, and those classified as coloreds (of mixed race) were about 8 percent. Many of the more conservative whites - largely farmers of Dutch descent, saw God as having given them their lands in South Africa, and they saw no reason to give up ruling themselves.

White farmers had become dependent upon blacks as cheap labor, and manufacturers were also using blacks for cheap labor. South Africa had become urbanized, with 50 percent of the black population living in cities dominated by white governments, many of the blacks there working as semi-skilled labor in manufacturing, blacks operating machinery having replaced the white master-craftsmen of previous generations. The labor of black people had become a mainstay of South Africa's economy, but with wage discrimination. A law had been passed creating what was called a Civilized Labor Policy, which protected the wage levels of white workers and left employers free to hire blacks at wages as low as possible. And there was the Bantu Act of 1953, which took schools away from missions and assured that whites would receive educations different from and superior to that of blacks.

The movement of blacks in the urban areas had exacerbated race relations, and in 1948 the most conservative of white political parties, the Nationalist Party, won the national election - elections in which only whites participated. The Nationalist Party was predominately rural and consisted largely of those of Dutch heritage, and it was the most adamant in maintaining a separation between whites and the other races in South Africa.

They set out to more than maintain the separation of the races; they tried to turn back the clock and undo what appeared to them to be unacceptable integration. Blacks were working in white owned factories, other white businesses and in white homes, but they were largely segregated into black enclaves in the cities and had their own facilities and doors of entry to public places where they were allowed, and other restrictions that were common in the South in the United States. But still there was too much integration for the Nationalist Party.

New laws restricted blacks living in cities. Blacks were forbidden to own their own homes in urban areas. They had to rent less than satisfactory housing from local administration boards. The old apartheid dogma that blacks were "temporary sojourners" in the cities was applied. Those who had worked for the same employer for ten years or for different employers for fifteen years were allowed to continue living in cities and towns, and all others were regarded as migrant workers who had to have special work permits, which were to be renewed every year.

So called black spots in South Africa's cities were wiped out. This included neighborhoods where people of different races had been living beside one another peacefully, the black suburb called Sophiatown and the heart of the Colored community in Capetown (District Six). Blacks were now obliged to carry passbooks, open to inspection to any policeman or agent of the government whenever asked. Blacks had to acquire special permission for travel to various activities. Those no longer allowed in the cities, including the old and no longer useful, were to be forcibly removed to areas outside the cities designated as reserves for blacks - dusty places with abject poverty and far from what blacks considered home.

Every square inch of South Africa was designated as belonging to a racial grouping, and blacks were removed from villages and lands where generations had lived and worked fields they believed they owned - to be replaced by whites.

The response to the Nationalist Party's policies by blacks was increased agitation. An organization called the African National Congress turned to boycotts, strikes and civil disobedience. In the early fifties they began their Defiance Campaign, together with some of South African Indians. The government arrested 8,500, which outraged many more, and tens of thousands mobilized for defiance.

In 1956, the government indicted 156 opposition leaders, including Nelson Rolihiafia Mandela, leader of the African National Congress. The African Nation Congress issued what it called a Freedom Charter, asserting that South Africa belonged to all who lived in it, "black and white," and which called for universal suffrage and those individual freedoms found in the U.S. Bill of Rights.

The British government was less than thrilled over the new repressions in South Africa, and a white majority approved a new constitution that in 1961 made South Africa a republic. South Africa's government had hoped to remain within the Commonwealth, but with criticism from other Commonwealth nations South Africa withdrew from that association.

By now, the Communist Party of South Africa, originally all white, had joined with blacks and Asians against the repression. Already the Party was banned, by the Communism Act of 1950, which denied people the right to function peacefully in the political party of their choice. But as usual with such suppressions the Party worked underground. Blacks joined the Party, and the government and police had another charge against its non-white opponents.

In March 1962, while posturing righteously against the Communists and perpetrators of rebellion, government forces created what became known as the Sharpeville Massacre. In the black township of Sharpeville, south of Johannesburg, police fired on a crowd of about 10,000 that had gathered in front of a police station to protest against pass laws, the police killing 67 and wounding 186, including 40 women and 8 children, most of them shot in the back while trying to flee.

The Sharpeville massacre added to the other repressions made white rule more precarious, but the government continued on course and outlawed the African National Congress and the Pan-Africanist Congress, forcing these two organization underground. For awhile, only black labor activists were making protests, but the African National Congress was developing a military wing in its organization, called the Umkhonto. In 1963, diligent government forces discovered Umkhonto's headquarters and found there the leader Nelson Mandela. They arrested Mandela and others, and in 1964 Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment.

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