R1.10 Independence movements in Algeria, Angola, Ghana, Guinea, Namibia and Tanganyika (circa 1900–2000)

An independence movement is a political campaign by the people of a colony to end foreign rule and form their own state. Between 1957 and 1990 these six movements created six new states in North, West, East, Central and Southern Africa, by very different routes: elections in Ghana, a referendum in Guinea, negotiation in Tanganyika, and long wars in Algeria, Angola and Namibia.

The overview timeline shows two waves. Ghana, Guinea and Tanganyika became independent between 1957 and 1961 by largely peaceful means, while Algeria fought from 1954 to 1962. Angola and Namibia, where the colonial powers were dictatorships or minority regimes that refused to leave, had to wait until the collapse of the Portuguese dictatorship in 1974 and the regional settlement of 1988.

Colonial rule and the roots of the six movements

Every colonial system rested on the same principle: Europeans, or white South Africans, ruled and Africans were ruled. The systems differed in how far Africans could take part in government, whether white settlers held land and power, and whether the colonial power accepted that the colony might one day become independent. These differences shaped what kind of movement emerged and what methods it could use.

Six colonies, four colonial systems

Settler figures are approximate. The table makes the central contrast clear: the three colonies with few settlers and a colonial power willing to negotiate became independent first and without war, while the three with large settler populations and a colonial power that claimed the territory as its own did not.

Ideas that crossed borders

African nationalists drew on several bodies of ideas, often at the same time. Nationalism, the belief that a people forms a nation with the right to govern itself, was itself a European idea; African nationalists turned it against the empires that had brought it. Because colonial borders had been drawn by Europeans, the "nation" was usually the colony itself: Gold Coasters, Tanganyikans and Algerians had to be persuaded that they were one people.

• Self-determination. The Atlantic Charter (1941) and the UN Charter (1945) stated that peoples had a right to choose their own government. Britain claimed this applied to occupied Europe, but African nationalists read it as a promise to them. In December 1960 the UN General Assembly's Resolution 1514, the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, declared colonial rule a denial of human rights and said that a lack of preparation should never be used as a reason to delay independence.

• Négritude, a movement of French-speaking Black writers such as Aimé Césaire and Léopold Senghor from the 1930s, asserted the value of African culture against French claims to be "civilising" Africans.

• Marxism and African socialism. Marxist ideas reached African students and trade unionists through communist parties in Paris and Lisbon; the MPLA and later SWAPO described themselves as Marxist. Nkrumah, Sékou Touré and Julius Nyerere preferred an "African socialism" that claimed roots in communal village life.

• Islamic reform and Arab nationalism shaped Algerian nationalism, which defined the nation by Islam and the Arabic language as well as by territory.

Ideas mattered most through the people who carried them. Many leaders studied abroad: Nkrumah in the United States and Britain, Nyerere at Edinburgh, Agostinho Neto in Lisbon, Messali Hadj among Algerian workers in Paris. Abroad they met other colonial students, read Marxist and Pan-African writing and saw that Europeans were not invincible.

The world after 1945

The Second World War weakened every European colonial power. France had been defeated and occupied in 1940; Britain ended the war with huge debts and depended on US loans; the Netherlands lost Indonesia. Hundreds of thousands of African soldiers served in the war, about 65,000 from the Gold Coast alone, and saw European armies beaten as well as victorious.

The diagram of external reasons groups the pressures that bore on every movement. India and Pakistan became independent in 1947 and Indonesia in 1949. In May 1954 the Viet Minh defeated the French army at Dien Bien Phu in Indochina. At the Bandung Conference in April 1955, 29 Asian and African states condemned colonialism. Once Ghana became independent in 1957, and 17 African colonies followed in the "Year of Africa", 1960, independence for the rest became a question of when rather than whether.

The United Nations gave colonial peoples a stage. Tanganyika was a UN trust territory whose administering power had to report to the UN Trusteeship Council, and the status of South West Africa was argued at the UN and the International Court of Justice for forty years. As newly independent states joined, the General Assembly became a forum where colonial powers were in a minority.

The Cold War worked in two directions. Both superpowers claimed to oppose colonialism, and both competed for influence in the new states. The United States pressed its allies to make concessions to moderate nationalists, partly so that independence movements would not turn to Moscow. But where movements were Marxist (the MPLA, SWAPO) or the colonial power was a useful ally (Portugal was a NATO member; South Africa was strongly anti-communist), Western states often supported the colonial power, and the Soviet Union and Cuba armed the movements.

The two maps of 1954 and 1964 show the speed of the change and its limits. By 1964 most of the continent was independent, but the Portuguese colonies and South West Africa remained under minority rule, and their movements had already taken up arms.

Ghana: from the Gold Coast to the first independent state of sub-Saharan Africa, 1900–1966

The Gold Coast was a British colony on the West African coast, with the Asante (Ashanti) kingdom inland and the Northern Territories beyond it. It had no settler population, a wealthy African trading class and the largest cocoa industry in the world. On 6 March 1957 it became Ghana, the first colony in sub-Saharan Africa to win independence from European rule, under Kwame Nkrumah and the Convention People's Party (CPP).

Domestic reasons: an educated elite, cocoa and the crisis of 1948

The Gold Coast had a long tradition of educated African protest. The Aborigines' Rights Protection Society (1897) successfully opposed British land bills that would have handed "unoccupied" land to the Crown. In 1920 the lawyer J. E. Casely Hayford founded the National Congress of British West Africa, which asked for elected Africans in the legislatures. These were movements of a small coastal elite of lawyers, merchants and clergy, who wanted a larger share in colonial government rather than its end.

British rule relied on chiefs. Under indirect rule, chiefs collected taxes and ran local courts under British supervision, which gave them power that educated Africans resented and made many chiefs dependent on the colonial state. Governor Gordon Guggisberg (1919–1927) built Achimota College and expanded schools, and his 1925 constitution allowed a few elected Africans in the Legislative Council, but the chiefs and officials kept control.

Cocoa made many farmers prosperous and also showed them how far their incomes depended on European firms. In 1930–1931 and again in 1937–1938 farmers organised cocoa hold-ups, refusing to sell to the big European buying firms that had agreed to keep prices low. After 1945 farmers faced compulsory cutting-out of trees infected with swollen shoot disease, which the government saw as science and many farmers as the destruction of their livelihood.

The immediate crisis came in 1948. Prices for imported goods were high, controlled by the European firms of the Association of West African Merchants, and a chief, Nii Kwabena Bonne III, led a boycott of European goods from January 1948. Ex-servicemen who had fought for Britain had received little of the pay, land and jobs they had been promised. On 28 February 1948 a march of ex-servicemen towards the governor's residence at Christiansborg was stopped by police, who opened fire; Sergeant Nii Adjetey, Corporal Patrick Attipoe and Private Odartey Lamptey were killed. Rioting and looting of European and Asian shops followed in Accra and other towns, and 29 people died in the disturbances.

The British Watson Commission blamed the unrest on political frustration as well as economic grievance and concluded that the Burns Constitution of 1946, which had given the colony the first African majority in a Legislative Council in British Africa, was out of date from the start because most members were still chosen by chiefs and officials. Britain responded with the all-African Coussey Committee (1949) to draft a more democratic constitution.

External reasons: war service, Manchester and a Labour government

About 65,000 Gold Coast soldiers served in the Second World War, many in Burma, and returned with new expectations. The Atlantic Charter and the Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester (1945), where Nkrumah was a joint secretary, gave the Gold Coast's politicians a language of self-determination. Indian independence in 1947 showed that Britain would leave a colony that was determined to go.

Britain's Labour government (1945–1951) intended to develop the colonies towards self-government within the Commonwealth, though on a timetable of decades. The 1948 riots shocked officials into faster change, and the Cold War made them want a moderate African government in place before radicals or communists could exploit discontent. A colony without settlers and with a cocoa economy that earned dollars for Britain was a place where concession seemed safe.

Parties and leadership: from the UGCC to the CPP

The United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC) was founded in August 1947 by J. B. Danquah and other lawyers and businessmen, with the slogan "self-government in the shortest possible time". They invited Kwame Nkrumah, then in London, to become its full-time general secretary in December 1947. Nkrumah built UGCC branches across the colony. After the 1948 riots the British arrested the UGCC's leaders, the "Big Six", including Nkrumah and Danquah, which made them national figures.

The leaders soon split. The UGCC elite wanted gradual change led by men of property and education; Nkrumah built a following among young men who had some schooling but few prospects, market women, ex-servicemen and clerks. On 12 June 1949 he founded the CPP with the slogan "Self-Government Now". The new party had a newspaper, the Accra Evening News, branches in every town, a youth wing, colourful rallies and party songs. It reached people the UGCC never had.

Nkrumah's leadership was both charismatic and organisational. He spoke in a style that crowds loved, styled himself the "Showboy" and later "Osagyefo" (redeemer), and his imprisonment made him a martyr. But the CPP's success also rested on organisers such as Komla Gbedemah, who ran the party while Nkrumah was in prison, and on thousands of local activists. Market women such as Hannah Cudjoe, the party's propaganda secretary for women, raised funds and turned markets into centres of party support.

Divisions: the National Liberation Movement and the North

The CPP never united the whole colony. In September 1954 Asante cocoa farmers, chiefs and young men founded the National Liberation Movement (NLM). They were angry that the CPP government had frozen the price paid to cocoa farmers to fund development, and they feared rule by a coastal party that ignored the Asantehene and the Asante kingdom. The NLM demanded a federal constitution. In the North, the Northern People's Party feared domination by the more educated south, and in British Togoland many Ewe wanted union with French Togoland instead of with the Gold Coast. Violence between CPP and NLM supporters in Kumasi in 1955–1956 killed several people.

These divisions delayed independence by about a year, because Britain insisted on a further election to prove that the CPP had majority support. They also showed that Ghanaian nationalism contained rival ideas of the nation: a unitary state led from Accra, or a federation of older kingdoms and regions.

Non-violence and negotiation: "Positive Action" and the ballot box

Nkrumah adapted Gandhi's methods. In January 1950 the CPP launched Positive Action: a general strike, boycotts and non-cooperation to press for immediate self-government. There was some violence; the government declared a state of emergency and Nkrumah was sentenced to three years in prison. Positive Action did not win self-government directly, but it made the CPP the voice of nationalism and Nkrumah its hero.

The decisive breakthrough came through elections. Under the Coussey constitution, the February 1951 election gave the CPP 34 of the 38 directly elected seats. The governor, Sir Charles Arden-Clarke, released Nkrumah from prison on 12 February 1951 to become Leader of Government Business, and in March 1952 Prime Minister. The period that followed is often called dyarchy: British officials kept defence, foreign affairs and finance, while CPP ministers ran the rest of government and Africanised the civil service.

Data: Dieter Nohlen, Michael Krennerich and Bernhard Thibaut, Elections in Africa: A Data Handbook (1999). The 1956 result shows both the CPP's strength and its limits: it won a clear majority of seats but lost most seats in Asante and the North, which is why the NLM claimed that the country was divided.

British policy was to transfer power to a government that had shown it had popular support and would keep Ghana in the Commonwealth. When the 1956 Legislative Assembly voted for independence, Britain set the date of 6 March 1957. The Togoland plebiscite of May 1956, in which British Togoland voted to join the Gold Coast, settled the new state's eastern border.

At long last the battle has ended! And thus Ghana, your beloved country, is free for ever. … Our independence is meaningless unless it is linked up with total liberation of the African continent.

Kwame Nkrumah, speech at the Old Polo Ground, Accra, midnight, 5–6 March 1957 (extracts; wording as in the full text reconstructed from archival recordings by the media scholar Erik Johnson, 2022; shorter versions circulate, including the one in Nkrumah's I Speak of Freedom, 1961). Nkrumah spoke to a crowd of tens of thousands and to the world's press. His audience explains the two themes: a celebration of a victory for the people of Ghana, and a claim that Ghana's independence was the first step towards the liberation of all Africa, the Pan-African mission that shaped his foreign policy.

Armed struggle: of limited importance

Ghana is the clearest case of independence achieved without armed struggle. There was no guerrilla movement, no secret army and no plan to use force. The violence of February 1948 and of Positive Action in 1950 was unplanned, and Nkrumah condemned violence. Its importance was indirect: the fear of disorder persuaded British officials to work with Nkrumah as a moderate who could control the crowds, and the threat that frustrated nationalists might turn to violence strengthened his bargaining position.

Impact of independence

Nkrumah became the most famous African leader of his time. He hosted the Conference of Independent African States (April 1958) and the All-African People's Conference (December 1958) in Accra, lent Guinea £10 million after its break with France and formed the Ghana–Guinea Union in November 1958. Ghana's example inspired movements across the continent, including in Tanganyika, Angola and South West Africa.

At home, the impact was more mixed. To deal with opponents in Asante and elsewhere, the government passed the Preventive Detention Act (1958), which allowed detention without trial. Ghana became a republic in 1960 with Nkrumah as president, and a one-party state in 1964. The Volta River Project and the Akosombo Dam (completed in 1965) aimed to industrialise the country, but falling cocoa prices, debt and corruption brought economic crisis. On 24 February 1966, while Nkrumah was abroad, the army and police overthrew him.

New identities emerged alongside old ones. Nkrumah promoted a Ghanaian and African identity through the name "Ghana" itself (after the medieval West African empire), national symbols and Pan-African ideas, but Asante, Ewe and northern identities remained strong. Women had been central to the CPP's organisation, and in 1960 ten seats in parliament were reserved for women, a first in Africa; yet few women reached real power. Marginalised groups included the opposition parties, chiefs whose powers were cut, and northerners, whose region remained poorer than the south.

Guinea: the "No" of 1958

Guinea was a French colony on the Atlantic coast of West Africa, one of the eight territories of French West Africa (Afrique occidentale française, AOF), governed from Dakar. In the referendum of 28 September 1958 it became the only French African territory to reject the French Community offered by Charles de Gaulle, and on 2 October 1958 it declared independence. Its movement, led by the trade unionist Ahmed Sékou Touré and the Parti démocratique de Guinée (PDG), won independence without war, through mass organisation and a single vote.

Domestic reasons: forced labour, chiefs and workers

French rule in Guinea rested on coercion. Until 1946 Africans were "subjects" under the indigénat, a code that let administrators punish them without trial, and they owed forced labour on roads, railways and European plantations of bananas and coffee. France governed through chefs de canton, chiefs appointed by the administration, often from families that had collaborated with the conquest. They collected taxes, recruited forced labour and soldiers, and enriched themselves, so that by the 1950s many Guineans saw the chieftaincy as the most hated part of colonial rule.

Society was divided by region and ethnicity. The Fulbe (Peul) aristocracy of the Fouta Djallon highlands owned land and, until the colonial period, slaves; the Malinke of Upper Guinea and the Susu of the coast had different histories. Early parties in the 1940s were ethnic associations, and the Fulbe chiefs dominated Guinea's first elected politics.

The reforms of 1946 changed the political ground. France abolished forced labour (the Houphouët-Boigny law of April 1946) and the indigénat, made Africans citizens of the French Union and allowed parties and trade unions. A growing class of wage workers in ports, mines and offices, including the young postal clerk Sékou Touré, organised unions. Bauxite mining at Fria and Boké was beginning to make Guinea valuable to France.

External reasons: the RDA, French politics and Algeria

Guinea's movement belonged to a West African federation of parties, the Rassemblement démocratique africain (RDA), founded at Bamako in October 1946 and led by Félix Houphouët-Boigny of Côte d'Ivoire. Until 1950 the RDA was allied with the French Communist Party, and its activists, Touré among them, learned organisation from French communist trade unions. The RDA's goal in the early 1950s was equality within the French system, not independence.

Events beyond Guinea forced the question. The French defeat at Dien Bien Phu (1954), Ghana's independence (1957) and above all the war in Algeria weakened French authority. The loi-cadre (framework law) of 1956, passed by a French government anxious to avoid "another Algeria" in sub-Saharan Africa, introduced universal suffrage and territorial governments with African ministers. When the Algerian crisis of May 1958 brought de Gaulle back to power, he offered the colonies a choice in a referendum: membership of a new French Community with internal self-government, or immediate independence without French help.

Parties and leadership: Sékou Touré and the PDG

The PDG was founded in 1947 as the Guinean branch of the RDA and grew slowly until Sékou Touré became its leader in 1952. Touré had made his name in labour politics. In 1953 he led a general strike across Guinea that lasted 71 days, longer than in any other French West African territory, to force the government to apply the new Overseas Labour Code of 1952, which promised shorter hours and higher wages. The strikers won, and Touré became the most popular politician in the colony.

Touré built the PDG as a mass party on the model of the unions: local committees in every village and urban neighbourhood, a women's wing and a youth wing, and a programme that attacked the chiefs. The party crossed ethnic lines by appealing to workers, women, young men and former soldiers against the colonial chiefs and the Fulbe aristocracy. In the territorial election of 31 March 1957, held under the loi-cadre, the PDG won 56 of the 60 seats, and Touré became vice-president of the government council, in effect head of the territorial government. In December 1957 the new government abolished the chieftaincy, replacing appointed chiefs with elected village councils.

Women were central to the PDG's success. Women activists such as Mafory Bangoura organised the party in markets and neighbourhoods, sheltered strikers in 1953, collected funds and enforced boycotts of rival parties. The historian Elizabeth Schmidt argues that these grassroots activists, together with trade unionists, students and veterans, were more radical than the party leaders and pushed the PDG towards rejecting the Community in 1958.

Divisions

The PDG's rivals were the parties of the chiefs and the Fulbe elite, above all the Bloc africain de Guinée, which the PDG defeated electorally and, in 1955–1958, in street violence in Conakry. The bigger division was within the RDA. Houphouët-Boigny wanted each territory to deal directly with France; Touré and the Senegalese leader Léopold Senghor (from another party) wanted a strong West African federation. In 1958 Houphouët campaigned for "Yes", and Touré broke with him.

Non-violence: the referendum of 28 September 1958

On 25 August 1958 de Gaulle visited Conakry to campaign for the Community. In front of him, at the territorial assembly, Touré made a speech demanding a Community of equals with a right to independence.

Nous avons, quant à nous, un premier et indispensable besoin, celui de notre dignité. Or, il n'y a pas de dignité sans liberté … Nous préférons la pauvreté dans la liberté à la richesse dans l'esclavage.

("We, for our part, have one first and essential need: our dignity. Yet there is no dignity without freedom … We prefer poverty in freedom to riches in slavery.") Ahmed Sékou Touré, speech to Charles de Gaulle at the territorial assembly, Conakry, 25 August 1958 (extracts; translated from the French). Touré was addressing de Gaulle directly but also the crowd outside and his own party, which was divided on how to vote. The speech did not yet announce a "No"; it set out terms. De Gaulle took it as a challenge and replied that Guinea could have its independence by voting "No", but would face the consequences.

A PDG congress on 14 September decided to campaign for "No". The party's committees mobilised the electorate in three weeks. On 28 September 1,136,324 voted "No" and 56,981 "Yes", on a turnout of about 85 per cent.

The chart of the referendum shows how exceptional the result was. Every other territory of French West Africa voted "Yes", most by more than 95 per cent; the governing parties there, led by Houphouët-Boigny and Senghor, had chosen to stay. Guinea's vote reflected the PDG's total control of local politics as much as public opinion: by 1958 the party had destroyed the power of the chiefs who had organised the "Yes" vote elsewhere.

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Armed struggle: none

Guinea did not need an armed struggle. It had few settlers, France had already offered self-government, and the referendum gave a legal route to independence. Its experience shows that a well-organised mass party could win independence from France peacefully when the colonial power had accepted, even reluctantly, that a territory could leave.

France's response and the impact of independence

France reacted to the "No" with deliberate punishment. Within two months it withdrew its administrators, teachers, doctors and soldiers, ended aid and investment, and took or destroyed equipment and records, from office furniture to files. Its aim was to make Guinea an example to other territories tempted to follow. Guinea turned to Ghana, which lent it £10 million and formed the Ghana–Guinea Union (November 1958), and to the Soviet Union and its allies, who sent aid, advisers and trade. The United States, unwilling to offend France, was slow to engage, and then competed for influence.

The photograph of Touré at the White House in 1962 records that competition. Guinea's break with France made it, for a time, a Cold War prize that both superpowers courted.

Independence brought the first African-led government in French West Africa and a new national identity built around the PDG, the "No" and Touré himself. Guinea backed liberation movements elsewhere: the PAIGC of Amílcar Cabral, fighting Portugal in neighbouring Guinea-Bissau, had its headquarters in Conakry, and in November 1970 Portuguese forces and Guinean exiles raided Conakry in Operation Green Sea to free Portuguese prisoners and attack the PAIGC.

Inside Guinea, the impact soon turned authoritarian. The PDG became the only party, and Touré claimed that a "permanent plot" against the revolution justified purges. Thousands were imprisoned at Camp Boiro in Conakry; estimates of the deaths there under Touré's rule range from about 5,000 to about 50,000, and are disputed. In 1976 Touré accused the Fulbe of a "Peul plot", and the former OAU secretary-general Diallo Telli died in Camp Boiro in 1977. Hundreds of thousands, by some estimates more than a million, Guineans left the country. Women were celebrated in the party's rhetoric and held some posts, and the PDG's women's committees gave them a public role, but they had little independent power.

Tanganyika: TANU and a negotiated independence

Tanganyika, the mainland of today's Tanzania, was a German colony until the First World War and then a British-administered mandate and UN trust territory. Its movement, the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) led by Julius Nyerere, won independence on 9 December 1961, seven years after the party was founded, without violence and with remarkable unity across a country of more than 120 ethnic groups.

Domestic reasons: German conquest, British trusteeship and land

German rule (1885–1916) was violent. The Maji Maji rebellion of 1905–1907 united many peoples of the south against forced cotton growing; its leaders gave fighters water (maji) believed to turn German bullets to water. The Germans crushed it with a scorched-earth campaign, and the war and the famine that followed killed somewhere between 75,000 and 300,000 people. Later nationalists remembered Maji Maji as a first, failed, national rising, and the memory taught TANU that armed revolt against a modern army could be catastrophic.

After 1922 Britain ruled Tanganyika under a League of Nations mandate, and from 1946 as a UN trust territory. Governor Donald Cameron (1925–1931) introduced indirect rule through "native authorities", sometimes creating chiefs where none had existed. Society was organised in a racial hierarchy: Europeans at the top, Asian traders and clerks in the middle, and Africans at the bottom, with separate schools, hospitals and pay scales. Africans grew coffee, cotton and other cash crops; on Kilimanjaro, Chagga farmers formed the Kilimanjaro Native Cooperative Union (1933), an early example of African economic organisation.

Tanganyika had relatively few settlers, but settlers mattered in some regions, and British development policy after 1945 brought the state into villages as never before. The Groundnut Scheme (1947–1951), a British government plan to clear about 3 million acres for peanuts, failed on poor soil and lack of rain, costing about £49 million. Soil conservation and cattle-dipping rules, enforced through chiefs, angered peasants. In 1951 more than 3,000 Meru people were evicted from their land on Mount Meru to make way for European farms; their leader Kirilo Japhet took the Meru land case to the UN Trusteeship Council in 1952. The case lost, but it showed rural Tanganyikans that grievances could be taken beyond the colony.

Britain's plan for the territory was "multiracialism": a future in which the small European and Asian minorities would share power equally with the African majority. The 1955 Legislative Council gave each race the same number of unofficial seats, and in the 1958 elections every voter had to choose one European, one Asian and one African candidate. For Africans, who were about 98 per cent of the population, this "parity" was a denial of majority rule.

External reasons: the UN, British weakness and the example of Ghana

Tanganyika's status as a trust territory was its movement's greatest external advantage. Every three years a UN Visiting Mission toured the territory and received petitions, and Africans could address the Trusteeship Council in New York. The 1954 Visiting Mission recommended that Tanganyika should become self-governing within 20 to 25 years; the British government rejected any timetable, but the report made independence an international expectation.

Ghana's independence in 1957, French concessions in West Africa, the British withdrawal from Suez in 1956 and the Kenyan emergency all shaped British thinking. After Harold Macmillan's "wind of change" speech in February 1960 and the decision to speed up decolonisation in East Africa, Tanganyika, with no large settler community and a moderate, popular leader, was the obvious place to begin.

Parties and leadership: Nyerere and TANU

The Tanganyika African Association, founded in 1929 by African civil servants and teachers, was a social and welfare body. On 7 July 1954 it was turned into TANU, a political party demanding self-government, with Julius Nyerere, a teacher who had studied at Makerere and Edinburgh, as president. TANU's first constitution aimed at self-government and independence, the end of racial discrimination, and democratic elections.

The chain of TANU's growth shows how its organisation produced its success. TANU recruited through existing networks: cooperatives, trade unions (the Tanganyika Federation of Labour, led by Rashidi Kawawa from 1955), market traders and religious groups, Muslim and Christian. It used Swahili, the trade language of the coast and the colonial administration, which allowed it to speak to every region without favouring any ethnic language. Its membership grew from a few thousand to, by some estimates, close to a million by 1960.

Nyerere's leadership was intellectual and moral more than flamboyant. He argued calmly and in good English at the UN and with British officials, insisted on non-violence and non-racialism, and resigned his teaching post in 1955 to work full time for TANU. TANU's women's section, led from 1955 by Bibi Titi Mohamed, a Dar es Salaam singer and activist, recruited more than 5,000 women in its first three months and brought thousands more to rallies. The historian Susan Geiger argues that these largely Muslim, often uneducated urban women built TANU's mass base and its national culture, and that the history of the movement has been told too much through Nyerere.

Rivals and divisions

TANU's rivals were weak. The United Tanganyika Party (1956), backed by the government and by settlers, supported multiracialism and was crushed at the polls. Zuberi Mtemvu's African National Congress (1958) demanded "Africa for the Africans" and opposed TANU's acceptance of Europeans and Asians as citizens, but it won almost no support. The main division was within TANU itself: in 1958 the party argued about whether to take part in the tripartite elections, which it opposed in principle. Nyerere persuaded the Tabora conference (January 1958) to participate and to back candidates of all three races, a decision that delivered the legislature.

Non-violence and negotiation

TANU's methods were rallies, membership drives, petitions, speeches at the UN and elections. Nyerere addressed the UN Trusteeship Council in March 1955 and the General Assembly's Fourth Committee in December 1956, asking for a promise that Tanganyika would be governed as a primarily African state. The government of Governor Edward Twining (1949–1958) tried to block TANU: it banned the party's branches in some districts, forbade civil servants from joining, prosecuted Nyerere for libel in 1958 and encouraged the United Tanganyika Party.

The arrival of Governor Richard Turnbull in July 1958 changed British policy. Turnbull, who had served in Kenya during the Mau Mau emergency, concluded that only rapid concessions to TANU would avoid similar violence. In the elections of September 1958 and February 1959, TANU and the European and Asian candidates it endorsed won every contested seat. In August 1960 TANU won 70 of the 71 elected seats, and Nyerere became chief minister. Internal self-government followed on 1 May 1961, and independence on 9 December 1961, with Nyerere as prime minister; Tanganyika became a republic a year later with Nyerere as president.

In October 1959 Nyerere told the Legislative Council that Tanganyika would light a candle on top of Mount Kilimanjaro to shine beyond its borders, bringing hope where there was despair. On the night of independence a torch was lit on the summit, and the Uhuru (Freedom) Torch remains a national symbol.

Armed struggle: none

There was no armed struggle in Tanganyika. Nyerere committed TANU to non-violence and kept to it even when Twining's government harassed the party. Three conditions made this possible: few settlers to resist African majority rule, a colonial power bound by trusteeship to prepare the territory for self-government, and a single, popular party that could negotiate for the whole country. The memory of Maji Maji, and the example of Kenya, where the Mau Mau war killed thousands, made violence look both dangerous and unnecessary.

Impact of independence

Independence produced a new leadership drawn from TANU and a strong national identity built on Swahili, which became the national language, and on a party that included every region and religion. In January 1964 the army mutinied over pay and Africanisation of the officer corps; Nyerere had to ask Britain for troops to restore order, an embarrassment that led him to rebuild the army under party control. In the same month a revolution in Zanzibar overthrew the Arab-dominated government of the islands, and on 26 April 1964 Tanganyika and Zanzibar united as Tanzania.

In 1965 Tanzania became a one-party state, with competition between TANU candidates within each constituency. Dar es Salaam became the headquarters of the OAU Liberation Committee (1963) and a base for movements fighting in southern Africa, among them FRELIMO of Mozambique, the ANC and SWAPO. In February 1967 TANU issued the Arusha Declaration, setting out Nyerere's programme of socialism and self-reliance.

We have been oppressed a great deal, we have been exploited a great deal and we have been disregarded a great deal. It is our weakness that has led to our being oppressed, exploited and disregarded. Now we want a revolution — a revolution which brings an end to our weakness, so that we are never again exploited, oppressed, or humiliated.

Tanganyika African National Union, The Arusha Declaration, 5 February 1967 (revised English translation; written by Julius Nyerere and issued in Swahili). The declaration was addressed to party members and the nation, and its language of "war" against poverty reflected Nyerere's view that political independence was incomplete without economic independence. As a source on the impact of independence it shows the leadership's aims, not their results.

The results of ujamaa were disappointing. Villagisation, voluntary at first, became compulsory in 1973–1976; figures attributed to Nyerere put the number moved between September 1973 and June 1975 at over seven million, though officials also inflated their results by re-registering existing villages. Agricultural output fell and the state became heavily dependent on aid. Marginalised groups included Asian traders, many of whose businesses were nationalised, and pastoralists such as the Maasai, pressed to settle. Women won formal equality and some posts, but Bibi Titi Mohamed, who opposed the Arusha Declaration's leadership code, was arrested in 1969, convicted of treason and sentenced to life imprisonment, and released by presidential pardon in 1972. Tanzania nevertheless avoided the ethnic conflict and military coups that affected many neighbours, which most historians attribute in part to the national identity TANU had built.

Algeria: from reform to revolution, 1912–1962

Algeria was France's oldest and most valued African territory, conquered from 1830 and declared part of France in 1848. Its independence movement passed through every stage seen elsewhere, petition, mass party, election and strike, before a small group launched a war on 1 November 1954. The Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) won independence on 5 July 1962 after a war that killed hundreds of thousands.

Domestic reasons: a colony that claimed to be France

Colonial Algeria was built for its European settlers. After 1848 the coastal plains were divided into three départements governed like those of metropolitan France, but only the roughly one million pieds-noirs (Europeans, together with Algerian Jews, who were made French citizens by the Crémieux decree of 1870) enjoyed full citizenship. Muslim Algerians were French subjects. They could become citizens only by giving up their Muslim personal status, which meant renouncing Islamic law in marriage and inheritance, and very few did. Until 1944 they lived under the Code de l'indigénat (1881), which allowed administrators to punish them without trial.

Land was the deepest economic grievance. Laws such as the Senatus-consulte of 1863 and the Warnier law of 1873 broke up collectively owned tribal land so that it could be sold to Europeans. By the 1950s settlers owned much of the best farmland, producing wine and citrus for export, while the Muslim population, about 8.5 million by 1954 and growing fast, was crowded onto poor land. Hundreds of thousands of Algerian men migrated to work in France, where many first met trade unions and political parties.

Every attempt at reform was blocked by the settlers, who were represented in the French parliament and dominated local government. The Jonnart law of 1919 widened the Muslim vote only slightly. The Blum–Viollette proposal of 1936, which would have given French citizenship to about 25,000 educated Muslims without requiring them to give up their personal status, never reached a vote after settler mayors threatened to resign en masse. The Organic Statute of 1947 and the rigged Assembly elections of 1948 repeated the pattern after the war.

Three currents of nationalism

Algerian nationalism grew in three currents that agreed on little except opposition to settler rule.

The flow diagram of Algerian nationalism traces the three currents. The first, liberal reformism, began with the "Young Algerians" before 1914 and Emir Khaled, a grandson of the resistance leader Abd al-Qadir, who demanded equal rights in the 1920s and was exiled. Its leading figure in the 1930s was Ferhat Abbas, a pharmacist from Sétif who wanted Muslims to become full French citizens.

Si j'avais découvert la nation algérienne, je serais nationaliste … Mais je ne mourrai pas pour la patrie algérienne parce que cette patrie n'existe pas. … J'ai interrogé l'histoire, j'ai interrogé les vivants et les morts, j'ai visité les cimetières, personne ne m'en a parlé.

("If I had discovered the Algerian nation, I would be a nationalist … But I will not die for the Algerian homeland, because this homeland does not exist. … I have questioned history, I have questioned the living and the dead, I have visited the cemeteries; nobody spoke to me of it.") Ferhat Abbas, "La France, c'est moi", article in L'Entente franco-musulmane, 1936 (extract; translated from the French). Abbas wrote for educated Muslims and sympathetic French readers at the moment when the Popular Front seemed likely to grant reform. The article shows the assimilationist hope of the 1930s; its later fame comes from the contrast with Abbas's own journey to the FLN.

The second current was religious reformism. The Association of Algerian Muslim Ulama, founded in 1931 by Sheikh Abd al-Hamid Ben Badis, built schools that taught Arabic and a reformed Islam. Ben Badis answered Abbas in 1936 that he had searched history too, and found an Algerian Muslim nation with its own language, religion and culture that was not France and could not become France. The Ulama's slogan, that Islam was Algeria's religion, Arabic its language and Algeria its homeland, gave nationalism a cultural content that assimilation could not offer.

The third current was revolutionary nationalism. The Étoile Nord-Africaine (North African Star) was founded in Paris in 1926 among Algerian migrant workers, with links to the French Communist Party, and was led from 1927 by Messali Hadj. It was the first movement to demand full independence. Banned in 1929 and 1937, it was refounded as the Parti du peuple algérien (PPA, 1937) and then the Mouvement pour le triomphe des libertés démocratiques (MTLD, 1946). Messali, with his long beard and robes, became the charismatic "father" of Algerian nationalism, and spent much of the period from 1937 to 1962 in prison, exile or under house arrest.

External reasons: the war, the Arab world and the "Third World"

The Second World War broke the authority of France in Algeria. France's defeat in 1940, Vichy rule and then the Anglo-American landing in North Africa in November 1942 showed that France was not invincible, and the Atlantic Charter offered a language of self-determination. In February 1943 Abbas presented the Manifesto of the Algerian People to the Allied and French authorities, asking for an Algerian state with its own constitution. In 1944 Abbas, Messali's followers and the Ulama joined in the Friends of the Manifesto and of Liberty (AML), which claimed hundreds of thousands of members.

The massacres at Sétif and Guelma in May 1945, which followed nationalist marches on the day of victory in Europe, convinced many young nationalists that France would answer peaceful demands with force. French official figures put the Algerian dead at 1,020; Algerian nationalists claimed 45,000; most historians estimate between several thousand and 20,000. For the movement, Sétif was a turning point: Kateb Yacine, later Algeria's most famous writer, was arrested as a schoolboy and later said that his nationalism was formed there.

After 1945 the Arab and Asian world gave the movement allies. The Arab League (1945), Gamal Abdel Nasser's Egypt after 1952 and its radio station Voice of the Arabs backed the FLN with money, arms and propaganda. The Viet Minh victory at Dien Bien Phu (May 1954) showed that a colonial army could be beaten, and independence for Tunisia and Morocco in March 1956 gave the FLN bases and sanctuaries on Algeria's borders. The Bandung Conference of April 1955 put Algeria on the agenda of the new "Third World".

Parties and organisation: the making of the FLN

The young activists of the MTLD grew impatient. In 1947 the party created a secret armed wing, the Organisation Spéciale (OS), led first by Hocine Aït Ahmed and then Ahmed Ben Bella. The French police broke it up in 1950. In 1953–1954 the MTLD split between Messali, who demanded personal control, and the "centralists" of its central committee. Former OS members formed the Comité révolutionnaire d'unité et d'action (CRUA) in spring 1954 to end the split by starting an armed revolt.

The FLN was founded in October 1954 by nine men later called the chefs historiques (historic leaders): six inside Algeria (Mohamed Boudiaf, Larbi Ben M'hidi, Mostefa Ben Boulaïd, Mourad Didouche, Rabah Bitat, Krim Belkacem) and three in Cairo (Ben Bella, Aït Ahmed, Mohamed Khider). It divided Algeria into military regions, later six wilayas, each with its own commander. Messali's followers formed a rival movement, the Mouvement national algérien (MNA), in December 1954.

The FLN grew by absorbing or destroying its rivals. In 1956 Abbas's UDMA, the Ulama and the fighters of the Algerian Communist Party joined it as individuals; the FLN refused to accept other parties as partners. It created or took over mass organisations: a trade union federation (the UGTA, February 1956), a students' union, whose members went on strike and left their studies in May 1956 to join the struggle, and the FLN's Federation of France among the hundreds of thousands of Algerian workers there, whose dues paid for much of the war.

The Soummam Congress and the struggle for leadership

On 20 August 1956 the leaders inside Algeria met secretly in the Soummam valley in Kabylia. The Soummam Congress, organised by Abane Ramdane, gave the FLN a programme and a structure: a parliament of the revolution (the CNRA) and an executive committee (the CCE). It laid down three principles: collective leadership, the primacy of the political over the military, and the primacy of the interior (the fighters in Algeria) over the exterior (the leaders abroad). The platform also defined the future Algeria as a democratic and social republic, not a theocracy.

These principles were contested from the start. Ben Bella and the leaders in Cairo, who had not attended, rejected them; the military commanders resented civilian control. In December 1957 Abane himself was lured to Morocco and killed on the orders of other FLN leaders. The colonels of the wilayas and, later, the "army of the frontiers" in Tunisia and Morocco under Houari Boumediène became the real centres of power. Internal purges, such as the "bleuite" crisis of 1958–1959 when French intelligence tricked wilaya III into killing hundreds of its own members, cost thousands of lives; estimates of Algerians killed in internal FLN violence during the war run to about 12,000.

The civil war with the MNA was fought in Algeria and in France. In May 1957 the FLN massacred more than 300 villagers suspected of supporting the MNA at Melouza, and the "café wars" between the two movements in France killed about 4,000–5,000 people. By the end of the war the FLN had eliminated the MNA as a serious rival.

Non-violent methods: petitions, elections, strikes and crowds

Algerian nationalists used non-violent methods for thirty years before 1954 and kept using them during the war. Petitions and the Manifesto of 1943, election campaigns by the MTLD and UDMA in 1946–1951 and the AML's mass meetings all failed because the settlers and the administration blocked reform and, in 1948 and 1951, rigged the results. The lesson that the CRUA drew was that only force would make France negotiate.

During the war, non-violent mass action remained important. The FLN called an eight-day general strike from 28 January 1957, timed to coincide with a UN debate on Algeria; the army broke it by forcing shops open. In December 1960, during de Gaulle's visit, tens of thousands of Muslims marched through Algiers and other cities with FLN flags, showing that the movement had mass support even after its armed units had been weakened. On 17 October 1961 tens of thousands of Algerians demonstrated peacefully in Paris against a curfew; the police, under prefect Maurice Papon, killed dozens and perhaps more than a hundred people, many thrown into the Seine. The FLN's most effective non-violent weapon, however, was diplomacy.

The FLN's external delegation lobbied at the UN from 1955, where Algeria was debated every year from 1957. The Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic (GPRA), formed in Cairo on 19 September 1958 with Ferhat Abbas as president, was recognised by Arab states, many Asian and African states, China and, from 1960, in practice by the Soviet Union. It gave the FLN the appearance of a state in waiting and made it the only possible partner in negotiations. Outside events helped. In July 1957 Senator John F. Kennedy called in the US Senate for Algerian independence, and in February 1958 French aircraft bombed the Tunisian border village of Sakiet Sidi Youssef, killing dozens of civilians; the international outcry brought Anglo-American "good offices" and helped to bring down the French government in April. The historian Matthew Connelly calls this a "diplomatic revolution": the FLN won independence by making the war an international problem for France.

Armed struggle

The FLN began its war with about 70 small attacks across Algeria on 1 November 1954, carried out by perhaps a thousand or fewer fighters of its army, the ALN. Its strategy was to provoke repression that would push the Muslim population towards the FLN and make reform impossible. In August 1955, at Philippeville (Skikda) and nearby villages, the FLN commander Zighoud Youcef organised attacks that killed 123 people, including 71 Europeans; French reprisals killed 1,273 by the official count and about 12,000 according to the FLN. After Philippeville, the space for compromise between communities largely disappeared.

The ALN never defeated the French army, which grew to more than 400,000 men. The Battle of Algiers (1956–1957), in which General Massu's paratroops used systematic torture to destroy the FLN network in the capital, the Morice Line along the Tunisian border (1957) and the Challe offensive (1959–1960) reduced the ALN inside Algeria to scattered groups. For the movement, the armed struggle did three things: it made the FLN the leader of Algerian nationalism, it made the "Algerian question" impossible for France and its allies to ignore, and it gave the army that fought it the strongest claim to rule after independence.

Estimates of Algerian deaths in the war range from about 250,000–400,000 (the figures most historians give) to 1.5 million (the figure used by the Algerian state). About 25,000 French soldiers died. The violence was not only between Algerians and the French: the FLN killed thousands of Algerians it regarded as traitors, and the French army recruited Muslim auxiliaries, the harkis.

Military leadership shaped the movement as much as the fighting did. Wilaya commanders such as Krim Belkacem in Kabylia and Colonel Amirouche, who led wilaya III until he was killed in March 1959, built local followings and often acted independently of the political leaders. Houari Boumediène, chief of the general staff of the army of the frontiers from 1960, kept a conventional force of tens of thousands intact in Tunisia and Morocco behind the French barrier lines. That army fought little after 1958, but it was the best-organised force in the movement in 1962, and its commander became the arbiter of who would rule.

France's response and the negotiated end, 1958–1962

The French response combined military repression with political offers. Settler and army protests in Algiers on 13 May 1958 brought down the Fourth Republic and returned Charles de Gaulle to power. He first offered reform within French Algeria: the Constantine Plan (October 1958) promised land, housing, jobs and equal voting, and he invited the ALN to a "peace of the brave", a surrender with honour, which the GPRA rejected. On 16 September 1959 he recognised the Algerians' right to self-determination by referendum, the decisive concession. Settlers rose against it in the Barricades Week of January 1960, and in April 1961 four generals tried to seize power in Algiers; the putsch collapsed within days when conscripts and the French public stood by de Gaulle.

Negotiations were slow because the FLN insisted on being the sole representative of Algeria, on the unity of the territory including the Sahara and its oil, and on independence before any ceasefire. The talks at Melun (June 1960) failed; in January 1961 French voters approved self-determination by about 75 per cent in a referendum; talks at Évian and Lugrin in 1961 broke down over the Sahara before de Gaulle conceded it. Meanwhile the settler terrorist Organisation armée secrète (OAS) bombed and murdered in Algeria and France to wreck any settlement. The Évian Accords of 18 March 1962 gave a ceasefire, guarantees for Europeans and French military bases for a limited period. They were approved by about 91 per cent of French voters in April and by 99.7 per cent of Algerian voters on 1 July 1962, and Algeria became independent on 5 July.

For the movement, the negotiations showed both its strength and its weakness. The FLN obtained almost everything it had demanded in 1954, but its negotiators were the politicians of the GPRA, while real military power lay with Boumediène's army, which denounced the accords as too generous to France. That division burst into the open as soon as independence came.

Impact of independence

Independence opened a crisis in the movement. In summer 1962 the GPRA, led by Benyoucef Ben Khedda, was challenged by Ben Bella and Boumediène's army of the frontiers, and fighting between rival wilayas killed hundreds before the army entered Algiers in September. Ben Bella became prime minister and, in 1963, president of a one-party state. In June 1965 Boumediène overthrew him in a coup. The FLN ruled as the only legal party until 1989, and the army that had grown out of the ALN remained the real power. Historians link this militarised politics to the civil war of the 1990s.

The movement's definition of the nation had lasting consequences for identity. The state promoted Arabic and Islam as the basis of Algerian identity, following the Ulama's formula, and pursued Arabisation of schools and administration. Many Berber-speakers, especially in Kabylia, felt excluded; Aït Ahmed led an armed revolt in Kabylia in 1963, and the "Berber Spring" protests of 1980 demanded recognition of the Berber language.

Women, the moudjahidat, had fought, nursed, carried bombs and messages and kept families alive in the regroupment camps; among them were Djamila Bouhired, sentenced to death in 1957 and later reprieved, and Hassiba Ben Bouali, killed in the Battle of Algiers in October 1957. Yet the new state did not translate their role into political power, and the Family Code of 1984 gave women fewer rights than men in marriage and divorce. Marginalised groups paid heavily: most pieds-noirs, and almost all Algeria's Jews, left for France in 1962; thousands of harkis and their families were killed in reprisals and those who reached France were held in camps; and Messalists and other rivals of the FLN were excluded from the national story for decades.

Angola: three movements, one war and a revolution in Lisbon

Angola was the largest and richest colony of Portugal, the poorest and most authoritarian of the European colonial powers. Its independence movement was really three movements, which fought Portugal from 1961 and each other from the start. Independence came on 11 November 1975, after an army coup overthrew the Portuguese dictatorship, in the middle of a civil war in which South Africa, Zaire, the United States, the Soviet Union and Cuba all intervened.

Domestic reasons: forced labour, settlers and the Estado Novo

From 1932 Portugal was ruled by António de Oliveira Salazar's Estado Novo ("New State"), a dictatorship with a secret police, the PIDE, and no free elections even for the Portuguese. Salazar regarded the colonies as essential to Portugal's identity and economy. In 1951 they were renamed "overseas provinces", so that Portugal could tell the UN that it had no colonies to decolonise. Portuguese propaganda used the theory of lusotropicalism, developed by the Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre, which claimed that the Portuguese were uniquely free of racism and created mixed, harmonious societies in the tropics.

The reality was a legal colour bar. Under the indigenato system, Africans were classed as indígenas (natives), without citizens' rights, unless they became assimilados by showing that they spoke Portuguese, had a European way of life and earned a regular wage. By 1950 only about 30,000 of more than 4 million Africans, under 1 per cent, were assimilados. Indígenas paid a head tax and could be conscripted as contratados, contract workers sent to plantations, fisheries and public works. In the cotton districts, such as the Baixa de Cassanje, farmers were forced to grow cotton for the company Cotonang at prices fixed far below the market.

White settlement grew fast after 1945, encouraged by the regime to relieve poverty in Portugal and to strengthen its hold. Settlers took coffee land from Bakongo farmers in the north and competed with Africans and mestiços (people of mixed descent) for jobs in Luanda, even as taxi drivers and shop workers. The colony's wealth, in coffee, diamonds (mined by the Diamang company) and, from 1966, oil in the enclave of Cabinda, gave Portugal strong reasons to stay.

External reasons: decolonisation next door and the Cold War

Angola's nationalists watched the rest of Africa become free. Holden Roberto attended the All-African People's Conference in Accra in December 1958, and the Belgian Congo's independence in June 1960 gave the northern movement a base just across the border. Leaders of the MPLA met other Portuguese-speaking nationalists, including Amílcar Cabral of Guinea-Bissau and Marcelino dos Santos of Mozambique, as students in Lisbon in the late 1940s and 1950s, and formed links with Portuguese communists.

At the UN, the General Assembly declared in 1960 that Portugal's territories were colonies, and from 1961 it repeatedly condemned Portuguese rule. Portugal was isolated diplomatically but not materially: it was a founding member of NATO, and the United States, which needed its air base in the Azores, limited its criticism after 1962. The Cold War divided the movements' backers. The Soviet Union, Cuba and Eastern Europe supported the Marxist MPLA; the United States supported Roberto's movement from 1961 through the CIA, and China at different times helped the FNLA and UNITA.

Parties and leaders: the MPLA, the FNLA and UNITA

The three movements had different leaders, social and regional bases and ideologies.

The Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA) grew from small groups of urban intellectuals in Luanda. The movement dates its founding to a manifesto of December 1956; some historians argue that it took shape only in 1960, in exile. Its leaders, among them the poet Viriato da Cruz, Mário de Andrade and, from 1962, the doctor and poet Agostinho Neto, were mostly assimilados and mestiços, influenced by Marxism. Its base was among the Mbundu people of Luanda and its hinterland. Neto, imprisoned by the Portuguese in 1960 and escaped from Portugal in 1962, became its president in December 1962.

The FNLA grew out of the Union of the Peoples of Northern Angola (1954), a Bakongo movement that initially sought to restore the old Kingdom of Kongo, renamed the UPA in 1958 under Holden Roberto, who widened its aim to the independence of all Angola. In 1962 it merged with a smaller party to form the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA) and set up a government in exile (GRAE) in Léopoldville (Kinshasa), recognised for a time by the OAU. Roberto relied on support from the Congo and, after 1965, from his brother-in-law Mobutu Sese Seko, the ruler of Zaire. The FNLA was anti-communist and hostile to the mestiço and assimilado leaders of the MPLA.

UNITA (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola) was founded on 13 March 1966 by Jonas Savimbi, a former foreign minister of the GRAE who had broken with Roberto in 1964. Its base was the Ovimbundu, Angola's largest ethnic group, in the central highlands. UNITA began with Maoist rhetoric and Chinese training, but in the early 1970s it made local truces with the Portuguese army against the MPLA, and after 1975 it was backed by South Africa and the United States.

The divisions were rooted in Angola's colonial history: the three movements grew among peoples whose regions had been colonised differently, who spoke different languages and who looked to different neighbours for support. Personal rivalries and foreign backers deepened them. The historian John Marcum, whose two-volume The Angolan Revolution (1969, 1978) remains the standard account, shows how ethnic and regional bases limited each movement's appeal. The MPLA itself split in 1973–1974 into three factions, the "Eastern Revolt" of Daniel Chipenda and the "Active Revolt" of intellectuals, and was saved by Neto's control of its army and its foreign support.

Non-violent methods and the Portuguese response

Non-violent methods had almost no chance in Angola. There were no elections, parties were illegal and the PIDE arrested nationalists, including Neto, in 1959–1960. Nationalists sent petitions to the UN, and in the north the Bakongo petitioned the Portuguese authorities over the succession to the Kongo throne. In January 1961 cotton farmers in the Baixa de Cassanje refused to plant and burned seed in a protest against Cotonang's forced cotton system. The Portuguese air force bombed the villages. Most estimates of the dead range from about 400 to 7,000; the MPLA later claimed 10,000.

After the risings of 1961, Portugal combined repression with reform. In September 1961 it abolished the indigenato and the forced cultivation of crops, making all Africans legally citizens, and it invested heavily in roads, schools and the economy of the colony. These concessions came too late to win over the nationalists, who had been pushed into exile and armed struggle.

Armed struggle, 1961–1974

Armed struggle began in 1961. On 4 February a group of militants, later claimed by the MPLA, attacked the prisons and police stations of Luanda to free political prisoners; the attack failed, and settlers and police killed hundreds of Africans in the musseques (shanty towns) in reprisal. On 15 March 1961 the UPA launched a rising in the coffee country of the north. In the first weeks its fighters killed about 1,000 Portuguese settlers and several thousand Africans, many of them Ovimbundu contract workers from the south. Salazar answered with a call to send troops to Angola "rapidamente e em força" ("quickly and in force"). Settler militias and the army retaliated against Bakongo villages; estimates of the Africans killed in 1961 range from about 20,000 to 50,000, and hundreds of thousands fled, many of them across the border into the Congo.

The chain of events from 1961 to 1975 shows the structure of the war. The movements fought a guerrilla war on several fronts: the FNLA from Zaire in the north, the MPLA from Congo-Brazzaville into Cabinda and, after 1966, from Zambia in the east, and UNITA in the east and centre. They rarely held territory. Portugal fought three colonial wars at once, in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau, with about 150,000 troops by the early 1970s (more than 65,000 of them in Angola), and spent about 40 per cent of its budget on defence. It used strategic villages (aldeamentos), helicopters, defoliants and the PIDE's intelligence, and recruited Africans, who made up about 40 per cent of its army in Angola by the end of the war. Militarily, Portugal was containing the guerrillas in Angola by the early 1970s.

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The war was decided in Portugal. Young officers, many of them conscripts and junior officers who had served in Africa, concluded that the colonial wars could not be won and were destroying Portugal. On 25 April 1974 their Armed Forces Movement (MFA) overthrew the dictatorship in the almost bloodless Carnation Revolution. The new government agreed to decolonise. The armed struggle had therefore achieved independence indirectly: by imposing a cost that the Portuguese army itself refused to go on paying.

From the Alvor Agreement to civil war, 1975

In the Alvor Agreement of 15 January 1975, Portugal and the three movements agreed on a transitional government in which all three would share power, elections before independence, and an independence date of 11 November 1975. The agreement collapsed within months. Fighting broke out in Luanda in March, and by July the MPLA had driven the FNLA and UNITA out of the capital.

Foreign intervention turned the struggle for power into an international war. Zaire sent troops with the FNLA; the CIA began a covert programme to arm the FNLA and UNITA in July 1975; and in October South Africa invaded from Namibia in Operation Savannah, advancing towards Luanda with UNITA. The Soviet Union supplied arms to the MPLA, and from November Cuba sent thousands of troops (Operation Carlota). On 10 November the MPLA and Cuban forces defeated the FNLA and Zairean troops at Quifangondo outside Luanda, and on 11 November Agostinho Neto declared the People's Republic of Angola. The historian Piero Gleijeses argues, from Cuban archives, that Cuba decided to intervene on its own initiative and not as a Soviet proxy.

Impact of independence

Independence brought the MPLA to power, with Neto as president and, after his death in 1979, José Eduardo dos Santos. In 1977 the MPLA declared itself a Marxist-Leninist party. When Nito Alves, a former minister, attempted a coup on 27 May 1977, Neto's government and its Cuban allies crushed it, and the purge that followed killed thousands; estimates range from about 2,000 to more than 30,000. The civil war with UNITA, backed by South Africa and the United States, lasted, with pauses, until Savimbi was killed in February 2002. Angola became a front of the Cold War: Cuban troops stayed until 1991, and the battles around Cuito Cuanavale in 1987–1988 led to the settlement that freed Namibia.

Hundreds of thousands of Portuguese settlers, the retornados, left Angola in 1975, taking skills and capital with them. The new state promoted an Angolan identity based on Portuguese as the common language and on the MPLA's non-racial nationalism, but Bakongo and Ovimbundu Angolans often saw the state as an Mbundu and mestiço creation. Women had fought and organised in the liberation war through the Organisation of Angolan Women (OMA, founded in 1962); Deolinda Rodrigues, a leading MPLA activist, was captured by the FNLA in 1967 and killed. After independence women gained legal equality and some posts, but war and poverty limited what the state delivered.

Namibia: SWAPO, the United Nations and South Africa, 1946–1990

Namibia, called South West Africa until the UN adopted the name Namibia in 1968, was a German colony until 1915 and then ruled by South Africa. It was the last African colony to become independent, on 21 March 1990. Its movement, the South West Africa People's Organisation (SWAPO), combined petitions and diplomacy at the United Nations, strikes, and a guerrilla war fought from neighbouring states. The colonial power was not a European state but South Africa, itself a former colony ruled by a white minority.

Domestic reasons: genocide, mandate and contract labour

German rule left deep scars. When the Herero and then the Nama rose against land seizures in 1904, the German army crushed them with a campaign of extermination; in 1904–1908 an estimated 80 per cent of the Herero and about half the Nama died, through killing, starvation in the desert and death in concentration camps. Most historians call it the first genocide of the twentieth century. The surviving Herero and Nama lost their land and cattle and were forced into labour on white farms. Herero and Nama memory of the genocide shaped their politics throughout the century.

South African forces conquered the territory in 1915, and on 17 December 1920 the League of Nations gave South Africa a "C" class mandate to govern it as an "integral portion" of its own territory, with the duty to promote the "well-being and development" of its people. In practice South Africa treated it as a fifth province. White settlers, mostly Afrikaners and Germans, about 100,000 by the 1970s, held most of the farmland in the central and southern "Police Zone". South African aircraft bombed the Bondelswarts (a Nama community) in 1922 after they refused a dog tax, killing about 100 people.

The economy ran on contract labour. Men from Ovamboland in the north, where about half the population lived, were recruited by a single agency, SWANLA, on fixed contracts of 12 to 18 months to work in the diamond, copper and later uranium mines and on white farms, separated from their families and unable to change employer. After the National Party took power in South Africa in 1948, apartheid laws were extended to the territory. The Odendaal Plan (1964) divided it into ethnic "homelands", which SWAPO saw as an attempt to divide and rule.

External reasons: a mandate that became an international case

Namibia's legal status gave its movement a unique external weapon. In 1946 South Africa asked the new United Nations to let it annex the territory; the UN refused and asked South Africa to place it under trusteeship, which South Africa refused. For forty years the question went back and forth between the UN and the International Court of Justice (ICJ):

• In 1950 the ICJ advised that the mandate was still in force and that South Africa must report to the UN, though it was not obliged to accept trusteeship.

• In July 1966 the court dismissed a case brought by Ethiopia and Liberia against South Africa, ruling that they had no legal standing, by the casting vote of its president.

• On 27 October 1966 the UN General Assembly ended the mandate (Resolution 2145) and declared that South Africa had no right to administer the territory.

• In June 1971 the ICJ advised that South Africa's continued presence was illegal and that it must withdraw.

Events in the region shaped the struggle. Zambia's independence (1964) gave SWAPO a base; the collapse of Portuguese rule in Angola in 1975 gave it a long border from which to operate and a friendly government in Luanda. The Cold War cut both ways: the Soviet Union and Cuba armed SWAPO and its Angolan allies, while the Reagan administration in the United States, from 1981, linked Namibian independence to the withdrawal of Cuban troops from Angola, a policy known as linkage. The end of the Cold War in the late 1980s removed the obstacles to a settlement.

Parties and leaders: from the OPC to SWAPO

The first petitions came from traditional leaders. From 1946 Chief Hosea Kutako and the Herero Chiefs' Council sent petitions to the UN, carried by the Anglican priest Michael Scott, who addressed the UN's Fourth Committee in 1949 on their behalf. Modern political organisation began among contract workers and students. In 1957 Andimba Toivo ya Toivo and other Ovambo migrant workers in Cape Town founded the Ovamboland People's Congress, which became the Ovamboland People's Organisation (OPO) in 1959, led by Sam Nujoma, a railway worker and clerk. Its first cause was the contract labour system.

On 10 December 1959 police fired on people at the Old Location in Windhoek who were protesting against their forced removal to a new, segregated township, Katutura; 11 or more people were killed. Nujoma was arrested and left for exile in 1960. On 19 April 1960 OPO became SWAPO, a national party open to all Namibians and aimed at the independence of the whole territory. Its rival, the South West Africa National Union (SWANU, 1959), was based among the Herero and educated groups, and was weakened by SWAPO's success in winning international recognition.

SWAPO's leadership was in exile for three decades, in Dar es Salaam, Lusaka and Luanda, and it organised Namibians in camps, schools and its army abroad. Its strength lay among the Ovambo, about half the population, which its rivals presented as ethnic domination; SWAPO insisted on a national, non-ethnic identity. From the 1970s it described itself as socialist and drew most of its arms from the Soviet bloc.

Divisions within SWAPO

Exile produced bitter internal conflicts. In 1976 a group in Zambia led by Andreas Shipanga demanded a party congress and accountability; with the help of the Zambian army, the leadership detained hundreds of them, and Shipanga was held in Tanzania until 1978. In the 1980s SWAPO's security service, fearing South African spies, detained hundreds of its own members in pits at Lubango in Angola, where many were tortured and some died. Colin Leys and John Saul call SWAPO's liberation struggle a "two-edged sword": it won independence but also bred authoritarian practices that the new state had to live with.

Non-violent methods: petitions, diplomacy and the general strike

The vertical timeline shows how diplomacy and resistance ran together. Diplomacy was SWAPO's most consistent method and its greatest success. The UN Council for Namibia (1967) claimed to be the legal administering authority; in 1973 the General Assembly recognised SWAPO as the "authentic representative" of the Namibian people, and in 1976 as their "sole and authentic representative". This gave SWAPO an international standing that no internal rival could match.

Inside Namibia, the most important non-violent action was the contract workers' general strike of December 1971 to January 1972. Prompted by the ICJ ruling of June 1971 and an open letter from the Lutheran churches condemning apartheid, workers struck against the contract system; between about 13,000 and 25,000 took part, by different counts, and most were sent back to Ovamboland. The strike forced South Africa to abolish SWANLA and modify the contract system, and it brought a generation of young Namibians into politics. In 1974 thousands of them crossed into Angola and Zambia to join SWAPO in exile.

South Africa's response was a mixture of repression and attempts to create an internal settlement that excluded SWAPO. It banned SWAPO meetings, detained its internal leaders and, in 1975–1977, held the Turnhalle Conference of ethnic delegations in Windhoek, which produced the Democratic Turnhalle Alliance (DTA). In 1977 five Western members of the Security Council, the Western Contact Group (the United States, Britain, France, West Germany and Canada), began to negotiate; their plan became UN Security Council Resolution 435 of 29 September 1978, which provided for a ceasefire, a UN force and UN-supervised elections. South Africa accepted it in principle and delayed it for ten years.

Armed struggle: PLAN and the "border war"

After the ICJ judgement of July 1966, SWAPO concluded that the law would not free Namibia and declared that it would fight. Its army, later called the People's Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN), fought its first engagement when South African forces attacked its camp at Omugulugwombashe on 26 August 1966, now commemorated as Heroes' Day. The war that followed, which South Africans called the "border war", lasted until 1989.

In 1966–1967 South Africa arrested Toivo ya Toivo and other SWAPO members and tried 37 of them in Pretoria under the new Terrorism Act of 1967. Toivo's statement from the dock became one of the founding texts of Namibian nationalism.

We are Namibians and not South Africans. We do not now, and will not in the future, recognize your right to govern us; to make laws for us in which we had no say; to treat our country as if it were your property and as if you were our masters. … We have found ourselves voteless in our own country and deprived of the right to meet and state our own political opinions. Is it surprising that in such times my countrymen have taken up arms?

Andimba Toivo ya Toivo, statement from the dock before sentence at the Pretoria terrorism trial, 1967–1968 (extracts; as published in The African Liberation Reader). Toivo was speaking to a South African court whose authority he denied, knowing he faced a long sentence; he was jailed for 20 years on Robben Island. His real audience was the world outside, and the statement was published and circulated internationally. It shows how SWAPO justified armed struggle as a last resort after peaceful channels were closed, the same argument it made at the UN.

PLAN grew from a few hundred trained fighters in the mid-1960s to, by one estimate, about 32,000 under arms by 1989, including semi-conventional battalions, but it could not defeat the South African Defence Force (SADF). It was commanded from 1967 to 1990 by Dimo Hamaambo, who succeeded Tobias Hainyeko after Hainyeko was killed in 1967. After 1975 it operated from bases in southern Angola. South Africa built up a large army in the north of Namibia, used the counter-insurgency police unit Koevoet ("crowbar"), notorious for its brutality, and raided deep into Angola. On 4 May 1978 South African paratroopers attacked SWAPO's camp at Cassinga in Angola; the Angolan government put the dead at 624. South Africa called Cassinga a military base, SWAPO a refugee camp, and the debate continues, though the evidence suggests it held both refugees and combatants.

The war was ended by a regional settlement. In 1987–1988 Angolan and Cuban forces, with SWAPO, fought South African and UNITA forces around Cuito Cuanavale in southern Angola, and Cuban troops advanced towards the Namibian border. Neither side won outright, but the cost of the war, the risk of escalation and the end of the Cold War led to the New York Accords of 22 December 1988, in which Angola, Cuba and South Africa agreed that Cuban troops would leave Angola and Resolution 435 would be carried out.

The transition and the impact of independence

The UN Transition Assistance Group (UNTAG) arrived in April 1989. On 1 April, as the ceasefire began, PLAN fighters crossed from Angola, and South African forces, allowed to leave their bases, killed more than 300 of them in nine days of fighting; the peace process nearly collapsed but was saved. In the elections of 7–11 November 1989, with a turnout of about 97 per cent, SWAPO won 57.3 per cent of the vote.

The 1989 election result shows the extent and the limits of SWAPO's support: a clear majority, strongest in the Ovambo north, but not the two-thirds that would have let it write the constitution alone. The Constituent Assembly adopted a liberal democratic constitution, with a bill of rights and an independent judiciary, in February 1990. At independence on 21 March 1990 Sam Nujoma became president. Walvis Bay, the main port, remained South African until 1994.

The new government followed a policy of national reconciliation: white Namibians kept their property and civil servants their jobs, and no trials were held for crimes of the war, by either side. Critics, including former SWAPO detainees, argued that reconciliation protected SWAPO's own abuses from scrutiny. SWAPO increased its majority, winning more than two-thirds of the seats in 1994. Land remained mostly in white hands, since redistribution was limited to willing buyer, willing seller purchases.

Identity, women and marginalised groups were all affected. The new state built a Namibian identity around the liberation struggle, in which SWAPO and PLAN were central, which other groups, including the Herero and Nama, felt marginalised their own histories of resistance. Women had made up a significant share of PLAN and of the exile community, and the SWAPO Women's Council organised them; the 1990 constitution banned sex discrimination and later laws reserved places for women in local government, but women held few senior posts at first. The San, among the poorest Namibians, remained landless, and many San had been recruited by the SADF as trackers, which left them distrusted after independence. Herero and Nama leaders began to campaign for German recognition of, and reparations for, the genocide of 1904–1908.

Comparing the six movements

Each movement can be studied alone, but comparison shows which factors mattered generally and which were specific to one place. The table compares the six across the questions that run through the whole study.

Negotiated and fought independence

The most striking contrast is between the three movements that won independence by negotiation or vote and the three that fought. It is tempting to explain it by the character of the leaders: Nkrumah and Nyerere believed in non-violence, while the FLN, the MPLA and SWAPO chose armed struggle. The comparison suggests that the choice was shaped mainly by what the colonial power would allow.

The diagram of the reasons for armed struggle sets out four conditions found in Algeria, Angola and Namibia but not in the other three. Large settler communities could veto reform and had nowhere else to go. The colonial power claimed the territory as part of itself, so independence was treated as secession. No free election or legal party could carry nationalists to power. And the Cold War, especially in southern Africa after 1975, brought outside powers that prolonged the fighting. Where these conditions were absent, as in the Gold Coast and Tanganyika, Britain was willing to negotiate a transfer of power with the party that won elections; in Guinea, de Gaulle's referendum offered a legal exit.

The comparison also shows the limits of armed struggle. None of the three armed movements won a military victory: the ALN was broken inside Algeria by 1960, the Angolan guerrillas were contained by the early 1970s, and PLAN never defeated the SADF. Each war ended through politics: de Gaulle's decision to leave, the Portuguese officers' coup, and the regional and superpower diplomacy of 1988. Armed struggle mattered because it raised the political and financial cost of colonial rule until the colonial power, or its army, decided to stop paying it, and because it made the armed movement the only possible heir.

Women and marginalised groups

Women took part in every movement, in different roles: market women and party organisers in Ghana and Guinea, TANU's women's section in Tanganyika, fighters, nurses and couriers in Algeria, Angola and Namibia. In every case independence gave women formal political rights and some symbolic posts, but none of the new states made gender equality a priority, and in Algeria the Family Code of 1984 reduced women's legal rights. Historians such as Susan Geiger and Elizabeth Schmidt have shown that women's contribution was central to the success of the movements, and that the official national histories written after independence often left them out.

The table shows that independence created new marginalised groups as well as ending old forms of exclusion. Those who had sided with the colonial power (harkis, some chiefs), rival nationalist movements (Messalists, the FNLA and UNITA) and minorities who did not fit the new national identity (Asian Tanzanians, Berber speakers, the San) often lost most.

Perspectives and debates

Historians have argued about the independence movements from the moment they happened. Three debates run through the whole study: whether independence was won by African movements or conceded by colonial powers; how far the movements were united national movements or coalitions of different groups; and how to judge the states they created.

Won or conceded? Explaining decolonisation

Older nationalist histories, written in the 1960s, presented independence as the victory of African movements over colonial rule. Dennis Austin's Politics in Ghana, 1946–1960 (1964) explained the Gold Coast's independence through the organisation and appeal of the CPP. Imperial historians answered by stressing decisions in London and Paris. John Darwin, in Britain and Decolonisation (1988), argues that decolonisation resulted from the interaction of three sets of pressures: colonial nationalism, British domestic politics and economics, and the international system, and that none of them alone explains the timing. Ronald Hyam, in Britain's Declining Empire (2006), emphasises British ministers' calculations about cost, the Cold War and the need to keep friendly governments in power.

Frederick Cooper, in Decolonization and African Society (1996), offers a third view: after 1945 Britain and France tried to make colonial rule modern and productive, but African workers, through strikes such as the Guinean strike of 1953, used the colonial powers' own language of development and equal pay to make demands that the empires could not afford to meet. On this view, decolonisation was partly the result of the colonial powers' failure to make reformed colonialism pay.

Algeria: battlefield or diplomacy?

Alistair Horne's A Savage War of Peace (1977) narrates the war mainly through French politics and the army, and explains independence by de Gaulle's recognition that the war could not be won politically. Matthew Connelly's A Diplomatic Revolution (2002) uses archives in several countries to argue that the FLN won by internationalising the conflict, turning the UN, the Arab states, the Cold War rivals and world opinion against France. Benjamin Stora (La gangrène et l'oubli, 1991), on the memory of the war, and Martin Evans (Algeria: France's Undeclared War, 2012) stress the violence on all sides and the competing memories of the war in France and Algeria, including those of the harkis and the Messalists, whom the FLN's official history long ignored.

Leaders or masses?

A second debate concerns who made the movements. Early accounts focused on leaders: Nkrumah, Nyerere, Touré. Social historians have since shown how much depended on ordinary members. Susan Geiger's TANU Women (1997), based on interviews with women activists in Dar es Salaam, argues that women such as Bibi Titi Mohamed built TANU's mass support and its national culture. Elizabeth Schmidt (Mobilizing the Masses, 2005) argues that in Guinea grassroots radicals pushed the PDG leadership to vote "No". Jean Allman's The Quills of the Porcupine (1993) shows that the Asante National Liberation Movement was itself a popular movement with its own vision of the nation, not simply a reactionary rival of the CPP. John Iliffe's A Modern History of Tanganyika (1979) presents TANU as the culmination of many local movements of farmers, workers and cooperatives.

Angola and Namibia: the Cold War and the costs of liberation

John Marcum's The Angolan Revolution (1969, 1978) explains the divisions between the MPLA, FNLA and UNITA mainly by their different ethnic and regional bases. Piero Gleijeses (Conflicting Missions, 2002), using Cuban archives, argues that Cuba sent troops to Angola in 1975 on its own initiative and not as a Soviet proxy, and that US policy was driven by Cold War fears more than by Angolan realities. For Namibia, Colin Leys and John Saul (Namibia's Liberation Struggle: The Two-Edged Sword, 1995) argue that the liberation struggle won independence but also produced authoritarian habits within SWAPO, shown in the detention and abuse of its own members in exile; SWAPO leaders rejected this view as playing down South African violence.

What kind of states?

The last debate concerns the outcome. Basil Davidson, in The Black Man's Burden (1992), argues that the nationalist movements took over the European model of the centralised nation-state, with colonial borders and institutions, and that this inheritance, rather than African culture, explains the one-party states and conflicts that followed. Others place more weight on the choices of leaders such as Touré and Neto, the economic weakness of new states and the Cold War.

These perspectives are not simply alternatives. Darwin's framework can include Austin's and Cooper's evidence as the "colonial" pressure; Connelly's argument fits Algeria better than Ghana; Geiger and Schmidt add the experience of people the leader-centred accounts left out. A strong judgement on any one movement uses the perspectives that fit it and explains why others fit less well.

Applying the ideas in exam questions

Every question gives an argument to evaluate: a claim that one factor was the most significant, or a statement about the character or effects of independence. The four practice questions cover domestic reasons, the growth of parties, methods and impact; questions can equally be set on external reasons, non-violence or the role of foreign support and military leaders.

Paper 3: domestic reasons for emergence

Paper 3: the growth of parties

A question on parties often asks about leadership, the most familiar explanation, and expects you to weigh it against organisation, strategy, ideology and divisions.

Paper 3: armed struggle and diplomacy

Paper 3: the impact of independence

Self-check

• To do:

  I can compare the four colonial systems behind the six movements and explain why settlers and the colonial power's view of a territory mattered.

• To do:

  I can explain the domestic reasons (discrimination, economic conditions, colonial administration, settlers) for the emergence of each of the six movements.

• To do:

  I can explain the external reasons (ideas, success elsewhere, colonial weakness after 1945, the Cold War and the UN) and say which mattered most for a named movement.

• To do:

  I can explain the growth of the CPP, the PDG, TANU, the FLN, the three Angolan movements and SWAPO, including leadership, organisation, strategy, ideology and divisions.

• To do:

  I can assess the importance of non-violent methods (campaigns, strikes, elections, the 1958 referendum, UN petitions and diplomacy) and the colonial powers' responses for each movement.

• To do:

  I can assess the importance of armed struggle in Algeria, Angola and Namibia, and explain why it was absent or unimportant in Ghana, Guinea and Tanganyika.

• To do:

  I can explain the role of foreign support and military leaders in the Algerian, Angolan and Namibian wars.

• To do:

  I can explain the political and social impact of independence for each movement, including new leaders, new identities, women and marginalised groups.

• To do:

  I can analyse the primary sources by Nkrumah, Touré, Abbas, Toivo ya Toivo and TANU in their context.

• To do:

  I can outline and weigh the views of Austin, Darwin, Cooper, Connelly, Geiger, Schmidt, Marcum, Gleijeses and Leys and Saul.