African Independence

Between 1957, when Ghana under Kwame Nkrumah became the first sub-Saharan colony to gain independence, and 1980, when Zimbabwe became one of the last, some fifty new states emerged on the African continent. In a single year, 1960 — later called the Year of Africa — seventeen of them became independent, and sixteen took their seats at the UN before it was out. Within twenty years the European empires that had ruled most of Africa for less than a century withdrew their flags and went home. The leaders who took over — Nkrumah, Nyerere, Kenyatta, Senghor, Lumumba, Mugabe — were a generation of extraordinary men, several of whom had been imprisoned by the very regimes they replaced, and several of whom carried Pan-African ambitions far larger than the borders they inherited.

The independence settlements were radically incomplete. The new states inherited colonial borders — often drawn in European capitals with scant knowledge of or accountability to the societies they divided, under the rules of the scramble that Berlin in 1884–85 had laid down and then fixed treaty by treaty, cutting across nations and bundling rivals into single jurisdictions — along with colonial bureaucracies, colonial school systems, colonial debts, and economies engineered to export raw materials to Europe rather than feed their own people. Decolonization itself ranged from the negotiated handover of Ghana to the savage settler wars of Algeria, where hundreds of thousands died, and Kenya's Mau Mau emergency. They emerged into a Cold War world in which outside powers constrained new sovereignty through proxy conflicts, from Angola, where Cuban troops and South African forces fought for fifteen years, to the Horn, where Washington and Moscow swapped Ethiopia and Somalia between them. Some founding leaders were killed within months — Patrice Lumumba in the Congo in 1961, murdered with decisive Belgian involvement after the CIA had separately plotted to eliminate him; others clung to power for decades and became, in turn, the local autocrats, and the continent saw scores of military coups between 1960 and 1990. Then came the waves: post-1973 oil shocks and commodity collapse, the debt crises of the 1980s, IMF structural-adjustment programmes that gutted public spending on health and schooling, and AIDS, which cut life expectancy in southern Africa by decades. By 2000 the continent's per-capita income relative to the West was lower than it had been at independence — a generation of net regression. The 2000s reversed the trajectory: a China-driven commodity boom, the HIPC debt-relief initiative, mobile telephony, and falling conflict pushed sustained growth across much of the continent, and the demographic future is now more African than anywhere else on earth.