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 took their seats at the UN. 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 — most of them drawn in Berlin in 1884–85 by Europeans who had never set foot there, 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 perhaps a million died, and Kenya's Mau Mau emergency. They emerged into a Cold War world that promptly re-colonized much of the continent 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, with Belgian and CIA involvement; 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.
By 2050, one in four humans will live in Africa; by 2100, closer to two in five, and Lagos and Kinshasa are on track to be among the largest cities ever built, each pushing past forty million. Whether the century's most populous continent governs itself well, urbanizes humanely, and industrializes rather than merely extracting is plausibly the single largest open question about the texture of human life in the second half of this century — and increasingly a question that Europe, facing it across the Mediterranean as migration pressure and as market, treats as its own.