End of Empire in Africa: Continuities and Ruptures

At the close of World War II,  the main imperial occupants in Africa (Britain, France, Belgium, Portugal) recognized that some adaptations of colonial policies were necessary, given the altered global geopolitical environment.  However, the voice of anti-colonial nationalism was still barely audible in most territories, and the dominant perspective presumed decades if not centuries of time before any fundamental alteration of the architecture of colonial hegemony was needed.  Invigorated development, social provisions, and openings for the educated elites seemed sufficient to ensure the durability of reformed colonialism.  Only Britain had a template for eventual self-government. The late colonial state benefited from an extraordinary surge in postwar revenues, which financed a marked reinforcement of its administrative scope and capacities.  Though by the 1950s under growing challenge by nationalist movements; in governance capacities the terminal colonial state was a robust hegemon.  However, the international environment rapidly deteriorated, and from 1954 the Algerian armed liberation movement demonstrated the possibility of externally supported insurgency to hold a colonial army at bay. In the substantial majority of cases, the imperial powers (save for Portugal) accepted a negotiated decolonization.  Out of the tension between combative mobilization and bargained cooperation, by the later 1950s a code of decolonization had taken form, with a half-dozen elements:  territoriality, representative institutions, majoritarian universal suffrage, central role of political parties, undiluted sovereignty, and speed. In these cases, the late colonial state passed intact into the hands of African successors qualifying under the terms of the decolonization code.  The colonial legacy thus defined the post-colonial state, with its autocratic essence soon reasserted.  A greater discontinuity occurred in the eight instances of armed liberation.  Equally noteworthy was the disjuncture in imperial lands:  the collapse of the Estado Novo and Fourth Republic, the communalization of Belgian politics.