Third world nationalism. These kinds of images were inspirations for movements
around the rest of the world, calling for human rights for colonial peoples,
democracy and self rule for people who'd been living in empires for a long time,
including in many of the settlement colonies of the rest of the world. Where
we see a conflict emerge between European settlers who've been living, sometimes for
generations in the colonies. And an indigenous or native peoples. Where we see
struggles between a, often native majority population and a settler minority
population. This is, of course, what had exploded in Algeria in the 1950s. And it
was a harbinger of things to come. One of the sites for a struggle such as this one
would, in fact, be to take us back to a case that we've been touching on over the
course of these lectures. South Africa, where Dutch and then, later, British
settlers had moved from, particularly eighteenth century. So they've been there
for a very long time and established very deep roots, but had never of course become
the majority population. What had happened, of course after the Second World
War, is that this minority population had declared what was called the apartheid
state. This was a regime that contained Africans, Black Africans. And to some
extent even the Indian migrants who'd come from India to South Africa and constrained
their rights. They did not enjoy then home rule within a within South Africa. The key
organization leading the struggle then to resist both in some senses, European rule
and white rule within South Africa was the African National Congress, created in
1923. notice, in fact, that the title itself borrows already the model of the, a
notion of a congress party which the Indians had rolled out in the 1880's. The
African National Congress, or the ANC, which remains, which is in power now in
South Africa. was born out of trade union activists. communist party militants,
modeled on the Indian notion of a pan. In this case would be pan, let's call it
tribal identities, to create a natio n out of the plurality of religions, tribes, and
regions of South Africa. And in 1955, the ANC would issue what they called their
freedom charter. This was an announcement, then, and you can imagine, 1955, this,
this is the same year as the Bandung Conference, then, outlining the demands
for what a free South Africa would look like. In this case it would be not just
free from any European rule, because that was no longer the issue, but free meant
that everybody in South Africa could enjoy the same political rights. This was then
followed by a series of strikes, particularly a mass strike by women, by
African women against the apartheid authorities. Agitation in the shanty towns
against the ways in which Africans had been hemmed in to these very poor areas
and deprived of basic needs, and of course, shootings by the police and the
military to contain the agitation that threatened to spill into an insurgency in
South Africa. In fact, funerals in South Africa in the 1950s became the site for
the clashes between organized activists, who'd come out to mourn the dead in the
funeral processions and the police themselves. Because among other things,
the funerals were the only legal gatherings. So repressive had apartheid
state become. India was in negotiated withdrawal, but it was not violent in the
sense that the violence was directed at the empires. The violence became civic
violence between denominational groups. South Africa was so hard because it pit,
it became a civil struggle. A civil war brewing in South Africa between settler
populations and native populations who all felt they belonged at home. So the
process, what I'm trying to convey to you is that the process of decolonization,
when you had incumbent settler populations who could not simply go home. There was no
home to go to, for the descendants of the Boers, for instance. For them South Africa
was home, too. But the fact was, South Africa, was only one of a set of many
sites across Africa, what would become a continental struggle, for freedom. In most
cas es, the bellicosity of the struggle wa-, was much more pronounced than it had
been in India, and in some senses, one might say that many places of Africa are
still grappling with the consequences of empire and the consequences of
decolonization. How to become nation states in internally heterogeneous
political communities, where languages and faiths and tribal identities, regional
identities, are not amalgamated together into some carapace, or umbrella of the
nation state. Much of the struggle because they were so complicated on the ground can
be simplified. And I may be doing some injustice to the complexity of local
processes. But, we can simplify it into three fundamental barrier, three
fundamental variables. One was, how strong the local European settler colony was. In
general, the stronger the local settler colony would be, the more resistance there
would be to European withdrawal. Secondly, how much resistance did the European
metropole put up, depending on its own dependency in the colony, where the colony
was more strategic. Alright, and therefore, the metropole more dependent on
the colony. Very often, we see more resistance. And finally, a third variable
is, how strong, how unified were the anti-colonial forces? This is one way in
which the Hindu movement of Indian nationalists was very powerful. Alright.
And really could negotiate with the British from a strong, relatively strong
bargaining position. So, in the decolonization of Africa, and I'm going to
pull up a map here. Lance, maybe we could have people get a sense of this. as you're
looking at this map, this is of course why I can't go case by case. There are just so
many instances. A couple of things to note. One, as you read further, and I hope
you do read further. Think about those three variables. The second, is that it
takes a very long time. In a sense, it begins in Egypt in the early 1950's, and
in Egypt a treaty would be signed between the nationalist Nasser and British
authorities that would allow Egyptian autonomy and independence. And s pread to
sub-Saharan Africa, in Ghana in 1957. The leader or the broker of this transition
would be Kwame Nkrumah. Okay I'm going to put somebody on the hot spot here. Maybe
Lance. Who's the guy on the right-hand side here? Judging by that title I'm gonna
say Martin Luther King Junior. Oh, oh, of course, there you go. I sort of gave it
away. This is the problem, you see, when I'm lecturing to you all and, and to you
all, I can't necessarily see what I brought up on the screen. Yes it's Martin
Luther King. I'm going to come back to King in a minute. But Nkruma was the
broker of Ghanan independence, and this idea of Ghanan independence had become
iconic for the rest of Africa, and in fact for African-Americans themselves. But the
these were relatively pacted models of transition, not unlike the Indian case.
But especially as we move to central Africa, the process of in, or winning
independence would become increasingly violent. And in the Congo region
particularly, became the site of one of the most brutal proxy wars of the Cold
War, in which Belgian and Portuguese colonies trying to secede from the
metropoles had to the nationals had to pick up arms. And in so doing, had, were
supported on the one hand by communist and, and, and, and Soviet, and eventually
Chinese support, which then drew in other proxy allies, like South Africa. Cubans
would send tens of thousands of troops to fight in Central Africa. And so these war
became especially brutal, because the struggle for independence became highly
militarized and weaponized. Proxy wars, and within them, civil wars between
tribes, regions, linguistic groups. So the wave of decolonization that began more,
let's say, civic and, and, and pacted in the earlier phase become more violent over
time, when the pacting process doesn't work. And these sites become struggle,
proxy struggles for contests between Washington and Moscow. So, I'd like you to
think, then, about how these different patterns of anti-colonial struggles in
Africa, in particular, play out.