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European Colonialism after 1945. A Few Reasons. Cost. Myth of Racial Supremacy. Growth of Nationalist Sentiment. Opposition of the United States. Remarkable tenacity. The End of Empire: Great Britain. Imperial Flashpoints Kenya (1952-1959). Britain’s Gulag?.
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A Few Reasons • Cost. • Myth of Racial Supremacy. • Growth of Nationalist Sentiment. • Opposition of the United States. • Remarkable tenacity.
Britain’s Gulag? • Kikuyu tribe denied fertile land. • Mau-Mau rebellion 1952-1959. White settlers killed. • Britain established concentration camps for suspected Mau-Mau oath-takers in the Kikuyu population. • A minimum of 11,000 Kikuyu killed; some speak of 100,000. Camps hold tens of thousands of civilians. At least 150,000 sent to camps during emergency. Elkins suggests 1.5 million. • Torture, rape and savage beatings practised in the “Pipeline”. Files systematically destroyed in records. • British colonial minister, Lennox-Boyd, and colonial governor Evelyn Baring, deny all stories of atrocities. In 1959, “Hola camp massacre” provokes parliamentary crisis.
U.S. Fears • J.F. DULLES: PRESS CONFERENCE 2 OCTOBER 1956 • “THE UNITED STATES CANNOT BE EXPECTED TO IDENTIFY ITSELF 100% EITHER WITH THE COLONIAL POWERS OR THE POWERS UNIQUELY CONCERNED WITH THE PROBLEM OF GETTING INDEPENDENCE AS RAPIDLY AND AS FULLY AS POSSIBLE…” • J.F. DULLES: MINUTES NSC 1 NOVEMBER 1956. • “FOR MANY YEARS NOW THE US HAS BEEN WALKING A TIGHT-ROPE BETWEEN THE EFFORT TO MAINTAIN OLD AND VALUED RELATIONS WITH OUR BRITISH AND FRENCH ALLIES ON THE ONE HAND, AND ON THE OTHER HAND TRYING TO ASSURE OURSELVES OF THE FRIENDSHIP AND UNDERSTANDING OF THE NEWLY INDEPENDENT COUNTRIES…UNLESS WE NOW ASSERT AND MAINTAIN OUR LEADERSHIP, ALL OF THESE NEWLY INDEPENDENT COUNTRIES WILL TURN FROM US TO THE USSR….” • SOURCE: WM ROGER LOUIS, “DULLES, SUEZ AND THE BRITISH,” IN ED., RICHARD H. IMMERMAN, JOHN FOSTER DULLES AND THE DIPLOMACY OF THE COLD WAR (PRINCETON UP, 1990).
Wind of ChangeHarold Macmillan February, 1960, Cape Town • The wind of change is blowing through this continent, and whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact. We must all accept it as a fact, and our national policies must take account of it. • Well you understand this better than anyone, you are sprung from Europe, the home of nationalism, here in Africa you have yourselves created a free nation. A new nation. Indeed in the history of our times yours will be recorded as the first of the African nationalists. This tide of national consciousness which is now rising in Africa, is a fact, for which both you and we, and the other nations of the western world are ultimately responsible. • As I have said, the growth of national consciousness in Africa is a political fact, and we must accept it as such. That means, I would judge, that we've got to come to terms with it. I sincerely believe that if we cannot do so we may imperil the precarious balance between the East and West on which the peace of the world depends.
ALGERIAFRENCH NIGHTMARE 1954-1962 • France loses control of Vietnam after defeat at battle of Dien Bien Phu (May 1954). Lose Tunisia and Morocco in 1955-56. • Algeria jewel in crown of French empire. 1,000,000 whites (many Italian, Spanish and Maltese) have political rights. Algeria part of France. Both left and right regard it as permanently French. • Resistance movement F.L.N. (Ahmed Ben Bella). Brutal civil war between French and FLN, between FLN and Algerian moderates and, after 1960, between OAS and French government. • Casualties: France 18,000 dead. FLN at least 150,000. 70,000+ murders of Muslim civilians. 42,000 terrorist incidents 1954-1962. Like Iraq but on larger scale. France condemned by ONU in 1958. • Algerian crisis brings to power Charles de Gaulle and ends IV Republic. Without de Gaulle might have been a civil war and/or military coup.
J.P. SartreIntroduction to the “Wretched of the Earth” • NOT so very long ago, the earth numbered two thousand million inhabitants: five hundred million men, and one thousand five hundred million natives. The former had the Word; the others had the use of it. Between the two there were hired kinglets, overlords and a bourgeoisie, sham from beginning to end, which served as go-betweens…The European élite undertook to manufacture a native élite. They picked out promising adolescents; they branded them, as with a red-hot iron, with the principles of western culture, they stuffed their mouths full with high-sounding phrases, grand glutinous words that stuck to the teeth. After a short stay in the mother country they were sent home, whitewashed. These walking lies had nothing left to say to their brothers; they only echoed. From Paris, from London, from Amsterdam we would utter the words ‘Parthenon! Brotherhood!’ and somewhere in Africa or Asia lips would open ... thenon! ... therhood!’ It was the golden age. • It came to an end; the mouths opened by themselves; the yellow and black voices still spoke of our humanism but only to reproach us with our inhumanity. We listened without displeasure to these polite statements of resentment, at first with proud amazement. What? They are able to talk by themselves? Just look at what we have made of them! We did not doubt but that they would accept our ideals, since they accused us of not being faithful to them. Then, indeed, Europe could believe in her mission; she had hellenized the Asians; she had created a new breed, the Graeco-Latin Negroes. We might add, quite between ourselves, as men of the world: ‘After all, let them bawl their heads off, it relieves their feelings; dogs that bark don’t bite.’
Frantz FanonThe Wretched of the Earth • We must leave our dreams and abandon our old beliefs and friendships of the time before life began. Let us waste no time in sterile litanies and nauseating mimicry. Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe. For centuries they have stifled almost the whole of humanity in the name of a so-called spiritual experience. Look at them today swaying between atomic and spiritual disintegration. • And yet it may be said that Europe has been successful in as much as everything that she has attempted has succeeded. • Europe undertook the leadership of the world with ardour, cynicism and violence. Look at how the shadow of her palaces stretches out ever farther! Every one of her movements has burst the bounds of space and thought. Europe has declined all humility and all modesty; but she has also set her face against all solicitude and all tenderness. • She has only shown herself parsimonious and niggardly where men are concerned; it is only men that she has killed and devoured. • So, my brothers, how is it that we do not understand that we have better things to do than to follow that same Europe?
Frantz Fanon ctd. • That same Europe where they were never done talking of Man, and where they never stopped proclaiming that they were only anxious for the welfare of Man: today we know with what sufferings humanity has paid for every one of their triumphs of the mind. • Come, then, comrades, the European game has finally ended; we must find something different. We today can do everything, so long as we do not imitate Europe, so long as we are not obsessed by the desire to catch up with Europe. • Let us decide not to imitate Europe; let us combine our muscles and our brains in a new direction. Let us try to create the whole man, whom Europe has been incapable of bringing to triumphant birth. • Two centuries ago, a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe. It succeeded so well that the United States of America became a monster, in which the taints, the sickness and the inhumanity of Europe have grown to appalling dimensions. • Comrades, have we not other work to do than to create a third Europe? The West saw itself as a spiritual adventure. It is in the name of the spirit, in the name of the spirit of Europe, that Europe has made her encroachments, that she has justified her crimes and legitimized the slavery in which she holds four-fifths of humanity.
African National CongressWe Are At War (December 1961) • Why we fight • The white oppressors have stolen our land. They have destroyed our families. They have taken for themselves the best that there is in our rich country and have left us the worst. They have the fruits and the riches. We have the backbreaking toil and the poverty. • We burrow into the belly of the earth to dig out gold, diamonds, coal, uranium. The white oppressors and foreign investors grab all this wealth. It is used for their enrichment and to buy arms to suppress and kill us. • In the factories, on the farms, on the railways, wherever you go, the hard, dirty, dangerous, badly paid jobs are ours. The best jobs are for whites only. • In our own land we have to carry passes; we are restricted and banished while the white oppressors move about freely. • Our homes are hovels; those of the whites are luxury mansions, flats and farmsteads. • There are not enough schools for our children; the standard of education is low, and we have to pay for it. But the government uses our taxes and the wealth we create to provide free education for white children. • We have suffered long enough. • Over 300 years ago the white invaders began a ceaseless war of aggression against us, murdered our forefathers, stole our land and enslaved our people. • Today they still rule by force. They murder our people. They still enslave us. • Only by meeting force with force can we win back our motherland. • We have tried every way to reason with the white supremacists. For many years our leaders and organizations sent petitions and deputations to Cape Town and Pretoria, even overseas, to London and the United Nations in New York. We organized mass demonstrations, pass-burnings, peaceful stay-at-homes. • What answer was given by the government? • Strikers and demonstrators were shot in cold blood. New acts of oppression and injustice were heaped upon us. Our leaders and spokesmen were banned, gagged, jailed, banished--even murdered. Our organization, the African National Congress, was outlawed. Our meetings, journals and leaflets were prohibited. • They have declared war on us. We have to fight back!
