The scope and chronology of decolonization
‘They shot up like volcanic lava’, dramatically wrote the former French colonial administrator, Robert Delavignette (1977:137), of the independence movements that had occurred in the European colonial possessions. The metaphor seems at first glance to be most appropriate, suggesting that decolonization was a force gathering from deep causes and bursting forth uncontrollably onto the international scene. The metaphor, moreover, had a timeliness about it, appearing in 1968 when the several European empires had been largely replaced by dozens of new nation-states.
The series of erupting facts to which the word decolonization had been applied by Delavignette were considered to be primarily political. The British scholar John D. Hargreaves (1996:244) said of decolonization that ‘its central theme’ was ‘the creation of self-governing nation-states’. The American histo-rian David Gardinier in his 1967 article defining ‘decolonization’ stated that it was initially a political phenomenon soon extended in meaning to include all elements incurred in the colonial experience, ‘whether political, economic, cultural or psychological’.1 Delavignette (1977:131) went further, arguing that decolonization fundamentally meant the ‘rejection of the civilization of the white man’.
Like many globally-embracing terms, such as ‘imperialism’ and ‘postco-lonialism’, ‘decolonization’ was seldom restricted in application to a particu-lar political activity or a neatly defined era. Moreover, as a binary activity, decolonization was interpreted to be both a calculated process of military engagement and diplomatic negotiation between the two contending parties:
colonial and anticolonial.
Many authors, of whom Gardinier is one, understood decolonization to be best defined as a process that began before the dramatic occurrences of which
1 Gardinier 1968:269. Gardinier suggests that the first use of the word ‘decolonization’ was probably made by Moritz Joseph Brown (1932) in his article ‘Imperialism’, appearing in the Ency-clopedia of the social sciences.
Delavignette wrote. Not using the word but clearly subscribing to the idea of decolonization, the British scholar H.M. Kirk-Greene (1982:575), for instance, saw an early ‘metropolitan initiative’ toward the devolution of empire not only in the work of Lord Hailey, famous for his African survey, but also in a lecture Hailey gave at Princeton University in 1943 titled ‘The future of colo-nial peoples’. The metropolitan drive for decolonization reappears in many studies. Recently, Dutch authors Gert Oostindie and Inge Klinkers (2004) in their Decolonising the Caribbean wrote of two forms of decolonization. First, there was the ‘classic model’ of armed conflict ending around 1960. Then the second phase began; it was characterized by negotiation toward indepen-dence between the contending parties, as in the Caribbean when both the Dutch and the British determined that their possessions there were no longer of value and sought the means to retreat from them (Oostindie and Klinkers 2004:9, 216-7).
Sharply dissenting from such interpretations of voluntary or negotiated decolonization were two French authors. The Marxist historian Jean Suret-Canale (1982:476) plainly wrote: ‘The empires did not deliberately decide upon decolonization, did not desire it, and did not really prepare for it’.
Henri Labouret (1952:20), a former French colonial administrator and one of the first persons to attempt an analysis of decolonization, went further than most in describing the development of the occurrence. According to him,
‘modern colonization necessarily led fatally to this ineluctable end that his-toric circum stances only sped up or slowed down’.
Subscription to this conclusion in which human intervention could do little against accumulated forces was found in book titles bearing qualifying nouns such as ‘eclipse’, ‘collapse’, and ‘dissolution’. Describing the situation in Africa in 1960, the then British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan offered the most memorable of metaphors: ‘the winds of change’. As with few other major events, decolonization seemed to many to occur with the force of inevitability. Starkly put in the words of British historian John Darwin, ‘the colonial order fell to pieces’.2
Although the majority of authors writing on the subject restricted their analysis, as did Delavignette, to the widespread upheaval beginning with the end of World War II, others reached further back in time. The first major disruption of the European order of things was marked by World War I, with enormous losses in manpower, finances, and confidence, while anticolonial resentment grew and was widely expressed in literature and strikes. The famous words of the Irish poet William Butler Yeats summed up the
condi-2 Darwin 1988:4. Darwin’s introductory essay on decolonization, which extends beyond the British case, is one of the best available. Two anthologies of essays on the subject are worth men-tioning: Le Sueur 2003 and Duara 2004.
tion in 1921: ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.’3
Some scholars have continued the march for causes back to the beginning of modern imperialism when ‘pacification’ in the colonial world really meant military action against restive populations and resistance writing appeared in many colonial regions. Oostindie and Klinkers (2004:9), concentrating on the Caribbean, write of two stages of decolonization, one occurring in 1791 when Haiti declared its independence from France and in an armed revolt gained its independence; the second came in the 1960s and 1970s.
Whatever its assigned chronology, decolonization was foremost con-sidered a global-scale political change, most intense and successful in the three decades following World War II. As Edward Said (1994:xii) wrote in the preface to his Culture and imperialism, the dominance of the West ‘culminated in the great movement of decolonization all across the Third World’.
Decolonization as political change
The rapidity of the retreat from modern colonial empire impressed all as it was happening. Yet few among those who assessed the colonial situation immediately after World War II expected such a swift outcome. Introducing both administrative and political changes that they assumed would redefine and reinvigorate the colonial system, those still favouring empire anticipated a long run ahead, as certainly did those British who anticipated that Nigeria would reach independence at the end of the twentieth century. Fewer, however, were as optimistic as the organizers in 1941 of a Dutch symposium on that nation’s colonial rule in the East Indies. One of the two editors of the papers that appeared in their English-language edition under the title Mission interrupted was W.H. van Helsdingen, who, before the war, had been chairman of the People’s Council in the Netherlands Indies. He wrote that this book ‘expresses the confidence that in future more “great things” will be done in the Indies and that they will be done by the Dutch. May the Mission Interrupted become a Mission Fulfilled!’ (Van Helsdingen and Hoogenberk 1945:viii).
It did not. The Dutch, after four years of bitter fighting, left the East Indies in 1949. They were not the first of the colonial powers to leave this part of the world. The Americans, belated imperialists, left the scene first: they had
3 Chinua Achebe’s novel Things fall apart (1958) is entitled after a line from W.B. Yeats’ poem
‘The second coming’, and bears as motto the first four lines:
‘Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.’
planned for independence in the Philippines to take place in 1944, but the act was delayed until 1946 because of World War II. The British had already quit India in 1947. Then the French, after the disastrous military defeat at Dien Bien Phu, followed the Dutch in 1954.
Resistance to colonial rule grew successfully around the world when the two remaining, major colonial states had lost their status as ‘Great Powers’.
Britain was weakened by a war that drained its wealth and saw the quick defeat and surrender of its Far East bastion, Singapore, to the Japanese.
France was defeated and with much of its colonial empire overrun. Not only was their postwar hold on empire tenuous as a result of the war but also the metropolitan population in all the European nations now questioned what had hitherto been largely treated with indifference: the purposes of colonial empire. Moreover, as Europe recovered from the war, the colonial powers increasingly vested their interests in their own continent, faced on the east by the Soviet Union and the west by the United States, the two superpowers of the new era, both publicly opposed to the colonial empires. The defensive treaty NATO (1949) was one clear indication of a new European cooperation, distinguished from the former colonial rivalry.
A considerable factor in the debate over decolonization was the United Nations. With a 51-state membership in its founding year, 1945, the United Nations grew to 99 in 1960, the year the largest number of states joined: 17, of which 16 were from Africa. That year the United Nations gathered further significance because it was then that the Declaration on Decolonization of Granting Independence to Colonial Countries and People was adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on 14 December. ‘Believing that the process of liberation is irresistible and irreversible’, the Declaration asserted that ‘an end must be put to colonialism’.
Although world opinion favoured this development, sufficient vestiges of colonial domination lasted so that the General Assembly declared the 1990s
‘the international decade for the eradication of colonialism’. The decade passed, but the problem in miniscule form still continues. One of the remain-ing 16 non-self-governremain-ing territories is Pitcairn Island, where some of the crew who precipitated the famous mutiny of HMS Bounty had settled, along with a few Tahitian cohorts. The population of the island, never more than 300, is fewer than 50 today. Seized in 1838 to become Great Britain’s first Pacific colony, Pitcairn is today the last in that region. That decolonization is no longer a contemporary political issue of any consequence does not mean that the centuries-long history of Western domination of much of the world has ended. Most students of decolonization would argue that only the focus has shifted.
Early study of decolonization
As the colonies broke away, scholars amassed considerable literature on the subject. In the 1970s, more than two dozen studies in English carried the word
‘decolonization’ in their title. Grandest of the texts was Rudolf von Albertini’s Decolonization; The administration and future of the colonies, 1919-1960 (1971).
This hefty volume, analysing the recent history of the colonial world by concentrating on each of the former national empires, was one of the first studies of the colonial world to appear – in German in 1966 – after the colo-nial empires had been largely disassembled. It was preceded, however, by the work of Henri Grimal, a French author, whose La décolonisation 1919-1963, more descriptive than analytical, was published in 1965. As decolonization evolved even more rapidly in the 1960s, it became a hot topic. After the first synthesizing studies, most of the scholarly work was done by examination of decolonization in a national or regional context, with the phenomenon treated most frequently as it occurred in Sub-Saharan Africa, where the action was generally the quickest and centred on states having little or no experience of unity before the Europeans ‘carved up’ the continent in the late nineteenth century. International conferences of comparative decolonization were fre-quently organized – such as the one held in Amsterdam in 2003. But perhaps the most significant conferences were organized in the years immediately following the great movement of decolonization in Africa by two American scholars, Prosser Gifford and Wm. Roger Louis. Two of the conferences were sponsored by Yale University in 1965 and 1968. The third, sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation and held in 1977, was a retrospective analysis of the end of colonial power in Africa. ‘Decolonization is one of the great themes of our age’, the two editors said in the first line of their introduction to the papers emerging from the first conference (Gifford and Louis 1982:vii).
Yet the most provocative of the earliest, critical studies of decolonization appeared in 1961, the year following the disassembling of French West Africa and the outbreak of violent resistance by the National Liberation Front (FLN) in Algeria. This book, The wretched of the earth, written by the Martiniquan author Frantz Fanon, became one of the most widely read on decoloniza-tion. The first sentence of the book establishes the author’s stark thesis:
‘[Decolonization is always a violent phenomenon’. He adds: ‘The naked truth of decolonization evokes for us the searing bullets and blood-stained knives which emanate from it’ (Fanon 1966:29-30). Clearly influenced by French writer and radical syndicalist Georges Sorel, whose Réflexions sur la violence (1908) found therapeutic value in violence, Fanon saw in it a cleansing effect, the expunging of the colonial experience, itself achieved through the use of violence. The disinherited or wretched, in rising against the system, become
‘new men’, gaining an authority and dignity previously denied to them
by their colonial overlords. As Fanon insists, there is or will be a complete change in the social order with the earlier oppressed people now becoming free and in control of their own destinies.
Few studies of decolonization have been so taut, both angry and ana-lytical. In his preface to the book, the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1966:11) lay down this challenge: ‘Europeans, you must open this book and enter into it’. A reviewer for Time, the American weekly magazine, wrote in the 30 April 1965 issue: ‘This is not so much a book as a stone thrown against the windows of the West’.
Decolonization after political independence: The economic argument
The wretched of the earth broadly described many of the characteristics that would soon appear in subsequent considerations of decolonization. The book, moreover, became part of a crowded concourse of ideas and theories that appeared as the world was being reshaped politically and on the way to being dominated by global economics. In these years, notably the 1950s and 1960s,
‘modernization’ and ‘underdevelopment’ entered the popular vocabulary.
The disparity in wealth and standard of living between the former colo-nial powers and the colonized areas was submitted to wide analysis. The term ‘exploitation’ gained severely in negative connotation and stood as a synonym for underdevelopment. The Guyanese scholar Walter Rodney (1974:205), in his provocatively titled book, How Europe underdeveloped Africa, described the situation ironically as that of a ‘one-armed bandit’, not a two-handed activity: on one hand, exploitation, and on the other, benefits to the indigenous populations. Underdevelopment, the comparative advantage of one group of nations over another, is ‘a product of capitalist, imperialist and colonialist exploitation’ (Rodney 1974:14). Kwame Nkrumah, first president of the new state of Ghana, had already made a similar argument in Neo-colonialism; The last stage of imperialism. As V.I. Lenin had seen imperialism as the means of carrying on elsewhere the highest or last phase of capitalism then surfeited in the West – hence the title of his small but largely influential book, Imperialism; The highest stage of capitalism – so now Nkrumah found that the economic exploitation that had been carried on in the colonial period con-tinued unabated after the European flags were taken down and sent home.
Neocolonialism was the ‘worst form of imperialism’ because it assumed no responsibility in the new states it was exploiting. He argued that this devel-opment ‘means exploitation without redress’ (Nkrumah 1970:xi).
‘Neocolonialism’ did not gain value as currency in any way comparable to that of ‘decolonization’. Furthermore, it was surpassed in significance – and in scholarly debate – by dependency theory, of which a wide variety of soon
well-known critics like Samir Amin (1977) and Andre Gunder Frank (1979) are among the best known. In 1980 a series of essays on the subject and colo-nialism was published under the title of Decolonization and dependency. The editor of the book, Aguibou Y. Yansané, a professor at San Francisco State University, argues in the conclusion that the benefits of political decoloniza-tion were few among the indigenous populadecoloniza-tion at large. It was the collabora-tive middle class ‘that allowed transnational corporations to gain control of local economies and to make them part of ongoing globalization’ (Yansané 1980:287-9). Fanon had already complained in The wretched of the earth of this national middle class as an ‘under-developed middle-class’. Having no economic power itself, he claimed, it has ‘[t]he psychology […] of the busi-nessman, not that of a captain of industry’. Its chief function was to act as an intermediary ‘between the nation and a capitalism […] which today puts on the masque of neo-colonialism’ (Fanon 1966:122, 124).
To many critics, then, decolonization was not solely achieved with national independence. Economic control also had to be obtained but was not. Nonetheless, ‘[t]he oppressed and exploited of the earth maintain their defiance: liberty from theft’. So wrote the Kenyan novelist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.
But Ngũgĩ’s concern (1986:3) was not primarily economics; he added, ‘the biggest weapon wielded and actually daily unleashed by imperialism against that collective defiance is the cultural bomb’.
Decolonization and culture
That bomb caused cultural destruction, the annihilation of a people’s culture through the imposition of the colonial power’s cultural system. The mind had to be decolonized as well. Such was the thought of Ngũgĩ (1986), well expressed in the eponymous title of his small but provocative book Decolonising the mind. The subject was one Ngũgĩ had long considered as it related to literature. It first aroused his interest at a ‘Conference of African writers of English expression’, held at Makerere College in Uganda in 1962.
A few years later, in 1967, he attended an African-Scandinavian conference on contemporary African writing, held in Stockholm in 1967. There, Eldred Jones, a professor of English literature at Fourah Bay University, argued in his paper ‘The decolonization of African literature’ that the writer should be faithful to his imagination in whatever language or literary mode he chose to employ. Language need not constrain cultural authenticity, he asserted (Jones 1968). That argument was supported by a considerable number of African writers at the time, but not by Ngũgĩ.
Language greatly concerned Ngũgĩ. He understood that language and its uses are ‘central to a people’s definition of themselves’ (Ngũgĩ 1986:4). Hence
the system of communication should be the people’s own, not the culturally alienating, imposed one of the colonial power. Writing in Gĩkũyũ, his native tongue, Ngũgĩ (1986:28) considered himself to be ‘part and parcel of the anti-imperialist struggle’. With colleagues at the University of Nairobi, he called for reform in the literature department, which would dethrone English in favour of African languages. ‘With Africa at the centre of things, […] things must be seen from the African perspective’, the statement read (Ngũgĩ 1986:94).
In The empire writes back – its title is a play on an episode of George Lucas’s film Star Wars – the Australian academics Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin follow and extend Ngũgĩ’s argument into postcolonial thought.
They are more concerned with the instrument of writing than with the lan-guage it utilizes. As they put it, ‘In many postcolonial societies, it was not
They are more concerned with the instrument of writing than with the lan-guage it utilizes. As they put it, ‘In many postcolonial societies, it was not