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The struggle for independence

“Vade Retro domum” - “Nolo Relinquere”

the Sahara as well as in the most populous British and Belgian ones (Nigeria and Congo

respectively)“
"African Economic Development and Colonial Legacies." 121
Austin, Gareth. ; International Development Policy (March 2010)
*****

“ The decolonisation of Africa took place in the mid-to-late 1950s to 1975, with sudden
and radical regime changes on the continent as colonial governments made the

transition to independent states. Often quite unorganized, and marred with violence,
political turmoil, and widespread unrest, organized revolts in both northern and sub-
Saharan colonies including the Algerian War in French Algeria, the Angolan War of

Independence in Portuguese Angola, the Congo Crisis in the Belgian Congo, and the Mau
Mau Uprising in British Kenya .

***
Colonial economic exploitation involved the siphoning off of resource extraction (such as

mining) profits to European shareholders at the expense of internal development,
causing major local socioeconomic grievances.[16] For early African nationalists,

decolonisation was a moral imperative around which a political power base could be
assembled.

In the 1930s, the colonial powers had cultivated, sometimes inadvertently, a small elite of
local African leaders educated in Western universities, where they became familiar with

and fluent in ideas such as self-determination. Although independence was not
encouraged, arrangements between these leaders and the colonial powers developed, [9]

and such figures as Jomo Kenyatta (Kenya), Kwame Nkrumah (Gold Coast, now Ghana),
Julius Nyerere (Tanganyika, now Tanzania), Léopold Sédar Senghor (Senegal), Nnamdi

Azikiwe (Nigeria), and Félix Houphouët-Boigny (Côte d'Ivoire) came to lead the struggles
for African nationalism.

***
On February 12, 1941, United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime
Minister Winston Churchill met to discuss the postwar world. The result was the Atlantic

Charter. It was not a treaty and was not submitted to the British Parliament or the Senate
of the United States for ratification, but it turned out to be a widely acclaimed document.

One of the provisions, introduced by Roosevelt, was the autonomy of imperial colonies.