By Tirthankar ChandaPosted on 01-01-2020Modified on 01-01-2020 at 12:43
Sixty years ago, most of the former French colonies in sub-Saharan Africa gained sovereignty. Between January 1 and December 31, 1960, 17 countries including 14 under French administration acquired their independence. Back on the conditions and the circumstances of these grouped emancipations which the African populations called for with all their wishes.
Dominated, enslaved, colonized for almost three hundred years by Europe, the African populations took their destiny in hand in the 20th century, with the 55 countries of the continent gaining political independence over the years. However, if African independence spans seven decades, in the collective unconscious it is the year 1960 , during which we saw 17 countries of sub-Saharan Africa free, which symbolizes the turning point of the exit from the continent of European guardianship. To the point that, in African historiographical mythology, 1960 is designated as the " magic year ", the " year of the number of things ", according to the expression of the poet and the politician Léopold Sédar Senghor .
Of the 17 African countries which became independent in 1960, 14 came from the former French colonial empire: Cameroon, Togo, Madagascar, Benin, Niger, Upper Volta (Burkina Faso), Côte d'Ivoire, Chad, Central African Republic, Congo, Gabon, Senegal, Mali and Mauritania. The three other countries which gained independence during the same year were: Nigeria, Somalia and DR Congo, respectively the former British, Italian and Belgian colonies. The emancipatory contagion of 1960 will not fail to spread throughout the continent over the years that follow, exploding the last bastions of colonialism and European domination before the turn of the millennium. Zimbabwe in 1980 and Namibia in 1990 were the very last African countries to emancipate themselves from European domination.
This chain of events makes historians say that there is now a before and after 1960. In fact, when the year 1960 began, sub-Saharan Africa was still essentially composed of colonies and protectorates administered by the great European powers. The wave of independence that swept across the continent during this " pivotal year " changed the geopolitical balance of the continent and, in turn, that of the United Nations, where the mass arrival of the new independent States of Africa brought in the multilateral organization resolutely in the post-colonial era.
A new balance of power in the world
Apart from Liberia, founded in the 19th century by American slaves repatriated to Africa and free since 1847, and Ethiopia which was never colonized except the parenthesis of the Italian occupation between 1935 and 1941, the march towards independence of the African continent began in 1922 with Egypt. It accelerated in the 1950s with the emancipation of Libya in 1951, Sudan, Morocco and Tunisia in 1956 and the Gold Coast, under the Africanized name of Ghana in 1957. It was the latter who opened the ball of independence in sub-Saharan Africa. Much to the chagrin of the French government at the time.
Columnists report that in Accra, during the handover ceremony between the former colonial power and the new independent state, France was represented by its Keeper of the Seals, a certain François Mitterrand. The latter " could not bear the fact that Ghana proclaimed its independence " and " incriminated Great Britain which would have favored it only to cause problems in the empire of its French rival ", writes Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch in his preface to a work dedicated to the fiftieth anniversary of independence (1).
However for historians, the acceleration of decolonization which we witnessed in Africa in the years 1950-1960 is explained less by any feeling of any rivalry between colonial powers than by the rise of a new African political class since the end of the Second World War, an elite particularly sensitive to the changes taking place in the international environment. This new political elite was made up, increasingly, of intellectuals and militants, trained for what concerns the French colonies, by trade unionism or by Parisian universities. Attentive to the general evolution of the world, they understood that events such as the independence of India in 1947, the victory of Mao Tse-tung in China, the defeat suffered by the French army at Dien-Bien Phu in Indochina, or the moral success of Egypt at Suez had established a new balance of power between colonizers and colonized, dominators and dominated.
Nothing illustrates this new balance of power better than the holding in 1955 of the Afro-Asian Conference in Bandoeng (Indonesia), from April 18 to 25, under the aegis of the Indian Nehru, the Indonesian Sukarno and the Egyptian Nasser. This unprecedented meeting of former colonizers brought together delegations from 29 countries in Africa, Asia and the Near East. Africa had sent six delegations to Bandoeng, while Asia, which was largely on the road to decolonization, provided the largest number of participants. These delegations all had in common that they belong to the world formerly dominated by the European Empires, which thus burst into the spotlight and gained visibility. It was the baptism of fire of what the French demographer Alfred Sauvy designated under the term of the “ third world ”. For Senghor, French official envoy and future president of Senegal, this conference was like " a thunderclap ". A thunderclap that would soon sound in the skies of Africa.
De Gaulle and French decolonization
At the origin of these new power struggles between the metropolises and the old colonized countries, the Second World War. This was on the African continent also the starting point of decolonization. The accession to independence of 17 countries in sub-Saharan Africa in the year 1960 was partly, recall historians, the result of the process started fifteen years earlier in the tumult of war, with the arrival of Senegalese skirmishers and other Moroccan goumiers.
The contribution in men requested from the colonies by their tutelary powers, arguing that it was a question of fighting against racism, had subtly changed the situation in the colonized / colonizer relationships. It had accelerated the awareness by the Africans, who had gone to war in Europe, of the injustices of which they were victims at home. An awareness to which a black deputy in the French National Assembly had given voice at the time in memorable terms: " By helping you get out of Hitler's boots, we have bitten on the bread of freedom and do not believe above all not that you can take away our taste. "
On the side of the French leaders, nobody had understood better the stakes of the call made to the colonized to come to help to the mother country than general de Gaulle. As the journalist Claude Wauthier wrote, " the man of June 18 " will never forget that without the rallying of the territories of French Equatorial Africa (AEF) to the cause of free France from the first days of the In the summer of 1940, he " undoubtedly could not have fully played the historical role which was his ".
Brazzaville had become the capital of free France. Aware of the role that the forces of the colonial empire had played in national liberation, de Gaulle took the initiative to organize in 1944 the Brazzaville conference, a founding meeting where he suggested that it was time for France, to set out " on the road to new times ". This meeting where the representatives of Africa still had no voice in the chapter and where there was still no question of independence, is considered as a turning point in the colonial policy of France in Africa because the debates it welcomed laid the foundations of the reforms that Paris was preparing to undertake to consolidate the links between the French metropolis and its African possessions.
From the French Union to the Community
Two years later, the French colonial empire was replaced by a French Union, approved by a referendum on October 27, 1946. The new entity erased the most humiliating aspects of colonization such as the code of indigénat, also designated under the name of "forced labor" and passed laws transforming the " subjects " of the Empire into full citizens.
The Constitution also provided for representation for Africans in institutions, especially in the two chambers of Parliament. But the number of African elected officials remained too limited, out of all proportion to the size of the black population. The founding fathers of the Fourth Republic had feared, it seems, as the chroniclers of the time quoted by Claude Wauthier wrote (2) that if total equality of representation was admitted, the Civil Code would be voted " By a majority of polygamists " and the Penal Code " by sons of cannibals "!
It was not until General de Gaulle's return to business in 1958 that Africans were offered, within the framework of the Constitution of the Fifth Republic, a Franco-African Community, which proposed a more ambitious alliance of autonomous states, with the possibility of transfer of common competences between the metropolis and the member countries as well as the maintenance in the Community of independent States.
The project was voted in 1958 by 11 of the 12 former African colonies of France except the Guinea of Sékou Touré. However, the Community will only have an ephemeral existence following the proclamation of their independence by most of the African Member States during the year 1960, thus emptying the entity of its substance.
According to a number of informed observers, it was the successive colonial wars fought by France in Indochina, in Algeria, but also in Cameroon where the French army had been engaged since 1956 to suppress an agitation of popular and Marxist inspiration, which had reason for the metropolitan dream of a Franco-African federation. For the African historian Joseph Ki-Zerbo, it was " the ambiguity of designs " which marked all French colonial policy because of " the double requirement of the moment, which consisted in maintaining colonial power while sparing openings towards progress ”, which is the main cause of the bankruptcy of the Gaullian Community.
The fact remains that it was the break-up of the Franco-African Community which paved the way for the independence of the former French colonies, which essentially occurred during this fateful year of 1960. This development was both the result of intense negotiations between France and its former colonies and international pressures favorable to decolonization which pushed Paris as London to reform their empires since the end of the Second World War.
Finally, recent historiographical research has shown that the conquest of independence was also a battle waged by local political, associative, socio-professional movements and indigenous leaders, torn between moderate and radical tendencies which have always coexisted. The war waged by radical militants such as Maghemout Diop (Senegal), Djibo Bakary (Niger), Ruben Um Nyobé (Cameroon) and the moderate camp embodied by the Leopold Sedar Senghor (Senegal), Houphouët-Boigny (Ivory Coast ), the Modibo Keita (Mali), the Ahmadou Ahidjo (Cameroon) or the Philibert Tsiranana (Madagascar), bear witness to the extent of the political struggles in the French colonies.
" France would certainly not have recognized independence if it had not
not constrained by African political action , ”writes Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch.
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(1) Independences in Africa: The event and its memories, 1957/1960. , by Odile Goerg, Jean-Luc Martineau and Didier Nativel. Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2010. With a preface by Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch.
(2) Four presidents and Africa , by Claude Wauthier. Threshold 1995
► Also consult our RFI Savoirs dossier: African independence, Cameroon
Anniversaries of the sixtieth anniversary of African independence: key dates
January 1, 1960 : Independence of Cameroon
April 4, 1960 : Independence of Senegal
April 27, 1960 : Independence of Togo
June 26, 1960 : Independence of Madagascar
June 30, 1960 : Independence of DR Congo
July 1, 1960 : Independence of Somalia
August 1, 1960 : Independence of Benin
August 3, 1960 : Independence of Niger
August 5, 1960 : Independence of Burkina Faso
August 7, 1960 : Independence of Côte d'Ivoire
August 11, 1960 : Independence of Chad
August 13, 1960 : Independence of the Central African Republic
August 15, 1960 : Independence of the Congo
August 17, 1960 : Independence of Gabon
September 22, 1960 : Independence of Mali
October 1, 1960 : Independence of Nigeria
November 28, 1960 : Independence of Mauritania
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