sovereign states. Africa was originally colonised by Europeans with Southern Africa primarily by the British, and the West Africa and North Africa primarily by the British, French, Spanish and Portuguese. Today, Africa consists of 54 sovereign states of various government types, the most common consisting of parliamentary systems. Timeline notes See also Colonialism Decolonization Economic history of Africa Indépendance Cha Cha Scramble for Africa States and Power in Africa Wars of national liberation Year of Africa References Further reading Brennan, James R. "The Cold War battle over global news in East Africa: decolonization, the free flow of information, and the media business, 1960-1980." Journal of Global History 10.2 (2015): 333+. Brown, Judith M. and Wm. Roger Louis, eds. The Oxford History of the British Empire: Volume IV: The Twentieth Century (2001) pp 515–73. online Burton, Antoinette. The Trouble with Empire: Challenges to Modern British Imperialism (2015) Chafer, Tony. The end of empire in French West Africa: France's successful decolonization (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2002). Chafer, Tony, and Alexander Keese, eds. Francophone Africa at fifty (Oxford UP, 2015). Clayton, Anthony. The wars of French decolonization (Routledge, 2014). Cohen, Andrew. The politics and economics of decolonization in Africa: the failed experiment of the Central African Federation (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017). Cooper, Frederick. Decolonization and African society: The labor question in French and British Africa (Cambridge University Press, 1996). Gordon, April A. and Donald L. Gordon, Lynne Riener. Understanding Contemporary Africa (London, 1996). online Hargreaves, John D. Decolonization in Africa (2014). Hatch, John. Africa: The Rebirth of Self-Rule (1967) James, Leslie, and Elisabeth Leake, eds. Decolonization and the Cold War: Negotiating Independence (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015). Jeppesen, Chris, and Andrew W.M. Smith, eds. Britain, France and the Decolonization of Africa: Future Imperfect? (UCL Press, 2017) online. Jerónimo, Miguel Bandeira, and António Costa Pinto, eds. The Ends of European Colonial Empires: Cases and Comparisons (Springer, 2016). Khapoya, Vincent B. The African Experience (1994) online Louis, William Roger. The transfer of power in Africa: decolonization, 1940–1960 (Yale UP, 1982). Louis, Wm Roger, and Ronald Robinson. "The imperialism of decolonization." Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 22.3 (1994): 462–511. Manthalu, Chikumbutso Herbert, and Yusef Waghid, eds. Education for Decoloniality and Decolonisation in Africa (Springer, 2019). MacQueen, Norrie. The Decolonization of Portuguese Africa: Metropolitan Revolution and the Dissolution of Empire (1997) online Michalopoulos, Stelios; Papaioannou, Elias (2020-03-01). "Historical Legacies and African Development." Journal of Economic Literature. 58#1: 53–128. online Mazrui, Ali