Title: Decolonisation of Africa - Wikipedia
Headings: Decolonisation of Africa
Decolonisation of Africa
Contents
Background
Causes
External causes
Internal causes
Economic legacy
Social legacy
Language
Law
Transition to independence
British Empire
Ghana
Winds of Change
French colonial empire
Conflict
Algeria
French Community
Timeline
Timeline notes
See also
References
Further reading
External links

Content: 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, 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 . During the second world war, some local African industry and towns expanded when U-boats patrolling the Atlantic Ocean reduced raw material transportation to Europe. Over time, urban communities, industries and trade unions grew, improving literacy and education, leading to pro-independence newspaper establishments. By 1945 the Fifth Pan-African Congress demanded the end of colonialism, and delegates included future presidents of Ghana, Kenya, Malawi and national activists. Economic legacy
There is an extensive body of literature that has examined the legacy of colonialism and colonial institutions on economic outcomes in Africa, with numerous studies showing disputed economic effects of colonialism. The economic legacy of colonialism is difficult to quantify and is disputed. Modernisation theory posits that colonial powers built infrastructure to integrate Africa into the world economy, however, this was built mainly for extraction purposes. African economies were structured to benefit the coloniser and any surplus was likely to be ‘drained’, thereby stifling capital accumulation.