Title: The Challenge of Decolonization in Africa
Headings: The Challenge of Decolonization in Africa
The Challenge of Decolonization in Africa
Benjamin Talton – Temple University
The Year of Africa
The Cold War
Neo Colonialism
Pan-Africanism and Socialism
Tragedy in Congo
Proxy War in Angola
Bibliography
Image Gallery

Content: One of the many questions that African leaders faced was whether continued economic and political interaction with former colonial powers threatened their autonomy and political viability. The ex- colonizers wanted to retain their former colonial territories within their sphere of influence. This continued relationship, Fanon argued, benefited African politicians and the small middle class but did not benefit the national majorities. The result was tension between the ruling classes and the majority population. In 1964 he wrote in Toward the African Revolution: " Every former colony has a particular way of achieving independence. Every new sovereign state finds itself practically under the obligation of maintaining definite and deferential relations with the former oppressor." With regard to the Cold War he continued: This competitive strategy of Western nations, moreover, enters into the vaster framework of the policy of the two blocs, which for ten years has held a definite menace of atomic disintegration suspended over the world. And it is surely not purely by chance that the hand or the eye of Moscow is discovered, in an almost stereotypical way, behind each demand for national independence, put forth by a colonial people.