MAP 27.5 Decolonization and the Third World, 1943–1990
In the decades after World War II, African nations threw off the yoke of European colonialism. Some new nations, such as Ghana, the former British colony of Gold Coast, achieved independence rather peacefully. Others, such as Algeria and Mozambique, did so only after bloody anticolonial wars. American civil rights activists watched African decolonization with great enthusiasm, seeing the two struggles as linked. “Sure we identified with the blacks in Africa,” civil rights leader John Lewis said. “Here were black people, talking of freedom and liberation and independence thousands of miles away.” In 1960 alone, the year that student sit-ins swept across the American South, more than a dozen African nations gained independence.