Decolonization took a different course in French-speaking Africa. The events in the French North African colony of Algeria in the 1950s and early 1960s help clarify France’s attitude toward its sub-Saharan African colonies.

France tried hard to retain Algeria, where predominantly Arabic-speaking and Muslim nationalists were emboldened by Egyptian president Gamal Nasser’s successful revolution in 1952 and by France’s defeat and loss of its colonies in Indochina in 1954. But Algeria’s large, and mostly Catholic, European population — known as the pieds-noirs (black feet) because its members wore black shoes instead of sandals — was determined to keep Algeria part of France. In November 1954 Algeria’s anticolonial movement, the National Liberation Front (FLN), began a bitter war for independence. After the FLN won and created an independent Algerian state in 1962, an estimated 900,000 of the 1.25 million Europeans and indigenous Jews fled.

The long and violent anticolonial war in Algeria, following Indochina’s military victory, sharply divided France and undermined its political stability. As a result, it was difficult for France to respond to nationalists in its other African colonies until Charles de Gaulle returned to power in 1958. Seeking to maximize France’s influence over the future independent nations, de Gaulle devised a divide-and-rule strategy. He divided the French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa federations into thirteen separate governments, thus creating a “French commonwealth.” Plebiscites were called in each territory to ratify the new arrangement. An affirmative vote meant continued ties with France; a negative vote signified immediate independence and a complete break with France.

De Gaulle’s gamble was shrewd. The educated black elite — as personified by the influential poet-politician Léopold Sédar Senghor, who now led Senegal’s government — identified with France and dreaded an abrupt separation. They also wanted French aid to continue. France, in keeping with its ideology of assimilation, had given the vote to its educated colonial elite after the Second World War, and about forty Africans held French parliamentary seats after 1946. For these reasons, French Africa’s leaders tended to be moderate in their pursuit of independence.

In Guinea, however, a young nationalist named Sékou Touré (1922–1984) led his people to overwhelmingly reject the new constitution in 1958. Echoing Ghana’s Nkrumah, Touré laid it out to de Gaulle face-to-face: “We have to tell you bluntly, Mr. President, what the demands of the people are. . . . We have one prime and essential need: our dignity. But there is no dignity without freedom. . . . We prefer freedom in poverty to opulence in slavery.”10

Though peoples that had been colonized by France and Britain often found paths for independence, those of other regions of Africa struggled with the colonial policies of European nations less prepared to acknowledge the wave of decolonization. Portugal’s dictatorship sought to simply ride out the pressure for decolonization: it hoped to keep its colonies, such as Angola and Mozambique, in perpetuity. To ensure this, the Portuguese regime intensified white settlement and repression of nationalist groups.

Belgium, a long-time practitioner of colonial paternalism coupled with harsh, selfish rule in its enormous Congo colony (see “The Scramble for Africa, 1880–1914” in Chapter 25), had always discouraged the development of an educated elite. When Belgium abruptly decided to grant independence in 1959 after intense riots, the fabric of Congo’s government broke down. Independence was followed by violent ethnic conflict, civil war, and foreign intervention. The mineral-rich nation stabilized under the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko, who renamed the country Zaire. Mobutu’s corruption deepened poverty as the tremendous wealth generated from mining went into the hands of foreign companies and Mobutu’s family and cronies.