"Powerful people never educate powerless people in what they need that they can use to take the power away from powerful people; it's too much to expect. If I was in power, I would not educate people in how to take my powers away." Dr. John Henrik Clarke

WAR AND REVOLUTION

So often in history, war has been the vehicle of revolution. Some wars are 'revolutionary wars'; they are waged with the specific purpose of achieving or defending a revolution. Examples in the 20^th century are the Soviet revolutionary war of 1918-21 and the Third World wars of liberation in China, Vietnam, Cuba and, in Africa, Algeria, Kenya, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Angola, Zimbabwe and Namibia. Yet many wars which have been fought for purposes other than revolution have nevertheless sparked off revolution unintentionally.

The First World War led to the collapse of the major European continental monarchies, and to the Communist revolution in Russia. The Second World War even though the major colonial powers emerged as victors - marked the beginning of the end of political colonialism in Asia and Africa, and thereby became the great turning point in the modern history of both continents.                                   Sir Winston Churchill

In 1939, when the war broke out, no part of Africa could be said to be truly independent. The Italians had recently occupied Ethiopia, which now formed part of that vast majority of the continent that had fallen under direct colonial rule. Each of the three nominally independent states - South Africa, Egypt and Liberia - were in practice semi- colonial states. The Union of South Africa was an independent dominion within the British Commonwealth, but the white majority who ruled it practised at least as harsh a form of colonialism on the black majority as did the nominally colonial governments in Africa. Egypt was ruled by a British puppet regime backed by British troops in the Suez Canal Zone. Liberia had already fallen prey to American economic imperialism. Yet only a quarter of a century later 54 states had gained independence, including Ethiopia; Egypt had thrown off British control; and only the southern white redoubt, and a few isolated territories elsewhere, remained under direct colonial rule.

World War II

What part did the Second World War play in bringing about this revolutionary change in the political map of Africa?

First, the war brought about a revolution in world global politics, and this in turn had a profound effect on Africa.

Secondly, the war stimulated African nationalism in the colonial territories themselves, to a point where, almost everywhere, its demands were eventually met.

The revolution in world global politics took the form of a change in the world balance of power. Britain and France, the major colonial powers in Africa, were reduced from the first to the second rank of world powers, and the United States of America and the Soviet Union were raised to the first rank. Both these new 'super-powers' had an anti-colonial tradition and actively encouraged the colonial powers to decolonize. They dominated the new United Nations Organization and ensured it applied pressure on the colonial powers to prepare their African subjects for self-government.

Paradoxically, this shift in the world balance of power was largely the achievement of the German Nazi dictator, Adolf Hitler, and the Japanese Emperor, Hirohito, who had started the war with the intention of making Germany and Japan the most powerful nations in the world. American and Soviet world power rose largely over the ashes of a destroyed and partitioned Germany and the nuclear-devastated cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yet Hitler and Hirohito were responsible not only for the rise of the two super- powers of the twentieth century; they were also inadvertent liberators of the black man. Hitler was himself racially arrogant and the embodiment of brutal racial intolerance. Yet the war he precipitated turned out to have considerable consequences for the future of the French and British colonies. The defeat of France by Germany, and of Britain by Japan in South-East Asia, reduced part of the mystique of French and British imperial power in Africa. Britain held on to India in spite of Japanese invasion, and was not defeated by Germany, but the sheer depletion of British resources and the sheer exhaustion at the end of the war helped to destroy Britain's will to rule its colonies.

The war led to a considerable Asian impact on Africa, in two major ways. First there was the contribution of Japanese military victory and technological achievement to African nationalist thinking.

Secondly, soon after the war the European empires in Asia crumbled before victorious Asian nationalism, and Asian, especially Indian, nationalism, came to constitute another form of external pressure on the colonial regimes in Africa - both in the United Nations, and by mere force of example to African nationalists.

The Second World War, then, created forms of external pressure on European colonialism in Africa. But even more fundamental, the war enhanced political consciousness in Africa itself, and made inevitable increasing anti-colonial militancy.

European powers with their kings had Hitler as a serious challenge

Hitler's war, by forcing the recruitment of colonial armies, contributed to the expanding political consciousness of those Africans who travelled far from their villages to fight for the King of England or the French Republic. The direct involvement of many hundreds of thousands of Africans in the war, either in theatres of war in Africa itself, or in Asia or Europe, contributed enormously to the eventual victory of African political nationalism over the next quarter of a century. Africans wondered what they had been fighting for. They had fought for the British or the French against fascist tyranny and imperialism in Europe and Africa or for the British against Japanese imperialism in Asia. They now demanded the same rights of self-determination and political liberty that their white colonial masters enjoyed in the metropolitan countries. At the end of the war their hopes were high that speedy changes would occur.

Clement Attlee, leader of Labour Party

The accession to power of a Labour government with a large majority, and committed to radical socialist policies itself a direct result of the war particularly encouraged British Africans. However, it soon turned out that Africa was low on the list of the priorities of the Labour government - it was more concerned with granting independence to India and its neighbours, and to nationalizing the key points of the British economy.

Idi Amin was one of the World War II fighters

The initial enthusiasm soon gave way to its inevitable sequel: bitter disappointment and a sense of hopelessness. Yet the change in political consciousness in the minds of many Africans brought about by the Second World War meant that the post-war disillusionment was soon replaced by a more realistic and determined commitment to win political freedom.