Year of Africa 1960: Seventeen Nations Win Their Independence

The Year of Africa was 1960, when seventeen African countries won their independence in the space of eleven months. Most were former French colonies, but the Belgian Congo, Somalia and Nigeria also became sovereign states that year. The wave redrew the map of Africa, changed the balance of the United Nations and marked the moment when European colonial rule south of the Sahara began to end for good.

Background: the road to 1960

European powers had partitioned almost all of Africa in the late nineteenth century during the Scramble for Africa. The Second World War weakened Britain, France and Belgium, while African soldiers, workers and students returned home with new political expectations. Nationalist parties, trade unions and newspapers grew rapidly in the late 1940s and 1950s.

The first breakthroughs came in the north and west. Libya became independent in 1951, Sudan, Morocco and Tunisia in 1956, and the Gold Coast became Ghana in March 1957, often described as the first Black African colony south of the Sahara to do so. Guinea followed in October 1958 after voting “no” in a French referendum. Meanwhile France was fighting a costly war against Algerian nationalists, which made a long struggle elsewhere in Africa look unaffordable.

France and the French Community

When Charles de Gaulle returned to power in 1958, the new constitution of the Fifth Republic created the French Community, a union in which African territories had internal self-government while France kept control of foreign affairs, defence and the currency. In the referendum of 28 September 1958, every territory except Guinea voted to join. Guinea’s immediate independence, and France’s abrupt withdrawal of officials and aid, showed the risks of a sudden break.

Within a year, however, African leaders were asking for full sovereignty. In 1959 Senegal and French Sudan formed the Mali Federation and requested independence within the Community. France agreed, and the constitution was amended to allow independent states to remain associated with it. Once that door opened, the other territories followed in quick succession during 1960, usually through negotiated agreements that kept close economic, military and monetary ties with France.

What happened in 1960

The year opened on 1 January with the independence of Cameroon, a former French-administered UN trust territory. Togo, another trust territory, followed on 27 April. In June the Mali Federation (20 June) and Madagascar (26 June) became independent, and on 30 June the Belgian Congo became the Republic of the Congo.

On 1 July the former Italian trust territory of Somalia united with British Somaliland, which had become independent five days earlier, to form the Somali Republic. August brought a cluster of former French colonies: Dahomey (1 August), Niger (3 August), Upper Volta (5 August), Ivory Coast (7 August), Chad (11 August), the Central African Republic (13 August), Congo-Brazzaville (15 August) and Gabon (17 August).

The Mali Federation broke apart when Senegal withdrew on 20 August, and the former French Sudan proclaimed itself the Republic of Mali on 22 September. Nigeria, Britain’s most populous African colony, became independent on 1 October under Prime Minister Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa. The year closed with Mauritania on 28 November.

The Congo: a warning

Not every transition was peaceful. Belgium had prepared the Congo poorly, with very few Congolese university graduates or senior officers, and set a date for independence only months in advance. Within a week of independence the army mutinied, Belgian troops intervened and the mineral-rich province of Katanga declared its secession. The Congo Crisis drew in the United Nations and the Cold War superpowers and overshadowed the celebrations elsewhere.

Further south, white-minority governments resisted change. In March 1960 police in South Africa killed 69 protesters at Sharpeville, and settlers in the Rhodesias and the Portuguese territories of Angola and Mozambique remained determined to hold on to power.

Key people

• Charles de Gaulle – President of France, who accepted that the French Community could not hold its members and allowed a negotiated, largely peaceful transfer of power.
• Harold Macmillan – British Prime Minister, whose Wind of Change speech in Cape Town on 3 February 1960 signalled that Britain would accept African self-government.
• Léopold Sédar Senghor – poet and politician, first President of Senegal and a leading advocate of close ties with France.
• Félix Houphouët-Boigny – first President of Ivory Coast and the most influential French-speaking African leader of the era.
• Abubakar Tafawa Balewa – first Prime Minister of independent Nigeria.

Consequences

The new states transformed the United Nations. Most of them were admitted in September and October 1960, and Mauritania in 1961 after a delay caused by Morocco’s claim to its territory. African and Asian members together became a large bloc in the General Assembly, which on 14 December 1960 adopted Resolution 1514, the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples.

Independence did not end foreign influence. France signed defence and cooperation agreements with most of its former colonies, kept troops in several of them and maintained the CFA franc, a shared currency linked to the French franc. Critics later called this system “Françafrique”. Many new governments inherited colonial borders, small educated elites and economies built around exporting raw materials.

Political stability proved fragile. Within a decade, military coups had overthrown governments in Togo (1963), Dahomey, Upper Volta, the Central African Republic, Nigeria and elsewhere, and Nigeria fell into civil war in 1967. Many leaders also established one-party states, arguing that national unity required it.

By the numbers

Legacy

1960 is remembered across Africa as the moment the end of empire became irreversible. Many countries celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of their independence together in 2010. The year also inspired the Organisation of African Unity, founded in Addis Ababa in 1963, which pledged to defend the sovereignty of its members and to support liberation movements in the territories that remained under colonial or white-minority rule.

The year also left a cultural mark. Music, literature and art celebrated the new nations, and songs such as the Congolese rumba hit “Indépendance Cha Cha”, recorded in 1960, became anthems of the moment across the continent. New national flags, anthems, currencies and postage stamps gave everyday expression to sovereignty.

Historians now stress both the achievement and its limits. Independence was won mainly through negotiation and political pressure rather than war, yet it often transferred power to small elites and left economic dependence largely intact.

Timeline

• 1958, 28 September: French referendum on the Community; Guinea alone votes no and becomes independent on 2 October.
• 1960, 1 January: Cameroon becomes independent.
• 1960, 3 February: Harold Macmillan delivers the Wind of Change speech in Cape Town.
• 1960, 27 April: Togo becomes independent.
• 1960, 30 June: The Belgian Congo becomes independent; crisis follows within days.
• 1960, 1 July: Somalia and British Somaliland unite as the Somali Republic.
• 1960, 1–17 August: Eight former French colonies, from Dahomey to Gabon, become independent.
• 1960, 1 October: Nigeria becomes independent.
• 1960, 28 November: Mauritania becomes independent.
• 1960, 14 December: UN General Assembly adopts Resolution 1514 on decolonisation.

Why it matters

The Year of Africa turned decolonisation from a series of individual cases into a continental movement. It created many of the states that exist today, gave Africa a collective voice in world politics and set the pattern of opportunities and problems that shaped the continent for decades.