Decolonization And White Africans

Decolonization and White Africans examines how African decolonization affected white Africans in eight countries - Algeria, Kenya, Northern Rhodesia (Zambia), Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), Angola, Mozambique, South West Africa (Namibia), and South Africa - and discusses their varied responses to decolonization, including resistance, acquiescence, negotiations, and migration. It also examines the range of mechanisms used by the global community to compel white Africans into submitting to decolonization through such means as official pressure, diplomatic negotiations, global activism, sanctions, and warfare. Until now, books about African decolonization usually approached the topic either from the perspective of the colonial powers or from an anti-colonial black African perspective. As a result, white African perspectives have been marginalized, downplayed, or presented reductively. Decolonization and White Africans adds white African perspectives to the story, thereby broadening our understanding of the decolonization phenomenon.

The negotiated transfer of power in apartheid South Africa was the last act in the dismantling of white supremacy on the African continent. While opening a new era for the whites in Africa, it closed an earlier one that contains some of the most colourful episodes in world history. In The White Africans, South African journalist and writer Gerald L'Ange gives a warts-and-all account of the European experience in Africa, from the explorations of the 15th-century Portuguese mariners to the presidential inauguration of Nelson Mandela in 1994. The story is traced through the Europeans' exploration and settlement, through their slavery and economic exploitation, their conquest and colonisation, through decolonisation and the liberation struggles in Kenya, Algeria, the Portuguese territories, Rhodesia and Namibia to the negotiation of democracy in South Africa. Avoiding both past falsities and recent distortions, the book seeks the truth of the European experience, examines the present situation of the white Africans and looks at what might lie ahead for them.

A truly satisfactory history of Rhodesia, one that takes into account both the African history and that of the whites, has never been written. That is, until now. In this book Luise White highlights the crucial tension between Rhodesia as it imagined itself and Rhodesia as it was imagined outside the country. Using official documents, novels, memoirs, and conversations with participants in the events taking place between 1965, when Rhodesia unilaterally declared independence from Britain, and 1980 when indigenous African rule was established through the creation of the state of Zimbabwe, White reveals that Rhodesians represented their state as a kind of utopian place where white people dared to stand up for themselves and did what needed to be done. It was imagined to be a place vastly better than the decolonized dystopias to its north. In all these representations, race trumped all else including any notion of nation. Outside Rhodesia, on the other hand, it was considered a white supremacist utopia, a country that had taken its own independence rather than let white people live under black rule. Even as Rhodesia edged toward majority rule to end international sanctions and a protracted guerilla war, racialized notions of citizenship persisted. One man, one vote, became the natural logic of decolonization of this illegally independent minority-ruled renegade state. Voter qualification with its minutia of which income was equivalent to how many years of schooling, and how African incomes or years of schooling could be rendered equivalent to whites, illustrated the core of ideas about, and experiences of, racial domination. White s account of the politics of decolonization in this unprecedented historical situation reveals much about the general processes occurring elsewhere on the African continent."

This bold, popularizing synthesis presents a readily accessible introduction to one of the major themes of the twentieth-century world history. Between 1922, when self-government was restored to Egypt, and 1994, when non-racial democracy was achieved in South Africa, no less than 54 new nations were established in Africa. Written within the parameters of African history, as opposed to imperial history, this study charts the process of nationalism, liberation and independence that recast the political map of Africa in these years. Ranging from Algeria in the North, where a French colonial government used armed force to combat the Algerian aspirations of home rule, to the final overthrow of apartheid in the South, this is an authoritative survey that will be welcomed by all students tackling this complex and challenging topic.

In the mid-twentieth century, the struggle against colonial rule fundamentally reshaped the world and the lives of the majority of the world's population. Decolonization, Black and Brown freedom movements, the establishment of the United Nations and NATO, an exploding Cold War, a burgeoning world human rights movement, all became part of the dramatic events that swept through Africa at a furious pace, with fifty nations gaining independence in roughly fifty years. Meanwhile, the United States emerged as the most powerful and influential nation in the world, with the ability—politically, economically, militarily—and principles to help or hinder the transformation of the African continent. Tears, Fire, and Blood offers a sweeping history of how the United States responded to decolonization in Africa. James H. Meriwether explores how Washington, grappling with national security interests and racial prejudices, veered between strengthening African nationalist movements seeking majority rule and independence and bolstering anticommunist European allies seeking to maintain white rule. Events in Africa helped propel the Black freedom struggle around the world and ultimately forced the United States to confront its support for national ideals abroad as it fought over how to achieve equality at home.

A new investigation into Hammarskjöld's role in the decolonisation of Africa during the Cold War offers startling conclusions.

The election of 1994, which heralded the demise of Apartheid as a legally enforced institutionalization of “whiteness,” disconnected the prior moorings of social identity for most South Africans, whatever their political persuasion. In one of the most profound collective psychological experiences of the contemporary world, South Africans are renegotiating the meaning of their social positionalities. In this book, Melissa Steyn, herself a white South African, grapples with what it means to be white, reflecting on events in her past that still resonate with her today. Her research includes discourse with more than fifty white South Africans who are faced with reinterpreting their old selves in the light of new knowledge and possibilities. Framed within current debates of postcolonialism and postmodernism, “Whiteness Just Isn’t What It Used To Be” explores how the changes in South Africa’s social and political structure are changing the white population’s identity and sense of self.