Year of Africa

In the course of 1960, seventeen African colonies became sovereign states, and commentators soon gave the period a name: the Year of Africa. Fourteen of the new states had been French possessions, two came from British rule and one from Belgian. The wave of independence, together with violence in the Congo and South Africa, made the continent a central question in world politics and at the United Nations.

Observers expected 1960 to be decisive even before it began. A British colonial official, O. H. Morris, predicted in January that it would be a year of Africa, and the American diplomat Ralph Bunche used the same words in February, pointing to the speed with which colonial rule was collapsing. On 3 February the British prime minister Harold Macmillan said in a speech in Cape Town that a "wind of change" was blowing through the continent, a speech widely read as an admission that the empire could not be held.

France had tried to keep its African territories through the French Community, a looser federation created under the 1958 constitution. Only Guinea refused to join, taking independence in 1958 and losing French support as a result. In December 1959 Charles de Gaulle accepted that members could leave, and in 1960 all of them did, far faster than Paris had expected. Cameroon led on 1 January, followed by Togo in April, the short-lived Mali Federation and Madagascar in June, and a cluster of states in August, among them Dahomey (later Benin), Niger, Upper Volta (later Burkina Faso), Ivory Coast, Chad, the Central African Republic, Congo-Brazzaville and Gabon. The Mali Federation divided into Mali and Senegal on 20 August, and Mauritania became independent on 28 November. Most of these states kept close economic ties with France and continued to use the CFA franc.

On 26 June British Somaliland became independent, and on 1 July it joined the Italian-administered trust territory to form the Somali Republic. Nigeria, the most populous colony on the continent, gained independence on 1 October. In neighbouring Ghana, already independent since 1957, voters chose to become a republic, and Kwame Nkrumah was elected president.

Belgium agreed at a conference in Brussels in January to grant the Congo independence on 30 June. Patrice Lumumba, released from prison to attend, emerged from the May elections with the largest bloc of seats and took office as prime minister. Within weeks the country was in turmoil; Lumumba was deposed on 14 September and later executed. The disorder, known as the Congo Crisis, prompted the London Daily Express to denounce the whole notion of an African year.

On 21 March police opened fire on protesters at Sharpeville, an event often treated as a turning point in resistance to apartheid (see Sharpeville massacre). In October a South African referendum approved a republic, a step towards the country leaving the Commonwealth the following year. At the United Nations, where Africa was emerging as a major force, Nkrumah spoke that autumn on Africa's demand for freedom. On 14 December the Assembly adopted the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, without a single vote against, though the United States and seven other colonial powers chose to abstain.

The events of 1960 changed how Africa was seen abroad and encouraged new, Africa-centred scholarship. They also resonated with African Americans in the civil rights movement, who drew links between segregation at home and colonial rule abroad. In 2010 a number of states marked fifty years of independence.

Our 1945 map shows the colonial blocs that dissolved in 1960, including French West Africa, French Equatorial Africa and the Belgian Congo; the 1960 map captures the continent in the year of change.