The African Independences: How a Continent Changed Its Flags Without Shedding Its Empires
HISTORY 360
Sep 2026 · M. Muñoz
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182
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About this ebook
Between 1956 and 1975, the political map of an entire continent was redrawn: dozens of new flags rose, dozens of European governors sailed home, and more than fifty new sovereign states took their seats at the United Nations. To the people who lived through it, it felt like a sunrise after the long colonial night — and in a real sense it was. Yet sixty years on, a harder question hangs over that dawn: the continent changed its flags, but how much did it change its chains? This book tells the story of African decolonization in all its grandeur and all its disappointment, refusing both the triumphalist myth of a spotless march to freedom and the despairing myth — itself a descendant of colonial propaganda — that independence changed nothing. It runs from the empire at its 1945 zenith through the awakening of Pan-Africanism, the breakthrough of Ghana and Nkrumah, the great wave of 1960, the wars in Algeria and the Congo and the Portuguese colonies, the long agony of apartheid and the settler south, and on to the Cold War proxy conflicts, the dictators, the debt spiral, and the arbitrary borders that bred new wars. Following the rule of the HISTORY 360 collection, it draws a clear line throughout between what the documented record establishes — the British detention camps proven by the Hanslope Park files, the foreign complicity in Lumumba’s murder — and what is colonial propaganda or nationalist legend. A vivid, balanced, and humane reckoning with the difference between raising a flag and being free.
Between 1956 and 1975, the political map of an entire continent was redrawn: dozens of new flags rose, dozens of European governors sailed home, and more than fifty new sovereign states took their seats at the United Nations. To the people who lived through it, it felt like a sunrise after the lo...
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