Quick questions on Anti-colonial and independence movements (QCE Modern History Unit 1)

Britain accelerated withdrawal under Mountbatten. Partition produced India and Pakistan and an estimated $1$ to $2$ million deaths in communal violence; about $14$ million displaced. The largest mass migration in human history.

Seventeen African states gained independence in a single calendar year: Cameroon, Senegal, Togo, Madagascar, Benin, Niger, Burkina Faso, Cote d'Ivoire, Chad, Central African Republic, Congo-Brazzaville, Gabon, Congo (the former Belgian Congo, now DR Congo), Somalia, Mali, Nigeria, Mauritania.

The most violent decolonisation. The FLN (Front de Libération Nationale) launched insurgency on 1 November 1954. The conflict killed several hundred thousand Algerians, used torture systematically (documented by historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet and others), brought down the French Fourth Republic in 1958, and ended with the Evian Accords (March 1962).

Where significant European settler populations had established themselves (Kenya, Rhodesia, South Africa, Algeria), decolonisation was harder and more violent. Kenyan Mau Mau emergency (1952-1960). Rhodesian UDI (1965) and Bush War.

A series of congresses (London 1900; Paris 1919; Manchester 1945) bringing together African and African-diaspora thinkers. Key figures: W.E.B. Du Bois, Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta, George Padmore.

Twenty-nine Asian and African states met in Indonesia. Established the principle of solidarity among non-aligned, newly independent nations. Led to the formal Non-Aligned Movement (Belgrade, 1961).

Aimé Césaire (Martinique) and Léopold Sédar Senghor (Senegal). Literary and intellectual movement asserting Black cultural identity against colonial assimilationism.

"Orientalism" (1978). Foundational text of post-colonial studies. Argued that European representations of "the East" produced a body of cultural knowledge inseparable from imperial power.