Africa

The Century of Resistance

Africa's liberation history is the most extensive, the most geographically diverse, and — in the mainstream of Western historical education — the most systematically underdocumented of any continent's struggle for self-determination. This archive is an attempt to address that.

The conventional account of African decolonisation presents it as a post-World War Two phenomenon: a series of independence declarations between 1956 and 1975, organised by educated elites, granted by departing European powers in more or less orderly handovers. This account is false in almost every particular. African resistance to colonial conquest was immediate, sustained, and often militarily formidable. Yaa Asantewaa of the Ashanti in Ghana led a full military campaign against the British in 1900. Omar Mukhtar of Libya commanded guerrilla forces against Italian occupation for nearly twenty years before his public hanging in 1931. Mbuya Nehanda of Zimbabwe was executed by British colonial forces in 1898 and had already declared, correctly, that her bones would rise. They did — in the liberation war of the 1970s that bore her name.

The archive documents two distinct but overlapping phases of African liberation. The first is the armed and political resistance to initial colonial conquest and the imposition of colonial systems between roughly 1830 and 1940. This phase produced figures like Abd el-Krim of Morocco, who inflicted a catastrophic defeat on Spanish colonial forces at Annual in 1921 and governed the Rif Republic for five years; Sayyid Mohammed Abdullah Hassan of Somalia, the 'Mad Mullah' of British propaganda, who resisted British, Italian, and Ethiopian expansion for twenty-one years; and Ahmad Orabi of Egypt, whose 1882 uprising against Ottoman and British control was the first major nationalist revolt in the Arab world.

The second phase is the organised independence and liberation movements of the mid-twentieth century, which produced the continent's most internationally recognised figures: Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, whose 1957 independence was the first in sub-Saharan Africa and whose pan-African vision shaped the founding of the Organisation of African Unity; Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, who built one of the continent's most coherent post-independence states while hosting liberation movements from across the continent; Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, whose country served as a frontline state for the ANC, ZIPRA, and SWAPO throughout the southern African liberation wars; and Nelson Mandela, whose twenty-seven years of imprisonment became the central international symbol of apartheid's brutality and whose release in 1990 marked the beginning of the transition that ended it.

But the archive deliberately documents figures beyond this canonical list. The women of the liberation movements — Djamila Bouhired and Zohra Drif of Algeria's FLN, who carried out bombings in Algiers' European quarter while in their early twenties; Deolinda Rodrigues of Angola's MPLA, who was captured and executed by the FNLA at twenty-eight; Albertina Sisulu and Helen Joseph and Lilian Ngoyi and Winnie Mandela of the ANC, who maintained the South African movement during the decades when its male leadership was imprisoned or exiled; Graca Machel of Mozambique, who built the educational infrastructure of a liberated country while her husband Samora Machel fought and later governed it — these women have been systematically written out of the history that their organisations later recorded.

The archive also documents the cost. Of the three hundred individuals profiled in this section, the majority were imprisoned, exiled, tortured, or killed. Patrice Lumumba was executed at thirty-five, eleven weeks after taking office. Thomas Sankara was assassinated at thirty-seven after 1,531 days in government. Chris Hani was shot in his driveway at fifty. Steve Biko was tortured to death at thirty years old; the inquest found no one responsible. Solomon Mahlangu was hanged by the apartheid state at twenty-three and reportedly told his mother: 'Tell my people that I love them and that they must continue the fight.'

Africa's liberation history did not end in 1994 with the fall of apartheid, which is where most Western accounts stop. The archive includes figures from the independence movements of the 1950s and 1960s who lived to see their revolutions compromised, reversed, or captured by new elites. It includes the thinkers — Frantz Fanon, Amílcar Cabral, Walter Rodney, Cheikh Anta Diop — whose theoretical work shaped liberation movements far beyond Africa. And it includes the ongoing struggles: the Western Sahara, Somaliland, the continuing displacement of communities across the continent whose liberation remains unfinished business.