Where few Europeans lived, empires could often leave by negotiation, as Britain did in most of West Africa. Where many had settled, departure was slower and bloodier. Settler populations made decolonization harder because they held land and political influence and feared majority rule. Settlers had votes, newspapers and friends in the ruling country's parliament, and they often believed, with reason, that independence would cost them their privileges. Algeria, Kenya and Rhodesia show the pattern in different forms.

Algeria

France conquered Algeria from 1830. Unlike most colonies, Algeria was legally part of France, organized into French departments, so French leaders described its loss as unthinkable, like losing Brittany. By the 1950s about a million Europeans, known as pieds-noirs, lived alongside about nine million Muslim Algerians, who in practice were denied equal political rights. On 8 May 1945, the day Germany surrendered, a demonstration at Sétif turned into a riot that killed about a hundred Europeans. French reprisals killed thousands of Algerians, with estimates ranging from about 1,500 to many times that number.

The National Liberation Front (FLN) began its war in November 1954 with coordinated attacks. France sent hundreds of thousands of conscripts. In 1957, in what became known as the Battle of Algiers, French paratroopers broke the FLN's network in the capital. French forces used torture of suspects systematically during the Battle of Algiers, along with mass arrests and disappearances. The FLN also killed civilians, both Europeans and Muslims who refused to back it, and bombed cafés. When the journalist Henri Alleg published an account of his own torture in 1958, the government banned the book.

The war brought down the French Fourth Republic. In 1958 a revolt by settlers and army officers in Algiers returned Charles de Gaulle to power. They expected him to keep Algeria French. Instead he moved step by step toward self-determination, surviving an attempted military coup in 1961 and assassination attempts by the OAS, a terror group of settlers and soldiers. The Évian Accords of March 1962 ended the war, and Algeria became independent in July 1962.

The end was traumatic. About 800,000 pieds-noirs left for France within months. Muslim auxiliaries who had fought for France, the harkis, were mostly abandoned, and many thousands were killed in reprisals. Algerian deaths in the war are disputed: Algeria's official figure is about 1.5 million, while many historians estimate several hundred thousand. In 2018 President Emmanuel Macron acknowledged that France had allowed a system of torture during the war.

Kenya

In Kenya, Britain had reserved the fertile highlands for white farmers, while many Kikuyu families lost land and became squatters or laborers. In the early 1950s a movement the British called Mau Mau took up arms. Britain declared an Emergency in 1952 and detained tens of thousands of Kikuyu in camps, where beatings and forced labor were common. In March 1959 guards at the Hola camp beat eleven detainees to death, and the scandal in Parliament helped convince London that its Kenyan policy could not continue. Kenya became independent in December 1963 under Jomo Kenyatta, whom Britain had imprisoned for years as a supposed Mau Mau leader.

Rhodesia

Britain's colony of Southern Rhodesia had over 200,000 white settlers and about four million Africans in the mid-1960s. When Britain insisted on progress toward majority rule as the price of independence, Ian Smith's white minority government declared independence unilaterally in November 1965. No country recognized the new state. The UN responded with its first mandatory economic sanctions, but South Africa and Portugal helped Rhodesia evade them. A guerrilla war by two nationalist movements grew through the 1970s. A conference at Lancaster House in London in 1979 produced a settlement, and Zimbabwe became independent in April 1980 with Robert Mugabe as prime minister.

Portugal fought the longest of these wars, from 1961 until 1974, in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau. Its colonies became independent in 1974 and 1975, after the dictatorship in Lisbon fell.

Worked example: two versions of one war

For decades France did not officially call the Algerian conflict a war; it spoke of "events" or "operations to maintain order." Only in 1999 did the National Assembly formally recognize it as a war. In Algeria, the FLN's victory became the founding story of the state, and the party ruled alone for nearly three decades. That story honored real sacrifice, but it also left out the FLN's purges of rival nationalists and its violence against civilians.

In 2021 the historian Benjamin Stora, asked by Macron to report on the memory of colonization and the war, recommended symbolic steps such as opening archives and creating a joint commission of historians, rather than a formal apology. Some welcomed the realism; others, including many Algerians, said that without an apology the gestures were empty. The case shows how each side's national story can make it harder to see the other side's suffering, and how a fuller history makes room for the victims on every side.