Decolonization was fought with ideas as well as with votes and weapons. Colonized thinkers had to answer a claim built into empire itself: that some peoples were fit to rule and others fit only to be ruled. Their answers ranged from proud cultural renewal to calls for revolution, and they still shape debates about race, culture and power.

Pan-Africanism

The idea of a shared African cause took shape among Caribbean and American thinkers before it spread in Africa itself. In 1903 W. E. B. Du Bois wrote that "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line," and he helped organize a series of Pan-African Congresses beginning in Paris in 1919. Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican, built a mass movement in the 1920s around black pride and a return to Africa. Pan-Africanism held that people of African descent everywhere share a common cause, and after 1945 it became a program for African independence and unity.

Négritude

In 1930s Paris, students from France's colonies, among them Aimé Césaire of Martinique, Léopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal and Léon Damas of French Guiana, founded a literary movement they called Négritude. Négritude celebrated black African culture and identity against colonial claims of inferiority. Its writers turned the racist assumption that Africans had no civilization on its head, praising African rhythm, community and spirituality. Senghor, a poet, became Senegal's first president in 1960.

Critics argued that Négritude reversed a European stereotype instead of rejecting it: the stereotype that Africans were emotional and Europeans rational, now with the values swapped. The Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka mocked the idea that a culture needs to proclaim its identity, comparing it to an animal announcing its own nature. Defenders replied that a people told for centuries that it had no culture had good reason to proclaim one.

Césaire's indictment

In his Discourse on Colonialism of 1950, Césaire went on the attack. Césaire argued that colonization degraded the colonizers morally, brutalizing the soldiers, officials and settlers who carried it out. He also argued that Europe had tolerated Nazi methods when they were used on Africans and Asians and was shocked only when they were turned against Europeans. The argument made colonialism a European moral problem, not only a colonial one.

Fanon and the question of violence

Frantz Fanon, born in Martinique, trained as a psychiatrist in France and in 1953 took charge of a psychiatric hospital in Algeria, where his patients came to include both victims and perpetrators of torture. He joined the FLN. In Black Skin, White Masks (1952) he described how colonial racism damages the minds of the colonized. In The Wretched of the Earth (1961), written as he was dying of leukemia, Fanon argued that violence by the colonized could free them psychologically as well as politically.

The same book carried a second, often overlooked warning. Fanon warned that a new national elite might simply replace the colonizers and enrich itself while the poor stayed poor. Many later readers have found this prediction more lasting than his praise of violence.

Fanon had sharp critics. The political theorist Hannah Arendt, in On Violence (1970), argued that violence can destroy power but cannot create it, and that regimes born in violence tend to rule by it. Advocates of nonviolent resistance pointed to India's independence movement as proof that mass refusal could defeat an empire without copying its cruelty. Fanon's defenders answered that in settler colonies like Algeria the empire had closed every peaceful path first.

Neocolonialism

Once independence was won, attention turned to what it was worth. In 1965 Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana's first president, published Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. Nkrumah defined neocolonialism as formal independence combined with outside economic control of a country's resources and policy. The term spread quickly. Critics noted that it could also become an all-purpose excuse, letting leaders blame foreigners for their own failures; Nkrumah's own government was overthrown the following year amid an economic crisis.

Worked example: Amílcar Cabral

Amílcar Cabral, an agronomist from Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, led the war against Portugal there from the early 1960s. Before the fighting began, he spent years studying the peasants he hoped to mobilize, using his work on an agricultural survey to learn how different communities farmed, worshipped and governed themselves. He insisted that liberation had to grow from people's own culture and concrete grievances, not from imported slogans, and he told his followers to be honest with villagers about the hardships ahead rather than boasting of easy victories.

Cabral's movement set up schools, clinics and people's courts in the areas it controlled, and in 1973 it declared independence. Cabral did not live to see it: he was assassinated in January 1973 by members of his own movement, with Portuguese involvement widely suspected. His career brings together several ideas from this level: cultural renewal, the armed struggle he believed was necessary against a regime that allowed no peaceful change, and the hard question of what kind of state would follow.