Decolonization and citizenship Africa between empires and a world of nations

Abstract

The author's goal in this chapter is to look at a crucial period in African history, the decade and a half after World War II in a dynamic fashion, to look at possibilities that opened up and possibilities that shut down. In the aftermath of war, the two most powerful colonial powers, Britain and France, needed both to expand the economic utility of their African territories and to reinforce the legitimacy of holding colonies to a world in which such claims were becoming increasingly contested. The citizenship idea was crucial to a lively period of African politics. But citizenship was not the only framework within which Africans mobilized and acted politically. During the period of decolonization in the 1950s and early 1960s, most scholars - and African political leaders themselves - were eager to assimilate them to European patterns.Keywords: African history; citizenship; decolonization; European population; political movements