Decolonization in Africa and Asia: 1960 Year of Africa and Cold War Proxy Effects

Seventeen Nations in One Year

In 1960 alone, 17 African countries achieved independence — a pace of political transformation unprecedented in the history of sovereignty. Cameroon, Togo, Madagascar, Benin, Niger, Burkina Faso (then Upper Volta), Ivory Coast, Chad, Central African Republic, the Republic of Congo, Gabon, Senegal, Mali, Nigeria, Mauritania, and Somalia all became independent nations that year, along with the Democratic Republic of Congo from Belgium. The United Nations had 51 member states in 1945; by 1970 it had 127. The European colonial order that had divided Africa among Britain, France, Belgium, Portugal, and Spain at the Berlin Conference of 1884–85 effectively dissolved within a single generation after World War II — driven by anti-colonial nationalism, economic exhaustion of the colonizing powers, Cold War pressure from both superpowers, and the moral contradictions that the war against fascism had made impossible to ignore.

The Accelerants of Decolonization

World War II fundamentally altered the colonial relationship in several ways simultaneously:

• Military service: Over 2.5 million Africans and 2.5 million Indians served in Allied forces. Soldiers who had fought fascism in Europe returned home unwilling to accept colonial subjugation as natural or inevitable.
• Economic disruption: Britain emerged from the war with debts of £3.5 billion (largely to India) and was no longer capable of administering a global empire. France, Belgium, and the Netherlands were physically occupied and economically devastated.
• The Atlantic Charter (1941): Roosevelt and Churchill's statement that "all peoples have the right to choose their own form of government" was invoked globally by anti-colonial movements, to Churchill's mounting fury.
• United Nations pressure: The UN Charter's commitment to self-determination created an international legal framework and forum for independence claims that had not existed before 1945.

Partition Violence: India and Pakistan (1947)

British India's partition into independent India and Pakistan on August 14–15, 1947, was the largest forced migration in human history. Approximately 14–18 million people crossed the new borders in both directions — Hindus and Sikhs moving to India, Muslims to Pakistan. Between 200,000 and 2 million people were killed in communal violence during the partition, with estimates varying widely because records were not kept and many deaths occurred in remote areas. Some 75,000 women were abducted and raped by members of all three communities. The psychological and political legacy shaped South Asian geopolitics for the remainder of the twentieth century and persists in the Kashmir dispute today.

The speed of the partition was itself a significant cause of the violence. Lord Mountbatten, the last Viceroy, accelerated the handover timeline from June 1948 to August 1947 — less than six weeks after Cyril Radcliffe's border commission began work. Radcliffe, a lawyer who had never visited India, drew the Punjab and Bengal borders in five weeks; the boundaries were not publicly announced until two days after independence, meaning millions had moved without knowing which country their home village was in.

The Congo Crisis (1960–1965)

Belgium granted the Democratic Republic of Congo independence on June 30, 1960, after 75 years of rule that had included King Leopold II's personal reign (1885–1908) — the most brutal colonial regime in Africa, during which an estimated 10 million Congolese died from violence, forced labor, and famine. Belgium transferred power with fewer than 30 Congolese university graduates in the country and not a single Congolese officer in the military.

Within two weeks of independence, the army mutinied against its Belgian officers; the mineral-rich Katanga province seceded with Belgian and Union Minière corporate support; Belgian paratroopers re-entered the country. Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba appealed to the United Nations and then to the Soviet Union when UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld declined to use UN forces against the Katanga secession. President Eisenhower's National Security Council authorized a CIA program to "eliminate" Lumumba; he was overthrown in September 1960, transferred to Katanga, and murdered on January 17, 1961. A Senate investigation confirmed CIA involvement in 1975. The Congo crisis established the pattern of Cold War intervention in African independence that would repeat across Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, and elsewhere.

Independence Movement Leaders

Cold War Proxy Effects

Both superpowers viewed decolonization through a zero-sum lens. The Soviet Union supported anti-colonial movements rhetorically and materially, providing military training, arms, and economic assistance to newly independent states that adopted socialist development models. The United States supported independence from European colonial powers but was simultaneously determined to prevent newly independent nations from aligning with Moscow — producing contradictory policies of supporting independence while backing authoritarian anti-communist leaders.

• The CIA backed the 1953 coup against Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, whose oil nationalization threatened Western interests
• The United States supported France's war in Indochina until 1954, then supported South Vietnam's government until 1975
• Soviet and Chinese support for the Viet Minh and later the NLF (Viet Cong) reflected the same logic in reverse
• Cuba's Che Guevara led a failed intervention in Congo (1965) and was killed in Bolivia (1967) attempting to export the Cuban model