The Wave After the War

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Decolonization did not happen at one moment or in one place; it happened in waves, region by region, in the three decades after the Second World War. India and Pakistan became independent in 1947, carved out of British India through a partition that itself displaced millions. The Philippines followed in 1946, and Indonesia secured its independence from the Netherlands in 1949 only after an armed conflict the Dutch could not win. France held on longer and paid more for it: its defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 ended French rule in Indochina outright. Africa's wave came slightly later and moved faster once it started. Libya was independent by 1951, Morocco and Tunisia by 1956, and Ghana's independence in 1957 opened the door for Nigeria in 1960 and Kenya in 1963; by 1977, colonial rule had ended across the whole of mainland Africa. No single cause explains the timing. Constitutional conferences in London negotiated the terms of transition, colonial insurgencies raised the cost of staying, and international pressure, culminating in the United Nations General Assembly's 1960 Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, made continued occupation harder to defend on the world stage than it had ever been before.