The 1950s were a monumental decade for the people of the African continent, who witnessed a dramatic disruption of the status quo of colonial rule by European powers, which had been in place in most areas for three quarters of a century. A dramatic TIME magazine poster by mapmaker Robert McFarlane Chapin highlighted the rapid transition of Africa from colonialism to independence.
In the 1950s, Libya, Morocco, Sudan, Tunisia, Ghana, and Guinea all achieved independence. Then, on February 3, 1960, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan delivered a speech in Cape Town, saying, “The wind of change is blowing through this continent…we must all accept it as a fact, and our national policies must take account of it.”
To this, Guinean Foreign Minister Caba Sory retorted, “The ‘wind of change’ which has been referred to…threatens soon to become a hurricane…guns and bayonets can no longer prevail in the face of the strong conscience of the populations of Africa which are determined to put an end to colonialism.”
And indeed, in 1960 alone-a year referred to as the “Year of Africa” by global media across the world-no fewer than 17 African nations gained independence. The most dramatic single year was 1960.
The decolonisation of Africa was a series of political developments in Africa that spanned from the mid-1950s to 1975, during the Cold War. Colonial governments gave way to sovereign states in a process often marred by violence, political turmoil, widespread unrest, and organised revolts.
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The poster, likely published in May or June 1960, highlights the dramatic transformation of the continent in just the past decade. The map at the top depicts the continent in 1950 as a patchwork of European colonial holdings, with independence enjoyed by only Egypt, Ethiopia, South Africa, and Liberia.
The lower map depicts it a decade later, with the newly-independent Cameroon and the Republic of Togoland and more than a dozen other entities either “autonomous republics in the French community”, “approaching independence”, or “approaching internal self-government”.
By the end of the year Madagascar, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, Benin, Niger, Burkina Faso, the Ivory Coast, Chad, the Central African Republic, the Republic of the Congo, Gabon, Senegal, Mali, Nigeria, and Mauritania became independent.
It is worth noting that Chapin has somewhat extended the coverage of the 1960 map in order to highlight the Soviet Union and its “satellites” in Eastern Europe. In doing so his intent may have been to contrast the expansionist aims of the Soviet Union with the decolonializing program of the West.
The Scramble for Africa between 1870 and 1914 was a significant period of European imperialism in Africa that ended with almost all of Africa, and its natural resources, claimed as colonies by European powers, who raced to secure as much land as possible while avoiding conflict amongst themselves. Almost all the precolonial states of Africa lost their sovereignty.
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What Is The Meaning Of Wind Of Change? - African Roots And Routes
Key Figures and Events
Robert MacFarlane Chapin, Jr. (?-2002) graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1933 with a degree in architecture. Finding little demand for his training during the Depression, he took a job as a retoucher of photos at Newsweek, where he somehow learned to draw maps. In 1937 he was lured away to run the map department at Newsweek rival TIME, where he worked for the next 33 years.
He and his team were extremely prolific, particularly during the Second World War, when they produced four, five and six maps per week to keep up with breaking news. After the War Chapin remained at TIME for another quarter century, during which period he produced numerous maps, including many addressing aspects of the Cold War, a titanic “us vs. them” struggle to which his bold style and liberal use of red were well suited.
Chapin is remembered today for the distinctive quality of his work as well as his prolific output. His maps have an immediately-recognizable style involving bold use of color, minimal clutter, standardized and evocative symbols (such as a vice to indicate military encirclement), and the use of distinctive projections and perspectives.
This distinctive style was facilitated by a number of his own innovations: “First, Chapin used an airbrush, a sort of high-power atomizer, with that he sprayed paint over his maps in an infinite number of shadings that gave mountains and valleys, plateaus and riverbeds their three-dimensional height and depth. Second, he suspended two large floating globes - one political, one physical - from the ceiling by pulleys and counterweights in such a way that they can be turned, lowered and photographed from any angle or perspective. Third, he created a library of celluloid symbols, that contained bomb explosions, flags, camels, ships, soldiers and moving battalions.” (Angeletti)
Over time, perhaps the most noticeable shift in his work was the use of color. His Time maps during the Second World War all use a simple palette of black, gray and red, but some time thereafter his maps begin appearing in full color.
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Writing in 1957 during the middle of Chapin’s career at Time, Walter Ristow observed that “the Time-Chapin association, extending over almost two decades, has been one of the major pillars of American journalistic cartography. Chapin maps have established a pattern and style for modern newsmagazine cartography.” (Ristow, p. 384)
Chapin’s TIME magazine maps were enormously popular, and they were often enlarged and reprinted in poster format for distribution to schools.
Starting with the 1945 Pan-African Congress, the Gold Coast's (modern-day Ghana's) independence leader Kwame Nkrumah made his focus clear. In the conference's declaration, he wrote, "We believe in the rights of all peoples to govern themselves. We affirm the right of all colonial peoples to control their own destiny.
In 1948, three Ghanaian veterans were killed by the colonial police on a protest march. Riots broke out in Accra and though Nkrumah and other Ghanaian leaders were temporarily imprisoned, the event became a catalyst for the independence movement.
In February 1951, the CPP gained political power by winning 34 of 38 elected seats, including one for Nkrumah who was imprisoned at the time. The British government revised the Gold Coast Constitution to give Ghanaians a majority in the legislature in 1951.
Prime Minister Harold Macmillan gave the famous "Wind of Change" speech in South Africa, in February 1960, where he spoke to the country's Parliament of "the wind of change blowing through this continent." Macmillan urgently wanted to avoid the same kind of colonial war that France was fighting in Algeria.
Colonial Powers and Their Territories
Britain's remaining colonies in Africa, except for Southern Rhodesia, were all granted independence by 1968. British withdrawal from the southern and eastern parts of Africa was not a peaceful process. Kenyan independence was preceded by the eight-year Mau Mau Uprising.
Britain has moved to return its last British-occupied possession in Africa by signing a formal agreement in 2025 transferring sovereignty over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius. Under the terms of the agreement, the strategic atoll of Diego Garcia and its 38-kilometre buffer zone are immediately returned to Mauritius.
Belgium controlled several territories and concessions during the colonial era, principally the Belgian Congo (modern DRC) from 1908 to 1960 and Ruanda-Urundi (modern Rwanda and Burundi) from 1922 to 1962. Roughly 98% of Belgium's overseas territory was just one colony, about 76 times larger than Belgium itself, known as the Belgian Congo.
The colony was founded in 1908 following the transfer of sovereignty from the Congo Free State, which was the personal property of Belgium's king, Leopold II. The violence used by Free State officials against indigenous Congolese and the ruthless system of economic extraction had led to intense diplomatic pressure on Belgium to take official control of the country.
Belgian rule in the Congo was based on the "colonial trinity" (trinité coloniale) of state, missionary and private company interests. During the 1940s and 1950s, the Congo experienced extensive urbanization and the administration aimed to make it into a "model colony".
Of Belgium's other colonies, the most significant was Ruanda-Urundi, a portion of German East Africa, which was given to Belgium as a League of Nations Mandate, when Germany lost all of its colonies at the end of World War I.
The French colonial empire began to fall during World War II when the Vichy France regime controlled the Empire. One after another, most of the colonies were occupied by foreign powers with Japan in Indochina, Britain in Syria, Lebanon, and Madagascar, the United States and Britain in Morocco and Algeria, and Germany and Italy in Tunisia.
Control was gradually reestablished by Charles de Gaulle, who used the colonial bases as a launching point to help expel the Vichy government from Metropolitan France. De Gaulle, together with most Frenchmen, was committed to preserving the Empire in its new form.
The French Union, included in the Constitution of 1946, nominally replaced the former colonial empire, but officials in Paris remained in full control. The colonies were given local assemblies with only limited local power and budgets.
De Gaulle assembled a major conference of Free France colonies in Brazzaville, in central Africa, in January-February 1944. The survival of France depended on support from these colonies, and De Gaulle made numerous concessions. These included the end of forced labour, the end of special legal restrictions that applied to natives but not to whites, the establishment of elected territorial assemblies, representation in Paris in a new "French Federation", and the eventual representation of Sub-Saharan Africans in the French Assembly.
After World War II ended, France was immediately confronted with the beginnings of the decolonisation movement. In Algeria demonstrations in May 1945 were repressed with an estimated 20,000-45,000 Algerians killed.
French involvement in Algeria stretched back a century. Ferhat Abbas and Messali Hadj's movements marked the period between the two wars, but both sides radicalised after the Second World War. In 1945, the Sétif massacre was carried out by the French army. The Algerian War started in 1954. Atrocities characterized both sides, and the number killed became highly controversial estimates that were made for propaganda purposes.
Algeria was a three-way conflict due to the large number of "pieds-noirs" (Europeans who had settled there in the 125 years of French rule). The political crisis in France caused the collapse of the Fourth Republic, as Charles de Gaulle returned to power in 1958 and finally pulled the French soldiers and settlers out of Algeria by 1962.
Lasting more than eight years, the estimated death toll typically falls between 300,000 and 400,000 people. By 1962, the National Liberation Front was able to negotiate a peace accord with de Gaulle, the Évian Accords in which Europeans would be able to return to their native countries, remain in Algeria as foreigners or take Algerian citizenship.
French conservatives were disillusioned with the colonial experience after the disasters in Indochina and Algeria. They wanted to cut all ties to the numerous colonies in French Sub-Saharan Africa. During the war, de Gaulle had successfully based his Free France movement and the African colonies. After a visit in 1958, he made a commitment to make sub-Saharan French Africa a major component of his foreign-policy.
The French Union was replaced in the new Constitution of 1958 by the French Community. Only Guinea refused by referendum to take part in the new colonial organisation. However, the French Community dissolved itself amid the Algerian War; almost all of the other African colonies were granted independence in 1960, following local referendums. Some colonies chose instead to remain part of France, under the status of overseas départements (territories).
Critics of neocolonialism claimed that the Françafrique had replaced formal direct rule. They argued that while de Gaulle was granting independence, on one hand, he was creating new ties with the help of Jacques Foccart, his counsellor for African matters.
Robert Aldrich argues that with Algerian independence in 1962, it appeared that the Empire practically had come to an end, as the remaining colonies were quite small and lacked active nationalist movements. However, there was trouble in French Somaliland (Djibouti), which became independent in 1977. There also were complications and delays in the New Hebrides Vanuatu, which was the last to gain independence in 1980.
Unlike other European nations during the 1950s and 1960s, the Portuguese Estado Novo regime did not withdraw from its African colonies. During the 1960s, various armed independence movements became active in Portuguese Africa.
The Portuguese Colonial War, also known as the Angolan, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambican War of Independence, was a 13-year-long conflict fought between Portugal's military and the emerging nationalist movements in Portugal's African colonies between 1961 and 1974.
CIA Maps: Documenting the Change
The CIA, a prolific publisher of maps from its inception in the 1940s, produced a series of maps titled Africa administrative divisions. This series captures the changing political status of a large number of African countries in visual format.
Prior to 1959, the CIA’s Africa administrative divisions maps included a simple year in their title; beginning in 1959 and reflecting the rapid changes occurring across the continent, a month was added to the title, and multiple maps were published per year.
One country, South-West Africa, is ruled as a “Mandate” by the Union of South Africa, which itself is labeled as an independent country, along with a handful of others. The excitement of 1960 began on the very first day of the year, when Cameroon gained its independence from France.
In the map’s lower left corner, the key has grown more complex. By July 1960, just five months later, the pace of change has quickened. Five more countries are now marked “independent,” most of them from France: the Federation of Mali, Togo, and the Malagasy Republic.
The center of the map is dominated by the Republic of the Congo, labeled “Belgian Congo” on the February map. The French presence in north, west, and central Africa that was so pronounced prior to 1960 has all but vanished, save for Mauritania (“Projected independence - 1960”) and Algeria.
The last Africa administrative divisions map published in 1960 shows that the tide of independence continued its sweep across the continent through the very last month of the year (and indeed through most of the 1960s). Mauritania and Nigeria have achieved independence, and Sierra Leone is projected to join them in 1961.
Looking at one more map in the Africa administrative divisions series, dated May 1961, we can see that the pace of change has slowed: only Sierra Leone has joined the ranks of independent nations since December 1960.
In May 1961, the map is dominated by independent countries, both new and old. France retains a toehold in the form of Algeria, Djibouti, and the Comoro Islands, as well as the island of Réunion, a French possession to this day.
Notable too are the names which have changed from the 1959 CIA map, and those which have changed since. By 1961, Soudan has become Mali, named after the medieval West African empire.
Table: Key Independence Dates in the 1950s and 1960
| Country | Independence Date |
|---|---|
| Libya | 1951 |
| Morocco | 1956 |
| Sudan | 1956 |
| Tunisia | 1956 |
| Ghana | 1957 |
| Guinea | 1958 |
| Cameroon | 1960 |
| Togo | 1960 |
| Madagascar | 1960 |
| DR Congo | 1960 |
| Somalia | 1960 |
| Benin | 1960 |
| Niger | 1960 |
| Burkina Faso | 1960 |
| Ivory Coast | 1960 |
| Chad | 1960 |
| Central African Republic | 1960 |
| Republic of the Congo | 1960 |
| Gabon | 1960 |
| Senegal | 1960 |
| Mali | 1960 |
| Nigeria | 1960 |
| Mauritania | 1960 |
| Sierra Leone | 1961 |
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