In comparing the patterns and results of decolonization of India and Africa, there are many similarities and differences. The decolonization movement gained strength after WWII in both India and Africa because of the war’s weakening of the colonizing European countries’ economies, as well as rising nationalism in India and Africa. Also, both Africa and India suffered splits between populations within the same colony after decolonization. This was because of ethnic and religious differences among populations of the colonies. However, Africa and India were different in their political structures after decolonization. This was because of the desire of these African nations to protect and gain valuable resources, as well as the desire of the Hindus of India to gain political power and of the rulers of the nations of Africa to remain in power.
After World War II, the colonizing nations of Europe, including Britain and France, became weaker due to the war’s negative impact on their economies and military. This meant they had less funding to run bureaucracies in their colonies, and were reluctant to make military commitment to suppress revolts in their colonies. Because of WWII’s drain on their economies, the European nations wanted to take even larger advantage of their colonies, taking more of the colonies’ valuable resources, and paying even less for them. This furthered nationalistic beliefs because it greatly upset local elites, who owned most of these resources and were not receiving adequate pay for them. Europe’s struggling economy meant it couldn’t pay African workers decent wages to work for them, so instead Europeans forced Africans into labor for them. When the government of French Equatorial Africa decided to build a railroad from Brazzaville to the Atlantic Coast, it drafted 127,000 men to carve a roadbed across mountains and through rainforests. Lacking food, clothing, and medical care, 20,000 of them died. Events such as this contributed to rising nationalism in Africa. Also, during WWII, many people from Africa and India went to Europe to help in the war effort. Between the years of 1939 and 1945, over a million Africans served in World War II. Upon arriving and seeing the European nations in their weakened state, they no longer saw Europeans as dominant economically, militarily, or culturally. The weakness of the European countries and growing nationalism in India and Africa, due to their new views of Europe, combined to help India reach decolonization in 1947 and the nations of Africa to reach decolonization in and after the 1950s. This included Ghana’s independence in 1957, Nigeria’s in 1960, and Algeria’s in 1962.
When the Europeans split up Africa into different colonies, they did so to further their own agenda, and ignored the fact that they were separating and mixing peoples of different ethnicities and religions. After independence, African countries were responsible for governing themselves, and many tribes didn’t want to be part of nations composed of peoples of different ethnicities and religions. One example of this was the religious conflict between Muslims and Christians in Nigeria. Also, tribes within these nations didn’t want to have a centralized democratic African government because some regions had valuable natural resources, while others did not. For this reason, tribes in regions with valuable natural resources didn’t want to share these resources with the rest of their nation through the central government, and would attempt to split off from the nation instead. As a result, many nations of Africa became dictatorial military governments, so that the government would have enough power to force tribes to stay within the nation, and to compel people to give up their wealth. Another reason for some of the dictatorial governments in Africa was due to the fact that European settlers of these nations wanted to remain in power. Unlike in India, where Hindus used democracy to gain political power because they were a majority, these settlers, being an extreme minority, could not rely on democracy to remain in power. Instead, these settlers instituted dictatorships to remain in power. One example of this is in Zimbabwe, which was run by whites. Similarly, after South Africa won independence from Britain in 1931, the ruling British and Dutch colonists established a system of apartheid as an all-encompassing way of dividing blacks, who were 80% of the population, from the white minority. The worst areas of the country, compromising less than 15% of the nation’s land, were set aside for blacks. The whites were given the cities, the resource-rich mines, and the best farmland. Blacks who stayed in the cities were segregated into black slums.
By the time India received independence, conflict between Hindus and Muslims had become so intense that Muslims broke off and formed their own nation, Pakistan. This was followed by genocide of Muslims in India, as well as genocide of Hindus in Pakistan. Within a few months, some twelve million people had abandoned their homes and a half-million lay dead. Before the break, Muslims had a lot of political power, as they were the elites in India. However, when receiving independence, India declared its government would be a democracy, unlike in Africa, where many nations were governed by dictatorships. This was decided because the majority of India was Hindu, and Hindus knew they would gain control of India’s government if they used a democracy. However, as a minority, constituting only a quarter of the people of India, the Muslims would lose most of their political power in a democratic government, and so they decided to split off and form their own nation. This was similar to the attempts of many tribes of Africa to split off from their nations, because of ethnic and religious differences as well as their unwillingness to share valuable resources.
Sources:
Stearns, Peter. Adas, Michael. Schwartz, Stewart. Gilbert, Marc. World Civilizations: The Global Experience. (2003)
