African states were successors in a double sense. First, they were built on a set of institutions – bureaucracies, militaries, customs facilities, post offices, and (for a time at least) legislatures – set up by colonial regimes, as well as on a principle of state sovereignty sanctified by a community of already existing states. In this sense, African states have proven durable: borders have remained largely unchanged (with the notable exceptions of the secession of Eritrea from Ethiopia and South Sudan from Sudan). Almost every piece of Africa is recognized from outside as a territorial entity, regardless of the effective power of the actual government within that space. Even so-called failed states – those unable to provide order and minimal services for their citizens – are still states, and derive resources from outside for that reason.

In the late 1930s and 1940s colonial rule choked on the narrowness of the pathways it had created. Trying to confine Africans to tribal cages, seeking to extract from them what export products and labor it could without treating them as “workers,” “farmers,” “townsmen,” or “citizens,” colonial regimes discovered that Africans would not stay in the limited roles assigned to them. Instead, the constrictions created exactly the sort of danger administrators feared. Urban unrest within a very rural continent challenged colonial governments; a small number of wage workers threatened colonial economies; a tiny educated elite undercut the ideological pretenses of colonialism; supposed “pagans” worshiping local gods and ancestors produced Christian and Muslim religious movements of wide scope and uncertain political significance; and commercial farmers in a continent of “subsistence” producers made demands for a political voice for themselves and opportunities for their children that colonial systems could not meet.

On April 27, 1994, black South Africans, for the first times in their lives, voted in an election to decide who would govern their country. The lines at polling stations snaked around many blocks. It had been more than thirty years since African political movements had been banned, and the leader of the strongest of them, Nelson Mandela, had spent twenty-seven of those years in prison. Most activists and observers inside and outside South Africa had thought that the apartheid regime, with its explicit policy of promoting white supremacy, had become so deeply entrenched, and its supporters so attached to their privileges, that only a violent revolution would dislodge it. In a world that, some thirty to forty years earlier, had begun to tear down colonial empires and denounce governments that practiced racial segregation, South Africa had become a pariah, subject to boycotts of investment, sports events, travel, and trade. Now it was being redeemed, taking its place among nations that respected civil rights and democratic processes. This was indeed a revolution – whose final act was peaceful.

French and British rule in Africa collapsed not because of an all-out assault from a clearly defined colonized people, but because African political and social movements opened wider internal cracks in the imperial system. Those movements were demanding not just a political voice, but decent conditions of life, whether within a reformed French or British structure or through the creation of new, independent states. Africans turned the measures intended to reconcile them to colonial rule into escalating demands that made the colonial system untenable. Portuguese and Belgian rulers, and the whites who dominated South Africa, were in the mid-1950s and early 1960s holding onto political power and appropriating economic gains for a tiny fraction of the population. However, they were slowly moving from being ordinary members of an international club where colonialism was the norm to being outliers in a new world where legitimacy was measured in terms of progress toward self-government and economic development (). In the long run, while neither Portugal, Belgium, nor South Africa could contain the pressures coming from neighboring territories or from the transformation of international norms, it was the colonialism that identified itself with political reform and economic development that first came apart.

Let us pause for a moment to think about ways to grasp the timing of change during the decades after World War II. A narrative of “triumph and failure,” of “hope and disillusionment,” captures something of the time. It calls attention to the struggle for independence, the joy of seeing colonial rule end, and the subsequent despair at the inability of independent African states to sustain peace, democracy, and economic and social progress. The crisis that hit the Congo within weeks of independence in 1960, the coup that overthrew the pioneer of nationalism, Kwame Nkrumah, in 1966, and the Biafran war of 1967–70 mark political turning points. By the late 1960s Africa’s leading intellectuals were calling attention to moral corruption and political passivity in the wake of earlier hopes. Some scholars began to argue that independence was an illusion: the new states of Africa were “neo-colonial,” politically sovereign, but economically dependent and lacking in cultural self-confidence.

In 2000 a cover story in The Economist was entitled “Hopeless Africa.” In 2011 a cover story in the same journal read “Africa Rising.” In 2016 a New York Times headline read, “‘Africa Rising’? ‘Africa reeling’ may be a more fitting slogan these days.” In each of these instances the journalist made two of the most elementary errors in the social sciences: turning a partially valid point into a false generalization and looking at the future as a linear projection of the recent past. Looking back at Africa between 1940 and the present, one sees major differences across space and across time. In a continent that contains different ecological zones, different connections to the outside world, nearly fifty distinct nation-states in its sub-Saharan regions alone, varied languages and belief systems, and different historical trajectories, it is hardly surprising that Africa should not share a single fate. Yet in the eyes of much of the outside world – and in many African eyes too – Africa is a singular entity, defined by different criteria: by race, by a colonial past, by poverty. Such visions have gone along with the idea that Africa should follow, or should have followed, a singular path through time, whether it is called development, modernization, or liberation.

Looking backward from the 1960s, it is easy to see why the story of post-war politics is often told as if everything led to a single, inevitable outcome: national independence. It is more difficult to see what somebody in 1945 or 1947 – say, a young, politically minded African returning from higher education abroad – aspired to and expected to attain. Or a family who had just settled in a mining town after years of periodic separations, missed the familiar sociability of village life but perhaps not the constraints of their elders, and hoped that their children could obtain an education. Or a farmer, selling his cocoa in the booming world market, aware that colonial marketing boards were holding onto much of what his crops earned, and wondering if his children would continue to help with the harvest.