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38637 results in Cambridge Textbooks

Page 1001 of 1932

  • Chapter 1 - Introduction

  • Frederick Cooper, New York University
  • Book:
    Africa since 1940
    Published online:
    27 August 2020
    Print publication:
    04 July 2019, pp 1-26

  • Summary

    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.

  • Chapter 4 - Ending Empire and Imagining the Future

  • Frederick Cooper, New York University
  • Book:
    Africa since 1940
    Published online:
    27 August 2020
    Print publication:
    04 July 2019, pp 87-115

  • Summary

    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.

Page 1001 of 1932