Africa since 1940 The Past of the Present

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.