Africa’s twentieth century was shaped by colonial conquest, resistance, and the long struggle for independence. From the League of NationsLeague of Nations Full Description:The first worldwide intergovernmental organisation whose principal mission was to maintain world peace. Its spectacular failure to prevent the aggression of the Axis powers provided the negative blueprint for the United Nations, influencing the decision to prioritize enforcement power over pure idealism. The League of Nations was the precursor to the UN, established after the First World War. Founded on the principle of collective security, it relied on moral persuasion and unanimous voting. It ultimately collapsed because it lacked an armed force and, crucially, the United States never joined, rendering it toothless in the face of expansionist empires. Critical Perspective:The shadow of the League looms over the UN. The founders of the UN viewed the League as “too democratic” and ineffective because it treated all nations as relatively equal. Consequently, the UN was designed specifically to correct this “error” by empowering the Great Powers (via the Security Council) to police the world, effectively sacrificing sovereign equality for the sake of stability.
Read more Mandate SystemMandate System Full Description:A mechanism established by the League of Nations after World War I to administer former Ottoman and German territories. “Class A” Mandates—Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, and Transjordan—were considered nearly ready for independence but placed under temporary control of France or Britain until they could “stand alone.” In reality, Mandates were colonies by another name. Critical Perspective:The Mandate System was hypocrisy institutionalized. The same powers that carved up the Middle East for their own advantage claimed they were acting as benevolent trustees. No timetable for independence was set; “readiness” was defined by the mandatory power. Iraq was granted nominal independence in 1932, but with a British client king and treaty that preserved British military bases and oil control. The Mandate was not the road to freedom but the road to neocolonialism.
Read more that carved up former German and Ottoman territories, through the Bandung Conference and the liberation movements of the 1950s and 60s, to the fall of white minority rule in Rhodesia and the end of South African ApartheidApartheid Full Description: An Afrikaans word meaning “apartness.” It refers to the system of institutionalized racial segregation and discrimination that governed South Africa. It was a totalizing legal framework that dictated where people could live, work, and travel based on their racial classification. Apartheid was not merely social prejudice; it was a sophisticated economic and legal machine designed to maintain white minority rule. It involved the complete spatial separation of the races, the banning of mixed marriages, and the denial of voting rights to the black majority. Critical Perspective:Critically, Apartheid was a system of racial capitalism. Its primary function was to secure a steady supply of cheap, compliant labor for the white-owned mines and farms. By keeping the black population uneducated, disenfranchised, and restricted to specific areas, the state ensured that the immense wealth generated by the country’s resources flowed exclusively to the white minority and international investors. — these ten episodes of Explaining History trace the key currents of modern African history.

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Colonial Africa and Resistance (1919–1945)

After the First World War, the victorious powers used the Mandate System to extend their control over former German colonies in Africa. But resistance to imperial rule was already building — in petitions, protests, and Pan-African intellectual movements that would eventually transform the continent.

Petitions, Protests and the Mandate System 1919–21

It is easy to read history through the eyes of the coloniser rather than the colonised. This episode looks at the petitions and protests from African and Middle Eastern peoples resisting the Mandate System — and asks what it reveals that the victorious powers were deaf to these voices from the start.

Britain, France and the Mandate System

During the First World War, much of the fighting occurred in colonial Africa. In 1918 the victorious powers determined that the continent could not govern itself. This episode explores how Britain and the USA colluded on a neo-colonial mandate system that preserved imperial control under a liberal veneer — and how African peoples experienced it.

Colonial Wealth Transfers: A New Analysis

What would have happened to Europe over the past two and a half centuries if it had not plundered the Global SouthGlobal South Full Description:The Global South is a term that has largely replaced “Third World” to describe the nations of Africa, Latin America, and developing Asia. It is less a geographical designator (as it includes countries in the northern hemisphere) and more a political grouping of nations that share a history of colonialism, economic marginalization, and a peripheral position in the world financial system. Bandung is often cited as the birth of the Global South as a self-aware political consciousness. Critical Perspective:While the term implies solidarity, critics argue it acts as a “flattening” concept. It lumps together economic superpowers like China and India with some of the world’s poorest nations, obscuring the vast power imbalances and divergent interests within this bloc. It risks creating a binary worldview that ignores the internal class exploitations within developing nations by focusing solely on their external exploitation by the North.
Read more? This episode examines the staggering scale of colonial wealth extraction from Africa, Asia and Latin America — and what the new scholarship on wealth transfers tells us about the foundations of European prosperity.

Decolonisation and the Cold WarCold War The geopolitical and ideological confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union that dominated global politics from 1947 to 1991. It was fought not through direct military conflict between the superpowers but through proxy wars, arms races, espionage, and ideological competition across the developing world. The Cold War began before the Second World War had fully ended: American and Soviet disagreements over the post-war order in Europe were visible at Yalta in February 1945 and had hardened into open confrontation by 1947, when the Truman Doctrine committed the United States to resisting Soviet expansion and the Marshall Plan began binding Western Europe to American economic leadership. The term itself was popularised by journalist Walter Lippmann in 1947, capturing the essential quality of a conflict that neither side could allow to become hot — because both possessed nuclear weapons capable of annihilating the other’s cities. The resulting stalemate was managed through deterrence, alliance systems (NATO in the West, the Warsaw Pact in the East), and the deliberate avoidance of direct superpower confrontation even while both sides fought intense proxy wars in Korea, Vietnam, Angola, Afghanistan, and dozens of other theatres. The Cold War was simultaneously a strategic competition and an ideological one: each side claimed to represent the future of humanity, and each used development aid, propaganda, cultural diplomacy, and covert action to advance its model in the non-aligned world. It ended not with a military defeat but with the internal collapse of the Soviet system between 1989 and 1991. The Cold War’s most important characteristic was its globality: what began as a European dispute about occupation zones became a worldwide competition that shaped the politics of every continent. For the United States, it justified interventions that overthrew democratic governments (Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954, Chile 1973) on the grounds that any leftist government was a Soviet beachhead; for the Soviet Union, it justified the crushing of reform movements within its own bloc (Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968) on the grounds that any deviation threatened the socialist camp. The Cold War’s legacy is therefore not only the fall of the Berlin Wall but the long list of democracies destroyed, developmental alternatives foreclosed, and civil wars fuelled in the name of containing the other side. The Third World paid the price for a confrontation between two powers that never actually fought each other. (1945–1970)

After 1945, the tide of history turned against European empire. African independence movements gained momentum across the continent, while the Cold War gave the superpowers an interest in Africa’s politics that complicated and often undermined genuine liberation. Britain’s attempt to hold its African colonies through white settler federation ended in failure.

The Bandung Conference

In 1955, the leaders of recently decolonised nations of Africa and Asia met in Bandung, Indonesia to forge new economic and diplomatic ties outside the Cold War blocs. The conference was the founding moment of the Non-Aligned Movement and one of the most important international gatherings of the twentieth century.

The Creation of the Central African Federation

In 1953, Britain created the Central African Federation — binding together Southern Rhodesia, Northern Rhodesia, and Nyasaland. Sold as an experiment in multiracial partnership, in reality it served white settler interests while tightening imperial control. This episode explores the political calculus behind the Federation and why African nationalists opposed it from the start.

Britain and the Central African Federation 1951–59

During the 1950s, Britain’s attempt to hold its African colonies brought it into conflict with white settlers who wanted domination over the Black population on an explicitly racist model. This episode explores how British policy navigated between settler ambitions, African nationalist demands, and Cold War pressures — and why it ultimately failed.

NeoliberalismMonetarism Monetarism is the economic school of thought associated with Milton Friedman, which rose to dominance as a counter to Keynesian economics. It posits that inflation is always a monetary phenomenon and that the government’s role should be limited to managing the currency rather than stimulating demand. Key Mechanisms: Inflation Targeting: Using interest rates to keep inflation low, even if high interest rates cause recession or unemployment. Fiscal Restraint: Opposing government deficit spending to boost the economy during downturns. Critical Perspective:Critics argue that monetarism breaks the post-war social contract. By prioritizing “sound money” and low inflation above all else, monetarist policies often induce deliberately high unemployment to discipline the labor force and suppress wages. It represents a technical solution to political problems, removing economic policy from democratic accountability. vs National Liberation Movements 1945–79

The decades after 1945 saw African and Asian liberation movements win political independence — only to find economic independence far harder to achieve. This episode examines the intersection of neoliberal economic ideology and national liberation: how the IMF, World Bank, and Western financial institutions constrained the newly independent states of Africa.

White Minority Rule and Liberation (1960s–1994)

The last phase of Africa’s decolonisation was the dismantling of white minority rule — from Ian Smith’s Rhodesia through South African Apartheid. These episodes trace the fall of Rhodesia, the anti-Apartheid struggle, and the long afterlives of colonial economic structures.

Eye Witness: The End of White Rule in Rhodesia

Journalist James McManus was in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe during the tumultuous 1970s as Ian Smith’s white minority government fell. He engaged with the key figures of the liberation struggle — Mugabe, Nkomo, Sithole — and this episode draws on his eyewitness account to explore one of the final acts of Africa’s colonial era.

South Africa’s Democracy: 30 Years On

Peter Hain and his family were forced to flee South Africa in the 1960s at the height of Apartheid. A veteran anti-Apartheid activist, Hain looks back on thirty years of democratic South Africa — what the ANC achieved, where the Mandela settlement fell short, and what the country’s ongoing inequalities reveal about the limits of political liberation without economic transformation.

Live Aid, Famine, Debt and Activism: A Four Decade Struggle for Justice

Live Aid in 1985 was the moment the West became aware of African famine on a mass scale — but the story journalist Paul Vallely tells in his book is more complex and more political than the concert suggested. This episode explores forty years of Western engagement with African poverty, from Band Aid through debt cancellation campaigns to the persistent failures of aid and structural adjustmentStructural Adjustment Full Description Economic reform programmes required by the IMF and World Bank as conditions for loans to developing countries, typically including currency devaluation, cuts to public spending (including health and education), trade liberalisation, and privatisation. Structural adjustment programmes were applied across Africa, Latin America, and Asia from the 1980s onwards. Critics argued they prioritised debt repayment to Western creditors over the living standards of the populations being “adjusted.” Critical Perspective Structural adjustment is arguably the most consequential — and least debated — form of Western intervention in the Global South. The conditionalities attached to IMF loans removed economic decision-making from democratic national governments and transferred it to unelected international institutions accountable primarily to Western creditor nations. The dismantling of African healthcare systems under structural adjustment in the 1980s and 1990s left those states catastrophically ill-equipped for the HIV/AIDS crisis that followed..

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