Africa’s twentieth century was shaped by colonial conquest, resistance, and the long struggle for independence. From the League of Nations Mandate System 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 Apartheid — 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 South? 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 War (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.
Neoliberalism 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 adjustment.
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Related Collections
Further Reading
These articles from the Explaining History archive go deeper on the history behind these episodes:
- Mandela: The Making of a Global Symbol — How Nelson Mandela became the defining moral figure of the late twentieth century.
- Apartheid and the Anti-Apartheid Movement — The global campaign that made the defeat of apartheid a moral imperative.
- The Bandung Moment — The 1955 conference that crystallised the ideology of African and Asian independence.
- The Global Anti-Apartheid Movement — A longform article on the international campaign against South African apartheid: sanctions, solidarity, and the forces that finally brought the system down.
- Ghana: The Rise and Fall of a Pan-African Dream — A longform article on Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana, the promise of African independence, and the coup that shattered the pan-African vision.
