Long live independence is the new issue of Internazionale storia and tells the end of the great colonial empires through comments, reports, analyzes and chronicles from the international press of the time. It can be bought at newsstands, in bookstores, on Amazon, Ibs, Feltrinelli, Hoepli and on the Internazionale website.
“Decolonize” is a word that occurs often these days. It is invoked in the most varied contexts, from universities to museums to toponymy, on the occasion of protests and initiatives that promote the values of anti-racism, social justice and gender equality. To “decolonize” the leaders of European countries present belated apologies, commission historical studies or decide to return the works of art stolen from the former colonies.
In all this, it is not surprising that it may be unclear what “decolonization” was originally, a term used in history books to describe one of the most important processes of the twentieth century, a process so broad and profound that it changed dramatically. the world order is irreversible.
In the forty years following the end of World War II, the great colonial empires founded by European powers – the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal – crumbled, in some cases exploded, and new states were born in their place. independent in Asia, Africa and Central America. In 1945 the United Nations was made up of 51 countries, in 1960 there were 99 and today they are 193 (and the UN decolonization committee still has seventeen dossiers to close). In those decades some newly independent countries and those where the liberation movements were engaged in hard struggles to drive out the colonialists developed the awareness of belonging to a new camp, what the French demographer Alfred Sauvy called the “third world“.
Imagination in power
The articles collected in this volume – which have been selected to represent a plurality of voices, in a period between the end of the Second World War and 1990 (the year in which Nelson Mandela was released from prison in South Africa) – tell a series of very different processes, from the negotiated independence of India and Pakistan to the armed struggle against French troops in Algeria to the methodical preparation for self-government in Guinea-Bissau. At the same time, they show that independence and liberation were indeed the result of great diplomatic and military exploits of the colonized peoples, but also of an immense effort of imagination, on a political and cultural level.
If on the one hand the inhabitant of the colonized world, as the Tunisian writer Albert Memmi complained, was not “a subject of history” but suffered the weight “often more cruelly than the others”, on the other in the colonies great charismatic thinkers and politicians (Gandhi, Kwame Nkrumah, Frantz Fanon, Patrice Lumumba, Amílcar Cabral) reflected on the state and society models to be adopted to create an alternative to the imperialist one, based on exploitation and racial hierarchies. Models that have not always given the desired results, but which are the testimony of a great intellectual vitality, which today it is right to rediscover.