Year of Africa
In 1960, seventeen African territories became independent states, more than in any other single year. The wave was so striking that contemporaries called it the "Year of Africa." It marked the moment when European colonial rule on the continent, which had seemed secure only two decades earlier, began to collapse in earnest, and it dramatically changed the membership and politics of the United Nations.
The background lay in the Second World War and its aftermath. Britain and France, weakened and indebted, faced growing nationalist movements led by educated urban elites, trade unionists, and veterans who had served in imperial armies. Ghana's independence in 1957, under Kwame Nkrumah, showed that a sub-Saharan colony could win self-rule through political pressure, and Guinea's 1958 rejection of continued French ties under Ahmed Sékou Touré raised the stakes further. In February 1960, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan spoke in South Africa of a "wind of change" blowing through the continent, signaling that Britain would not resist the tide indefinitely.
Most of the new states were former French territories, including Cameroon, Togo, Senegal, Mali, Madagascar, Côte d'Ivoire, Niger, Chad, Gabon, and others in West and Central Africa. Their independence followed a revised French constitutional framework that allowed member territories to leave while often keeping close economic and military ties. Nigeria, the most populous, became independent from Britain in October, and Somalia was formed from British and Italian territories. The Belgian Congo, which became independent in June, was a different story. Belgium had made little preparation for self-government, and within days the country faced an army mutiny, the secession of Katanga, and foreign intervention.
The Congo Crisis became one of the first major Cold War tests in Africa. The United Nations sent a large peacekeeping force, and Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba was removed from office and later killed in early 1961, with Belgian and other foreign involvement. The episode showed that formal independence did not guarantee real sovereignty.
The consequences were wide-ranging. Newly independent states joined the UN, shifting its balance and strengthening the voice of the developing world. Many struggled with fragile institutions, borders drawn by colonial powers, ethnic tensions, and economic dependence on a few exports. Several soon fell under one-party rule or military government. Yet the year also encouraged pan-African cooperation, leading to the Organization of African Unity in 1963. Decolonization continued for decades, with long, violent struggles in Algeria, Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and elsewhere, and apartheid persisted in South Africa until the 1990s. Even so, 1960 remains the symbolic turning point when African independence became the rule rather than the exception.