Khapoya notes the significant resistance of powers faced to their domination in Africa. Technical superiority enabled conquest and control. Pro-independence Africans recognised the value of European education in dealing with Europeans in Africa. Some Africans established their own churches. Africans also noticed the unequal evidence of gratitude they received for their efforts to support Imperialist countries during the world wars.[21] While European-imposed borders did not correspond to traditional territories, such new territories provided entities to focus efforts by movements for increased political voice up to independence.[22] Among local groups so concerned were professionals such as lawyers and doctors, the petite bourgeoisie (clerks, teachers, small merchants), urban workers, cash crop farmers, peasant farmers, etc. Trade unions and other initially non-political associations evolved into political movements.
While the British sought to follow a process of gradual transfer of power and thus independence, the French policy of assimilation faced some resentment, especially in North Africa.[23] The granting of independence in March 1956 to Morocco and Tunisia allowed a concentration on Algeria where there was a long (1954–62) and bloody armed struggle to achieve independence.[24] When President Charles de Gaulle held a referendum in 1958 on the issue, only Guinea voted for outright independence. Nevertheless, in 1959 France amended the constitution to allow other colonies this option.[25]
Farmers in British East Africa were upset by attempts to take their land and to impose agricultural methods against their wishes and experience. In Tanganyika, Julius Nyerere exerted influence not only among Africans, united by the common Swahili language, but also on some white leaders whose disproportionate voice under a racially weighted constitution was significant. He became the leader of an independent Tanganyika in 1961. In Kenya, whites had evicted African tenant farmers in the 1930s; since the 1940s there has been conflict, which intensified in 1952. By 1955, Britain had suppressed the revolt, and by 1960 Britain accepted the principle of African majority rule. Kenya became independent three years later.[26]
The main period of decolonisation in Africa began after World War II. Growing independence movements, indigenous political parties and trade unions coupled with pressure from within the imperialist powers and from the United States and the Soviet Union ensured the decolonisation of the majority of the continent by 1980. Some areas (in particular South Africa and Namibia) retain a large population of European descent. Only the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla are still governed by a European country. While the islands of Réunion and Mayotte, Saint Helena, Ascension, and Tristan Da Cunha, the Canary Islands and Madeira all remain under either French, British, Spanish, or Portuguese control, the latter two of which were never part of any African polity and have overwhelmingly European populations.
