On the morning of 1 November 1954, an Algerian baker gathered his family together to share some important news. A little-known revolutionary movement calling itself the Front de Libération Nationale, or FLN, had mounted over fifty coordinated attacks against public buildings, police stations, and communications centres throughout the French colony. Writing almost half a century later, the baker’s daughter, Louisette Ighilahriz, recalled her father’s words. ‘It’s the end of humiliation,’ he said.1 Louisette soon proved her devotion to the FLN cause. Using the pseudonym ‘Lila’ she couriered weapons and scraps of intelligence to fellow militants, her secret cargo sometimes hidden inside bread baked by her father. But it was in the summer of 1957, during the final weeks of the notorious Battle of Algiers, that her life changed for ever. She and a group of fellow combatants were ambushed by French parachutists near Chebli, a town just south of the capital. She was shot and wounded, the prelude to years of imprisonment. A story of anti-colonial commitment, of bravery, of deprivation, Louisette Ighilahriz’s Algerian war would come to the French public’s attention for a different reason entirely. Writing in Le Monde on 20 July 2000, she revealed what her parachutist captors had done to her. A harrowing autobiographical account published ten months later went further still.
As summer turned to autumn 1957 Ighilahriz lay bandaged and in plaster in the Algiers Mustapha hospital. There, she was injected with the ‘truth drug’ Pentothal. She said nothing. Still bed-ridden, she was then transferred to one of the city’s army interrogation centres. Frustrated by her defiance, a parachutist captain took charge of proceedings. He cut her bandages with a bayonet. He prodded at her wounds. Then he raped her ‘with all sorts of objects’.2 The torture continued over days, weeks, months. And, as the audible screams of her fellow detainees proved, it had become the army’s way of doing things.3 More than four decades later Ighilahriz explained that she was writing about her experiences to remind French society that, for Algerians like her, the road from empire was travelled via a war of immeasurable cruelty.4 Her book sold well. But another, published almost simultaneously, sold better. Written by Paul Aussaresses, a senior army intelligence officer and a colleague of Ighilahriz’s tormentor, it was a shockingly frank and apparently remorseless account of how torture, death squads, and summary killings were integral to the work of the security forces in Algeria.5 The logic of Aussaresses’s account was straightforward: if France wanted to keep its empire, activities like this were necessary.6
These histories of people disfigured by violence and violation, of minds warped by colonial conflict, are bound up with the ways in which a large colonial empire came to an end. Theirs are stories of fight and flight. Of fights between opposing ideas of authority and legitimacy, one imperial, the other rooted in local demands for greater freedom. Of eventual flight as colonial authorities either negotiated their way out or packed up and left in de facto surrender to their local opponents. The examples above relate to Algeria, a French-ruled territory. But equally troubling accounts have emerged from Britain’s colonial record.7 In some places—not just Algeria but, as we shall see, India, Palestine, Kenya, and Vietnam, among others—the societal disruption involved was immense. In others, violence between colonial authorities and presumptive national movements was less pronounced. Sometimes it was virtually absent. This book examines why. In narrative terms, it is a story of how the British and French empires ended. In analytical terms, it is a comparative account of why they ended in particular ways. Above all, it is an exploration of a kind of cognitive dissonance, a collective disconnect between attitudes and worldviews so different that, for some, empire was worth defending at all costs while, for others, it was either manifestly indefensible or increasingly irrelevant. Finally, the book examines an accelerating rate of historical change, one that would see these once mighty empires brought down within two or three generations—in historical terms, the blink of an epochal eye.
By the end of the 1950s, only a few years after Louisette Ighilahriz began her struggle, the French and British empires were approaching dissolution. 1960. The year that marked John F. Kennedy’s election, a widening Sino-Soviet split, and the first commercially available contraceptive pill, was also the ‘year of Africa’. It was so called because seventeen African countries achieved independence from their European rulers. Some, including the vast tropical domains of the former Belgian Congo, descended into revolutionary turmoil. But most, including fourteen former French colonies below the Sahara, took their place on the world stage relatively peacefully.8 Africa’s newly independent states played an integral part in securing a landmark commitment from the United Nations later that same year. The UN General Assembly’s Resolution on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, affirmed that self-determination—understood, in this case, as the freely declared will of the majority within a colonial territory—conferred the right to sovereign statehood.9
Passed on 14 December 1960, this Resolution 1514 rejected the proposition that inadequate political or economic preparations by a colonial power could justify any delays in conceding national independence. Having lost the arguments that the UN had no authority to interfere in ‘internal’ colonial affairs and that the colonial nationalist groups vying for power were either unrepresentative, dangerous, or both, the final weapon left to Britain and France as imperial powers—namely, that their remaining African possessions could not yet stand on their own feet—was kicked away.10 Writing four years later in October 1964, Vivien Beamon, a member of America’s National Council of Negro Women, captured the mood among her fellow activists: ‘Independence in Africa … helped stimulate our civil rights movement, which in turn has helped stimulate civil rights movements in Southern Rhodesia, Mozambique, and South Africa. Everything ties together.’11 The days of white colonial domination were numbered. Or so it seemed.
One would be forgiven for thinking that the end of empire, the onward march of decolonization, the acclamation of civil rights, and the emergence of a fiercely independent ‘Third World’, were, by then, generally recognized phenomena. Yet, slant the historical lens differently and the picture is transformed. What the sociologist Julian Go has called the ‘blurry continuum’ between formal imperial rule and informal influence or control would remain a marker of relationships between numerous former colonies and their erstwhile European rulers.12 In other places colonialism refused to die. Several of Africa’s largest and most populous countries—Algeria, South Africa, Southern Rhodesia, Angola, and Mozambique—were still caught in the vice-like grip of racially discriminatory regimes. Some were close to rebellion, others already wracked by political violence.13 In Washington, US State Department officials noted ominously that, across Africa, black majority populations confronted privileged white settler communities ‘across a sea of developing hate’.14
The apparent disintegration of European empire into racially coloured violence was far from unique. In Southeast Asia, two conflicts whose recent ancestry was predominantly colonial were about to explode. The first, between Kennedy’s America and Communist North Vietnam, was demographically and environmentally devastating for the victorious Vietnamese, internationally and culturally debilitating for the United States. The second, between formerly British-governed Malaysia and once Dutch-ruled Indonesia, became the prelude to the mass killing and ruthless authoritarianism of President Suharto’s Indonesian military regime. France and Britain were, in different ways, instrumental to each of these conflicts. Yet the French presence in Vietnam formally ended in 1954 and Britain finally handed over power in Malaysia six years after that. France had fought and lost in Vietnam. Britain, ostensibly at least, had fought and won in Malaya. What did these contrasting trajectories signify?
Certainly by 1960 Britain and France, Europe’s predominant imperial powers over the preceding two centuries, were in general, if not quite total, colonial retreat. The rulers of both countries still treated certain lines in the sand or, more often, their garrison outposts in warmer seas, as sacrosanct. The French dismissed them as ‘the confetti of empire’, but some of these places—Hong Kong, Aden, Cyprus, Djibouti, New Caledonia—were anything but ephemeral to the global systems of imperial power that shaped them.15 For all that, Europe’s former colonial giants were picking fewer imperial fights than in previous decades. And their preference for flight, for negotiated pull-outs, became clearer as the 1960s wore on. Why had these global empires shrunk so quickly—over the course of a generation spanning the twenty years since the end of the Second World War? Or, to reverse the lens again, why did it take fully two decades (indeed, much longer) before the rulers of empire acknowledged that the game was up, that colonies and colonialism were becoming indefensible strategically, politically, ethically? Probing these questions a little further, perhaps the hardest problem to solve is why wars and violence erupted in some colonies in the throes of decolonization but not in others. What, in other words, configured the paths towards fight or flight? Why were some blocked and others cleared? The following chapters offer some answers.
Map 1. The British Empire.
