The Assertion of a Post-colonial Age

Abstract

As a broad generalization, it can be said that by 1964 the great age of European decolonization had already passed its peak. The outstanding exceptions to this statement lay in southern Africa, where the entrenchment of white-settler society imposed a different time-scale on events. In the final section of this volume, therefore, the tangled story of Southern Rhodesia, and the final collapse of Portuguese rule in Africa after its long isolation from the mainstream of continental development, will be outlined. An exhaustive catalogue of transfers of power during the 1960s, however, with the seemingly endless succession of flag ceremonies set in dusty squares and presided over by some eminent (usually royal) metropolitan personage, will not be attempted. These were simply the motions of those decisions taken in the late 1950s and early 1960s whose origins and nature have already been explored. Even where the British still showed a tendency to cling to traditional relationships after 1960, as they did in parts of the Arabian peninsula, the reason for this tenacity had less to do with pressures emanating from the past and more to do with a new set of contemporary circumstances; we shall see later that even here — in Aden and the Gulf — the British finally decided to cut their losses and vacate.¹ It is nicely ironic that in the latter of these instances the British departure ran against the wishes of the indigenous ruling elite; by the early 1970s the golden years of Anglophobia in the Middle East had long passed.