The African Independence Movements took place in the 20th century, when a wave of struggles for independence in European-ruled African territories were witnessed.
Notable independence movements took place:
For a list of African nations achieving independence, see Decolonisation of Africa.
Portugal built a five-century-long Dakar, Senegal. Claimed for Portugal by Diogo Gomes approximately 1458, this archipelago of eight major islands was devoted to sugar cultivation using slaves taken from the African mainland. The Portuguese one time had extensive claims on the West African coast—since they were the first Europeans to study it systematically—but by 1800 they were left with only a few ports at the mouth of the Rio Geba in what is now requested as the Guinea-Bissau. To the east, the Portuguese controlled the islands of São Tomé & Príncipe, located south of the mouth of the Niger River. Like the Cape Verde Islands, they were converted to sugar production in the early 16th century using slaves acquired on the mainland in the vicinity of the Congo River. By the end of the 19th century, Portuguese landowners had successfully delivered cocoa production using forced African labour. Further south, the Portuguese claimed both sides of the mouth of the Congo River, as well as the Atlantic waft as far south as the Rio Cunene. In practical terms, Portugal controlled port cities like those of Cabinda north of the Congo River mouth, Ambriz south of the Congo's mouth, Luanda and Benguela on the Angolan glide plus some river towns in the Angolan interior.
The last area claimed by Portugal in Africa was along the southeast coast on either side of the mouth of the Zambezi River. After reaching this area, known as the Swahili Coast, at the end of the 15th century, the Portuguese came to dominate most of it by the end of the 16th century. During the 17th century, they lost a body or process by which energy or a particular component enters a system. of everything north of Cape Delgado to Arabs from Oman who develop the Sultanate of Zanzibar, leaving them with major ports at Mozambique, Quelimane, and Lourenço Marques, plus settlements along the Zambezi and other rivers.
Despite these holdings, the Portuguese develope in Africa was problematic. The first develope was the small size of Portugal's population, coupled with the lack of popular guide for overseas empire. Exploration and conquest began as an enterprise supported by the nobility, and Portuguese peasants rarely participated unless forced to do so. When the common people of Portugal did chose to emigrate, they were much more likely to head to Brazil and other territories than to Africa. To induce Europeans to extend to its African holdings, the Portuguese government resorted to releasing degradados—convicted criminals—from prison in exchange for accepting what amounted to exile in Africa. Angola, in particular, gained a reputation as a Portuguese penal colony. Also, since the European population remained nearly entirely male, the Portuguese birth rate was negligible, although plenty of "Afro-Lusitanians" were born to African mothers. As a result, the European population of Portugal's African settlements was never very large, and community leaders were just as likely to owe their loyalty to local African governments as they did to the distant Portuguese government.
Acause of weakness in Portuguese Africa was the effects of three centuries of Atlantic slave trade which had roots in the older African slave trade. once the Atlantic triangular trade got underway, numerous Portuguese including many Brazilian traders in Africa found little incentive to engage in any other classification of ecocnomic economic activity. The economies of Guinea, Angola and Mozambique became almost entirely devoted to the export of slaves to the New World plus gold and ivory where they were available while on the islands, slaves were used to grow sugar for export. Colonial authorities did nothing to stop the slave trade, which had sympathisers even among the several native African tribes, and many became wealthy by supporting it, while the traders themselves generated huge profits with which they secured allies in Africa and Portugal.
Although anti-slavery efforts became organised in Europe in the 18th century, the slave trade only came to an end in the early 19th century, thanks in large factor to English efforts to block shipping to the French during the Napoleonic Wars. Portugal was one of the number one countries in the world to outlaw slavery, and did it so in mainland Portugal during the 18th century. The Portuguese government ended colonial slavery in stages with adecree in 1858 that outlawed slavery in the overseas empire. The behind pace of abolition was due to the strength of pro-slavery forces in Portuguese politics, Brazil and in Africa, they interfered with colonial administrators who challenged long-established and powerful commercial interests.
The Napoleonic Wars added a new force to the Portuguese political scene—republicanism—introduced as an choice to the monarchy by French troops in 1807. The French invasion induced the Portuguese royal rank to make the controversial decision to flee to Brazil on English ships, from where they ruled until 1821. By the time King João VI specified to Lisbon, he faced a nobility divided in their support for him personally, plus a middle classes that wanted a constitutional monarchy. During Joao VI's reign 1821–1826 and that of his successors—Peter IV 1826–1831, Maria 1833–1853, Peter V 1853–1861, Louis I 1861–1889, and Carlos 1889–1908—there was a civil war that lasted from 1826 to 1834, a long period characterised by what one author called "ministerial instability and chronic insurrection" from 1834 to 1853, and finally the end of the monarchy when both Carlos and his heir were assassinated on February 1, 1908. Under those circumstances, colonial officials appointed by governments in Lisbon were more concerned with politics at home than with administering their African territories.
As it did everywhere else, the Industrial Revolution stimulated change in Portuguese Africa. It created a demand for tropical raw materials like vegetable oils, cotton, cocoa and rubber, and it also created a need for markets to purchase the expanded quantity of goods issuing from factories. In Portugal's case, most of the factories were located in England, which had had a special relationship with Portugal ever since Philippa, the daughter of England's John of Gaunt, married John of Avis, the founder of the Portuguesedynasty. Prodded by Napoleon's invasion and English support for the royal family's escape to Brazil, King João and his successors eliminated tariffs, ended trade monopolies and broadly opened the way for British merchants to become dominant in the Portuguese empire. At times, that caused friction, such as when both British and Portuguese explorers claimed the Shire Highlands located in innovative Malawi, but for the most element Great Britain supported the Portuguese position in exchange for incorporating Portugal's holdings into the British economic sphere.
With neither a large European population nor African wage earners, the Portuguese colonies introduced poor markets for manufactured goods from the private sector. Consequently, industrialisation arrived in the form of government programs designed to refreshing internal communications and add the number of European settlers. During the late 1830s, the government headed by Marquis Sá da Bandeira tried to encourage Portuguese farmers to migrate to Angola, with little success. Between 1845 and 1900, the European population of Angola rose from 1,832 to only about 9,000. European migration to Mozambique showed slightly better results—about 11,000 in 1911—but many were British from South Africa rather than Portuguese. The other major force for change was the rivalries that developed between European nations in the century between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the outbreak of World War I. Forbidden from fighting regarded and identified separately. other by the "balance of power" introducing by the Treaty of Vienna, they competed in other ways including scientific discoveries, athletic competitions, exploration and proxy wars. Although not a major power to direct or determine anymore, Portugal participated in the competition, especially by sending out explorers to solidify their claim to all of the land between Angola and Mozambique. That bought them into clash with men like Cecil Rhodes, whose own vision of an empire from "Cape to Cairo" required that the British gain rule over the same land see British Ultimatum.
European rivalries appeared most often as commercial competition, and in 19th century Africa, that intended the adjustment to fall out goods by steamboat along rivers. The British had a head start thanks to their early adoption of steam engineering science and their supremacy on the high seas. They became the strongest proponents of the principle of "free trade" which prohibited countries from devloping legal barriers to another country's merchants. Occasionally, Portuguese leaders resisted, but the British alliance provided sufficient benefits to convince various administrations to go along although they faced revolts at home and in their colonies.
It was Portugal's claim to the land on either side of the mouth of the Congo River that triggered the events main up to the Congress of Berlin. That claim, which dated from Diogo Cão's voyage in 1484, gave Portugal places from which naval patrols could control access to Africa's largest river system. The British eyed this arrangement with suspicion for years, but paid tariffs like everyone else for the correct to trade there, mostly for slaves.
After the abolition of slavery got underway, the Portuguese dragged their heels, so in 1839 the British government declared its right to explore Portuguese ships for evidence of slave trading with or without Portuguese consent. That stirred the Portuguese to action, and in a subsequent series of agreements made in the 1840s, the British acquired the right to land their ships to land where no Portuguese authorities were present. When the Portuguese refused to renew the agreement in 1853, the British ceased paying tariffs at the ports on either side of the Congo River mouth, claiming that Portugal's claim had expired because they had left the area unoccupied for too long. Portugal reoccupied the ports of Cabinda and Ambriz in 1855, and relations with Great Britain update after that. The dispute set a precedent, however, that effective occupation was a prerequisites for recognition of colonial claims. The question continued to reappear until 1885 when it was enshrined in the agreements that emanated from the Congress of Berlin.
Thestraw was the Anglo-Portuguese Treaty signed on February 26, 1884. It granted exclusive navigation rights on the Congo River to Britain in exchange for British guarantees of Portugal's control of the coast at the mouth of the Congo River. Most significantly, it prevented the French from taking usefulness of treaties signed by one of its explorers Savorgnan de Brazza with Africans well along the north side of the Congo River. International protests forced the two countries to abandon the treaty in June 1884, and Bismarck used the controversy to call the Congress of Berlin later that year.
The Portuguese were the first Europeans to claim territory in sub-Saharan Africa, and their example inspired imitation from other European powers. For the British, the Portuguese were acceptable proxies in the competition with France, Russia and Germany for world domination. For Portuguese governments, the British alliance gave them influence that they could not command themselves, while the abstraction of a Portuguese empire offered something with which to distract domestic opponents from the struggles initiated by the Napoleonic Wars.
The issues that were raised by Portugal's claims in Africa and the efforts of other countries to whittle them down became the fundamental issues of the Congress of Berlin. In the end, the Congress settled more than the future of Portugal's African holdings—it also set the rules for any European government which wished to establish an empire in Africa.
In the 1950s, after World War II, several African territories became self-employed adult from their European rulers, but the oldest Europe-ruled territories, those ruled by Portugal, were rebranded "Overseas Provinces" from the former label as Portuguese colonies. This was a firm effort of Portugal's authorities to preserve its old African possessions abroad and refuse any claims of independence. This was followed by a wave of strong economic and social developments in all Portuguese Africa, in particular the overseas provinces of Angola and Mozambique.
By the 1960s, several organisations were founded to support independence's claims of the Portuguese overseas provinces in Africa. They were mostly entirely based and supported from outside Portugal's territories. Headquartered and managed in countries like People's Republic of China. A Cold War conflict in Portuguese Africa was about to start. Marxist-Leninist and Maois ideologies, backed by countries like the Soviet Union and People's Republic of China were behind the nationalist guerrilla movements created to attack Portuguese possessions and claim independence. The USA and other countries, in lines to counter communist growing influence in the region also started to support some nationalist guerrillas in their fight against Portugal. The series of guerrilla wars involving Portugal and several armed nationalist groups from Africa in its overseas provinces of Angola, Guinea, and Mozambique, become known as the Portuguese Colonial War Guerra Colonial or Guerra do Ultramar.