Africa’s ‘Wind of Change’

It was events elsewhere in Africa that would ultimately spell out the obsolescence of Europe's colonial empires. The first reports of French military atrocities against FLN suspects in Algeria began to appear in the French press in 1956 and would continue with increasing regularity into the late 1950s, with progressively cor­rosive effects on popular support for the conflict.^[2640] Two episodes in March 1959 raised similar questions in Britain about the extreme measures employed to cling on to colonial possessions.

It was in the context of these unfolding crises throughout Africa, more than two decades after the first iterations ofthe term in the 1930s, that “decolonization” emerged into mainstream public discourse. As Todd Shepard compellingly argues: “In the last years of the Algerian War, French discussions transformed this descriptive term into a historical category, an all but inevitable stage in the tide of History.”^[2643] It was a transfor­mation necessitated by the years of ideological effort and legislative energy that had been invested in refuting the idea that Algeria might be disaggregated from metropol­itan France. The need for a new conceptual foundation became increasingly acute as the material and human cost of the war assumed unwinnable dimensions. General de Gaulle recognized this within a year of his return to the presidency, in his famous pro­nouncement of May 1959: “The Algeria of old is dead. If we fail to understand this, we will die with her.”^[2644] It was precisely this imperative—to understand—to find a way of rendering Algerian independence “thinkable,” that ushered “decolonization” into the rhetorical spotlight. As late as December 1960, Prime Minister Michel Debre could decry the “simplistic and erroneous” tendency to “speak of Algeria as if it were about carrying out a program of decolonization.”^[2645] But his very framing of the problem clearly suggested that a major semantic shift was underway.

The belated embrace of the language and logic of decolonization served to dis­place the burden of national failure onto deeper processes in world history. The term pointed to a deeper, structural pattern of historical causation that allowed the French people “to avoid explaining why they now overwhelmingly accepted Algerian inde- pendence.”^[2646] The central tenet of decolonization was its inevitability: an unstoppable dynamic deeply anchored in human history, for which no individual or political orga­nization could be held accountable.

These sweeping invocations of decolonization as a force of nature were directly echoed in British experience, in perhaps the most famous of all metaphors for African decolonization: Harold Macmillan’s “Wind of Change” speech in Cape Town in February 1960. In words unmistakably reminiscent of Moritz Bonn, he declared: “The wind of change is blowing through this continent, and whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact.” Macmillan himself seems rarely (if ever) to have used “decolonization” in his political (or pri­vate) vocabulary, but his choice of words in Cape Town was geared to the same purpose as his French counterparts: to find a suitable phrase that would displace the stigma of colonial retreat onto the laws of history, thereby diffusing any suggestion of ethnic betrayal of white settler communities in Africa.^[2649] He frequently compared the brewing tensions between African nationalism and British settlers in Kenya and Rhodesia to the protracted struggle in Algeria, freely venting his anxiety that Britain might be drawn into a similar quagmire. His counterparts in British settler societies, by contrast, were at a loss to comprehend what seemed, to them, a failure of British resolve. From their perspective, the “Wind of Change” became a symbol, not of irresistible subterranean historical forces, but of cynical British duplicity and deceit.

Macmillan identified a ‘growth of national consciousness’ in Africa as the heart of the matter, spurred on by the very ‘processes which gave birth to the nation states of Europe’—indeed testimony to ‘the achievements ofwestern civilisation’. This was clearly self-serving, but it also overlooked the more profound contemporary shifts in the global order that were reshaping the rules of colonial engagement. Far from merely furnishing the latest instalment of an age-old clash of rival nationalisms, the Wind of Change signalled the advent of newly conceptualized moral worlds couched in the language of universal rights and the primacy of human dignity.^[2651] Both the supporters and detractors ofMacmillan’s speech would feel the rapidly unfolding consequences ofthe impulses and aspirations he had given voice to. Even Macmillan himself was taken aback, protesting a few months later: “I spoke of the wind of change.... But that’s not the same thing as a howling tempest which will blow away the whole of the new developing civilization.”^[2652]

Moreover, there is every indication that colonial nationalists were capable of co-opting the term for their own purposes. Frantz Fanon was one of the first to intuit the untapped potential of “decolonization” as a means of conveying the revo­lutionary aims of complete political and psychological emancipation. The opening lines of The Wretched ofthe Earth clearly signaled his radical intent:

National liberation, national reawakening, restoration of the nation to the people or Commonwealth, whatever the name used, whatever the latest expression, de­colonization is always a violent event.^[2653]

Fanon's notion of decolonization as redemptive violence anchored the concept in a new moral and intellectual foundation. It was only a small conceptual leap from Fanon to Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) in its emphasis on the colonizing instrumentalities of knowledge and representation, or Gayatri Spivak's notion (bor­rowing from Foucault) of the “epistemic violence” wielded by Western cultures to subjugate and ultimately “silence” colonized peoples.^[2654] Ngugi wa Thiongo's ap­peal to African writers to dispense with the language of the colonizers altogether in Decolonising the Mind (1986) took this logic a step further, bringing the con­cept into the realm of linguistics and literary aesthetics.^[2655] Maori intellectual Linda Tuhiwai Smith called for a root-and-branch rethink of the production of knowledge in Decolonizing Methodologies (1999), and the philosopher Paul Ricoeur spoke of the “decolonization of memory”—while calls for ‘decolonizing the curriculum would later become ubiquitous on university campuses in the wake of the Rhodes Must Fall Movement at the University of Cape Town in 20 1 5.^[2656] A term once exclusively re­served for depicting Europe's dwindling options in the face of the sweeping forward march of history was radically transformed to consider how the ‘internal mental structures of colonial power outlive their epoch'; an inflection not far removed from Sanchez Carrion's original purpose of ‘shedding the humiliating colonial costume'.^[2657]