The Advent of Necolonialism

The early 1960s thus marks the entry of decolonization into the mainstream of political and scholarly discourse, likened by one French observer to “a veil that was suddenly ripped apart.”^[2658] It was in the years 1962-1965 that its usage became commonplace in press and parliamentary debates.

The rapid succession of newly independent states in the early 1960s, ranging from Sierra Leone and Tanzania (in 1961) through Algeria, Burundi, Uganda, Rwanda, Jamaica, and Trinidad (in 1962), Kenya in 1963, Malawi and Zambia (1964), and The Gambia (1965), seemingly called for a retrospective renovation of the UN lexicon, with the introduction of Resolution 1514 on the granting of independence to colonized peoples in December 1960 and the subsequent establishment of the ‘Special Committee on Decolonization' the following year.

Yet at the same time, the more commonplace these understandings became, the more doubts were increasingly raised about the historical inevitability of the decolonization project. Ghana's first president, Kwame Nkrumah, reflected on the partial success of national liberation in his 1965 treatise Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. Taking his cue from Lenin, Nkrumah drew attention to the enduring economic fundamentals of colonial exchange:

Decolonisation is a word much and unctuously used by imperialist spokesmen to describe the transfer of political control from colonialist to African sovereignty. The motive spring of colonialism, however, still controls the sovereignty. The young countries are still the providers of raw materials, the old of manufactured goods. The change in the economic relationship between the new sovereign states and the erstwhile masters is only one of form. Colonialism has achieved a new guise. It has become neo-colonialism, the last stage of imperialism.^[2659]

“Neocolonialism” had originally been deployed almost a decade earlier by Jean Paul Sartre in 1956 to refer to liberal elements in France that believed in the possibility of colonialism’s rehabilitation.

“Neocolonialists,” he contended, “think that there are some good colonists and some very wicked ones, and that it is the fault of the latter that the situation of the colonies has deteriorated.” He warned against the “neocolonialist mystification” that an improvement in the material conditions of colonized peoples through “judicious reforms” might bring Algeria to heel, dismissing the neocolonialist as “a fool who still believes that the colonial system can be overhauled— or a clever cynic who proposes reforms because he knows that they are ineffective.”^[2660] By early 1957, Le Monde was heralding “an era of subtle neocolonialism” in relation to the founding of the European Economic Community, particularly the challenges it posed to newly independent states that remained heavily reliant on European markets. The protectionist provisions of the Treaty of Rome invited the suspicion that France, in the guise of “Europe,” merely sought to “recover what it had lost” in Morocco and Tunisia in 1956. In presaging “the conquest of money” in place of the “bloodier means” of the past, Le Monde had sketched the founding premise of a rapidly emerging idea.^[2661]

The following year, Tunisia’s president Habib Bourguiba became the first of many independence leaders to denounce “une mentalite neocolonialiste” in the attitudes and dealings of his metropolitan counterparts.^[2662] Frantz Fanon provided a further inflection, turning his aim on the “bourgeoisie in the underdeveloped countries.” This small class of “upstanding intellectuals” had betrayed the nationalist cause, serving its own interests in collusion with the West, thus imposing a “neocolonialist model” on the struggling economies of newly liberated states. “Once this caste has been eliminated, swallowed up by its own contradictions, it will be clear to everyone that no progress has been made since independence and that everything has to be started over again from scratch.”^[2663]

Fanon's invective was largely in response to the infamous murder of the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, in January 1961. Lumumba's six-month term had been suffused with intrigue, violence, and political unrest, amid tensions over the Belgian-backed secession of the mineral-rich Katanga province that the UN proved unable (or unwilling) to reconcile.

Lumumba took the fateful decision to turn to the Soviet Union for material and military assistance, sparking a chain of events that would lead to his capture and execution at the hands of his political enemies. From the outset, suspicions of Western (specifically Belgian, but also American and British) involvement in Lumumba's demise circulated widely, generating decades of enduring controversy.^[2664] Thus the Congo crisis can be regarded as the seminal event that cemented “neocolonialism” as a mainstay of Cold War political culture. Lumumba himself made frequent use of the term, not only in his pre-election campaign material in May 1960, but also in his struggle to regain control of his country later in the year.^[2665] Significantly, it was in the context of the Congo that “neocolonialism” entered the vocabulary of both The Times and the New York Times.^[2666] Figures ranging from Nkrumah to Guinea's Sekou Toure to the FLN freely deployed the term to condemn Western meddling in, and indeed instigation of, the crisis.^[2667] Within weeks of Lumumba's execution, Le Monde would refer to the Congo as “the very symbol... of neocolonialism.”^[2668]

Frantz Fanon was by no means alone in his conviction that the political impediments strewn in Lumumba's path, culminating in his brutal demise, were fundamentally orchestrated by the “machinations” of malign Western influences.^[2669] Sartre dedicated an entire essay to “Lumumba et le neo-colonialisme” in 1963, where he hailed Lumumba as “the uncompromising adversary of any restoration of disguised imperialism,” indicting the Belgians, their African collaborators, and the “large companies” for their betrayal of the ideal of independence.^[2670] He offered a substantially revised version of the term he had coined in 1956, by way of a pointed rhetorical question:

Was it really necessary for neocolonialism to be established in the Congo by this blatant murder? This tall, thin, energetic black man, a tireless worker and a magnificent orator, had lost his power: the real fact of the atomization of the Congo, the indisputable result of 80 years of “paternalistic” colonialism and six months of Machiavellianism, radically contradicted the prime minister’s Jacobin dream.^[2671]

Nkrumah’s “neocolonialism” was more squarely anchored in a critique of the economic levers of control, particularly those “exercised by a consortium of financial interests which are not specifically identifiable with a particular State.”^[2672] Despite his adherence to the principle of non-alignment, his neo-Marxism inevitably placed the weight of suspicion on the former colonial powers of Western Europe and the United States.

His first major elaboration of his views on the subject was a speech to the UN General Assembly in September 1960—an event which immediately sparked American suspicion that he was “very definitely leaning toward the Soviet bloc.”^[2673] Indeed, upon his arrival on a state visit to Moscow in July 1961, he professed a certain affinity with the Soviets and a shared “determination to crush imperialism, colonialism and neo-colonialism in Africa.”^[2674]

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Source: Bang Peter F., Bayly C.A., Scheidel Walter (eds.). The Oxford World History of Empire. Volume Two: The History of Empires. Oxford University Press,2020. — 1352 p.. 2020

The Advent of Necolonialism

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