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Y320: From Colonialism to Independence: The British Empire 1857–1965

Opposition to British Rule: African nationalism, methods and the role of opposition

  • 2 things to know
  • Unit group 3

Overview

Recall questions on Kenya before 1952 and Kenyatta, Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, peaceful and violent methods, the World Wars, Western-educated elites, and how far opposition caused decolonisation and with what consequences.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

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Numbers

Trace Nkrumah's route to power in the Gold Coast.

Numbers

What violent methods were used, and how did Britain respond?

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

  1. 1

    How did opposition in Kenya develop before 1952?

    Model answer

    Harry Thuku's East African Association protested against the pass laws and forced labour until his arrest in 1922 provoked a fatal shooting outside the Nairobi police station, the Kikuyu Central Association took up the land question from 1924 and sent Kenyatta to London, and after the Second World War the Kenya African Union became the first territory-wide African political body.

  2. 2

    What was Kenyatta's contribution to Kenyan nationalism?

    Model answer

    He spent some fifteen years abroad, mostly in Britain but including study in Moscow, publishing the anthropological defence of Kikuyu society Facing Mount Kenya in 1938 and helping to organise Pan-Africanism, returned to lead the Kenya African Union in 1947, was convicted at Kapenguria in 1953 of managing Mau Mau on perjured evidence, and emerged from detention as the only figure able to unite the nationalist movement and reassure the settlers.

  3. 3

    Trace Nkrumah's route to power in the Gold Coast.

    Model answer

    Recruited as secretary of the elite United Gold Coast Convention in 1947, he broke away in 1949 to found the mass Convention People's Party, launched Positive Action of strikes and boycotts in 1950 and was imprisoned, won the 1951 election from his cell and was released to lead the government, and took the country to independence as Ghana in March 1957, the first Black African colony to be freed.

  4. 4

    What was Pan-Africanism and why did it matter to the Empire?

    Model answer

    It was the movement for the political and cultural unity of people of African descent; the fifth Pan-African Congress at Manchester in 1945, attended by Du Bois, Padmore, Nkrumah and Kenyatta, shifted it from petition to a demand for independence, and the Accra conference of 1958 and the Organisation of African Unity in 1963 gave African nationalists an international platform against colonial rule.

  5. 5

    Give the main peaceful methods used by colonial opposition.

    Model answer

    Petitions and deputations to London, newspapers and pamphlets, constitutional agitation within legislative councils, court cases, boycotts of imported goods and of elections, and above all strikes, since the Copperbelt disturbances of 1935, the Nigerian general strike of 1945 and the Accra riots of 1948 showed that urban workers could paralyse a colonial economy.

  6. 6

    What violent methods were used, and how did Britain respond?

    Model answer

    Opposition ranged from rural rebellion to guerrilla warfare and urban terrorism, as with Mau Mau in Kenya, EOKA in Cyprus from 1955 and the Aden insurgency of the 1960s; Britain replied with states of emergency, mass detention, resettlement, collective punishment and executions, while usually negotiating in the end with leaders it had recently imprisoned.

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