Blacks push back

`If cursed, do not curse back. If pushed, do not push back. If struck, do not strike back, but evidence love and goodwill at all times." These were the words of Martin Luther King in 1956, then a young preacher and advocate of civil rights. Twelve years later he was dead, having won the Nobel peace prize for his Gandhi-inspired tactics of peaceful protest.

In the 1950s, the issue of black rights was just beginning to surface. "For the black man, there is only one destiny. And it is white," wrote Martinique-born psychiatrist Frantz Fanon in his book Black Skin, White Masks, published in 1952. In the southern United States, the hotly resisted process of desegregation had begun. In London's Notting Hill in the UK there were violent race riots against Caribbean immigrants in 1958. In Africa, black nations were throwing off the nets of colonialism. In South Africa billboards appeared which read "Caution: Beware of Natives".

By the 1950s, half the population of Washington DC was black. Most of the rundown city centre areas of northern American cities were lived in by blacks. Black Americans had fought in the second World War, against German racism towards Jews. This brought home to them all the more painfully how racist their own society still was. They saw the growing prosperity of the American way of life in the post-war boom. But they did not see any recognition of their equal right to the fruits of the Golden Years.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples (NAACP) was set up and focused its attention on the South, where blacks received the worst treatment of all, often unable to vote and prey to the bloodthirsty Ku Klux Klan. In 1954, after an appeal by the NAACP, the Supreme Court ruled that schools should be desegregated. The governor of Arkansas called out the National Guard to prevent black children from attending the high school at Little Rock. Eisenhower responded by sending in 1,000 federal paratroopers to escort the black students into the school. The Supreme Court's ruling was resisted all over the South. In December 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. A year- long boycott of the city's segregated buses by blacks ensued, led by Martin Luther King. The movement went on to tackle segregation in shops and restaurants with mass sit-ins and "freedom rides". The protests reached a climax in 1963 when a quarter of a million civil rights supporters staged a peaceful march on Washington and King made his famous "I have a dream" speech. During the second World War, African soldiers, like their black American counterparts, fought for the Allies. But Africans' hopes that they would win their own democracy were not realised after the war, when African colonies seemed like an important source of income for war-weary European economies. Britain drew £140 million from its Africa between 1945 and 1951. Tenants were evicted from land so that white farmers could exploit new opportunities. Technical experts were flown in to advise on intensive farming methods and irrigation.

African nationalism was divided along class lines but was cohesive enough to eventually drive out the colonial powers. There was a brutally suppressed nationalist uprising against the French in Madagascar (1947). In the Kenyan conflict of 1952-6, Mau Mau freedom fighters (Kikuyu tribesmen) were put in British concentration camps. The first African country to win independence was Ghana (formerly the British colony of the Gold Coast) in 1957. Most of the other 53 became independent in the 1960s; Zimbabwe was last in 1980 (South Africa will be covered in a later column).

Post-colonial conflicts have often been due, as in Zimbabwe, to peasant scepticism of centralised state modernisation programmes. There were bloody civil wars leading to untold suffering, exile and starvation. In Nigeria, Muslim Hausas fought Christian Ibos. The 1964 massacre of Tutsis in Rwanda foreshadowed the horrific Tutsi/ Hutu war of 1994. Having endured the excesses of post-colonial despots such as Idi Amin and Jean Bedel Bokassa, many African countries are now returning power to local chiefs. All new African nations have had to deal with a rapidly rising population, a hostile international environment, and the knock-on effects of crises generated by the West (such as the Cold War and the rise in oil prices). The burden of debt to the West is ever more crippling.