The Age of Decolonization

In the aftermath of World War II, the international balance of power shifted, leading to an age of decolonization. European powers such as Britain and France lost their capacity to hold on to their empires, and colonized peoples on multiple continents began the process of removing colonial political and economic controls and reversing the legacy of colonial rule.

Decolonization was not immediate. Wresting independence from former colonizers often took the form of armed resistance, as in Algeria’s struggle to gain independence from France (1954-62), a widely chronicled revolution that drew supporters from around the world. During the same period, politicians and citizens in Asian, African, and Latin American states came to emphasize the need for solidarity in the face of continued (neo) imperial influence over world affairs. Perhaps most famously, a conference of Asian and African states convened in 1955 at Bandung in Java, Indonesia, and established principles of non-aggression and respect for sovereignty.

As the decades wore on, and the Vietnam War became a protracted conflict between liberal and communist world powers, Afro-Asian political action often gained a military inflection. Anti-imperialists around the world embraced armed resistance, circulating imagery of guerrilla fighters and, in some cases, taking up weapons. Student and women’s movements also organized against the dominance of patriarchal systems.

The age of decolonization has not ended; efforts to reverse the legacy of colonialism continue and, in many cases, the occupation of lands is ongoing.

Iranian artist Siah Armajani became involved with left-wing resistance movements following a 1953 coup d’etat in Iran that unseated the democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, and brought Iran into a Western orbit. In this 1957 collage, Night Letter #2, Armajani brings together fragments of poetry by Persian mystic poets Rumi and Hafez as well as nationalist slogans (“Oil is ours”) in a visual format akin to clandestine political communications called shab-nameh, or “night letters.”

The photographs in Aspects of the Algerian Revolution (1957), an agitprop publication documenting what was then an active revolution against French military rule, emphasize gender parity on the front lines as all members of society rally to the independence cause.

Above: The National Liberation Front, Aspects of the Algerian Revolution, circa 1957. UC Berkeley Library collection.

In 1963, a third Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Conference was held in Tanganyika (now part of Tanzania), a country that had only gained its independence in 1961. More than 400 delegates from 60 countries, including observers from Latin America and socialist Eastern Europe, attended. The design seen here on the cover of the conference proceedings--featuring a torch of freedom surrounded by flowers and texts in several scripts (including Mongolian)--reflects the aspirations of an ever-growing, multilingual liberation cause.

The below map, one of many in this 1965 booklet commemorating the 10-year anniversary of the first Bandung conference, offers a snapshot of the age of decolonization as conceived in territorial terms. Color-codings indicate which Afro-Asian countries have secured independence, which are actively engaged in struggle, and which are still occupied.

Above: The Revolutionary Flame of Bandung (Jakarta: Government Printing Office, 1965). UC Berkeley Library collection.

In January 1966, the Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America (OSPAAAL) was established in Havana, Cuba, with the stated purpose of fighting imperialism and defending human rights. Many designers contributed innovative poster art to OSPAAAL's campaigns to encourage solidarity with Third World liberation struggles. The appearance of Arabic captions on the posters helps to substantiate the international character of the movement.

Above: Solidarity posters published by the Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America, reproduced in Lincoln Cushing, Revolución!: Cuban Poster Art (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2003). UC Berkeley Library collection.

In 1969, the Algerian government hosted a major Pan-African Cultural Festival dedicated to promoting cultural revival among the peoples of Africa and the African diaspora. This page, from a commemorative story published the following year, highlights the contributions of the Black Panthers as well as Palestinian liberation groups to the festival.

Above: Selected pages from The Faces of Algeria: First Pan-African Cultural Festival (Algiers: Ministry of Information and Culture, 1970). UC Berkeley Library collection.

Students of collective political action and struggles for decolonization will find innumerable resources in the UC Berkeley library. Below, Demet Lüküslü's 2015 study analyzes the “1968 generation” in Turkey, describing student movements for university reform, their solidarity with the peasant and worker movements, and intersection with anti-imperialist struggle. The author of the second book, Haga Kashif Badri, was one of the founding members of the Sudanese Women’s Union, which was launched in the 1950s. As her history of the women’s movement in Sudan describes, the union promoted equal wages, maternity leave, and pensions, and espoused gender equality between women and men.