Anticolonialism in Africa

Political freedom from colonial rule was viewed by nationalists and their supporters as the instrument to redress the economic and social neglect and injustices of the colonial era. Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana urged fellow nationalists throughout Africa to "seek first the political kingdom and all else would be added unto" them. There could be no meaningful social and economic progress without political independence. Nationalist activists and their followers expected an improvement in their living conditions. This desire and expectation to live in dignity partly explains the political support given by the masses to the nationalists and nationalism.

In India, Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964) argued emphatically that without political freedom, Indians would have no power to shape their destiny. They would remain "hopeless victims of external forces" that oppressed and exploited them.

In semicolonial China, Mao Zedong (1893–1976) also saw the critical value of national political freedom from external domination. Without this freedom, there could be no advancement of his revolutionary social and economic program. It would have been futile to dream of building a communist society without a nation in which to construct it.

Nationalism identified exploitation as the primary economic mission of colonialism—exploitation of the colonized people and their labor and resources. In Africa, the expansion of cash crop production, land alienation, mineral exploitation, and even limited manufacturing toward the end of colonial rule enriched the Western capitalist countries, and not Africans. In the struggle for decolonization, there was a general outcry by the nationalists against this exploitation. The colonial economic record in Asia, and especially in India, provided nationalists with rich evidence of exploitation. There was the familiar example of British investment in railways that remained quite profitable to the investors but did little for Indian economic advancement. Colonialism had deemphasized the production of food crops while actively promoting the growing of cotton, jute, indigo, and opium, which fetched high prices overseas. The profits that accrued from these exports and other British capital were, to a large extent, invested in "white settler countries," such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and not in India. In addition, European powers did not encourage, nor support, the industrialization of their colonies. In India, this aggravated economic and social problems on the eve of decolonization.

Socially and culturally, colonialism was a racist system. The era of "modern" nineteenth-century imperialism was also the era of scientific racism. Colonialism, mediated through racism and racist policies, limited and even forbade meaningful cross-cultural dialogue between colonizer and colonized. Throughout most of Africa and Asia, racism was "not an incidental detail, but … a consubstantial part of colonialism." Harsh, brutal, and deliberately discriminatory treatment at the hands of European colonizers was the constant, painful reminder to Africans and Asians that they were a colonized and humiliated people. All nationalists, irrespective of ideological differences, were generally agreed that such treatment was indefensible; it must be ended.