| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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Chapter 1
Introduction
Beginning in 1940, the grandeur de la France (one of the most powerful colonial powers until then) was rocked by a series of traumatic events. In that year, German Nazis rolled into France and occupied Paris, causing the French government to collapse and flee the country. In the colonies, the French military force was severely defeated in Vietnam in 1954, and in Algeria, the partisans of the revolution drove the French occupiers out of their country by force in 1962. Africans, bolstered by their participation in the liberation of the French from the Germans and emboldened by the Bandung Conference of 1955, vigorously demanded their independence from France. These demands that swept across the French colonies in Africa were heightened when Sékou Touré ridiculed Charles de Gaulle during his historic visit to Guinea by rejecting outright de Gaulle's attempts to establish l’Union Française (French Union) and demanding immediate independence. Humiliated and unpopular, France had no choice but to relinquish power and, at last, leave the African colonies it had occupied and dominated for more than two and a half centuries. When the French colonisers left the African continent, they