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This is essentially a response I intended for a discussion that ES poster "King" brought up but was subsequently deleted; as I was replying, I got the message that the topic "no longer existed"...
King posted an article containing as follows:
quote: BLOEMFONTEIN, SOUTH AFRICA—Tens of thousands of chanting and dancing revelers waved the green and gold colours of the African National Congress as Africa’s oldest liberation movement celebrated its 100th anniversary Sunday, though many South Africans say the party hasn’t delivered on its promises since taking power in 1994.
My response:
Ed Brown is mistaken. The ANC does not symbolize "Africa's oldest liberation movement". There have been many before it...
Below, are examples confined to western Africa, showcasing an interesting array of diversified liberation movement tactics applied:
In that last link, the book chooses to focus on the "instantaneous" setbacks faced by armed resistance and insurgency efforts. IMO, that is the wrong way to go about looking at the effects of these undertakings. The effects of the liberation movements lie in their accumulative effect over time. We start to see the turning point of these efforts on the heels of the World Wars, as Africans recruited in European armies overseas subsequently reinforced armed African liberation movements while European military resources weakened, and as both armed and civil African liberation struggles continued to harass and put increasing financial strains on colonial totalitarianism while denying the home European nations of these totalitarian regimes a stable ground for their businesses to exploit African resources. As a result, totalitarian European colonial regimes were forced to call on self-appointed leaders of African liberation movements, to strike deals that would see European states concede to "independence" demands of occupied African territories.
So, these liberation struggles ultimately proved effective in forcing out totalitarian European occupation from their lands, but it is the bourgeois elements--who appointed themselves as leaders/spokespersons of the African proletariat liberation movements--that betrayed the African public and squandered the gains their liberation struggles had won. Case in point, even Ed Brown was compelled to acknowledge in the OP article, "many South Africans say the party hasn’t delivered on its promises since taking power in 1994."
The following link (a spin-off of an ES discussion) contains a more geographically-comprehensive look at African or Afro liberation initiatives: The portrayal of the Submissive African
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