Decolonization

Full of gripping historical vignettes, this unique collaboration between academia and documentary filmmaking provides an accessible account of the dynamic figures who resisted colonization.

Decolonization started on the very first day of colonization. From the arrival of the first Europeans, the peoples of Africa and Asia rose up. No one willingly accepts being subjugated. But in order to one day regain freedom, you must first and foremost stay alive. Faced with the Europeans' machine guns, the colonized took up the fight in other ways: from civil disobedience to communist revolution, by way of soccer and literature. A struggle marked by infinite patience and unlimited determination.

This long fight is the subject of this book that, rendering the wealth of scholarly research, offers above all a fresh, lively story. An unforgettable epic that introduces us to unknown or forgotten heroines and heroes of this painful history: Manikarnika Tambe, the queen of Jhansi who led her troops into battle against the British in India; Mary Nyanjiru, the activist who led a protest in Nairobi; Lamine Senghor, the Senegalese infantryman who became an anti-colonial militant in Paris. Throughout these pages, we encounter more familiar characters, too: the Algerian Kateb Yacine, the Indian Gandhi, the Vietnamese Giap and Ho Chi Minh. With them, a current of resistance swept the world and culminated in the independence of almost all the colonies in the 1960s. But at what price? In the atomic India of Indira Gandhi, in the Congo subjected to Mobutu's dictatorship, or in a London shaken by the rioting of young immigrants, this history of decolonization shows just how crucial it is that we tell this story today.