Neocolonialism

African Origins

The concept or neocolonialism was forged in the African anticolonial political liberation struggles of the late 1950s and 1960s. Those African nations such as Ghana that had very recently won their independence from colonial governments were showing vivid evidence that decolonization was far more difficult to achieve than mere formal independence. There was an increasing understanding by the more radical of these independence leaders that economic, political, and cultural liberation were intertwined but that economic domination by the former colonial powers was particularly insidious.

The All-African People's Conference, a grouping of the pan-African movement against colonialism and imperialism, identified and defined the practice of neocolonialism with increasing clarity at its three conferences from 1958 to 1961. These conferences were framed by historical circumstances such as the escalating war of liberation against French colonial domination in Algeria, which crystallized the ideas of African psychiatrist Frantz Fanon (published later in English as The Wretched of the Earth) in 1961. French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre wrote the preface to this work, introducing it to a metropolitan French audience and publishing his own Colonialism and Neo-Colonialism in French in 1964.

The first All-African People's Conference in Accra briefly identified the problem of economic domination by the former colonizers without giving it a name. The Economic and Social Resolution of the 1960 Tunis conference was even more concerned with neocolonialism, identifying “the tendency of the colonialist countries to substitute economic for political domination and thus rob the newly won independence of the African states of its true content” (Gott & Warner, 1964, pp. 350–351). In its general resolution, this conference used the term neocolonialist for the first time with reference to “social and economic enclaves” and “particularly any foreign military establishments on their soil.”

...