The struggle for liberation in southern Africa was a cause célèbre for most of the second half of the 20th century. The colonizing powers vacated the major portion of Sub-Saharan Africa, with varying degrees of grace, during the three decades following the end of the Second World War – yet the 1960s saw only the beginning of what the activist-scholar John Saul has come to term, with an ironic nod to European history, the ‘thirty years war’ for national liberation in the Portuguese-ruled territories of Angola and Mozambique, settler-ruled Rhodesia, and apartheid South Africa. The sacrifices incurred in the different yet closely related and interdependent struggles for independence are remarkable. Indeed, they probably remain underestimated by the majority of historians today Nonetheless, the long-drawn-out process of liberation – in so far as this refers to crude racial domination – was eventually to become complete: the Portuguese beat a hasty retreat from Angola and Mozambique in 1975 following a coup (prompted by the strains imposed by running a costly and brutal war) the previous year; the settler regime in Rhodesia, after having declared unilateral independence from Britain in 1965, had to concede majority rule to ‘Zimbabwe’ in 1980, following, notably, a crucial withdrawal of support by neighbouring South Africa in the late 1970s; South West Africa, the United Nations' Trust Territory which had been under de facto South African rule since 1916 was transformed into independent Namibia in 1989 following extensive international pressure; and South Africa itself made its widely celebrated move to democracy in 1994, after an intense, troubled, compelling but ultimately inspiring period of political transition.