Each century has its dominant themes, which invest with particular significance all the varied events and situations which are chronicled as history. As “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité” dominated the eighteenth century, and slavery, abolition and emancipation agitated the nineteenth, so the liberation movement or decolonization is one of the outstanding phenomena of the twentieth century. Save for the great issues of communism versus capitalism, and the geopolitical and ethical considerations surrounding nuclear weapons and rocketry, no other issue has so captured men's imaginations and allegiance or wrought such dramatic transformation in the status and condition of peoples. The remarkable effect of this phenomenon can be demonstrated by reference to the continent of Africa alone, although the full significance and effect can be grasped only by appreciating similar transformations in Asia, in the Caribbean, and miscellaneous other places in the world.

For many decades prior to 1957, there had been only two independent states in the whole of Africa. The continent which had been the cradle of human civilization and enriched the cultures of many other distant lands and nations had seen its lights of freedom snuffed out one by one. My own country, in which the oldest surviving evidences of early human society exist, struggled valiantly but vainly to resist the tide of European imperialism which flowed irresistibly over Africa -- indeed over most of the world -- and was at its full flood during the latter half of the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth century. Only Ethiopia, with its proud dynasty tracing its lineage backward through two thousands of years, and Liberia -- a symbol of the brave efforts of the emancipation movement -- survived the blandishments and violence of the imperialist forces. Those forces had signified their ascendancy in the Berlin Treaty of 1885, and for another three-quarters of a century the eclipse of freedom in this part of the world justified its description as “the Dark Continent.”