In 1945 almost the entire African continent answered to Europe — a map of blues, tans and greys ruled from London, Paris, Lisbon, Brussels, Madrid and Rome, and held, more thinly than it looked, by a few thousand administrators. Fifty years later the map is red from the Mediterranean to the Cape: fifty-odd sovereign states where there had been a handful. This atlas follows that tide as it rises — the fastest redrawing of the political world in modern history.
Twelve chapters carry the story from the colonial map of 1945 to South Africa’s first free vote in April 1994 — Ghana’s opening door, Algeria’s terrible war, the seventeen states of 1960, the Congo crisis, the last Portuguese empire, the settler redoubt, and apartheid’s long fall. Africans — Nkrumah, Cabral, Nyerere, Ben Bella, Machel, Mandela — carry it; the empires react. Take the guided tour, or scrub the timeline yourself and watch the continent turn.
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