Decolonization as Emancipation Proclamation Not Civil Rights Struggle

During the Civil Rights struggle in the United States, a leader such as Martin Luther King, Jr., saw the decolonization struggles around the world, and especially in Africa, as akin to the Civil Rights struggle in the United States. This interpretation of the connection between the two seems to have been accepted as legitimate. However, reading W. E. B. Dubois's The Souls of Black Folks that details the lives of African Americans just after the Emancipation Proclamation, one would see that decolonization in Africa has much in common with what happened to African Americans just after their emancipation than during the Civil Rights Movement. After the Emancipation Proclamation, African Americans were struggling to find their feet in the context in which they had been thrust without prior preparation and Congress put many road blocks on their way to self-realization. Some of these road block torpedoed advances which African Americans could have made, thus contributing to some of the dysfunctions which we find today in America. In his essay, "On the Dawn of Freedom," Dubois narrates how political expediency on the part of Congress stifled policies that would have been far beneficial in providing African Americans with firmer footing in their move towards full citizenship in America. These policies, such as the creation of a national school system for the freed slaves, "a carefully supervised employment and labor office; a system of impartial protection before the regular courts; and such institutions for social betterment such as saving banks, land and building association, and social settlements. All this vast expenditure of money and brain," Dubois avers, "might have formed a great school of prospective citizenship, and solved in a way we have not yet solved the most perplexing and persistent of the Negro problems." But this was the road not taken and the effect of this road not taken can still be seen today.

A similar story can be told of most African post-colonial states. Post-colonial states were and are for the most part post-colonial only in name. In fact, they are the plantations of Machiavellian African elites and their foreign enablers who seek to put roadblocks on the peoples' path to well-being. The story of blacks in America after the Emancipation proclamation is very similar to the story of Africans in the post-colony. Perhaps more attention needs to be placed on this fact.