by their own Frenchmen, and sent ahead by their own superpower. In many places they were met with collaboration, if not cheers, in others it was not so simple. The Force Publique, newly republican, did not negotiate. Within months, the UPC was pushed from Yaoundé into the borders and highlands, replaced swiftly with one of the many Commonwealth governments that now comprised the United States of Latin Africa.

None of this was popular with the Congolese soldiers, not the occupation, and much less the ongoing campaigns against 'banditry'. But, what really got to them was something different. In Brazzaville, a soldier could sit in a Cafe, order a cup of coffee, and simply be served - even by a white waiter. In Léopoldville this was essentially unthinkable. It was a simple fact - these people had more rights than them. Many more could vote than in the Congo, many more could travel freely than in the Congo, black men occupied many if not most of the key roles, something alien to the Congo. Here, the Congolese saw independence, and at home, well, they were not so sure.

Nationalist sentiments exploded in the Congo, the brutality of the state's response only further driving their furor. What little political rights had been loosened became clamped, that is, until the explosion. When an ABAKO assembly was declared illegal, and, despite the efforts of its leaders, proceeded anyway, the rally was suppressed violently. Kasa Vubu, imprisoned, was now the very face of the nation, the face of a new era of nationalists who now came to the stage. For a full year the state attempted to repress dissidents and raise collaborators, but each strategy subverted the other. Leaders like Bolikango and Bolya distanced themselves from the government, as repression of dissidents found only more and more targets.

And then it ended, as riots in Leopoldville inspired strikes in Elisabethville. The old Congolese political system shattered to pieces, a new, reformist coalition ushered to power over its corpse. The old political parties, increasingly identified as the 'white parties', found room for compromise or perished. A broadened electorate and renewed elections cemented the shift - as the Congo became governed by the Kartel de la Réforme and its very first African Prime Minister - Jean Bolikango.

Reform, and Africanization, have been slow to progress, even years out from Bolikango's ascendancy. The KdR succeeded in navigating the Congo out of its last political crisis, but its defective four years of governance have drawn to question whether it can do any more than that. Nationalists foment at its edges, their once assured allegiance increasingly drawn into question. Whereas, the European minority remains fractured over the new political conditions in the Congo, picket fences and neighborhood walls carry graffiti decrying 'les traîtres' underlining the far more serious contentions deep within the Congo's state.

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Blood comes to the capital...

Further abreast of the Congo and its struggles are its very own sister states - the Kingdoms of Rwanda and Burundi. Bound by one of the last treaties to mention 'the United Nations', the now-republican Force Publique of the then-independent Congo guards the very same positions they took up after the countries were taken from Germany. Indeed, these are among the furthest outposts of the OFN, host to an array of listening systems, observation posts, and defense plans that begin with retreat. Burundi is a small island of calm amidst a sea of change. Governed by a clade of its young chiefs, educated in the West and in many ways attached to the OFN. To many in Burundi, the presence of the Americans liberates the country from the domination of Security politics, and offers yet another vector of stability within the careful ethnic and social balance at play in the

country. 

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Rwanda, however, is a kingdom in crisis, torn at its by ethnic conflict and class conflict wound and tied together. The Bahutu Manifesto has transformed Rwandan politics, and brought confrontations of increasing scale to the forefront. As tensions rise in the Congo, they begin to boil in Rwanda, and should the Congo falter, its distant satellite will fall.

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# East Africa:

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In contrast to the ostensibly liberal-democratic Congo, East Africa is where the colonial ancien regime is at its strongest. Governed under the retrograde darkness of the British Empire since the end of the war, the peoples of East Africa cry out for freedom from British rule.

The heart of both the region's resistance and its colonisation lies in Kenya. As the settler-colony of the British aristocracy, Kenya serves as the new crown jewel of the Empire, with many of the BPP's foremost leaders holding estates there. However, the prosperity of Kenya's settler elite was built on the blood of its native peoples, and a reckoning was due. This reckoning came in the early 1950s, with the rise of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army (quickly dubbed "Mau Mau" by the Administration, a name that would become popularised in the British press). Being drawn largely from the Kikuyu, Embu, and Meru ethnicities, due to them having been displaced from the majority of their land for the "White Highlands" project, the KLFA began a rebellion against the colonial administration, killing several settlers and one of Kenya's foremost collaborationist chiefs, Senior Chief Waruhiu. Britain responded quickly, sending the decorated general Gerald Templer to Kenya, allowing him to form a martial law administration and giving him carte blanche to deal with the Kenyan people as he saw fit. He implemented a brutal policy, confining any natives with suspect loyalties into various forms of concentration camp. Only those with a proven record of loyalty, fighting for the colonial administration, were exempt. While fighting continued for years, the brutality of the British forces and their collaborators proved impossible for the KLFA to overcome. Now, in 1962, the once-formidable movement is a spent force.

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Kenya's western neighbour, Uganda, remains mostly quiet, with much of the unrest there being overspill from Kenya, while a pliant collaborationist class runs the colony.

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 To the south, in Tanganyika, the Ghanaian Revolution and First Great Uprising led to the Tanganyika African National Union beginning an armed struggle against the colonial administration, although the British suppressed the uprising within a few months. The survivors, including their leader, Julius Nyerere, were forced to flee abroad, first to the Congo and then to Azad Hind, where they live in exile, training and preparing for the day when they can once more return to liberate Tanganyika. 

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The neighbouring Sultanate of Zanzibar remains a largely stable protectorate, but any instability in Tanganyika could quickly cause the same there. 

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To the south, the colonies of Southern Rhodesia, Northern Rhodesia, and Nyasaland are bound together in the Central African Federation, a loose economic union, set up to benefit Britain and the settler elite of the Rhodesias

first and foremost. In Southern Rhodesia, the previously politically dominant United Rhodesia Party served a serious split in the immediate post-war period over the issue of collaborationism and whether to recognise the London government, and the more right-wing, hardline Liberal Party swept to power in the face of it, under the leadership first of Jacob Smit, and then of his successor, Ian Smith. In far-away Mauritius, the ripples of East Africa’s politics have nonetheless reached the colony. As Templer’s administration in Kenya began to look for a place for “permanent exile” of 'recalcitrant' Mau Mau followers, they settled on Mauritius, with the assent of the ruling Franco-Mauritian planter oligarchy. The introduction of slave labour into the Mauritian economy severely destabilised its already violent and fractured racial caste system, and the Indian government looks upon the majority-Indian colony with disgust at the continued British repression of their people.

The Empire's grip in East Africa will be shattered by the Second Great Uprising in 1963. Ironically, the greatest blow inflicted upon it will come not from the rebel groups that have opposed the Empire for years, but from their own colonial army. A battalion of the King's African Rifles, stationed in Tanganyika, will mutiny against their British employers after a months-long stoppage of pay caused by the chaos. The mutiny will throw the colony into disarray, forcing a speedy withdrawal and allowing the TANU to return from Azad Hind and take up its governance. Further south, in Nyasaland, the fall of Tanganyika will lead to the British and Rhodesians both concluding that the colony cannot be held, and beginning a military and administrative withdrawal to Northern Rhodesia. The "abandonment" of Nyasaland will scarcely be noticed in Britain, but it will cause shockwaves in Southern Rhodesia, with the Liberal Party's hardliners enraged at Smith for allowing the Union Jack to be brought down in Africa, and ousting him, replacing him with the right-wing ideologue William Harper. Elsewhere in East Africa, while colonialism is able to hold during the Uprising, the independence of Tanganyika causes shockwaves, allowing old rebel groups, like the KLFA, to revitalise, and new rebel groups, like those in Northern Rhodesia, to form. But make no mistake - the Empire in East Africa has been dealt a blow, but it has not been vanquished. The Republic of Tanganyika must lead the banner of independence forward, or it may find itself consumed as it once was before.

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# Iberian Africa:

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The Iberian Union was never conceived of as a unitary state, but as a partnership between two brother nations, Spain and Portugal. At the Union’s formation, a special exception was made to keep each nation’s colonial ministry separate by mutual demand. The Portuguese Colonial Ministry oversees the colonies of Angola, Mozambique, São Tomé and Príncipe, and Cape Verde, while its Spanish counterpart administers Equatorial Guinea and Western Sahara.

On paper, the Portuguese colonies represent a more humane alternative to their nakedly white supremacist counterparts in Britain and France. Trumpeting the ideology of Lusotropicalism, the Portuguese have long portrayed themselves as a uniquely benevolent imperial project capable of peacefully incorporating native Africans into a civilization that combines the best of its disparate members. Behind the propaganda, however, lie some of the most backwards and repressive colonial regimes on the continent, replete with underdevelopment, exploitation, and a strict racial hierarchy. For decades into the Twentieth Century, the colonies languished on the periphery of Portugal's attention, little more than a source of coffee, minerals, and prestige. This began to change after the

implementation of the Estado Novo in 1933. Under Antonio Salazar's leadership, greater attention was paid to the colonies as sources of ideological pride as much as material wealth, in line with the theory of Lusotropicalism. For subjects of the Portuguese overseas empire, however, this change in official attitude did not translate into changes in day-to-day life. Indeed, reformers in the colonial ministry remained sidelined throughout the 1940s and 1950s. The triumph of the Reich's New Order did much to vindicate a more ruthless view of the world, and colonial officials in Lisbon, Lusotropicalist ideals notwithstanding, were no less susceptible to such views than anyone else.

It is in the crown jewel of Portuguese Africa, Angola, that the consequences of such attitudes first appeared. During the 1950s, thousands of Angolans fled the poverty and forced labor of the colony for better prospects in neighboring Congo, congregating in the capital of Léopoldville. Here, prominent Angolan refugees were soon entangled in Congolese political intrigues and increasingly nationalist undercurrents, although they never forgot the homeland they had fled. The epitome of this phenomenon is Holden Roberto, an Angolan who spent nearly his whole life in the Congo, taking leadership of the exiled Angolan Kongo separatist movements in the 1950s, coalescing into the United Party of Angola (UPA). In 1959, Roberto took advantage of labor discontent in the north of the country and, inspired by wider unrest around the continent, he attempted to launch an incursion from the Congo. His haphazard attempt at revolution posed no serious threat to the colonial regime, but it had enough popular support to awaken officials out of a self-assured stupor. Their belated response proved brutal, sending the rebels fleeing back across the border, with close to a million refugees behind them, amplifying Congo's existing political crises. American intelligence and the Congolese administration cajoled Roberto's newly founded UPA into forming a coalition with myriad other Angolan liberation organizations, even the radicals of Augustinho Neto's MPLA, recently returned from a long exile in Brazil. Together they formed the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Angola (FDLA). 

Now, in 1962, the FDLA has organized a second Angolan incursion, though it faces prospects little better than the first. These repeated failures have spurred increasing disillusionment with Roberto's authoritarian leadership. More militant members in the FDLA have begun to look towards the Azad Hind-trained Jonas Savimbi as a challenger to Roberto. They insist that a change in strategy is required, and that Roberto's fixation on the north is a product of his Bakongo chauvinism rather than revolutionary principle. For these dissidents, eastern Angola beckons. In Luanda, the Portuguese have grown increasingly aware of the role of the Congo in their African misfortunes and consider options to neutralize its influence. However, the Portuguese must be cautious in this; Léo'ville is no scattered guerrilla band, and is a key American partner to boot. 

On the other side of the continent, in Mozambique, the situation is quite different. Under the steady, experienced leadership of Governor-General Gabriel Maurício Teixeira, the colony has seen none of the violence or chaos experienced by its Atlantic counterpart. True, the state's cotton regime has spread misery throughout the north while the inadequacies of southern subsistence farming force unnumbered thousands into grueling labor in the mines of South Africa and Rhodesia - but this is simply the natural order of life in the eyes of the Portuguese. Opposition to the regime, such as it exists outside of a few hushed meetings from dissident settler exiles, is to be found outside of the colony itself. It is with the migrant laborers abroad that the stirrings of organized resistance can be found, and even then, it is with movements in their nascency. The sisal plantation laborers in neighboring British Tanganyika and

the dockworkers in Kenya have formed the Mozambican African National Union (MANU); in Southern Rhodesia, the National Democratic Union of Mozambique (UDENAMO) speaks quietly but boldly for the need for radical action; in Nyasaland, there are the Anglophone migrants of the National African Union of Independent Mozambique (UNAMI). Taken together, these groups are small, uncoordinated, and without the support needed to match even the FDLA's abortive attempts at rebellion. Until the enemies of colonialism in Mozambique unite, the administration in Lourenço Marques has little to fear. 

In his office at Syracuse University, Dr. Eduardo Mondlane, a one-time State Department employee, prepares another speech on the cruelties of colonialism and the need to stand against it globally. The year is 1962, and his patience is running thin.

In contrast to Angola and Mozambique, which have always been the focus of Lisbon's attention, the smaller colonies of Portuguese Africa have struggled thanks to long-term neglect. The colony of Guiné, a small carve-out along the West African coast, has been a Portuguese possession since the Sixteenth Century, but has precious little to show for it. Infrastructure of any kind, already negligible, becomes nonexistent the further one travels from the capital of Bissau. Independence efforts in the colony have been active since the 1950s, with Amílcar Cabral and his African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) leading the way. Officially, the PAIGC is only one member of the larger Guinean United Liberation Front (FUL) hosted in Accra by President Kwame Nkrumah, but this alliance has proved unstable since its inception owing to serious disagreements over tactics, goals, and the role of Cape Verdeans in the Guinean struggle. 

The Portuguese island colonies, Cape Verde and São Tomé and Príncipe, are unique in that they lack an indigenous population, having been uninhabited at the time of European arrival. Both island groups quickly became important nodes in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, and thus strategically important to the Portuguese. The majority of Cape Verdeans and Saotomeans are creoles, with a mix of European and African heritage, putting them in an awkward middle ground between their Portuguese colonial rulers and other African colonial subjects. The crioulos of Cape Verde and the forros of São Tomé and Príncipe are considered assimilados by the Portuguese Colonial Ministry and the Iberian government, allowing them citizenship as a class rather than on an individual basis. Due to this, neither group is subject to the rules of the Estatuto dos Indigenas that govern life for the majority of Portugal's colonial subjects. Despite this measure of privilege, neither colony has escaped from the violence and mismanagement so common to Portuguese rule. For now, these islands have yet to see much direct nationalist agitation compared to their mainland counterparts, but this may soon change as organized resistance to colonial oppression spreads like a wildfire across Africa.

On the other half of the patchwork Iberian empire, Spain has fallen far from their glory days as a colonial superpower. Where Portugal holds colonies rich in land and resources, with hundreds of thousands of settlers to boot, Spain's remaining colonies are poor, tiny, and hardly developed. They are less zones of extraction or new frontiers than consolation prizes; they remind men like Caudillo Francisco Franco of what Spain used to be, even as it has fallen so short of that vision. 

The Berlin Conference of 1884 legitimized Spain's claim to Western Sahara, although the land itself was of little value. Rather, it served as a natural springboard for Spanish penetration into Morocco and Mauritania. While French influence blocked off the latter route, Spain continued to insist on its right to a sphere of influence in Morocco. Eventually, this claim was substantiated with a protectorate zone based around the Rif, Cape Juby, and Sidi Ifni.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, the Reich pressured France into surrendering its control over the rest of Morocco to Franco in return for his seizure of Gibraltar from the British. Over the following years, Spain returned the territories of Spanish Morocco to Rabat as a way of ensuring the Sultan's loyalty; Western Sahara, however, remained under Madrid's control into the Iberian Union. 

Sultan Hassan II, having only recently succeeded his father, Mohammed V, continues to insist on Morocco's "historical claims" on all of the Sahara. So far, Madrid has politely but firmly rebuffed these entreaties each time the topic has come up, but the fever of Greater Moroccan irredentism has Rabat in its iron grip. The various factions in Morocco disagree on many issues, but almost all agree that the country must expand its borders.

Contrasted with the uniquely underdeveloped Western Sahara, Spain's territory on the Gulf of Guinea is a much more typical example of colonial management. The colony is divided between the Insular Province, the islands of Fernando Po and Annobón, and the Continental Province of Río Muni. The extensive inequality between the two halves of the colony has long been a source of internal tension. The Insular Province has prospered (in a relative sense) as the economic heart of the colony, thanks to the establishment of extensive plantations dealing in cacao, coffee, and tobacco, Río Muni has historically been treated as little more than a preserve for lumber and labor. Indeed, the demand for African labor to work the plantations on Fernando Po has always dominated colonial decision-making, and at one time necessitated the importation of labor from Nigeria and Liberia. In recent years, however, migrant labor has primarily arrived from Cape Verde and Angola, now part of the greater Iberian Union; the resulting penetration of Portuguese influence into Equatorial Guinea has not gone unnoticed. 

Despite its small size and suppression by the colonial authorities, Equatorial Guinea has produced several movements determined to throw out Spanish control and exploitation. The planter Acacio Mañe Ela became the father of the independence cause when, around 1950, he founded the Crusade for the Liberation of Equatorial Guinea (CNLGE). Throughout the 1950s, he quietly spread his movement throughout the Continental Province. While Mañe was far from a direct threat to the colony, Governor Faustino Ruíz González reacted ruthlessly, employing the Guardia Civil to murder the farmer. Other independence activists took the hint; within the year, hundreds had fled across the borders to the newly independent countries of Gabon and the Federal Republic of Cameroon. If the ethnic ties between the Fang people of Río Muni were not justification enough for the Gabonese and Cameroonian leadership to assist the Equaguinean exiles, the United States' involvement soon gave them plenty more. The State Department's African Affairs Bureau recognized that the Equaguinean independence movement could prove a useful tool for discomfiting the Iberian Union if such action ever proved necessary. Thus, the CNLGE evolved into the Popular Idea for Equatorial Guinea (IPGE) under the leadership of Nkuna Ndongo. 

The windfall of foreign support soon gave way to difficulties for the independence movement. The IPGE was headquartered in Ambam, Cameroon, under the official patronage of President Paul Soppo Priso; their official program called for the eventual integration of Equatorial Guinea into the country. President Priso was not the only actor with a legitimate claim to leadership over the country, however. The UPC had been fighting for an independent and free Cameroon since French rule, and by the early 1950s, they had started to make serious headway in claiming control in the country's interior. While the IPGE relied on Yaoundé, some within the movement held strong sympathies for the UPC. Under pressure from Priso, Atanasio Ndongo Miyone led his faction into a second exile, this time to Ghana; 

President Kwame Nkrumah, a friend of the UPC himself, welcomed them. In Accra, Miyone's IPGE exiles reformed into the National Movement for the Liberation of Equatorial Guinea (MONALIGE). They, too, called for federation with Cameroon, but the Cameroon they had in mind was not Soppo Priso's but Moumié's. The only national movement that has not endorsed federation with Cameroon is Bonifacio Ondó Edú's Union de Guinea Ecuatorial (UGE), based in Libreville and backed by the Aubame government there. 

With such a tangled web of visions for Equatorial Guinea's future, and so many outside forces at play, it is hard to imagine that the issue will be resolved quickly or cleanly. No matter what, it can be assumed that Madrid will not countenance the loss of one of its last colonies so easily, and that the murder of Mañe is merely a taste of what it is prepared to do to prevent such an occurrence.

https://redd.it/1m982oo
@tnomod

Vasily Shuskin as a Collectable
https://redd.it/1n9xvvu
@tnomod

bandits
https://redd.it/1na2nyt
@tnomod

GIFs for Yippie!

https://redd.it/1nccg8k
@tnomod

Jumbo will have his great society
https://redd.it/1ngtztq
@tnomod

How is WW1 remembered in TNO?
https://redd.it/1nii9w1
@tnomod

Development Diary XXXI: Débrouillez-Vous - Part 3/4

# Southern Africa:

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The modern state of South Africa is the result of a devil's bargain at the dawn of the twentieth century. As decades of competition between the British Empire and the independent Boer Republics in Southern Africa came to a climax in the Second Anglo-Boer War, Cape Colony Governor Alfred Milner promised that Black and mixed-race South Africans would prosper in a more racially tolerant society should Britain be victorious. Yet when drafting the Treaty of Vereeniging at the war's conclusion, the British were all too quick to play the role of Pilate, washing their hands of the messy issue of enfranchisement. They promised the defeated Afrikaner Boers that no decision would be made regarding enfranchisement for non-whites before self-government was granted to the newly incorporated colonies. On this point, the British kept their word, and by the time Union was declared between the Cape, Natal, Orange Free State (OFS), and the Transvaal in 1910, only the Cape had any sort of non-racial enfranchisement. 

A major turning point in South African politics came in 1914 with J.B.M. Hertzog's founding of the National Party (NP). Hertzog was one of the pillars of Afrikaner politics during the first decades of the Union; the former Boer general and cabinet minister held stubbornly to his resentment of the British and his republicanism. Under his leadership, the NP quickly became the primary opposition to the SAP, displacing the Unionists, who folded into the SAP in 1920.

The interwar period was one of great social upheaval in South Africa, as urbanization and industrialization exacerbated intense racial and class frictions. Hertzog's National Party capitalized on the underlying anger of the poor white workers, forging a coalition with the Labour Party that won a shock victory in the 1924 elections. The National-Labor government fulfilled its promises by instituting welfare policies and labor protections for the poorer whites; non-white workers were confronted with a reinforced 'colour bar'. Hertzog also pushed for an expansion of the franchise to all whites, first by granting white female suffrage and then by removing property and wealth restrictions, which substantially weakened the already minimal power of non-white voters.

The Great Depression was a massive blow to the South African economy, and desperate times called for desperate measures. Smuts and Hertzog agreed to merge their parties into the United South African National Party (UP). For hardliners in the Nationalist Party, this Fusion Government was a step too far. In 1935, Daniël François Malan, head of the Cape branch of the NP, formed the Purified National Party (GNP) with fellow hardliners. While the UP's victory in the 1938 general elections seemed to say that South Africans had no interest in the extreme Afrikaner nationalism of the GNP compared to the unity and stability promised by the UP, Smuts and Hertzog were building their political future out of sand, and this became apparent all too soon.

Only a year later, in 1939, the German Reich invaded Poland and triggered the Second World War. As a British dominion, South Africa was naturally expected to support its mother country, but there could not have been a more contentious issue for the government. Many Afrikaners, including Prime Minister Hertzog, were not interested in putting South African lives on the line for a country they wanted independence from. When Parliament voted narrowly to enter the war, Hertzog resigned rather than fight, leaving Smuts to be appointed as his wartime replacement. For the Afrikaners who agreed with Hertzog, there was more to this conflict than just the geopolitics involved; many had come to openly sympathize and admire fascism and Nazism in particular.

During the 1920s and 1930s, many Afrikaner hardliners saw fascism as the vehicle needed to bring about an independent

Afrikaner republic immersed in the principles of 'Christian-Nationalism'. South African fascists, almost all with ties to the old NP, formed groups like the Greyshirts, the Boernasie, and the Nuwe Orde. The most prominent of the South African fascist organizations would prove to be the Ox-Wagon Sentinels (OB), founded in 1938 as an Afrikaner 'cultural association'. By 1940, its Commandant, Johannes van Rensberg, had organized a thousands-strong paramilitary force: the Stormjaers. 

Many members of the GNP, who were soon re-joined by Hertzog to create the Reunited National Party (HNP), were open in their desire to see Nazi Germany defeat Britain, thinking that it would dramatically speed up their timetable to independence and republic. Others saw Nazism as a natural reaction to the threats of capitalism and Bolshevism, both of which, according to HNP leaders like Eric Louw, were to be blamed on the Jews. Louw and his party colleagues had spent the 1930s stoking antisemitic hate against the Jewish refugees who came pouring out of Germany.

The HNP enjoyed strong relations with most of the fascist organizations, although the OB soon began to cause them headaches. Initially seeing the OB as a powerful ally, given its tens of thousands of highly energized members, Malan formed a pact with OB leadership in 1940, the Cradock Agreement. The Agreement recognized that the HNP and OB operated in different spheres, the former in politics, and the latter in culture, and that neither group would meddle in the affairs of the other. Unfortunately for Malan, van Rensberg was as ambitious as he was extreme and was soon using his storm troops to engage in open sabotage efforts. On this, Malan was willing to defend the OB from the government, but when Rensberg began to jockey for the role of leader of the Afrikaners in the political space as well, Malan turned harshly on his former ally. By the time he assumed the title of Volksleier at the 1941 party congress, Malan had thoroughly thrown the OB under the proverbial bus while trying to moderate the HNP's image. 

Malan recognized that the HNP could not win the general election in 1943, but he put everything he could muster into the campaign. The result, a blowout victory for the incumbent UP, ought to have crushed his ambitions. What Malan recognized, however, was that this triumph for the UP and Smuts was highly illusory. The government had gained seats on its majority, yes, but the HNP had gained more, and with Hertzog out of the UP, a majority of the Afrikaner vote was now Malan's. Above all, it was now clear that the war was not going in favor of the Allied Powers. Only months before the July elections, German troops had come ashore on the beaches of southern England as Operation Sealion commenced. The rally to the flag had no doubt helped the ever-defiant Smuts, but war fatigue and the humiliation of the British would be decisive in the long run.

Before the dust from the election had even settled, Malan and his top lieutenants were taking action. Unlike the UP and the aged, increasingly aloof Smuts, the HNP could not rest on its laurels. The troublemakers within Afrikanerdom would need to be finished off. Malan had been right back in 1940 - the OB were still a valuable asset, they would just need definitive taming. Malan, working through former OB members in the HNP, quietly re-opened a dialogue with the OB Grand Council. The argument he presented to them was clear enough: anyone with eyes could see that the Axis was on the upswing - German landings in Britain and its offensive across the Volga, the Italian advance into Egypt, the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor - it was only a matter of time. South Africa could only meet the moment, however, with Malan in charge. The Afrikaners needed a strong leader to meet the moment, and van Rensberg, for all his bravado, was not capable of stepping into power. Moreover, the more trouble the Stormjaers caused, the more difficult a task Malan and his party would have in securing the support of the moderate

whites. Whether by luck or providence, the Grand Council agreed with Malan's reasoning. Van Rensberg was ordered to cease operations, and a reconciliation between the OB and the party produced the Second Cradock Agreement. 

The end of the war in 1945 humiliated the Smuts government. Having gone against so many of his fellow Afrikaners to defend the same empire of the camps, Smuts had gambled everything on Allied victory, and he had lost. What were South Africa's rewards for joining this pointless crusade? Thousands of dead across East Africa, Egypt, and in the British Isles. There were also the new dependencies - in the last year of the war, as it became obvious that Britain could not hold out much longer, Smuts had ordered the UDF into the High Commission Territories of Bechuanaland, Swaziland, and Basutoland in order to stop them from falling into Axis hands. The peace treaty had made no mention of them, and the new collaborator government in London had much more to worry about than three of its least valuable territories. Peace, then, was certainly a bitter pill to swallow.

The Smuts government limped along for three miserable years, fully conscious of its failures while Malan and the HNP marshalled overwhelming Afrikaner opinion against it. As the 1948 elections approached, Malan and his cronies fell back on a series of simple, but devastatingly effective attacks. There were, of course, the charges of national humiliation and popular betrayal from the entry into the war, and the claim that only a strong leader could navigate the New Order South Africa found itself in, but what struck an even deeper chord was Malan's apocalyptic vision of race relations. The demands of the war had spurred industrial growth,  this growth meant an increase in the need for labor, which in South Africa could only be met with African laborers from the reserves. The growth of a non-white, urban proletariat conscious of their leverage within the economy deeply alarmed white society. Some UP leaders around Prime Minister Smuts were prepared to offer social and economic reforms to meet the moment, but they were swimming against the tide. 

According to the HNP Volksleier, the only solution to this imminent crisis was the redoubling of segregation under the policy of Apartheid \- a complete separation between white and black, with the latter serving as a permanent underclass for the benefit of the former. The results of the election proved this strategy was far more successful than even the HNP could have counted on - the party was handed a clear governing majority. 

The party wasted no time, capturing South African institutions one after another. The police, the courts, the military, the parastatals - they were all packed with loyal HNP members and turned into tools for furthering the party's agenda. Under Malan's strict leadership, Parliament passed scores of Apartheid legislation. South West Africa, a League of Nations mandate assigned to Pretoria since Versailles, was officially made the Union's fifth province; its new seats in the Assembly and Senate were guaranteed wins for the HNP. Laws further restricting land occupation and travel by race were soon in force, tightening the state's grip on the non-white population. The Communist Party was banned, and the state was granted extraordinary powers to act against any group construed as a threat to the racial order.

For all of his zeal in pursuing Apartheid, however, Prime Minister Malan was always one step behind its most strident proponents within his party. More problematic than their enthusiasm, however, was their increasing willingness to countenance extraconstitutional means to speed up the process of transforming the state. Above all, Malan always prided himself as a constitutionalist, but in the eyes of men like Hendrik Verwoerd and Johannes Strijdom, the Prime Minister's reluctance to bend the rules was becoming a liability. Increasingly exhausted as his party slipped further and further out of his grasp, D.F. Malan suddenly resigned the

premiership in 1952.

Into his position slid the energetic and tenacious Johannes Gerhardus Strijdom, the HNP strongman of the Transvaal. Where Malan had balked at defying the constitution, Strijdom, the 'Lion of the North,' barrelled forward. Within months of his ascension, the government began to reshuffle the judiciary. Up until then, the courts had been one of the few obstacles in the way of Apartheid's implementation, and the new Prime Minister was determined to break that resistance permanently. It was in the midst of the complicated battle against the courts that the issue of the High Commission Territories, so long sidelined, reemerged with nearly disastrous consequences. 

The Smuts government had occupied the High Commission Territories in the waning days of the Second World War, and the Beaverbrook government had declined to press the issue. Now, however, the Duke of Bedford was determined to correct that mistake. Bedford demanded the return of the territories, threatening all manner of consequences, but Strijdom refused to concede anything - the territories had been claimed as the British empire was disintegrating, and the South Africans would no more return them than Canada could be expected to return Bermuda. Bedford, infuriated, deployed troops to Rhodesia while calling on the Germans for support if it came to fighting; Germania watched with interest as Strijdom in turn deployed the UDF to the Rhodesian border. In a move that the world, the Reich refused to commit itself against South Africa, even pressuring their British clients to give up on their old territories in exchange for a few token corporate concessions. 

Since the end of the High Commission Territories Crisis, analysts have hotly debated the Reich's actions. Some argue that the Master of Europe had simply been stretched too thin, as it still dealt with resistance across its occupied territories while suffering from a sharp economic downturn, all the while supporting other colonial actions as in Madagascar and Kenya. Others suspect that Germania saw much more value in a friendly Pretoria than in a marginally expanded British Empire, and that the Reich was already at work extending its influence into the Union.

Regardless of Germany's reasoning, Strijdom's successful standoff with Britain skyrocketed his popularity. The Prime Minister judged that the time was perfect for a decisive break with Britain, the dream of Afrikaner nationalists since Vereeniging: a republic. The referendum the next year was passed with a decisive majority. At one time, the Anglo-South Africans would have presented a major challenge to the scheme, but now, after watching their mother country transformed into a fascist puppet and having nearly come to blows only months earlier, loyalists to His Majesty Edward VIII were few and far between. With that, it was done - the Republic of South Africa was now finally independent. 

While Strijdom had worked to consolidate the HNP's institutional power, his mentor and Minister for Native Affairs, Hendrik Verwoerd, had been working towards the ultimate expression of the Apartheid doctrine - the Homeland system. Developing upon the Native Reserves first established in 1913, Verwoerd envisioned a future in which all Africans would live in such territories amongst their people, ruled according to their historical customs, able to develop at their own pace. Of course, for Verwoerd, this development would never outstrip that of the white herrenvolk. Verwoerd saw the two chiefdoms of Swaziland and Basutoland as excellent test cases in how the Homelands might develop, native authorities working harmoniously under Pretoria's sovereign authority but free, for the most part, to conduct domestic affairs under their traditional laws. By the end of the 1950s, Verwoerd had identified several other territories to be granted this strange form of self-government within a few years. 

Prime Minister Strijdom died unexpectedly in 1958, leading to a fierce competition between possible successors, but in the end, Verwoerd came out on

top. His commanding personality, political mentorship of the late Prime Minister, and status as the HNP's leading racial theorist all pointed in a single direction - only Dr. Verwoerd could lead the HNP into a future that promised to be ever more turbulent. 

While many legalist parties oppose the HNP government, the system of minority rule itself is opposed by two main groupings - the African National Congress (ANC), and the Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC). Of the two, the ANC is by far the older formation, having been founded in 1912. In its early years, the ANC was primarily a party of the Black elite and middle class, with very limited outreach to the masses. Inspired chiefly by Gandhian philosophy, the ANC maintained a stance of strict non-violence. Attempts at mass mobilisation occurred under the leadership of Josiah Gumede in the 20s, but he was eventually ousted from his position, and replaced by the conservative Pixley ka Isaka Seme. The ANC began to gradually revitalise in the 1940s, under the leadership of AB Xuma, who was able to successfully take advantage of an upsurge in discontent and Black trade unionism. The radical ANC Youth League was founded under his leadership, and they would quickly become the dominant faction in the ANC, surpassing the central leadership and building up the first generation of anti-apartheid freedom fighters - among them, Nelson Mandela.

The creation of Apartheid had huge impacts upon the ANC, with the Youth League being at the forefront, demanding a more radical policy against the government, which they successfully achieved, with the Programme of Action. The Programme of Action demanded mass civil disobedience, strikes, and deliberate defiance of the apartheid laws, which led in turn to the Defiance Campaign. The Campaign’s demands were not enacted, but it proved that radical action could work. The ANC, however, were beginning to fracture over the issue of whether or not the anti-apartheid struggle should adopt a multi-racial stance. Figures like Mandela wanted to begin official cooperation with the underground South African Communist Party, alongside other Indian, White and Coloured organisations that opposed apartheid and minority rule. They were able to successfully push for this goal, organising the Congress of the People in 1955, and forming an official alliance between anti-apartheid organisations, adopting the Freedom Charter stating their core principles and making it clear that the struggle against apartheid included all races.

Much of the ANC’s Youth League, however, felt betrayed by this policy, believing that it represented a step backward from the Programme of Action and that the Freedom Charter focused insufficiently on the Black majority. In addition to this, there was a strong dislike for the Communist Party among much of the Youth League, with the ANC and SACP being historical rivals and the ANC being a traditionally anti-communist organisation. In 1959, a major split in the party occurred due to this, with Robert Sobukwe and Potlako Leballo leading a significant section of ANC cadres over to a new party - the PAC. The PAC’s programme stressed the idea of South Africa as a solely Black African nation, and took heavy inspiration from Pan-Asian rhetoric in the Co-Prosperity Sphere, seeing common ground in the statement of “Asia for the Asians, Africa for the Africans”. In addition to this, the PAC firmly rejected communism in all forms, disavowing any cooperation with communist organisations and declaring that they had no interest in class struggle, only national liberation.

No single event better encapsulates the pervasive racial violence of South Africa than the Blesberg Massacre. In furtherance of Prime Minister Verwoerd's ambitious goals for the Homelands policy, in 1960, the HNP issued removal orders for Basotho, Swazi, and Tswana in South Africa. In a show of defiance, both the ANC and PAC organized major protests all across the country. While the South African Police unleashed violence to suppress many of

these demonstrations, the township of Blesberg in the Orange Free State was the site of the most severe confrontation. Armed officers opened fire on the protesting crowds, killing dozens and injuring scores more. In the aftermath, Prime Minister Verwoerd brought down the full force of the state; Justice Minister B.J. Vorster invoked the 1950 Suppression of Communism Act, banning the ANC and PAC. Both organizations were scattered as the authorities hauled thousands of activists to prison. Patlako Leballo, secretary general of the PAC, fled to Azad Hind, leaving Robert Sobukwe to manage the now underground movement. Meanwhile, the ANC's leadership dispersed, with some hiding in Bechuanaland and others escaping to as far away as Ghana. Both groups have prepared a transition to armed struggle and have organized paramilitary wings, but without ready sources of weapons or a strategy to follow, both MK and Poqo have been able to accomplish little more than basic training for volunteers.

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Ever since South African forces seized German South West Africa, the politicians have been determined to incorporate the territory into their country. Jan Smuts, South Africa's representative to the Versailles Conference, pushed for and ultimately received acceptance of South West Africa as a Class C mandate under the League of Nations. Under this classification, the territory would be governed as if it were an integral part of South Africa; South Africa's leaders, Smuts among them, fully expected that one day South West Africa would be recognized as the fifth province in the Union. 

South African policy certainly reflected this belief. Thousands of settlers were encouraged to immigrate to South West Africa by the post-war governments. When South Africa's Parliament established a whites-only Legislative Council, politics soon divided between the old German settlers and their newer Afrikaner and English counterparts. For years, the German voting bloc, resentful of their new neighbors and opposing incorporation, managed to secure dominance in the Council, but by the 1930s, they had lost significant ground to the United National South West Party. 

Unsurprisingly, National Socialism became quite popular in South West Africa during the interwar period, just as it gained many admirers in South Africa proper. To his credit, Smuts took decisive action to clamp down on many of these pro-Nazi groups, and working with the UNSWP, they banned several fascist organizations. In response, pro-Nazi German settlers formed the Deutscher Südwest Bund as a "cultural association" under the leadership of Ernest Emil Dressel. 

For much of the 1930s and 1940s, facing Pretoria’s scrutiny, the German community in South West Africa was on a serious back foot, but the Reich's victory in the Second World War and the HNP's in the 1948 elections would result in a dramatic reversal. The suppression of pro-Nazi groups, which the Smuts government had continued to enforce, was soon lifted as Pretoria re-established normal diplomatic relations with the Reich. The main beneficiary of this policy in South West Africa was, of course, the DSWB. Ernest Dressel would eventually retire from his position as Führer of the organization, replaced by Adolf Brinkmann. It is an open secret that the Reich Foreign Office and Abwehr have funneled significant resources to the DSWB, and Brinkmann himself has met several times with Hellmut von Leipzig, a South West African-born Wehrmacht officer who has on several occasions been sent to Pretoria with German military delegations.

With the League of Nations defunct, the HNP was free to declare South West Africa as the country's fifth province. Parliament quickly allotted the new province seats in the House of Assembly and Senate - all of which would end up in National Party hands. By this point, the German settlers' distaste for the Afrikaners had largely abated, and the DSWB made clear it

stood behind the government. The UNSWP collapsed in the Legislative Assembly elections in 1953, while the party's leader, Jacques Niehaus, adopted an ultraconservative tack that led nowhere. From that point on, South West Africa was an HNP stronghold. In a sign of extremism baked into the HNP's everyday politics, the party's chairman in South West Africa since the 1950s has been Senator Johannes von Strauss von Moltke, a former fascist Greyshirt.

It was during the Strijdom years that South African lawmakers began to turn their attention to implementing the new racial order in the Republic's fifth province. It helped that in the colonial period, the Germans had already established a native reserve system that the South Africans could take advantage of. Most of these reserves were located in the north of the territory, above the 'Police Zone' that demarcated where the state maintained European policing. As the timetable for the Homelands scheme in South Africa progressed, Native Affairs Minister Verwoerd tapped his longtime ally and fellow racial theorist Michiel Daniel Christiaan de Wet Nel to lead a commission aimed at expanding the Homeland system into South West Africa. When Verwoerd found himself the next Prime Minister after Strijdom's unexpected death, he picked de Wet Nel as South West's next administrator, with a remit to implement the recommendations of the Commission.

While opposition exists among the South West Africans, it has so far proven to be underdeveloped, underequipped, and heavily divided along ethnic lines, making large-scale resistance all the more difficult and armed resistance an impossibility for the foreseeable future. The nationalist cause is currently dominated by two organizations, the first being the South West African National Union (SWANU) under Jariretundu Kozonguizi and the South West African People's Organization (SWAPO) led by Sam Nujoma. At the urging of Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah, host of Nujoma and SWAPO's headquarters, both groups have pledged to integrate into the South West African National Liberation Front (SWANLF), but as of 1962, only tentative steps have been taken to bring this dream of a united front into reality.

Britain kept many of its African territories following the war, but this was not true for the High Commission Territories. The High Commission Territories, consisting of Basutoland, Swaziland, and Bechuanaland, were Britain's South African possessions under their direct supervision as compared to the self-ruling Union of South Africa. These territories had a long history of opposition to settler encroachment during the late nineteenth century, and while each eventually fell under British dominion, before the Second World War, London protected them from Pretoria's expansionist impulses.

The British declared a protectorate over the Bechuanaland territory, which at that time was divided between various Tswana chiefdoms, during the Berlin Conference in 1885 (before even making this known to the BaTswana themselves). Initially, the territory was expected to go to Cecil Rhodes' British South Africa Company, but Rhodes' ill-fated Jameson Raid caused Whitehall to shelve this plan. Still, with the consolidation of British rule in South Africa, culminating in the creation of the Union in 1910, incorporation into South Africa seemed inevitable. It was continuously delayed, however, thanks to the public and private lobbying efforts of the DiKgosi, the ruling Tswana chiefs, and their agents.

At first, South Africa's occupation of the High Commission Territories at the end of the war brought few real changes to life in the Protectorate. It was not even clear in what capacity the Smuts government even intended to administer Bechuanaland. The Protectorate had already been run from the South African city of Mafeking, and an equivalent reserve system had been introduced in the Union in 1913. 

More dramatic changes were introduced following the ascension of the HNP. Official documents began to refer to the "Territory

of Bechuanaland" rather than the "Protectorate" as they had continued to do during Smuts' tenure. This attitude would later culminate in South Africa's standoff with the British government in 1954, ultimately leading to the 1955 republican referendum. 

Prime Minister Strijdom took these new policies even further. Rather than seeing Bechuanaland as a British Protectorate under new management, or even just a large Tswana reserve in line with the nascent Homeland plan, he moved to expand Afrikaner presence northwards into the territory. To entice settlement, the government moved to dispossess the few African freeholders in the Barolong Farms, the only area in the Protectorate where individual Africans were allowed to own land; this land was then sold to settlers at a substantial discount. Pretoria then transferred the administrative capital of the territory from Mafikeng to Francistown.

By the time of Hendrik Verwoerd's premiership, thousands of settlers had taken up new residence in Bechuanaland. Charles Swart now represented the South African government in Francistown. A party rival of Verwoerd's, Swart lost the battle to succeed Strijdom and has been sent into political wilderness with the largely thankless task of carrying out Pretoria's will in its northern frontier. Counterbalancing the territorial administration is the Native Advisory Council. The Council's current speaker is Bathoen Gaseitsiwe, Kigosi of the BaNgwaketse; for the most part, he has found himself at peace with his new South African overlords, although he maintains an interest in uniting the Tswana chiefdoms into a federation under a single paramount chief. Who would have the credibility to claim such a mantle, though, remains rather unclear.

While these institutions constitute the accepted range of political involvement for Bechuanaland's elite, a new force is emerging in the territory. The Bechuanaland People's Congress has not yet faced official proscription like the ANC or PAC, but it is cast in their mold. Founded in the late 1950s by former schoolteacher Kgaleman Motsete, exiled activist Motsamai Mpho, and Philip Matante, a veteran, Apostolic minister, and Witwatersrand gangster. While the BPC has grown substantially, it is strained by competing visions for the future of the movement. Mpho and his followers in the party believe in the Charterist principles of their ANC cousins in South Africa, while Matante has increasingly identified with the more Africanist PAC. 

These divisions have caused a paralysis in the movement, and it is clear that something must give, and soon. For the South African masters of Bechuanaland, this crisis in the opposition can only be seen as an opportunity. Indeed, with South West Africa having been officially integrated, the most fervent settlement advocates in Pretoria now wonder if the former Protectorate is destined to become the Republic's sixth province.

After 1948, HNP rule transformed the small, landlocked chiefdoms of Basutoland and Swaziland into de facto autonomous Homelands under South African sovereignty, although officially, both polities remain in a legal grey area. Internally, South African overlordship also had the effect of reversing the very modest steps that had been taken towards diffusing and democratizing political power in the polities. For Pretoria, strong, centralized, and traditional authority would be its conduit to rule over its new subjects.

In Basutoland, they supported the ascension of the young and ambitious Moshoeshoe II. Working through tobacco magnate Anton Rupert, Pretoria and Moshoeshoe sidelined the Basutoland National Council in favor of the newly installed Basutoland Advisory Commission. Moshoeshoe's cooperation with the South African regime dismayed many of his loyalists thought to use the Paramount Chieftancy as a counterweight to the oligarchic chiefly class that the colonial order had empowered. This reversal drained support from reformist loyalist groups like the Basutoland Progressive Association of Samuel Seepheephe

Matete and towards oppositional movements advocating for a modern and independent Basutoland. At present, the two largest opposition movements, the Basutoland National League under Chief Joseph Leabua Jonathan and the PAC-aligned Basutoland African Congress under Ntsu Mokhele, have formed a united front in calling for a constitutional system of government able to check Moshoeshoe's currently unlimited powers.

To the east, Swaziland's estimable Ngwenyama Sobhuza II rules his lands as a royal dictator. Once a reformer engaged in the work of his progressively-minded subjects, the aging monarch has become increasingly wary of any efforts to limit his royal prerogative. In that sense, South Africa's offered quid pro quo - that of obeisance in return for a free hand domestically - had been a godsend. 

In contrast to the backwards Basutoland, Swaziland has had something of an economic boom since the 1940s. Swaziland is home to many profitable mines and plantations, most of which are in the hands of European corporations and a thriving settler community of nearly ten thousand. Unsurprisingly, these settlers, who make their outsized voices heard through the European Advisory Council, have benefited greatly from the arrival of the HNP and its representative, Jacobus Loubser.

Democratic and partisan politics do not exist in the new Swaziland, and even the Libandla lakaNgwane, the aristocratic Council of the Ngwane Nation, has been marginalized. Of course, politics have been banished - far from it. Alongside the European Advisory Council, other advocacy groups exist, like the EurAfrican Welfare Association, but they pale in comparison to the EAC's influence. Real opposition to Sobhuza and South African influence has come from the Swaziland Progressive Association. While handicapped by the monarchy's extensive popular support, it enjoys shrewd leadership under men like Dr. Ambrose Zwane and John Nquku. Unfortunately, this has come at something of a cost, as Nquku, despite his skill, has proven to be rather authoritarian himself, threatening to split the organization. For his part, Zwane looks not only to neighboring South Africa's ANC for guidance, but increasingly to President Nkrumah's Accra, and only the insistence of the South African authorities has prevented his visiting the capital of Pan-Africanist action.



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