African Identities and the Struggle for Self-Determination

We’ve touched on a variety of global and local factors that dictated the growth of new African identities and strategies that eventually will serve the ends of removing colonial regimes (or forcing them into ever-more-untenable positions). From your reading and the film Battle of Algiers, were global factors–geopolitics, social/economic/intellectual change, military realities, and so on–or local factors–similar, but tied to relationships within a colony specifically–more important to determining the nature of the move towards independence (in pace, timing, and character) for new African national governments? Both are important, so picking one only means you have to show that it is more determinative. If you feel that it’s impossible to say that one or the other is predominant (or is always so), you can write a more nuanced essay to that effect, but be sure to convey your understanding of the underlying developments! Battle of Algiers must be used in some meaningful way within this paper, because its characters do talk about the UN, France, other colonial wars, and so forth, as well as Algeria specifically.