What was achieved in all those struggles was independence. The colony was no longer. India
was no longer a colony of Britain. They tried for a while to have another name. They called it the
British Commonwealth. None of that stuff worked. Those places didn't want to be subordinated to
Great Britain in any significant way as they had been. [It] was a fundamental change.
The question arose in every one of the struggles for "independence": what exactly does it mean?
Yes we are no longer legally a part of the old empire. We have fought against them. We've won
in the fights- often as I said bitter long violent fights. We are now an independent country. We have
our own government. We have our own currency. We have our own etc, etc, and we sit in the United
Nations, for example, as an independent, equal voting with other countries and all the rest.
But the real issue was: did colonialism stop? That was the crucial question, and the answer
to that is unambiguous: no. It did not. It turned out in every country that won its independence,
which is most of the countries sitting in the United Nations today. [They] were once colonies.
A minority were colonizers, a majority were colonies, the subjects, the controlled spaces of
the minority in that situation. They didn't break away economically. They broke away politically but
not economically, and as I'm about to explain, if you break politically but not economically,
you haven't broken. It's a bitter lesson to learn. It was bitter for all these countries,
and it's bitter today because it's still being learned. Why? During the time that you were a
colony, the dominant country... so let's say, I'll pick up a country I talked about before. Kenya,
an East African country, that was for a long time a colony of Britain. Well, the British
built the harbor. The British built the railways that were there. The British designed the school
system even though the vast majority of people couldn't go to school because they didn't build
enough schools and they cost money and all the rest that colonialism did that I've talked about.
But you left only a skeleton. You didn't leave enough resources, and the resources that were
there were focused on, designed for integration with the company/the country that was dominant.
So even though you were independent, I'll give you the example of Kenya.
Kenya had become an important place for the British Empire to secure a food that they
needed called coffee. Kenya to this day depends on producing and selling coffee.
That's not a part of African history. That's what the British brought there. They also
brought the settlers if you recall who pushed the African population, the Kikuyu tribe and others,
off of their land to settle the British where they could run coffee plantations:
forcing Africans back to work on the land taken from them to produce the coffee that profited
those few settlers and the British merchants who took the coffee, processed it and shipped it all
over the world. In other words, Kenya's economy after Independence as much as before was geared
to the global capitalist market in which Britain was a very powerful player. The same is true for
French colonies and so on, and so on, and so on. It is really important to understand this:
that you don't become independent when you declare it. Even if you fight a bloody war to get it,
you're still stuck. The United States after our Revolutionary War and after the war of 1812,
we were still dependent on producing cotton and sending it to Great Britain.
Before the revolution and after, that was the most important industry in this country.
That's why slavery was so important. That's why we kept bringing slaves from Africa to the
American South to produce the cotton which continued to be sold to England. Because,
that was the lifeblood of the economy, and the United States had a formal independence
but it took them a long time to have a real economic independence. And during that time,
what the British did still shaped what the United States did. The British bought that cotton,
and that made the South rich. And that kept the slave trade going, and that destroyed large parts
of Africa. Those things didn't stop because the United States got independent, and those kinds of
things don't stop in Asia, Africa or Latin America when they stopped being a formal colony and become
yeah an informal colony, a neo-colony: hooked in to the dominant foreign power
that took them over as a colony in the first place. The struggle against colonialism and
imperialism continues under neo-colonialism and neo-imperialism right to our present day.