1950s–1960s: (Portuguese Africa and Algeria — The MPLA Founded in Angola in 1956, FRELIMO Formed in Mozambique in 1962, Both Launching Prolonged Wars of Libe…

1950s–1960s: (Portuguese Africa and Algeria — The MPLA Founded in Angola in 1956, FRELIMO Formed in Mozambique in 1962, Both Launching Prolonged Wars of Liberation Against Administrative Intransigence and Racist Policy, and Algeria’s FLN Launching War in November 1954 on Two Fronts — Guerrilla Warfare Inside and International Diplomacy Outside — Against a Settler Regime Backed by the Metropolitan State): In Portuguese Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau, nationalist leaders were compelled toward violent confrontation by administrative intransigence and increasingly racist policy. The MPLA, founded in 1956, took advantage of a widespread peasant uprising in the early 1960s erupting in response to forced labor and cotton cultivation — practices long abandoned in Anglophone and Francophone colonies. FRELIMO, formed in Mozambique in 1962, likewise launched a prolonged and destructive war of liberation. Yet there would be no bloodier war of national liberation than in Algeria, where within France the notion prevailed that Algeria was not a colonial territory but a province of the motherland. Constitutional reform schemes were half-hearted and continually sabotaged by colonial authorities. In 1948, younger nationalists formed the Organisation Secrète contemplating armed struggle; when it collapsed, a handful went on to found what became the Front de Libération Nationale, which launched the war for Algerian independence in November 1954 — fought on two fronts, guerrilla tactics inside Algeria and international diplomacy outside, taking the case to the UN, courting the non-aligned movement, and appealing to pan-Arab nationalism. The wars of liberation in Portuguese and French settler territories demonstrated what Fanon would theorize — that where the colonial system refuses negotiation, violence becomes the only language it understands.