In August 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt forced Winston Churchill to sign the Atlantic Charter as a condition for US support of the Allied effort in World War II. The Charter—a heartening emblem of American idealism—required the European allies to relinquish their colonies following the war. For two centuries, unimpeded access to the colonized world’s rich national resources had been the principal source of European wealth. The Atlantic Charter and nationalist liberation movements in the 1950s and ’60s dismantled the traditional colonial model in Africa. The continent, however, quickly
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