Africa's Wars of Independence: Algeria, Kenya, and the Congo

The Algerian War of Independence began on 1 November 1954 with coordinated attacks by the National Liberation Front (FLN). Algeria was legally organized as an integral part of France, and more than a million European settlers, the "pieds-noirs," lived there, complicating any path to independence; the FLN waged both urban and rural guerrilla warfare, including the Battle of Algiers (1956-1957), while France deployed hundreds of thousands of soldiers and resorted systematically to torture, in a war that caused, by different historiographical estimates, between 300,000 and more than a million Algerian deaths. The conflict provoked a grave political crisis in France, contributing to the fall of the Fourth Republic in 1958 and the return to power of Charles de Gaulle, who founded the Fifth Republic and gradually moved toward accepting Algerian self-determination despite the violent opposition of the Secret Army Organization (OAS). The Evian Accords, signed on 18 March 1962, established a ceasefire and recognized Algerian independence, formally proclaimed on 5 July 1962 after an overwhelming referendum, with Ahmed Ben Bella becoming the first president of the new state.