Great Historical Document or Just Propaganda? The Atlantic Charter and Global Africa in the Era of World War II

This article explores the impact of the Atlantic Charter, a key World War II era document authored by US President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, on Africans and people of African descent worldwide. No sooner had the Charter been released than Churchill, especially, tried to walk it back, claiming that its eight principles applied only to the European countries then under Nazi occupation and not to the colonies of Africa and Asia, including the British Empire. Rejecting Churchill’s ‘White Atlantic’ spin, anticolonial activists in the colonies, backed by allies and supporters in the metropoles, embraced the Charter as their own and insisted on its universal validity and applicability. Anticolonial activists in the British West African colonies and elsewhere in global Africa deployed the Charter to mobilise for a better postwar dispensation, including self-government and national independence. The Charter also provided political fodder for many in the United States, including African Americans linking colonialism and racism. Thus the Atlantic Charter, which some feared would become ‘just another piece of propaganda’, was made to live up to its promise as a ‘great historical document’ that informed both wartime struggles and the postwar dispensation.