In the late 1940s, the African world was in utter turmoil. Many factors led up to this condition, and most, if not all, stemmed from the adverse effects of the history of European encroachment and colonialism. The European trade of enslaved Africans brought not only cultural instability and foreign ideological immoralities to the African continent but drained it of both valuable human and natural resources. The Portuguese, specifically, ruined the ancient Indian Ocean trade network, while simultaneously opening up the Kongo Kingdom in modern-day Angola to the trade of human bondage that would ensure that over a quarter of Africans taken to the so-called Americas came from its shores.

Further, the ending of the trade by the very same European powers brought even more economic havoc to major kingdoms and territories that had incautiously grown dependent on its resources. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Africa began to be ravaged by colonial forces. Ancient cities like Benin were burned to the ground by the British, the French would subjugate the last of Dahomey's brave warriors, and the mighty Oyo empire under the rule of Adeyemi Alowolodu came completely under the vassal-ship of Britain's Victoria. The 1884–1885 Berlin Conference carved up the African continent and separated people into colonial territories without regard for cultural and political affiliation.

The twentieth century continued this trend. Masses of African people were affected by two large-scale European wars, usually referred to under the misnomers World War I and World War II, in which millions of Africans found themselves to be little more than cannon fodder. Two decades before the second war, a pandemic known as the Spanish Flu infected over a third of the world's population, as well as killing millions of African people on the continent. In the United States, African Americans were far more likely to die from the disease than whites.

A decade before the second war there was a worldwide economic crisis, retroactively referred to as the Great Depression, which greatly affected African peasant farmers and miners, still under the thumb of European trading companies. It is also reported that during the Great Depression, African Americans, already no strangers to hardship, were under such economic duress that nearly 40 percent of the African American population could not support themselves without government assistance.