At the beginning of 1960 British newspapers and the British Labour Party dubbed 1960 ‘Africa Year’. Subsequent events soon justified that description. Perhaps two of them stand out as pre-eminently important: the shooting dead of seventy-eight Africans at Sharpeville and Langa in South Africa in March and the later protracted crisis in the Congo.

The former epitomised for the watching world the tragic issues that had still to be resolved upon the last major battleground for racial equality. Racial discrimination, of course, existed elsewhere; but in no other country was it any longer elevated so purposefully to be the touchstone of national life. Sharpeville turned the meeting of Commonwealth prime ministers in May 1960 into the most electric thus far of the whole series of such meetings that stretched back for half a century and more. It precipitated a clear definition of the Commonwealth as pre-eminently a multi-racial society, and it hastened the departure from the Commonwealth of a member state (and a ‘white’ one at that) against its own declared wishes after having been a full participant for over half a century. For the world's only close-knit cross-continental club that was an eventuality of major significance.

The crisis in the Congo, which followed its attainment of self-government on 30 June 1960, obviously had even greater repercussions. It precipitated in particular not only the most ambitious political operation ever undertaken up to that date by the United Nations, but the establishment of the growing number of independent African countries as a world political force in their own right.