Nationalist Leaders Educated by Empire

Many leaders of independence movements were educated in the colonial powers' own universities and law schools, and they turned the ideas they learned there against empire. Jawaharlal Nehru studied at Cambridge and Muhammad Ali Jinnah trained as a barrister in London; Kwame Nkrumah studied in the United States and London; Jomo Kenyatta studied anthropology at the London School of Economics; Léopold Senghor became a leading French scholar.

In imperial capitals they met activists from other colonies and encountered ideas of liberalism, socialism and national self-determination. The Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester in 1945 brought together Nkrumah, Kenyatta and W. E. B. Du Bois and demanded independence. Critics later noted that these elites could be distant from rural majorities, and some historians argue mass movements mattered more than leaders. Still, their fluency in the colonizers' language and law made them effective negotiators.