I'm demonstrating for the repeal of this villainous law and this constant provocation directed at blacks

Je manifeste pour l'abrogation de cette loi scélérate et cette provocation continuelle vis a vis de noirs

This law which is an insult to all of those colonized

Cette loi qui est une injure a l'ensemble des peuples colonisés

The intension of the authors of the dubious legislation is unclear, but perhaps they would want the world to believe that Europe's struggle for and eventual partitioning of Africa at the Berlin conference in 1884, was a charitable gesture to "liberate" natives of the colonies.

It is also even possible, critics say, to "spin" the very well-documented inhuman slave trade, for instance, to show that millions of Africans uprooted from their countries to sugar cane plantations in the Americas and the Caribbean were done a great favour by the European slave merchants?

This would be in spite of overwhelming evidence showing that the African slaves were taken against their will, some in shackles and even with their mouths padlocked.

Luckily, no textbooks will erase the paraphernalia of slavery in places like Badagry in Nigeria and Goree island in Senegal, which are living testimonies to the evils of man's inhumanity to man.

On 29 November, the lower house of the French parliament voted by183-94 to uphold a law that puts a so-called positive spin on the country's chequered colonial past, ignoring complaints from historians and the former French territory of Algeria.

Legislators from the governing conservative UMP party had already passed the law in February when only a handful of deputies were present and it only came under full public scrutiny in recent months with a petition by history teachers.

Under the law, school textbooks are to address France's "positive role" in its former colonies and requires that "school programmes recognize in particular the positive character of the French overseas presence, notably in North Africa."

The law has embarrassed conservative Chirac and could delay the signing of a friendship Treaty between France and Algeria, a North African country, held up as France's one-time colonial jewel that won independence in 1962 after a brutal eight-year conflict, which France only recently admitted as a war. [...]

Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika has equated the law with "mental blindness," saying it smacks of revisionism while the Algerian Parliament has called it a "grave precedent."

Defending the piece of legislation, French Education Minister Gilles de Robien has said that textbooks would not be changed, but Socialists in the European country consider the law offensive to former colonies and French citizens with roots in areas whose history would be affected.

The nation expresses it's gratitude to the women and men who participated in the works accomplished by France in the former French departments in Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, and Indochina as well as the territories previously under French sovereignty.

Article 4:
The university research programs give to the history of the French overseas presence, notably in North Africa, the place that it deserve

School programs recognize, in particular, the positive character of the French overseas presence, notably in North Africa, and give the history and the sacrifices of the French army fighters from those territories the prominence they deserve.

The cooperation that allows for the connecting of the oral and written sources available in France and abroad is encouraged.

If the war in Algeria, decolonization and independence are taught "with their complexities" since the 1980s, the history of the slave trade is poorly represented, except in the French Caribbean Antilles islands. Even though the Taubira law expected "school programs to give [it] the important place it deserves". We are still waiting for the implementation rules to take effect. Often, the mention of this particular period relies on the good will of the instructors, their knowledge of the subject and the disparity of the textbooks available.

a detailed chronological study of decolonization is not possible. Two maps suffice to represent this global phenomenon, before focusing on the study of two particularly significant examples of end of the two great colonial empires:
-    The decolonization of India, as an example of the modalities of the British disengagement and it's post colonial consequences
-    The decolonization of French Africa that shows how France broke from it's colonial past, progressively and without bloody conflict in Black Africa, but with difficulty in Algeria where the confrontation was accompanied by a national trauma.