We begin today another historical retrospective, focusing on the perhaps the most defining moment of Bruuman history: the Independence War, which raged from 1942 to 1956. This is the first of multiple installments in which we will recant the theme.
 
The Bruuman War of Independence: the prelude (until 1942)
 
In the decades following the effective abolition of slavery in colonial Bruuma in 1838, a small black middle class gradually emerged, composed of small landlords and business owners and civil servants. Despite the persistence of segregationist and discriminatory policies, some were able to obtain a proper education and even study abroad. As they came in contact with the work of Enlightened and Marxist philosophers, they begin to advocate equal rights and economic reforms for the black population. After the Motherland was involved in the Grand Alliance War, these ideals morphed into independentism.
 
A group of Afro Bruuman students founded the Popular Union for the Independence of Bruuma (PUIB) in 1921 and during the decade it slowly spread the issue among the middle class first and the working class. Its ideology mixed light socialistic inclination, in particular unionism, with progressivism and democracy advocacy, and most of its followers were urban dwellers either from the educated, well-being black and mulatto elite or from the workers’ categories with strong sense of affiliation, like dock workers.
 
The authorities’ initial response was cautious, mostly limited to dispersing small rallies and arresting PUIB’s leaders for unlawful propaganda, usually releasing them shortly after.

Another approach to the independence issue came from an opposite, more populistic perspective from the Rightful Movement for Justice and Equality (RiMoJE), a messianic Christian movement founded in 1929 and centered on the preaching and on the figure of its charismatic leader, Marcus Tinney.  RiMoJE was popular especially among the bottom end of the middle class - shopkeepers, clerks and sharecroppers – and posed Afro Bruuman as a chosen people, whose liberation from colonial domination would finally allow to live under God’s Commandments.  
 
The last major movement was the Workers’ Mojo Party (WMP), founded in 1931. Its weird brand of revolutionary communism and voodoo cultural traditionalism found vast echoes among the poorest masses of agricultural day laborers and urban proletarians, to whom a century freedom had not brought a better life. Despite this popular vocation, most of its founders were well educated.
 
The colonial authorities reacted with increase authoritarianism to the proliferation and popularity of these movement and arrests and violence at demonstrations became more frequent. On October 12th 1936, a trade union demonstration in Port Bayou (today Bayougrad) turn violent when the WMP militants clashed with the police, who then shoot the crowd, leaving five people dead. A wave of mass arrests against all movements ensued, and the WMP answered by bombing a police precinct in Georgeville (today Voodooville), killing eight policemen – two white officers and six black cadres – and going underground.
 
The PUIB soon followed after being banned from the authorities, while RiMoJE was allowed to continue its existence despite some restrictions. In the six years that followed, sporadic but regular act of violence and sabotage, as well as occasional public confrontation marked a state of unrest. When the Border War started in the Motherland in 1939, the Bruuman administration found itself caught off from the warring Motherland. In 1941 PUIB, WMP and other smaller groups held a series of clandestine meeting and laid down a plan for the next year: a general armed insurrection.