Starting in Tunisia and Morocco in 1956 and extending to Sub-Saharan Africa with Ghana in 1957, most African countries had achieved independence from their European colonial masters by the mid-1960s.  In the Portuguese colonies independence was a longer and more drawn out experience, as the Portuguese continued to assert their control and encourage new white settlement right until 1974, on the eve of independence.  In February of 1961 a large group of Africans armed with knives and clubs attempted to free militants from a Luanda prison.