Another World? East Africa, Decolonisation, and the Global History of the Mid-Twentieth Century

Ismay Milford,Gerard Mccann,Emma Hunter,Daniel Branch

doi:10.1017/s0021853721000566

Ismay Milford, Gerard Mccann + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1017/s0021853721000566

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Abstract

AbstractThis article proposes that there is a gap in our current understanding of the globalising and deglobalising dynamics of mid-twentieth-century East Africa, one that might be addressed by consolidating and taking forward recent developments in the historiography of decolonisation. Recent work by international historians has recovered the connected world of the 1940s to 1960s: the era of new postcolonial states, the ‘Bandung moment’, pan-African cooperation, and the early Cold War. Yet East Africa is less prominent in these histories than we might expect, despite the vibrancy of current work on this period in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania. Bringing these two fields into dialogue, through an explicitly regional East African framework and with a particular focus on individual lives, expands our understanding not only of the ‘globalisation of decolonisation’ but also of the deglobalising dynamics of the following decades that are frequently reduced to a history of global economic crisis.

Highlights

This article proposes that there is a gap in our current understanding of the globalising and deglobalising dynamics of mid-twentieth-century East Africa, one that might be addressed by consolidating and taking forward recent developments in the historiography of decolonisation
Recent work by international historians has recovered the connected world of the 1940s to 1960s: the era of new postcolonial states, the ‘Bandung moment’, pan-African cooperation, and the early Cold War
Bringing these two fields into dialogue, through an explicitly regional East African framework and with a particular focus on individual lives, expands our understanding of the ‘globalisation of decolonisation’ and of the deglobalising dynamics of the following decades that are frequently reduced to a history of global economic crisis

Summary

Part I: Histories of East Africa and East African global histories

While studies of East Africa’s environmental, cultural, social, and economic history have long been transnational and global in scope, historical research on the region’s varied experiences of decolonisation remains commonly segmented by territorial nation-states. Debates about East Africa’s future during decolonisation were not neatly bounded by nation, state, or by region, but were deeply entangled with Afro-Asian solidarity, pan-Africanism, world civil rights struggles, and liberal and communist internationalisms — each of which had its own internal tensions.. If we want to capture the multiple worlds imagined by East Africans in this period, we need to build on and take further recent scholarship which has combined the insights of area expertise with an attention to internationalisms, mobility, and print cultures This will allow historians to explore how different types of connections, especially those outside of the sphere of trade and economics, were forged from East Africa. Engel, ‘Introduction: the momentous 1960s – reflections on an African decade’, Comparativ, 29:4 (2019), 12. 51Getachew, Worldmaking, 177–81

Part II: Global lives

Part III: Conclusion