Decolonizing interwar anticolonial solidarities: The case of Harry Thuku

Abstract

This essay suggests that a focus on the transnational and transcultural dimensions of twentieth-century interwar anticolonial movements in Africa creates opportunities to decolonize a historiographical tendency to foreground certain elitist accounts of the period that continue to pervade contemporary anticolonial scholarship. The essay explores the case of Harry Thuku, an early Kenyan nationalist and pan-Africanist active in Kenya Colony in the early 1920s, and subsequently imprisoned and exiled by the British colonial administration. Contemporaneous accounts largely painted Thuku as an insignificant lone agitator, being manipulated by East African Asian organizations, whilst more contemporary scholarship continues to depict him and his movement in strictly methodologically nationalist terms. This essay presents evidence to suggest Thuku’s actions were constituted across domestic cultural and class boundaries, as well as transnational anticolonial and pan-African networks. As such, the essay constructs an account of transcultural, transnational anticolonial solidarities that have thus far largely been confined to analyses of more obviously globally networked interwar spaces (i.e. imperial metropoles, West Africa, South Africa, and Ethiopia) and which thus unwittingly risk perpetuating a colonial historiography of the period.