Nuclear Imperialism and the Pan-African Struggle for Peace and Freedom: Ghana, 1959–19621

Abstract

What is often missing from historical reflections on Pan-Africanism, African nationalism, and movements for independence is the relationship between struggles for the liberation of the continent from colonial rule and pacifist movements in opposition to nuclear armament. This article reconstructs the struggle against “nuclear imperialism” that emerged out of the Pan-African struggle for freedom in the late 1950s and early 1960s through the important work of radical pacifists Bayard Rustin and Bill Sutherland. Based upon a broad range of sources—published and archival—it revisits the dramatic attempt by peace activists to travel from newly independent Ghana to a site in the Sahara desert where the French intended to test their atomic bomb. The movement against nuclear imperialism that took root in the Pan-African freedom struggle not only showcases the “global” and the “transnational” in ways that need to be recovered, but stands as a counter-narrative, a corrective, to the afro-pessimism that has so dominated scholarship on Africa since the 1980s.