African Decolonization Research Articles

Romancing the frontline: a view from dar es salaam on intimacy and political attachment

This article explores the entwinement of inter-racial romance, political mobilization, and public morality using the vantage-point of Dar es Salaam as a relay station for 1960s leftwing exiles. Cleansed from many formal political accounts, romance – and talk of it – loomed large and consequential in the everyday rhythms of life along the transnational networks of political exiles who transited through Dar. Featuring couples whose trajectories connected Southern Africa to Tanzania and the United States, the article revisits the intimate ways that the anti-Apartheid movement, African decolonization, and American campus struggles over racial discrimination were stitched together. But if romantic attachment played a significant role in political mobilization across these geographies, on the ground in Dar it also furnished a powerful lexicon for rank-and-file cadres challenging a leadership class via a critique of lifestyle and consumption. This latter dynamic both made romance a focus for material struggle over the terms of a decolonization-in-waiting and connected Dar’s community of exiles to the vernacular politics of their host city.

The Cuban Revolution Comes to America

The Cuban Revolution Comes to America

Xenophobic Threat to Nigerians Abroad – How Relevant is the Concept of “Afrocentrism”?

The subject of this article is the relevance of Afrocentrism in the view of xenophobic threat to Nigerians abroad. The Afrocentrism in Nigeria’s foreign policy had been successful in both decolonization of Africa and the fight against apartheid in South Africa. However, the attacks on Nigerians abroad continue to question the price that Nigeria has paid in human, capital and material resources in ensuring peace on the continent. The fusion between policy and practice in the articulation and implementation of Nigeria’s foreign policy (often at the expense of its own people) reflects the sacrifices the country has made in its dedication to the continent. The study reveals that the history of Nigeria-Africa relations can be viewed in the light of conflict, cooperation, and competition. The study concludes that the Federal government should come up with policies that would change the current narrative in favour of Nigeria’s national interest vis-a-vis protecting its citizens abroad. It further recommends a number of measures to be taken, such as: sensitization campaign (Nigeria’s missions abroad, in collaboration with the appropriate government agencies of the host country in the hotspot areas in Africa, should periodically carry out sensitization programmes); setting up and strengthening (where it already exists) early warning signal system; using soft power/public diplomacy; using art diplomacy/cultural diplomacy; practicing overseas investment/economic nationalism to protect the country’s economy; prioritizing Nigeria’s foreign policy on regional concern.

At Penpoint: African Literatures, Postcolonial Studies, and the Cold War

At Penpoint: African Literatures, Postcolonial Studies, and the Cold War

Nathaniel K. Powell. France’s Wars in Chad: Military Intervention and Decolonization in Africa.

Nathaniel K. Powell. France’s Wars in Chad: Military Intervention and Decolonization in Africa.

Book Review: France’s Wars in Chad: Military Intervention and Decolonization in Africa by Nathaniel K. Powell

Book Review: <i>France’s Wars in Chad: Military Intervention and Decolonization in Africa</i> by Nathaniel K. Powell

Dealing with ‘Returns’: African Decolonization and Repatriation to Italy, 1947–70

The repatriation of many citizens to Italy from the former colonies, and from other Italian communities in Africa, between the Second World War and the late 1960s, had a significant impact on the country. Compatriots coming back from Africa forced Italian institutions to deal with problems of reception and resettlement and made the consequences of African decolonization evident in the peninsula. Looking at three different cases of repatriation, the return of settlers from Italian ex-colonies (Libya, Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia), and the return of Italians from Tunisia and Egypt, this article aims to display the political strategies enacted by post-war Italy in order to cope with citizens returning from Africa. The comparative approach highlights the political reasons that guided the State's action during the long repatriation. Italian governments had different attitudes towards the returnees, depending on the purposes of domestic and foreign policy but also on their places of departure and the supposed more difficult assimilation of certain groups of repatriates. In this regard, the article argues that the definitive resettlement in the peninsula of the returnees from Tunisia and Egypt was especially discouraged by the institutions, which long tried to divert those flows of migration to other destinations.

‘Bogey Bogey Stuff’: Gold Coastism, federation, and white backlash in Southern Rhodesia, 1951-56

ABSTRACT This article explores the apprehension white Rhodesians evinced towards the transformation of the Commonwealth and initial signs of African decolonisation, especially in colonial Ghana. Whites informally dubbed these undesired changes ‘Gold Coastism’. Rhodesia’s ruling party weaponised these fears and argued that a Central African Federation would preserve British influence and forestall African nationalism on Southern Rhodesia’s borders. As it became clear this Federation would not significantly obstruct black African political activity, white fears of Gold Coastism accelerated. This resulted in a concerted push for independence and anti-British sentiment in Southern Rhodesia earlier than existing scholarship generally acknowledges.

France's Wars in Chad: military intervention and decolonization in Africa by Nathaniel K. Powell Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Pp. 336. $99.99 (hbk).

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TANU’s Bombay Delegates: Stephen Mhando, Ali Mwinyi Tambwe, and the Global Itineraries of Tanganyikan Decolonisation

Despite the recent move to understand African decolonisation in more global and transnational terms, the history of TANU’s struggle for independence remains understood primarily through a nationalist paradigm. Tanganyikans remain largely overlooked in the new historiography of ‘Afro-Asian’ connections in the 1950s. This article addresses this lacuna by sketching out the dual biographies of two less prominent TANU leaders, Stephen Mhando and Ali Mwinyi Tambwe. Using recently declassified colonial intelligence reports, it follows their journeys to the meeting of the Asian Socialist Conference in India in 1956 and subsequent travels around the Indian Ocean coastline. Through these life-stories, the article argues that activism under the auspices of African nationalism provided a platform for aspiring politicians to pursue their own projects in a decolonising world. These included the organisation of pan-African conferences, creating transoceanic solidarities between Muslim organisations, securing patronage from Cold War powers, and advancing anticolonial causes in Africa’s Indian Ocean basin. By stepping away from a narrative focused squarely on a struggle for national independence, the article argues for a more inclusive, globally connected and open-ended history of Tanganyikan anticolonialism.

Fonti per la storia del comunismo italiano, il colonialismo e la decolonizzazione in Africa

The international politics of the Italian communist party has been mainly investigated focusing the party’s entanglement with the Soviet Union, in a framework dominated by the East-West conflict. Since the 2000’s, the global dimension of Icp international politics has been underlined by historians. The focus on the place of Africa in Icp global relations is even more recent. The article contributes to this last field of research by an assessment of the Icp archival sources between the 1920s and the 1960s that are related to colonialism and decolonization in Africa.

Le carte del Partito comunista francese per una storia del comunismo in Africa

The history of African anti-colonial movements, especially those present in the French colonies, can be reconstructed thanks to the documentation of the French communists. The documents of the PCF, collected in the Archives départementales de la Seine-Saint Dénis, offer an important point of view on African decolonization. These sources provide the missing piece for a social, political and cultural history of relations between metropolises and colonies and between North and South of the world. Together with the digitization projects of the French sources preserved in the former Soviet archives (today still in Russia) and the documentary mass produced by trade unions and colonial security services, the sources of the PCF are also essential for internationalizing the history of the French Communist Party, reconnecting it to the broader relations between anti-colonial movements and the international communist movement.

The Relationship of Socialism, Nationalism and Pan- Africanism in the Thinking of Nyerere and Nkrumah

Nyerere is the first-generation of African nationalist, while Nkrumah is a famous ideological theorist and politician in the history of Ghana. They all saw socialism as manifestation of communitarianism. Nyerere believes that socialism is a state of mind and elaborates on the relationship between nationalism and Pan-Africanism, putting forward that unity is more important than independence and that African countries should establish federalism before achieving national independence. While Nkrumah holds the view that African socialism is the reappearance of traditional spirit in a modern environment. Pan-African Movement is the expression of African nationalism, and his socialist thought is mainly embodied in the philosophy of conscience. Socialism is the defence of local autonomy, and the goal of socialism is the decolonization of Africa.

Blood Brothers: Race, the Afro-Asian-Canadian Bloc, and South Africa’s Expulsion from the Commonwealth, 1960-61

During the 1961 Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ meeting, Canada’s prime minister, John Diefenbaker, joined with his non-white partners to form an “Afro-Asian-Canadian bloc” that, for all intents and purposes, expelled South Africa from the association. Drawing on American, Australian, British, Canadian, and South African documents, this article argues that Diefenbaker did so in a bid to preserve the Commonwealth to bridge global racial divides and avert a potential “race war” in the making. The Commonwealth could thus retain its integrity as an institution responsive to global South concerns and chaperone them during a transitional phase to statehood. In so doing, newly independent peoples would be rendered culturally familiar and predictable, embedding them within the liberal international order. Consequently, this study offers insight into Canadian attitudes towards African decolonization and what the Commonwealth meant to Canada beyond its strategic imperative.

Descolonização africana e a crítica do dualismo antropológico europeu: quando o outro da modernidade reflexiviza, corrige e educa a modernidade

The paper discusses the criticism performed by African decolonization regarding European anthropological dualism that serves as basis to the constitution of the philosophical-sociological-anthropological discourse of Western modernity-modernization, which implies (a) in the split, separation, autonomy, independence, endogeny, self-referentiality, self-subsistence, self-sufficiency and superposition of Europe in relation over all others of Europe, correlatively to (b) the legitimation of Europe, by means of rationalization, as effective present, substantive actuality and orientation to the future, the only paradigmatic-normative instance which is capable of ground, legitimize and implement the non-ethnocentric and non-egocentric universalism and with condition to generate criticism, reflexivity, mobility and emancipation, contrarily to all others of modernity who, as undifferentiated soup and absolute generalization demarcated by a mythic condition, are conceived as pre-modern and anti-modern perspective and, in this sense, as anthropological past, unable to generate criticism, reflexivity, mobility and transformation along the time, being charaterized for dogmatism-fundamentalism and contextualism-particularism. African decolonization, by means of the triad eurocentrism-colonialism-racism as fascism, will deconstruct the anthropological dualism, the historical-sociologica blindness and the normative-philosophical romanticization of Western rationalism and, from the voice-praxis of the minorized-colonized subjects constructed by Europe in terms of structural racism, will furnish a new perspective of a non-ethnocentric and non-egocentric universalism which can be generated and sustained only as decolonization, that is, as overcoming of the anthropological dualism and of the consequent political-moral dualism that, as structural racism, have streamlined the asymmetric relationship of Europe to non-European peoples in terms of usurpation, instrumentalization, construction of political-cultural minorities and, as the crowning point of all these, realization of etnocides-genocides against Black and Indigenous peoples.

Nathaniel K. Powell. France’s Wars in Chad. Military Intervention and Decolonization in Africa

Nathaniel K. Powell. France’s Wars in Chad. Military Intervention and Decolonization in Africa

France’s Wars in Chad: Military Intervention and Decolonization in Africa by Nathaniel K. Powell

<i>France’s Wars in Chad: Military Intervention and Decolonization in Africa</i> by Nathaniel K. Powell

Koloniale Fesseln brechen. Afrikanische Dekolonisierungsprozesse auf sowjetischen Plakaten der 1960er-Jahre

Breaking Colonial Shackles. African Decolonization Processes on Soviet Posters of the 1960sSince its beginnings, the Soviet Union has emphasized its anti-colonial solidarity. This paper examines how this political ambition was displayed on soviet posters during African decolonization processes in the 1960s. Combining the graphic analysis by Panofsky and the analytical focus on physical representations, it will be shown how the depiction of a strong, young man was used to create an ideal picture of an emancipated African freedom fighter who opposes western colonial powers.

Documenting Africa on Film and Nkrumah’s Legacy in Pan-Africanist Africa

Following Ghana’s attainment of political independence, the new nation’s leader, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, made efforts to lead Africa’s decolonisation process. He used film as a medium of achieving this Pan-African agenda. Nkrumah restructured and renamed the Gold Coast Film Unit (GCFU), which the British colonial administration had established, as the Ghana Film Industry Corporation (GFIC) and placed it at the forefront of documenting and propagating his version of the Pan-African narrative. From neighbouring Togo and Burkina-Faso, to distant Kenya and the Congo, GFIC cameras captured historical moments relevant to Nkrumah’s ideas. Whereas Nkrumah’s political legacy and diplomatic rhetoric are largely known, his use of cinema to execute his agenda remains unexplored. This article draws attention to the role documentary films of the GFIC played in the African decolonisation process. Drawing on information gathered about these films from interviews with key actors within the defunct GFIC, and from personal archives of these actors, it is argued that, although the functional use of documentary films in Nkrumah government appears similar to how film functioned in the colonial regime, GFIC films traversed national education and propaganda to become media of continental African integration and stimuli for post-colonial self- motivation and independence.

Two Kings of Kings: Iran-Ethiopia Relations Under Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and Haile Selassie

Iran’s engagement with the African continent increased significantly throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, driven by economic, political and strategic interests. The first country Iran reached out to in Sub-Saharan Africa was Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia, and the emperor remained the shah’s closest ally on the continent until his downfall in 1974. This relationship was established in 1960, when Haile Selassie’s Solomonic kingdom faced pressures from African decolonisation movements, and when the shah feared the growth of radical regimes sponsored by the Soviets across the Middle East. Addressing a gap in the literature on late Pahlavi foreign policy and drawing on a range of primary source materials, including Dutch and US diplomatic records, memoirs and newspapers, this article evaluates the political relationship between Iran and Ethiopia under the shah and Haile Selassie. It examines what each side gained from the relationship, particularly in the context of regional political developments, and the role monarchism played in drawing the two countries together. The paper investigates the shah’s developing interest in Africa from the 1960s onwards and the position of Ethiopia, not only as a gateway to the rest of the continent but also an area of strategic importance to the shah.