From Senegal in the west to the Comoros islands in the east, this collection of essays casts a critical eye over fifty years of 'independence' in former French colonial possessions of Africa and the Indian Ocean. With methods and perspectives that cross traditional disciplinary barriers, Contesting Historical Divides in Francophone Africa proposes fresh insights into the process of decolonisation in this part of the world.
This book explores foreign policy developments in post-colonial Africa. A continental foreign policy is a tenuous proposition, yet new African states emerged out of armed resistance and advocacy from regional allies such as the Bandung Conference and the League of Arab States. Ghana was the first Sub-Saharan African country to gain independence in 1957. Fourteen more countries gained independence in 1960 alone, and by May 1963, when the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) was formed, 30 countries were independent. An early OAU committee was the African Liberation Committee (ALC), tasked to work in the Frontline States (FLS) to support independence in Southern Africa. Pan-Africanists, in alliance with Brazzaville, Casablanca and Monrovia groups, approached continental unity differently, and regionalism continued to be a major feature. Africa’s challenges were often magnified by the capitalist-democratic versus communist-socialist bloc rivalry, but through Africa’s use and leveraging of IGOs – the UN, UNDP, UNECA, GATT, NIEO and others – to advance development, the formation of the African Economic Community, OAU’s evolution into the AU and other alliances belied collective actions, even as Africa implemented decisions that required cooperation: uti possidetis (maintaining colonial borders), containing secession, intra- and inter-state conflicts, rebellions and building RECs and a united Africa as envisioned by Pan Africanists worked better collectively.
The entwined histories of Blacks and Indians defy easy explanation. From Ghanaian protests over Gandhi statues to American Vice President Kamala Harris's story, this relationship--notwithstanding moments of common struggle--seethes with conflicts that reveal how race reverberates throughout the modern world. Shobana Shankar's groundbreaking intellectual history tackles the controversial question of how Africans and Indians make and unmake their differences. Drawing on archival and oral sources from seven countries, she traces how economic tensions surrounding the Indian diaspora in East and Southern Africa collided with widening Indian networks in West Africa and the Black Atlantic, forcing a racial reckoning over the course of the twentieth century. While decolonization brought Africans and Indians together to challenge Euro-American white supremacy, discord over caste, religion, sex and skin color simmered beneath the rhetoric of Afro-Asian solidarity. This book examines the cultural movements, including Pan-Africanism and popular devotionalism, through which Africans and Indians made race consciousness, alongside economic cooperation, a moral priority. Yet rising wealth and nationalist amnesia now threaten this postcolonial ethos. Calls to dismantle statues, from Dakar to Delhi, are not mere symbolism. They express new solidarities which seek to salvage dissenting histories and to preserve the possibility of alternative futures
Intended for those interested in the African continent and the diversity of human history, this work looks at Africa's past and reflects on the changing ways it has been imagined and represented. It illustrates key themes in modern thinking about Africa's history with a range of historical examples.
Decolonisation has lost its way. Originally a struggle to escape the West’s direct political and economic control, it has become a catch-all idea, often for performing ‘morality’ or ‘authenticity’; it suffocates African thought and denies African agency. Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò fiercely rejects the indiscriminate application of ‘decolonisation’ to everything from literature, language and philosophy to sociology, psychology and medicine. He argues that the decolonisation industry, obsessed with cataloguing wrongs, is seriously harming scholarship on and in Africa. He finds ‘decolonisation’ of culture intellectually unsound and wholly unrealistic, conflating modernity with coloniality, and groundlessly advocating an open-ended undoing of global society’s foundations. Worst of all, today’s movement attacks its own cause: ‘decolonisers’ themselves are disregarding, infantilising and imposing values on contemporary African thinkers. This powerful, much-needed intervention questions whether today’s ‘decolonisation’ truly serves African empowerment. Táíwò’s is a bold challenge to respect African intellectuals as innovative adaptors, appropriators and synthesisers of ideas they have always seen as universally relevant.
Africa is a continent of 54 countries and over a billion people. However, despite the rich diversity of the African experience, it is striking that continuations and themes seem to be reflected across the continent, particularly south of the Sahara. Questions of underdevelopment, outside exploitation, and misrule are characteristic of many - if not most-states in Sub-Saharan Africa. In this Very Short Introduction Ian Taylor explores how politics is practiced on the African continent, considering the nature of the state in Sub-Saharan Africa and why its state structures are generally weaker than elsewhere in the world. Exploring the historical and contemporary factors which account for Africa's underdevelopment, he also analyses why some African countries suffer from high levels of political violence while others are spared. Unveilling the ways in which African state and society actually function beyond the formal institutional façade, Taylor discusses how external factors - both inherited and contemporary - act upon the continent. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
Looking at decolonization in the conditional tense, this volume teases out the complex and uncertain ends of British and French empire in Africa during the period of ‘late colonial shift’ after 1945. Rather than view decolonization as an inevitable process, the contributors together explore the crucial historical moments in which change was negotiated, compromises were made, and debates were staged. Three core themes guide the analysis: development, contingency and entanglement. The chapters consider the ways in which decolonization was governed and moderated by concerns about development and profit. A complementary focus on contingency allows deeper consideration of how colonial powers planned for ‘colonial futures’, and how divergent voices greeted the end of empire. Thinking about entanglements likewise stresses both the connections that existed between the British and French empires in Africa, and those that endured beyond the formal transfer of power.
