decolonization Archives - Not Even Past

African Catholic Decolonization and the Transformation of the Church by Elizabeth A. Foster (2019)

(This article was originally posted on Imperial and Global Forum)

On July 1, 1888, Charles Lavigerie, founder of the White Fathers Catholic missionary order, gave a speech to a packed Saint-Sulpice Church in Paris in which he denounced the evils of slavery in Africa. The event was a public relations triumph, with African children who had been repurchased from slavery being paraded by the Fathers, clad in white burnouses with red fezzes on their heads, on the church steps. In the late nineteenth century as in the 1950s, slavery was used by the Catholic Church to galvanize public opinion and to raise funds. Lavigerie was not an isolated forerunner of post-war Catholic radicalism. He trained a generation of missionaries to enter the field as convinced anti-slavery activists, as well as supporting a series of military operations against slavery in Africa, with varying degrees of success. And yet until now Catholic missionaries have usually been relegated by historians to the status of obedient cogs in colonial state machines. Elizabeth Foster’s new book offers a major challenge by showing how missionary leaders like Lavigerie and his successors had aims that were often in clear conflict with those of the colonial state – a conflict between French Catholic missionaries and the colonial powers that resurfaced in a big way after the Second World War.

An emphasis upon political transition from colonial regimes to independent states dominates the literature on African decolonization. But decolonization, defined by Foster as the “ending or limiting of European hegemony” that involved power systems that were clearly outside of state apparatus, was a much broader process (p. 11). The book effectively uncovers the conflict between colonial state and Catholic mission in Africa in the 1950s. Foster sees the emergence of a more robust Catholic Left in France against a backdrop of colonial crisis as a key development. Catholicism in France, Foster argues, had previously been the almost exclusive property of the conservative Right. The Catholic Church hierarchy therefore struggled in an “awkward dance” in the 1950s as it sought to reconcile conservatives with radical anti-colonialists (p. 14). To make its provocative case, the book draws on a rich supply of archival sources in France, Italy, and Senegal, as well as a wide range of periodicals.

Charles Lavigerie (via Wikipedia)

Another main strength of the book lies in its illumination of the bifurcation between European and Christian identity that Catholic missionary work in Africa entailed. Catholic intellectuals such as Joseph Michel sought in the 1950s to “reclaim and reorient the church as a defender of the oppressed, colonized populations” of the French Empire (p. 100). As Foster argues, the Catholic church was considerably more successful in keeping its adherents in post-colonial Africa than in Europe. World War Two looms large as a turning point here, complementing other recent scholarship. According to Darcie Fontaine, for example, the war is similarly seen as the turning point in the development of French Catholic thinking about the colonies, as Christian theology was used in France as a basis for resistance to Nazism.[1]This can, however, lead to obscuring the continuity of missionary agendas and practice.

In Foster’s account, racial hierarchy keeps its orthodox place as a guiding paradigm of missionary thinking.[2] Foster argues that racist disdain for évolué Africans was common among missionaries and that blatant Catholic racism only became institutionally unacceptable in the 1950s. The new generation of post-war missionaries had more enlightened attitudes than the old guard they replaced. Missionary longevity in the field, the assumption appears to be, solidified racism. This begs the question of why Catholic missionaries would want to work among “unredeemable” and “inferior” peoples for so long.[3] For Lavigerie, setting Africans free from slavery and building the kingdom of Christ in Africa were intended as achievements that would fully match or surpass the establishment of Christianity in Europe. Why would these goals have resonated with peoples who were considered as inherently inferior? Foster’s book begins to provide answers.

Foster’s focus is on the period of decolonization, and the chronological gap between her discussion of Lavigerie and the 1950s paves the way for a new field of research. So, too, would the addition of Protestant missionary sources. After all, Foster makes quite clear the French hostility to American Protestant missionaries. Protestants usually answered back, and denominational rivalry was itself a potential driver of more polarised political stances taken by missionaries on the ground in Africa. Foster’s work thus raises big questions about how Catholic missionaries’ anti-slavery agenda shaped developments and denominational conflict in the first half of the twentieth century across the vast swathes of sub-Saharan Africa in which Christian missions operated. This important book starts the process of giving radical missionary currents their due place in models of colonialism and decolonization.

David Whitehouse is a freelance editor at the Africa Report published by Jeune Afrique in Paris and a PhD candidate at Exeter researching the impact of missionaries in Rwanda and Burundi 1900-1972.

[1] Darcie Fontaine, Decolonizing Christianity: Religion and the End of Empire in France and Algeria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

[2] For example, Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).

[3] Adas has even argued that that Europeans in the early centuries of expansion into Africa and Asia rarely used race to explain what they saw as their superiority, but rather Christianity and, much later, technological accomplishment. See Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 2014).

The Great Betrayal: Jean-Paul Sartre and the Arabs

It was the most intense intellectual and political love story that modern Arab intellectuals had ever had with a living European thinker and – even better – the sentiment was mutual. From the late 1940s to the late 1960s, Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophy, and his political recipes for self-emancipation, guided the project of Arab liberation. From the very beginning, Middle Eastern intellectuals considered Sartre’s ideas rich, meaningful and appropriate for their needs. Their goal was ambitious: the invention of a new type of Arab man and woman: sovereign, authentic, self-confident, self-sufficient, proud, willing to sacrifice and therefore, existentially free. Tampering with existence was their key strategy for a smooth exit from the legacy of colonial dehumanization, and Sartre’s intellectual fingerprints were all over this strategy. By the late 1950s the Arab world could boast of having the largest existentialist scene outside Europe. Indeed, almost everything that Sartre said and wrote during these years was translated to Arabic as soon as it hit the French market.

Sartre too was infatuated. Frustrated with European political passivity of the 1960s, he was enchanted by the sheer energy and broad horizons of the Arab revolutionary project. At the peak of this affair, Sartre and his home-made diplomatic crew came, in person, to pay respect to the Arab revolutionary project. And for a brief moment, the alliance appeared to be indestructible. And yet, for all the high philosophical talk about existence and revolution, the affair ended bitterly and Sartre would be forever remembered as a traitor to the Arab cause. Not just a traitor but one of the worst kind: a former friend. Here is a brief account of this painful trans-Mediterranean affair, its promise, and its demise

As World War II drew to a close and colonialism was in full retreat, a small but influential circle of Arab philosophers identified the sphere of being as the most intellectually significant problem to reckon with. What does it mean to be a person after colonialism? After decades during which Arabs were struggling objects in the closed world of European consciousness, who and what dominated the definition of the self and the political community to which it belonged? To answer this question and produce ideal conditions for cultural rejuvenation, they turned to philosophy and, specifically, to phenomenology and its new branch, existentialism. Studying with the very best teachers Europe could offer, they slowly learned that the essence of their colonized being was not fixed. That is, that the Left Bank slogan of Parisian youth, “existence precedes essence,” carries a very special promise of liberation. They realized that their struggle to become free and modern had nothing to do with the purported “essence” of an Islam framed as antithetical to reason, science, democracy and individualism.

Rather, it was a simple relational issue. Just as existentialism made Simone de Beauvoir realize that “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” it made colonized people understand the very process that made them inherently and irredeemably inferior. Existentialism not only exposed the paradoxical impossibility of the colonial demand but also offered tools to transcend it through self-liberation. The groundwork had already been laid a few years beforehand, as young philosophers had labored over how Islamic mysticism could be reconciled with Heidegger’s philosophy of being for the sake of creating an authentic and free individual. When Sartre’s work arrived to the Middle East it interfaced with this already-established philosophical opportunity, perfecting and substantiating it in simple and actionable ways.

The first such attempt was to generate a local version of Sartre’s idea of commitment, or engagement. According to Sartre, because writing is a consequential form of acting and being, intellectuals must assume political responsibility for their work and the circumstances that condition it. That meant that old guard intellectuals who were comfortable with the cultural assumptions of colonialism should be marginalized and retired. In their place, a new cadre of writers began the tedious work of intellectual decolonization. Known in Arabic as iltizam, this call for responsibility joined to professional action reorganized the cultural sphere and came to determine the political viability and legitimacy of any new idea. It also launched the careers of young thinkers, destroyed those of the established intellectual guard and established the norm that in decolonization culture and politics are inseparable.

Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre meeting with Che Guevara in Cuba in 1960 (Wikimedia Commons).

Most influential, however, was Arab intellectuals’ engagement with Sartre’s anti-colonial humanism, a cluster of thought that meaningfully connected the Arab world to Third-Worldism and the big struggles of the 1960s. This body of thought was shared by Sartre, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and many other, lesser-known intellectuals from the former colonies. Together, these intellectuals developed the foundations of post-colonial thinking about race and otherness as well as concrete concepts such as settler colonialism and neo-colonialism. These were not simply ideas but politics that translated to specific struggles for liberation in Cuba, Congo, Vietnam, Rhodesia and of course Algeria. It is the same body of thought that would eventually connect seemingly unrelated struggles such as those of the Black Panthers in the US with the revolutionary politics of Algerian freedom fighters. Today we call this intersectionality. Back then, there were no fancy words to describe the daily business of the Global South. Being the first global thinker to engage international politics on that level, Sartre was intellectually involved in all of these struggles. He readily acknowledged the oppression to which colonized people were subjected and his thought paved the way for self-liberation. The ultimate destination was global citizenship. In the service of this goal, Sartre weaponized ideas and mobilized metropolitan public opinion on behalf of all of these struggles.

Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre with local activists and intellectuals in the Egyptian village of Kamshish, February 1967. The village became famous as a site of successful grass-root socialist struggle to reclaim land from the hands of feudalist. Given the passivity of the European left and its practical complicity with capitalism, Kamshish was an example for the revolutionary spirit of the East (Courtesy of Ali al-Samman, the man sitting between Sartre and Beauvoir.)

That is, all of them except one – Palestine. Sartre’s silence on the conflict in Palestine mystified his Arab interlocutors. How could the person who contributed to the intellectual DNA of Arab decolonization – who had explained to them in no uncertain terms that they are the “collective others” of colonialism – not see that Zionists in Palestine were doing the exact same thing as French colonizers in Algeria and British ones in Rhodesia? What was unclear here? Was Sartre a crypto-Zionist? How could he turn his back on his own intellectual legacy to make such an exception? The truth of the matter was that Sartre’s political paralysis was due to an irresolvable philosophical conundrum. Yes, he was one of the first thinkers to reckon otherness and translate oppression into viable ethical frameworks that were clear and actionable. That was the basis for his position on Algeria, by which he went against his own motherland, and it was the basis for his support for anti-colonial violence. He could certainly see and recognize Arabs as the “Others” of colonialism and even of Palestinians as the victimized “Others” of Zionism. However, he had no idea how to reconcile two “others” that existed in the case of Palestine. Who was right? Who deserved what, and on which ethical ground? Who was a greater victim? Sartre could not resolve this question and the fact that his own society was instrumental in the destruction of European Jews did not help, either. Indeed, Arabs began to suspect that he was trading in ethical reparations for Zionists.

Responding to Arab and Israeli pressures to clarify his position (that is, to declare once and for all who was “right”), Sartre decided to visit Egypt, Gaza, and Israel. He did so on the late-night eve of the 1967 war, a war that would forever destroy the Arab project of liberation. The visit went relatively well, with both sides respecting Sartre’s request for time and space in order to formulate and then publish his opinion. The Israeli press called Sartre the philosopher of the Arabs and knew fairly well how instrumental he was for their liberation project. The Arab side suspected he was pro-Zionist but had no proof of it. For his part, Sartre was simply confused. As the visit ended and the chain-smoking philosopher returned to his Parisian apartment to write down his thoughts on the conflict, a full-scale Arab-Israeli war was already in the air. In the weeks prior to it, the general sense in Europe was that Israel would be forever destroyed. Sartre’s Jewish friends and their many acquaintances on the Left asked him to support their cause and avoid a so-called “second Holocaust.” He was reluctant to do so. After more pressure, he finally relented and, on the eve of the war, signed a petition on behalf of Israel. The who’s who of French culture, from Picasso to Marguerite Duras, signed the petition. His Arab interlocutors were stunned. But before they could even organize themselves to protest this signature, the war came, and destroyed everything for which they had struggled. Their project was in ruins, and Sartre was forever implicated in the most significant Arab defeat of modern times. So began, and so ended, a passionate intellectual and political affair, founded in visions of total freedom and concluded in heartache and infamy.

Yoav di Capua, No Exit: Arab Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre and Decolonization

Read more about existentialism and Arab history:

Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails (2016)

Ever wondered what was the existentialist hype all about but was never quite able to make sense of it? Give it another chance with Sarah Bakewell’s entertaining, engaging and highly lucid exploration of the philosophy and the people behind it. Voted one of the best books of 2016, At the Existentialist Café is a rare intellectual accomplishment that sets a new standard for popular intellectual history.

Eugene Rogan, The Arabs: A History (2009)

This international bestseller offers the most updated and fluent history of the modern Arab world. Rogan makes the daunting task of making sense of the last two centuries of Arab history much less intimidating and complex than initially assumed. Crucial reading for those who wish to quickly understand this foreign land and bring themselves up to date with the history of a people who is more often than not misunderstood.

The American “Empire” Reconsidered

by A. G. Hopkins

Whether commentators assert that the United States is resurgent or in decline, it is evident that the dominant mood today is one of considerable uncertainty about the standing and role of the “indispensable nation” in the world. The triumphalism of the 1990s has long faded; geopolitical strategy, lacking coherence and purpose, is in a state of flux. Not Even Past, or perhaps Not Ever Past, because the continuously unfolding present prompts a re-examination of approaches to history that fail to respond to the needs of the moment, as inevitably they all do.

This as good a moment as any to consider how we got “from there to here” by stepping back from the present and taking a long view of the evolution of U.S. international relations. The first reaction to this prospect might be to say that it has already been done – many times. Fortunately (or not), the evidence suggests otherwise. The subject has been studied in an episodic fashion that has been largely devoid of continuity between 1783 and 1914, and becomes systematic and substantial only after 1941.
There are several ways of approaching this task. The one I have chosen places the United States in an evolving Western imperial system from the time of colonial rule to the present. To set this purpose in motion, I have identified three phases of globalisation and given empires a starring role in the process. The argument holds that the transition from one phase to another generated the three crises that form the turning points the book identifies. Each crisis was driven by a dialectic, whereby successful expansion generated forces that overthrew or transformed one phase and created its successor.

The first phase, proto-globalisation, was one of mercantilist expansion propelled by Europe’s leading military-fiscal states. Colonising the New World stretched the resources of the colonial powers, produced a European-wide fiscal crisis at the close of the eighteenth century, and gave colonists in the British, French, and Spanish empires the ability, and eventually the desire, to claim independence. At this point, studies of colonial history give way to specialists on the new republic, who focus mainly on internal considerations of state-building and the ensuing struggle for liberty and democracy. Historians of empire look at the transition from colonial rule rather differently by focussing on the distinction between formal and effective independence. The U.S. became formally independent in 1783, but remained exposed to Britain’s informal political, economic and cultural influences. The competition between different visions of an independent polity that followed mirrored the debate between conservatives and reformers in Europe after 1789, and ended, as it did in much of Europe, in civil war.

“A Rival Who Has Come to Stay. John Bull – Good ‘evins! – wotever ‘ll become of my ship-building monopoly, if that there Yankee is going to turn out boats like that right along?” Puck magazine, July 24, 1895 (via Library of Congress)

The second phase, modern globalisation, which began around the mid-nineteenth century, was characterised by nation-building and industrialisation. Agrarian elites lost their authority; power shifted to urban centres; dynasties wavered or crumbled. The United States entered this phase after the Civil War at the same time as new and renovated states in Europe did. The renewed state developed industries, towns, and an urban labor force, and experienced the same stresses of unemployment, social instability, and militant protest in the 1880s and 1890s as Britain, France, Germany and other developing industrial nation-states. At the close of the century, too, the U.S. joined other European states in contributing to imperialism, which can be seen as the compulsory globalisation of the world. The war with Spain in 1898 not only delivered a ready-made insular empire, but also marked the achievement of effective independence. By 1900, Britain’s influence had receded. The United States could now pull the lion’s tail; its manufactures swamped the British market; its culture had shed its long-standing deference. After 1898, too, Washington picked up the white man’s burden and entered on a period of colonial rule that is one of the most neglected features of the study of U.S. history.

Columbia’s Easter Bonnet: In the wake of gainful victory in the Spanish–American War, Columbia—the National personification of the U.S.—preens herself with an Easter bonnet in the form of a warship bearing the words “World Power” and the word “Expansion” on the smoke coming out of its stack on a 1901 edition of Puck (via Library of Congress)

The third phase, post-colonial globalisation, manifested itself after World War II in the process of decolonisation. The world economy departed from the classical colonial model; advocacy of human rights eroded the moral basis of colonial rule; international organisations provided a platform for colonial nationalism. The United States decolonised its insular empire between 1946 and 1959 at the same time as the European powers brought their own empires to a close. Thereafter, the U.S. struggled to manage a world that rejected techniques of dominance that had become either unworkable or inapplicable. The status of the United States was not that of an empire, unless the term is applied with excessive generality, but that of an aspiring hegemon. Yet, Captain America continues to defend ‘freedom’ as if the techniques of the imperial era remained appropriate to conditions pertaining in the twenty-first century.

The signing of the NATO Treaty, 1949 (via Wikimedia Commons)

This interpretation inverts the idea of “exceptionalism” by showing that the U.S. was fully part of the great international developments of the last three centuries. At the same time, it identifies examples of distinctiveness that have been neglected: the U.S. was the first major decolonising state to make independence effective; the only colonial power to acquire most of its territorial empire from another imperial state; the only one to face a significant problem of internal decolonisation after 1945. The discussion of colonial rule between 1898 and 1959 puts a discarded subject on the agenda of research; the claim that the U.S. was not an empire after that point departs from conventional wisdom.

The book is aimed at U.S. historians who are unfamiliar with the history of Western empires, at historians of European empires who abandon the study the U.S. between 1783 and 1941, and at policy-makers who appeal to the ‘lessons of history’ to shape the strategy of the future.

A.G. Hopkins, American Empire: A Global History

Foreign Policy from Candidate to President: Richard Nixon and the Lesson of Biafra

By Roy Doron

On November 19, 2016, President Barack Obama, speaking on the transition of power to Donald Trump said “once you’re in the Oval Office … that has a way of shaping … and in some cases modifying your thinking.” The 2016 election will undoubtedly be remembered as one of the most unconventional and even bizarre elections in American history. When Trump emerged victorious, he did so on a platform that promised to rethink virtually every aspect of American foreign policy, from free trade agreements to environmental treaties. Though the scope of Trump’s promises are unprecedented, his election was not the first time a candidate openly challenged U.S. foreign policy goals.

Richard Nixon campaigning (via Wikimedia Commons).

On September 8, 1968, Richard Nixon, then Republican candidate for president, issued a statement calling on the United States to take a central role in intervening in the Nigerian Civil War and the growing humanitarian catastrophe that was unfolding in secessionist Biafra. Titled “Nixon’s Call for American Action on Biafra,” the candidate called the Nigerian government’s war against Igbo secessionists a genocide and demanded that the United States take a leading role in stopping what he termed “the destruction of an entire people.” “While America is not the world’s policeman,” he declared, “let us at least act as the world’s conscience in this matter of life and death for millions.” (Kirk-Greene, 334-5). But the clarity of the candidate’s call to arms soon had to confront the realities of the office of President. The demands of America’s Vietnam-era foreign policy forced Nixon to abandon his personal sympathy for Biafra.

Many in the United States and in Nigeria and Biafra saw candidate Nixon’s statement as a call for active intervention in the war, which by the end of 1968 had turned increasingly in Nigeria’s favor. Nigeria’s civil war began when Biafra declared independence on May 30, 1967 after a protracted crisis that included two coups and ethnic violence that claimed the lives of thousands, mostly Igbo from Nigeria’s southeast. Though Biafra enjoyed several early successes, the war quickly turned into a protracted blockade against the Igbo heartland, with thousands of civilians dying every day from starvation and disease in the beleaguered enclave that Biafra had become.

Children receive a food ration in Nigeria in 1968 (via Wikipedia Commons).

To counter the military losses, the Biafran leadership embarked on a global public diplomacy drive spearheaded by MarkPress, a Swiss public relations firm owned by the American William Bernhard, calling the blockade and ensuing starvation genocide. MarkPress’ access to global media outlets helped the Biafrans garner significant attention in an already chaotic year in world history. The Tet offensive in February 1968 created a seismic shift in American support for the war in Vietnam, turning the majority of the population against it for the first time. This was followed by the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy only two months apart; the latter’s occurring in the middle of a tumultuous election campaign. In Europe, student protests in Paris almost brought down Charles De Gaulle’s government, while a Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August ended Alexander Dubcek’s “Prague Spring.” However, with nightly news broadcasting images of starving children directly into homes around the world, many groups rallied to the Biafran side, with protests in cities around the world and benefit concerts featuring Jimi Hendrix and Joan Baez.

The Prague Spring was part of the global crisis of 1968 (John Schulze via Flickr).

These efforts, however, had little effect on government policies, because the Nigerians and their allies in the Organization of African Unity (OAU), eager to prevent a repeat of the Katanga Crisis in Congo, blocked most deliberations on the war in the United Nations, insisting that the matter was an internal African one. Biafra, led by the eloquent and charismatic Colonel Chukwuemeka Ojukwu, sought to use the humanitarian crisis to create a global outcry that would force Nigeria to come to terms with the secessionists and guarantee Biafra’s independence. Failing that, Ojukwu hoped for internationally recognized relief corridors that would be protected from the Nigerian military. However, any large scale international intervention would require either a ceasefire or a demilitarized zone. For the Nigerians, led by General Yakubu Gowon, any agreement for relief was preconditioned on Biafra renouncing secession and the ending of the war. In fact, despite frenetic efforts at two hastily convened OAU peace conferences in May and August 1968, the sides could not agree on either an end to the war or on any agreement to address the humanitarian concerns.

In the United States, the Lyndon Johnson administration was inundated with demands to help Biafra but could do little but support relief efforts led by the Red Cross, Joint Church Aid and Caritas. Walt Rostow, Johnson’s National Security Advisor, summed up the administration’s effort by saying “we are doing everything we can, which is very little.” Nixon’s statement, coming from a candidate that most believed would win the election in November, gave hope to many on the Biafran side that a new American administration would take a more active role in helping the beleaguered secessionists. For Ojukwu and Biafra, Nixon the candidate was a friend and they hoped that President Nixon would continue to be one.

Biafran leader Chukwuemeka Ojukwu (via Logbaby).

Though Nixon was personally sympathetic to Biafra, once he became president he could do very little to change the course of the conflict or to influence humanitarian efforts beyond what Johnson had done before him. In fact, like Johnson, Nixon attempted to assist in convening another round of peace talks, but, according to Nigerian historian George Obiozor, during a visit to London in February 1969, Nixon sacrificed his commitment to Biafra in order to secure British support for America in Vietnam. Nixon continued to personally support Biafra, despite his inability to translate it into policy. In one briefing document, he wrote in the margins “I hope Biafra survives!”

Candidate Nixon’s comments on Biafra showcase the limitations of a serious presidential candidate’s ability to transform foreign policy once they arrive in the White House. Many in Biafra hoped for a more interventionist United States and Nixon’s election gave hope for Biafra to hold out well into 1969, until it became clear that Nixon’s policy would closely mirror Johnson’s. When the war ended on January 15, 1970, the death toll, by most accounts, had reached a million people, most from the humanitarian crisis, and helped create organizations like Médecins Sans Frontières. Though the effects of Nixon’s 1968 comments cannot be quantified, his inability to translate them into policy illustrates the limitations of even the world’s most powerful executive.

Roy Doron (UT Austin History PhD, 2011) is an Assistant Professor of History at Winston-Salem State University. He is author, with Toyin Falola, of Ken Saro-Wiwa, part of Ohio University Press’ Short Histories of Africa and a forthcoming history of the Nigerian Civil War with Indiana University Press.

Sources:

H. M. Kirk-Greene, Crisis and Conflict in Nigeria: A Documentary Sourcebook (1971).

George A. Obiozor, The United States and the Nigerian Civil War : An American Dilemma in Africa, 1966-1970 (1993).

Freedom at Midnight by Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins (1975)

by Ellen Mcamis

Freedom at Midnight paints a sweeping picture of the tumultuous year of India’s independence from Great Britain in 1947. The narrative style of the book immerses readers in the visual landscape of the falling Raj and allows them to step into the minds of the great actors of this time. This sort of narrative history also contains drawbacks that limit our understanding of this important moment.

The book compresses the story to a tight one-year time frame. This allows Collins and Lapierre to focus on the state-level negotiations on India’s independence. It begins with Louis Mountbatten’s installation as the Last Viceroy of India, and closely follows the negotiations between Mountbatten, Whitehall, Jawaharlal Nehru, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, and Mohandas Gandhi as they make the decision to partition India. It then continues with the chaos and bloodshed of the split, until ending with Gandhi’s assassination in 1948. This narrative is undeniably fascinating, however, it also places an almost exclusive emphasis on the “great men” of history. They are represented here as isolated personages who hold the fate of the Indian people in their hands. The people themselves are often lost in this depiction, appearing as faceless masses helplessly reacting to political machinations.

Mahatma Gandhi (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Despite this focus on the agency of the great men, the primary mechanism which forces history forward in the book is destiny or fate. In this account, the British were “a race that God had destined” to rule the Indians, and therefore “naturally acquired” India. Faced with the prospect of division, Mountbatten must “save India” from itself. This device frees Mountbatten and the British from the charge of poorly handling or rushing independence. Instead, they are depicted as contending with historical inevitabilities far more powerful than themselves.

While a current reader does not expect a highly sympathetic and nuanced portrait of India from a book written three years before Edward Said’s Orientalism, and the rise of post-colonial studies, as a narrative with insight into the rush of daily life on the cusp of independence, it remains an enjoyable and exciting read.

You may also like:

Sundar Vadlamudi’s review of “Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and his Struggle with India.”

Amber Abbas’ review of “Prejudice and Pride: School Histories of the Freedom Struggle in India and Pakistan.”

Jack Loveridge’s reviews of “Wavell: the Viceroy’s Journal,”“Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography,”“The Decline, Fall, and Revival of the British Empire,” and “The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan.”

Voices of India’s Partition, Part V: Interview with Professor Mohammad Amin

Voices of India’s Partition, Part IV: Interview with Professor Masood ul Hasan

Voices of India’s Partition, Part III: Interview with Professor Irfan Habib

Voices of India’s Partition, Part II: Interview with Mr. S.M. Mehdi

Voices of India’s Partition, Part I: Interview with Mrs. Zahra Haider

Gender and Decolonization in the Congo: The Legacy of Patrice Lumumba (2010)

by Tosin Abiodun

In the 1960s the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) emerged as a political ‘hot spot’ in Africa. The transition from decades of Belgian colonial brutality and paternalism to independence, as historical records reveal, did not go smoothly. Gender and Decolonization in the Congo departs markedly from most work on this process by focusing on gender. There is a tendency on the part of scholars to neglect gender in their histories of decolonization in Africa. Political scientists, for instance, are apt to focus on the rise of the Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. Much historical scholarship on the DRC shows enthusiasm for resolving puzzles arising from the perennial question: who assassinated Patrice Lumumba? Karen Bouwer delivers on her stated goal, to draw attention to Congolese women’s active role in the politics of decolonization. Overall, the study goes a long way toward presenting the first truly groundbreaking investigation of women’s political participation in the DRC.

Bouwer illustrates women’s contribution to politics with a narrative woven around the life and popular representation of Patrice Lumumba. Bouwer privileges Lumumba’s legacy, writing, and personal experience not to glorify his image, but to expose the complex system of social and political relations that shaped Congolese women’s lives. This gendered analysis integrates a wide variety of evidence in a compelling manner, including Lumumba’s writings and speeches, literary works such as Aime Cesaire’s A Season in the Congo, and cinematic works dealing with Lumumba’s legacy. Of particular importance is the discussion of films produced by Haitian director Raoul Peck such as Death of a Prophet, Sometimes in April, and Lumumba.

Patrice Lamumba in his official portrait as Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, 1960. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

These critical assessments of film and literature are some of the strongest passages in the book. Equally interesting are the chapters that testify to the high level of women’s involvement in politics. These include the life portraits of frontline female politicians such as Leonie Abo, Andre Blouin, Pauline Opango, Martine Mandinga and Madeleine Mayimbi. In addition, the author brings into sharp focus the role of women as preservers of historical memory: we learn about efforts on the part of Leonie Abo to preserve the memory of the slain revolutionary, Pierre Mulele. We also learn about Justine M’poyo’s effort to preserve Joseph Kasavubu’s memory by all means necessary.

Perhaps the greatest achievement of this study lies in the fact that it offers a promising new approach to the history of decolonization in the DRC. It offers a valuable new perspective on interesting subjects such as the Kwilu Rebellion of 1963-1965 and Haitian migration to Congo. Decolonization in the Congo will be able to stir the minds of anyone interested in gender studies, history, politics, diaspora studies, development studies and literary studies. It presents rich documents including a useful index, an impressive bibliography as well as extensive notes and rare photographs of Congolese female activists.

Toyin Falola on Africa and the United States

By Toyin Falola

Often wrongly considered to be on the periphery of the history of the United States, Africa has played an important role politically, economically, and culturally from before American independence until the present day. The importance of slavery to early U.S. history was paramount, with lasting effects into the twentieth century and the contributions of African-Americans to life in the United States has often been celebrated, but Africa’s relevancy for the United States has been most appreciated and discussed in terms of the African roots of a broad spectrum of American culture. Following decolonization in Africa, the newly independent nations took on a new relevancy and significance for the United States, one that should be re-examined for the twenty-first century.

The entire history of the United States is deeply intertwined with the history of Africa. Slavery was practiced in America even prior to independence from Great Britain and was an integral part of its economy, particularly in the South. Agriculture depended on the labor of slaves sent from the West African coast, and was one of the key reasons the Southern states fought in the Civil War. When the fight against slavery as a moral issue gained momentum, slave owners in the South feared it would be outlawed on the national level. And it was outlawed at the conclusion of the Civil War, with the passing of the Thirteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution. However, despite the Thirteenth Amendment, and the citizenship and voting rights that came with the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, racial discrimination was still a critical issue in American social life. Jim Crow laws in the South kept both public and private life in the southern United States segregated until the climax of the Civil Rights Movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

The Civil Rights Movement was fostered in part by international developments. Following the Second World War, the Cold War and its numerous manifestations were the primary concern of the United States government. With the Civil Rights Movement, however, foreign and domestic policy concerns were directly connected. Contemporaneous with the ideological battle between the United States and the Soviet Union was the decolonization of much of Africa and Asia. As nations became independent from their former colonial powers, most often Great Britain and France, they faced a bipolar political situation in which they had to decide whether they wanted democratic or communist governance. The United States, in an attempt to ensure democracy for these sometimes geopolitically strategic nations, offered itself up as an ally to African nations. In such a situation, treatment of African Americans was an especially ugly scar on the face of the U.S., and America’s support for newly independent African nations proved to be an important impetus in accelerating Civil Rights legislation, including the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Decolonization in Africa affected both United States domestic policy towards Civil Rights legislation, as well as foreign policy toward Africa. Previously, American foreign policy toward Africa did not exist, and any concerns over Africa were instead directed towards its European colonizers. The combination of the Cold War and decolonization quickly made the African continent relevant to the U.S. in a new way. The overextension of the United States’ foreign policy during this period, including the rebuilding of post-War Europe, wars in Korea and Vietnam, and the nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union, meant that many African leaders of newly independent nations felt they were not given the audience that they deserved from the United States government. Yet it is clear that the U.S. involved itself where it felt Cold War concerns were most relevant, as when it supported Mobutu Sese Seko, the brutal dictator of the Democratic Republic of Congo, then Zaire.

The United States’ foreign policy changed dramatically after the end of the Cold War and its policy towards Africa in the 1990s did as well. For the last decade of the twentieth century the main agenda for the United States seemed to be to ignore African nations, even in the face of severe crisis, such as the Rwandan genocide. Yet with the end of the twentieth century also came the beginning of a huge international public health battle against HIV/AIDS. Africa, and Southern Africa in particular, has been at the forefront of this struggle, one that quickly linked U.S. interests in Africa with both positive and negative effects. Many countries, such as Uganda, have seen AIDS deaths drop significantly because of American help, particularly during the administration of President George W. Bush. However, issues surrounding aid dependency, the cultural relevancy of some aid programs, and the often times controversial role of American pharmaceutical companies in Africa have complicated this relationship.

On September 11, 2001, Africa’s relevancy to the United States changed once again with the bombing of the World Trade Center by Islamic extremist terrorists. While originally the focus of the U.S. was on the Islamic countries of the Middle East, political instability in Africa and a high percentage of Muslims in many African nations, has brought the American War on Terror to countries such as Somalia and against extremists in countries like Nigeria. It has become clear to policymakers that the political and economic stability of Africa is in fact relevant to the United States. However, the increasingly global nature of every aspect of life ensures that policies will have to broaden beyond a focus on public health and terrorism. Stability in Africa would not only help to ensure the safety and well-being of Americans, but also open opportunities for American companies to invest and create new networks in the global economy. Africa’s relevancy for the United States has changed significantly over the past 300 years; however, the relationship between the U.S. and Africa is crucial to understanding American history, and will continue to be an important element in the twenty-first century.

The United States and West Africa, edited by Alusine Jalloh and Toyin Falola

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