Decolonisation in context(s)

Speaker: David Murphy (University of Strathclyde, Glasgow)
Abstract: In interwar Paris, the Senegalese anti-colonialist, Lamine Senghor, was a prominent advocate for transnational solidarity between colonized subjects from different corners of the world. Initially, he found a political home in the French Communist Party and its affiliated anti-colonial grouping, the Intercolonial Union, which preached and practiced solidarity between France’s colonies in North Africa, Indochina, Africa and the Caribbean. Similarly, in the postwar period, the Senegalese poet and politician, Léopold Sédar Senghor (no relation to Lamine) and figures such as Aimé Césaire, acted, in Gary Wilder’s terms, as ‘pragmatic utopians’, reimagining the French Empire as a transnational federation in which former colonies would become autonomous members of a transcontinental polity. The aim of this paper, then, is to examine the transnational solidarities that marked these two anti-colonial moments, and to explore how they shaped different responses to decolonization in Senegal in the aftermath of independence.

Speaker: Allison Drew (York University)
Abstract: Ernesto Traverso argues that the 1917 Russian Revolution led to four types of communism. First, communism as a revolution; secondly, as a regime; thirdly, as anti-colonialism and fourthly, as a social democratic variant. This paper assesses Traverso’s schema with regards to Africa. It argues that there was no single communist path in Africa nor any clear pattern in the formation of communist parties. Rather, communism was both a movement from below and a regime from above. The success of movements from below reflected their incorporation of anti-colonial and anti-racist agendas. Nonetheless, communist parties were small and weak. In postcolonial Africa, Soviet-aligned regimes were imposed from above. Marina Ottaway argues Ethiopia, Angola and Mozambique applied Marxism-Leninism as a blueprint for state-led development—Afrocommunism. But her institutional formulation does not explain the divergent developments of these regimes, all of which foundered after the Soviet Union’s collapse. Traverso’s schema does not explain communist development in Africa, but rather illuminates its very different patterns compared to Russian and European experiences. Anticolonial and decolonizing agendas were crucial for communism in Africa, but overall African experiences highlight communism’s extreme diversity across regions and over time.

Speaker: Tim Gibbs (Universite Paris Nanterre)
Abstract: As the South African Government’s recent flirtation with Russia shows, the African National Congress (ANC) was never comfortable with a post-Cold War order dominated by the USA. Scholars such as Saul Dubow have discussed how, in the context of late Cold War Southern Africa, the ANC-in-exile reluctantly gave up doctrines of liberation war and people’s power for liberal constitutionalism. In this paper, I turn attention to the attempt of anti-apartheid activists inside South Africa, in dialogue with other new left movements across the Global South, to foster alternative doctrines of development and state sovereignty that challenged 1980s neo-liberal orthodoxies – their reversals in the 1990s and the legacies of these efforts.

Speaker: Sarah Ansari (Royal Halloway University)
Abstract: This paper focuses on the newspaper columns of a leading female journalist in 1950s Pakistan (Zeb-un-Nissa Hamidullah), and her prescriptions for how people there should be addressing what she saw as the major challenges facing the new state in its early years. While Hamidullah remains a familiar name in Pakistan to this day, her distinctive voice is still relatively unknown outside that context, despite how far her writing engaged with wider debates on citizenship and nation building. Her journalism also reminds us of the need to acknowledge individuals such as Hamidullah who might not be immediately categorised as a 'prominent thinker' but whose work nevertheless provides us with valuable insights into the complex debates taking place in early post-colonial states such as Pakistan.

Speaker: Bhagya Casaba Somashekar (Brunel University)
Abstract: In this paper, I will explore how spectres of the Indian Emergency (1975-77) had already appeared during earlier crises in India’s first decade of decolonisation. I will situate the later crisis in the context of the Indian Partition and the constitutional debates that led to the inclusion of emergency legal provisions during the drafting years. I will review how, in the forms and themes of anglophone and bhasha literatures on the period, crisis and constitution formation in the first decade are both implicated for providing the socio-legal and juridical contexts for a key neo-colonial moment in India’s post-independence future that was the 1975 Emergency.

Speaker: Anne Wetherilt (The Open University)
Abstract: In her 1958 novel The Mountain is Young, set in newly opened Nepal, the Belgian-Chinese author Han Suyin presents a fictional argument on the role of industrialisation and capital accumulation in driving economic development in decolonising nations. In common with prominent development economists of the period, Han views development as desirable and achievable, but is cognisant of some of its shortcomings, in particular the resulting unequal economic relations between former coloniser and colonised. Yet not only is Han’s novel overlooked in postcolonial literary criticism, 1950s development economics too is ignored in postcolonial critical studies, which are influenced primarily by dependency theory and world-systems analysis. My paper will make the case for a historicised reading of Han’s novel, which brings the insights of 1950s development economics to the fore.

Speaker: Emma Hunter (University of Edinburgh)
Abstract: This paper considers East African regionalism as an intellectual, cultural and political imaginary and as a world-making project of decolonization in the mid-twentieth century, from c. 1940s to 1970s. It focuses on the ways in which print cultures served as a space to re-imagine the world and East Africa’s place in it in the period of political independence and decolonization, considering the possibilities and limits of print culture in general and print media in particular as a space of world-making, knowledge production and intellectual exchange in this era.

Speaker: Kevin Okoth
Abstract: The paper will explore the history of anti-communism in the Kenyan trade union movement in the transition to independence. Kenya’s decolonisation took place in the context of Cold War power struggles between the two superpowers—the Soviet Union and the United States (as well as other geopolitical actors like Britain, China and the Warsaw Pact states). My paper will show how the promotion of anti-communist trade union leaders by imperialist interests shaped the labour movement and undermined the promises of national liberation. This was an important turning point in Kenya’s history and placed the country firmly in the Western (capitalist) sphere of influence. By revisiting the history of Kenya’s labour movement, the paper contributes to a fuller understanding of the lengths to which the Western bloc went to prevent the emergence of a communist and multi-racial trade union movement, which could have better represented the interests of the country’s working people (and its freedom fighters). A strong leftist labour movement would have thwarted imperialist interests in the region, too. Today, Kenya is considered a bastion of capitalist interests in East Africa. But the history of its trade union movement shows that this was only one among many competing visions of decolonisation that anti-colonial activists envisioned at independence.

Speaker: Poppy Cullen (Loughborough University)
Abstract: In 1965, Malcolm MacDonald was appointed as Britain’s Special Representative in Africa. This was a new role, designed to facilitate relations with newly independent African countries and to reassure them about Britain’s policies towards Rhodesia. The creation of this role, and the choice of MacDonald to fill it, highlights the importance of personal networks in an era of decolonisation. Especially as British officials believed that Africans valued and practiced a particular kind of personalised politics. While MacDonald’s practical results were limited, the personal connections it fostered were at least as important in any assessment of this position.