Theme seven: ‘Congomania’ and Forms of the National State
in Africa (1950s-1960s).
Participants and abstracts.
Theme coordinators:
Dr. Allana O’Malley
[email protected]
Participants:
1. ‘Pan-Africanism in Making of Nation-States’, Colak Gözde, Ankara University.
2. ‘Our Ancestral Home’, Lonneke Geerlings, VU Amsterdam.
3. ‘’, Emmanuel Gerard, KU Leuven.
4. ‘Nkrumah’s Critique, MacMillan’s fears: The Export of Democracy and the African Nationalist
Rejection of a Western Concept’, Frank Gerits, New York University.
5. ‘Resisting Independence? Matsouanist Resistance and State Repression in Congo Brazzaville,
1942-1960’, Meike de Goede, Leiden University.
6. ‘’, John Kent, London School of Economics.
7. ‘Beveridge’s Social Insurance in the Colonial Office: the Fabian Colonial Society, Anticolonial
Nationalism and the Welfare State in Postwar British Africa’, Luke Messac, University of
Pennsylvania.
8. ‘Unconstitutional Change of Government and Popular Uprisings in Africa’, Tushar Kanti Saha,
Kenyatta University.
Introduction
When the Congo exploded into conflict in 1960 it was a moment of crisis not just for the country
itself but also for the broader international community. One of the key points of intersection
between the Cold War and the process of decolonization, the Congo can be regarded as a contested
space in which forms of the national state were debated and evolved and in which the very role of
the national state as the basic building bloc of international society was challenged.
This workshop will consider how nation building and democratization took place in Africa
before and after the Congo crisis. As European imperialism crumbled and nation states moved into
the Black Atlantic, the nation state as an organizing tool was reconsidered. While the discussion
about the future of the Congo was taking place, there was simultaneously a broader reimagining of
what the national state was, as decolonization forcefully reshaped the contours of international
society. The Congo experience exploded many myths about the ease of installing a Western-friendly
regime in a post-colonial state and the difficulties of constructing a nation state in Africa.
Potential papers should be addressed towards nation-states in Africa in the 1950s and 1960s
and could examine an array of topics including:
- Democratization and nation-building after decolonization;
- The role of the Cold War in promoting nation states in Africa;
- Forms of the post-colonial national state in Africa;
- Decolonization and Democracy.
Timing: This is a particularly pertinent time for such a workshop to take place. The
publication, and popularity of Congo, The Epic History of a People by Leiden alumnus David Van
Reybrouck has renewed interest in the history of the Congo, disseminating the topic extensively. In
academia, the surge of publications in the area has even been referred to as “Congomania”.
Abstracts
Gözde, Colak (Ankara University)
[email protected]
Pan-Africanism in Making of Nation-States
(…)
Geerlings, Lonneke (VU Amsterdam)
[email protected]
‘Our ancestral home.’ The American Society for African Culture (AMSAC) and the one-year
celebration of Nigeria’s independence, December 1961
In June 1957, the American Society of African Culture (AMSAC) was founded. Although initially
inspired by the Société Africaine de Culture (SAC) in Paris, AMSAC quickly evolved into an American
movement. Its annual conferences were meant to examine ‘facets of African life’ and arts, ‘the high
culture of the African Negro as it has existed in Africa, in this country [the United States], and indeed,
in this hemisphere.’ Cultural objectives also held political undertones. In 1962, one of the founders of
AMSAC described Pan-Africanism as a ‘motivating force to prevent political, economic, and military
rivalries between African nations.’1 Pan-Americanism (as established in the United States) was meant
to serve as an example. On the other hand, the decolonisation of the African continent served as a
source of inspiration to African Americans during the civil rights movement.2
This case study will focus on the third annual conference of AMSAC, held in December 1961
in Lagos, Nigeria. This event coincided with the one-year celebration of Nigerian independence.
1
John A. Davis, ‘ Preface’, in: John Davis (ed.), Pan-Africanism Reconsidered (Berkeley, CA, University of
California Press, 1962), p. v-vii:v-vi.
2
James Meriwether, Proudly We Can Be Africans. Black Americans and Africa, 1935-1961 (Chapel Hill, NC [etc.],
University of North Carolina Press 2002)
Recent research has focused on the movement as a vehicle for Cold War anti-Communist purposes.3
However, the (often very personal) motives of individual actors have largely been neglected. Poet
Langston Hughes (1902-1967), for example, envisioned a Black Atlantic community when opened the
event saying: ‘In a sense we feel we are coming home, to our ancestral home, back to the roots of
our culture.’4 Hughes had just visited Nigeria one year before, in December 1960, to witness the
installation of his old Lincoln University fellow student, Nnamdi Azikiwe (1904-1996), as GovernorGeneral of newly independent Nigeria.5 As Azikiwe was trained at American universities, historian
Obi Iwuanyanwu has argued that his inauguration was seen as a ‘triumph of American liberalism over
Soviet socialism throughout the African continent.’6 The photograph of the AMSAC delegates with
Azikiwe at Lagos (figure 1) can therefore also be seen as an anti-Communist statement.
The visit of the group provides an interesting case study on the intersection of the American
civil rights movement, the decolonisation of the African continent, and Cold War anti-Communist
activities. By focusing on a small number of AMSAC members, the significance of this visit and this
movement will be examined. Of special interest will be the roles of the Dutch poet Rosey E. Pool
(1905-1971), Hughes and Azikiwe.
Gerard, Emmanuel (KU Leuven)
[email protected]
(…)
(…)
Gerits, Frank (New York University)
[email protected]
Nkrumah’s Critique, MacMillan’s fears: The Export of Democracy and the African Nationalist
Rejection of a Western Concept
On 6 March 1957 the new nation of Ghana became independent under the leadership of Kwame
Nkrumah. The British had allowed their Colony, the Gold Coast, to become independent because
they felt confident that the Westminster model would be duplicated in this West African country.
The initial perception of Nkrumah, as a rabble rousing speaker, transformed into that of a
responsible man who had been converted by the civilizing mission. After independence, however,
Nkrumah revealed himself to be an authoritarian leader who saw democracy as a break on the
modernisation process. This opinion played into Western perceptions of African nations. When Vice
3
Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer. How the CIA Played America (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press,
2008)
4
Arnold Rampersad, The life of Langston Hughes. v. 2. 1941-1967, I dream a world (2002), p. 348. Emphasis in
original text.
5
James Campbell, Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787-2005 (New York, The Penguin
Press, 2006) 222-223.
6
Obiwu [Obi Iwuanyanwu], 'The Pan-African Brotherhood of Langston Hughes and Nnamdi Azikiwe', Dialectical
Anthropology, vol. 31, no. 1/3 (2007) 31:143-165:144.
President Richard Nixon returned from the independence celebrations in Accra he wondered
whether African leaders could maintain democracy as they took on the challenges of development.
This paper explores how diverging conceptions of democracy shaped the relationship
between Nkrumah and the British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, and strengthened mutual
misperceptions. The British government had always justified its refusal to grant so-called ‘selfgovernment’ by arguing that the territories still needed more preparation. Conversely, in a letter to
Julius Nyerere in December 1961, Nkrumah wrote that too much democracy would only hand
imperialists the sticks to beat them with. These new African leaders tried to fend off an emerging
international discourse on human rights and democracy, which they saw as an interference in African
affairs. Nonetheless, deeper ideological incentives were also at work. Nkrumah believed that his
developing society needed to be sheltered from neo-colonial propaganda. Haile Selassie of Ethiopia,
for instance, had talked about ‘engorgement’ – a gradual process of ideological intrusion that
destroyed identity and personality.
Changing civilizing discourses in the West and new postcolonial attempts to legitimate
centralized rule focused on democracy. This papers analyses this interaction based on sources from
American, British and Ghanaian archives.
Goede, Meike de (Leiden University)
[email protected]
Matsouanist Resistance & State Repression in Congo Brazzaville, 1942-1960
(…)
Kent, John (London School of Economics)
[email protected]
(…)
(…)
Messac, Luke (University of Pennsylvania)
[email protected]
Beveridge’s Social Insurance in the Colonial Office: the Fabian Colonial Society, Anticolonial
Nationalism and the Welfare State in Postwar British Africa
In the aftermath of the Second World War the UK Government implemented many of the
recommendations in William Beveridge’s Report on Social Insurance and Allied Services (1942),
consolidating programs of social protection including unemployment insurance, health care, and
subsistence payments for the elderly and infirm (Baldwin 1990). But for some, including Beveridge
and prominent members of Britain’s newly elected Labor Government, the social and economic
rights embodied in the report seemed applicable not only to Britain, but also to its colonies.
Immediately after the war Beveridge planned a trip to India, where he hoped to write a report on
social protection that included programs for subsistence farmers as well as industrial laborers.
Meanwhile, Labor Party intellectuals grappled with the contradictions inherent in administering
colonies while propounding the virtues of democratic socialism.
Drawing upon original archival research in Malawi and the United Kingdom, this paper
examines early postwar debates over social and economic rights in Britain’s colonies in southern
Africa. In Nyasaland, Northern Rhodesia and Southern Rhodesia, new health and education funding
came from the UK’s Colonial Development & Welfare Act. Beginning in 1945, the UK Treasury was
not as adamant as before that colonial expenditures must match revenues from taxes on colonial
subjects (Constantine 1984; Cooper 1996; Eckert 2004). This new fiscal reality spurred the publication
of a number of schemes for social welfare in the Colonies. Many of these plans were written by
members of the Fabian Colonial Society, a group of democratic socialists allied with Labor who had
long discussed the relationship between their political commitments and the practice of colonial rule.
Descriptions of welfare regimes are often based on ideal-types, such as social democratic,
conservative and liberal. These, in turn, are abstracted from regimes of social protection in Europe
(Esping-Andersen 1990, 1999). In recent years the number of typologies has expanded to include
“liberal-informal” welfare states in Latin America and “productivist” welfare states of East Asia
(Wood and Gough 2006). African states, however, are mostly grouped among regimes of social
insecurity wherein large swaths of the population can rely on little protection (Biehl 2005; Bourgois
2009; Ferguson 2006).
Still, there remains a divide between this literature on welfare regimes and the shifting,
uncertain debates over the proper scope and scale of social protection programs among
impoverished, mostly rural colonial subjects (Ferguson 2015). My dissertation research aims to give
an account of a contingent moment, when various sorts of social welfare were considered in latecolonial southern Africa. The programs that resulted were often paltry and focused on forging
“modern” sensibilities rather than ensuring material subsistence (Iliffe 1987). But from relatively
industrialized and independent South Africa to the heavily agricultural Protectorate of Nyasaland
(today’s Malawi), discussions over welfare state policy during the 1940s and 1950s fostered ideas
about public sector health care, subvention for agricultural inputs, and public pensions have
perdured in political discourse into the twenty-first century.
Saha, Tushar Kanti (Kenyatta University)
[email protected]
Unconstitutional Change of Government and Popular Uprisings in Africa
Unconstitutional Change of Government may mean either to oust or overthrow a legitimately
elected government from power by force such as military coup d'état or by defiling the constitution
to extend the term limits by machination even though it apparently tends to follow the procedural
route in a ritual manner. Sometimes, constitution itself may prohibit taking over power by
unconstitutional means as a deterrent such as provided in the constitution of Ghana but it may not
practically stop it from happening on all occasions. With the advent of modernity, dalliance with
democracy won the day in the Western world. The experiment has crystallized into a permafrost
overtime on merit of its least harmful nature in the sphere of governance. Master philosopher
Aristotle was highly opposed and critical about democracy primarily because of its corruptible
influence in society which has been historically proven true. Even in recent times, the clawing greed
of British MPs has been reported in the Economist. Yet, there is no escape from democracy at this
point of time. The constitution serves to achieve its goal through good governance. The term limit for
the elected Head of the State is designed to clip the wings of the dictatorial flight. This was well
understood by the Constitution makers in early hours of constitution making process in the United
States of America.
African constitutions are mostly designed in Presidential form of government making the
term limit a constitutional necessity to leave space for youthful leadership opportunities because
democratic aspiration of the people include personal ambition to rise to the summit level in power
paradigm as a principle of constitutional right to equality. However, constitutional term limit in many
African countries are being changed in order to extend the lease of life to the class of elected
dictatorship in indecent haste without any rhyme or reason. This points to the greed for clinging to
power by any means. These unhealthy trends are serving as retrograde steps reversing the gear of
democratization process in Africa. The example of Zimbabwe shows a Kingly attitude to stay in power
irrespective of any concern for life or liberty. The former Nigerian President Obasanjo soon after
being re-elected for the second term, attempted to change the constitution in his eventual bid for a
third term which of course failed to materialize in spite of injecting bribery. In DRC this is being
gradually unfolded. Taking clue from this example, Rwanda is accomplishing the ‘mission unlimited’
with the process now set in motion. In Burundi the same saga is tragically re-enacted in the face of
virtually global scale of opposition. No lesson has been learnt from history and history is now in
repetitive fury taking toll on tons of life. The Paper is aiming to critically examine the open mystery of
leadership in African democracy in its quest for constitutionalism for a better and brighter tomorrow
in alleviation of the suffering souls of humanity in this resourceful continent and to demonstrate how
things can be pursued differently to ensure a faithful governance for the good of its people.