Description
As wars of liberation in Africa and Asia shook the post-war world, a cohort of activists from East and Central Africa, specifically the region encompassing present-day Malawi, Zambia, Uganda and mainland Tanzania, asked what role they could play in the global anticolonial landscape. Through the perspective of these activists, Ismay Milford presents a social and intellectual history of decolonisation and anticolonialism in the 1950s and 1960s. Drawing on multi-archival research, she brings together their trajectories for the first time, reconstructing the anticolonial culture that underpinned their journeys to Delhi, Cairo, London, Accra and beyond. Forming committees and publishing pamphlets, these activists worked with pan-African and Afro-Asian solidarity projects, Cold War student internationals, spiritual internationalists and diverse pressure groups. Milford argues that a focus on their everyday labour and knowledge production highlights certain limits of transnational and international activism, opening up a critical – albeit less heroic – perspective on the global history of anticolonial work and thought.
Table of Contents
Introduction; 1 Regional learning: Makerere, Mau Mau and the anti-Federation campaign; 2 Information sources: Socialist internationalism and the limits of London and Delhi; 3 Before Accra: Holding independent states accountable, from Cairo to Mwanza; 4 Publicity and violence in the shadow of Algeria: Old methods, new settings and the distant UN; 5. Conspiracy in the Congo: Youth, students and the Cold War challenge; 6. Radio waves: Statehood, fundraising and the fate of an anticolonial culture.
