Nationalist movements in Africa may have been led by male luminaries, but the influence and successes of these movements largely depended on women’s grassroots organizing and mobilizing. Women played central roles in local and national organizing efforts, and in some cases, many of them joined their male counterparts on the front lines of war during the armed struggle. From leading protests against taxation policies to distributing anti-colonial propaganda pamphlets, as well as feeding and treating wounded guerrilla soldiers, women’s roles in nationalist movements were diverse. Whether popular mobilization or clandestine networks, women’s anti–colonial efforts were met often with violent resistance from colonial regimes. Many activists were flogged, arrested and imprisoned as a way to repress and immobilize their political participation.
While their personal histories and motivations for joining independence movements differed and varied, many women participated in these movements because they saw their emancipation as women as closely linked with the liberation of their countries. Within various movements, women took their duties as patriotic mothers seriously and for most of them, their gender consciousness was awakened as a result of their political participation and their desire for independence. However, participating in national liberation struggles involved more than just fighting against colonial oppression. Despite their influence and active involvement, women had to contend with their own subordination and marginalization within various nationalist movements due to the patriarchal structures that characterized nationalist politics. A struggle that many female politicians and activists continue to engage within the 21st century.
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Women in Nationalist Movements in Africa
Selina Makana
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Nationalism, Liberation, and Decolonization in Cabo Verde and Guinea-Bissau
Abel Djassi Amado
Guinea-Bissau represents Africa’s only successful anticolonial liberation struggle through a well-adjusted combination of constant mobilization of the population, armed struggle, and active diplomatic engagement with foreign actors. The 1950s represented a boom of anticolonial nationalism in Guinea-Bissau and Cabo Verde, like for most West African states. Inspired also by the long tradition of resistance and the labor of public intellectuals in the process of imagining the nation, anticolonial nationalism in Cabo Verde and Guinea-Bissau developed in the Bissau-Dakar-Conakry axis. These three cities—chiefly the last two, where a vibrant diasporic community of Cabo Verdeans and Guineans lived—formed the main arenas of political action.
Though several liberation movements appeared on the Guinean political scene in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the actual liberation movement was almost entirely carried out by the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cabo Verde (PAIGC). Given its binational inclination, the PAIGC engaged in a grueling struggle in the two territories. While plans were drawn to open a new battlefront in Cabo Verde in the 1960s, political and military pragmatism dictated that the liberation struggle in Guinea-Bissau could serve the purposes of liberating the two lands. In 1973, under PAIGC, Guinea-Bissau unilaterally declared independence, which was recognized by more than eighty states, causing another major blow to the eroding dictatorial regime in Lisbon that eventually fell on April 25, 1974. Pressured by PAIGC, the new regime in Portugal would subsequently accept the recognition of the independence of Guinea-Bissau and the right of Cabo Verde to self-determination and autonomy, paving the way to its independence on July 5, 1975.
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The Politics of Decolonization in French and British West Africa
Frederick Cooper
At the end of World War II, Britain and France tried to find new bases for the legitimacy of empire. Their hesitant moves created openings that African political movements exploited. Scholars have tried to capture the excitement of this process, first focusing on the drive to create nation-states, then exploring other possibilities, both regions within territorial states and federations among them. Historians have drawn on archives and interviews as well as a wide variety of texts produced by political movements.
Although Africans had long conducted politics through both local idioms and pan-African connections, the postwar openings led political movements to focus on arenas where they could achieve results. In French Africa, this entailed a partially successful struggle for French citizenship, representation in both the French and territorial legislatures, and social and economic equality with other French citizens. Eventually the French government tried to diffuse claim-making by devolving internal autonomy to territorial governments. When Guinea obtained independence in 1958 and other African leaders differed over whether they should create a francophone African federation within a Franco-African confederation or participate as equals in a French federation, the movements shifted to seeking independence and a new relationship with France.
Britain failed to get African politicians to focus on local governance. Instead, politicians demanded power in each colony. Meanwhile, Britain tried to appease African social movements with a program of economic development only to face escalating demands and heightened conflict. Although fearful of disorder and corruption, the government decided that the best it could hope for was to have attracted Africans to a British way of life and to achieve friendly relations with African governments that, led by Ghana, came into power.
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Development in Lesotho
John Aerni-Flessner
Contestations around the idea and practice of development in Lesotho’s history illustrate the tensions that have accompanied development projects on the African continent during the colonial and postcolonial periods. The concept of “development” gives space to actors—international agencies, foreign governments, Basotho political leaders, and common people—to communicate visions for local communities and the nation. Individuals and communities in 19th-century Lesotho took advantage of new economic opportunities afforded by changing regional dynamics and they explored notions of “progress” (tsoelo-pele in Sesotho) in their everyday lives and cultural practices. However, the explicit term “development” came from 20th-century programs run by the British colonial administration in an effort to justify empire. After independence, Basotho saw development projects as an even higher priority because they were a proxy for the manifestation of independence. The postindependence period has seen interest in Lesotho’s development efforts by international partners wax and wane with regional and global geopolitical turns. The apartheid era saw Lesotho reap much development funding due to the state’s enclave status within South Africa, but much of this funding went away when the Cold War and apartheid ended. Thus, post-1994 development efforts have been more regionally focused on efforts like the Lesotho Highlands Water Project and the fight against HIV/AIDS. While the range of international partners has changed, Basotho in the 21st century continue to demand a role in shaping and planning development efforts that impact their country and communities. This is, broadly speaking, also true for most places on the African continent. Thus, examining the history of development in Lesotho shows how Africans have attempted to engage with and change development projects and ideas. This local voice has helped shape the ways in which colonialism, the Cold War, the antiapartheid movement, Structural Adjustment Programs, and the fight against HIV/AIDS have played out in local communities.
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Colonial History and Historiography
Marie-Albane de Suremain
The colonial condition in Africa has been revisited by all of the main historiographic currents of thought, from a heroizing, highly political and military history of colonization primarily considered from the colonists’ standpoint, to a much more complex and rich history integrating the colonized perspective. This history has been enhanced by contributions from Postcolonial Studies and Subaltern Studies as well as from New Imperial History and perspectives opened by its global interconnected history.
At the intersection of these issues and methods, colonial studies offers an innovative reinterpretation of various facets of colonial Africa, such as the factors and justifications for colonial expansion; conquests and colonial wars; processes of territorial appropriation and border demarcation; and the organization and control of the colonies. In these fundamentally inegalitarian societies, accommodation and social and cultural hybridization processes were also at work, as well as multiple forms of resistance or subversion that paved the way for African states to win their independence. In addition to the role played by the First and Second World Wars, the emergence of nationalist and separatist movements helps to clarify the multifaceted nature of these independences, when approached from a political as well as a cultural and social perspective, while questioning the durability of the legacy of the colonial phase in African history.
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Nationalism, Liberation, and Decolonization in Angola
Didier Péclard
Angolan independence was achieved on November 11, 1975, after a 14-year-long war. The war was the result of three overlapping dynamics. The first was Portugal’s refusal to consider the possibility of a negotiated settlement for the independence of its colonies in Africa. Under the dictatorial regime of António Salazar, Portugal had become extremely dependent on its colonies, both economically and politically, and was therefore, by the late 1950s, bent on maintaining its colonial empire. The second was the development of nationalist feelings among Angolan elites, which eventually materialized in the late 1950s to early 1960s in two—and, as of 1966, three—competing nationalist movements. The third constituted a series of popular grievances within sectors of the Angolan population, especially landless farmers and plantation workers in the north, against their growing marginalization and impoverishment due to exploitative colonial policies. This eventually led to three uncoordinated revolts in January, February, and March 1961 that marked the beginning of the war of independence.
The division of Angolan nationalism into three competing movements—the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA), the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA)—was shaped by Angola’s long history of violent integration into Portugal’s colonial empire. The 20th-century Portuguese colonial state in Angola relied on the exploitation of the so-called native workforce through a vast system of forced labor and on taxation. It was also exclusionary and discriminatory, leaving very few avenues for upward social mobility for Angolan “natives.” It was therefore mostly at the margins of the colonial world that such mobility was possible, especially within Christian missions. The integration of these Angolan elite groups into the colonial world, or their exclusion, followed different paths according to local contexts and histories. As a result, the different lived experiences of the social groups that formed the backbone of the nationalist movement made it exceedingly difficult for them to agree on a common vision for independent Angola. This, together with the uncompromising thirst for power of the leadership of the three movements and Cold War logics, contributed to the civil war that engulfed the country at independence and lasted until 2002.
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Maps and Cartography in the History of South Africa: From Print to Digital
Norman Etherington
The first well-attested maps showing Southern Africa date from the late 15th century. Before the 19th century, maps provided little information about the interior but depicted coastlines in great detail, thanks to the requirements of seaborne navigators. Information about the inhabitants was scanty and skewed by misconceptions about the nature of African societies. Land-based exploration activity increased dramatically in the 1830s but the poorly trained and equipped human agents made many errors that had significant historical consequences. Accuracy in the mapping of physical topography improved with the advent of skilled civil and military surveyors, but entanglement with advancing forces of European colonialism resulted in biased representations of the nature and distribution of the indigenous people. Competition among European invaders during the so-called Scramble for Africa in the last decades of the 19th century made cartography a volatile element in the general mix of combustible material. Continual war among Europeans and Africans also affected the production of maps. The impact of African resistance to colonial surveys and land seizures on map making was for too long neglected by historians. By the end of World War I, the geopolitical boundaries of the region assumed their present configuration, marking off South Africa from its neighbors. The imposition of European rule, racial inequality, and segregation introduced cartographical distinctions between areas in which land was held in freehold title by members of a ruling racial elite and so-called African reserves and locations where land was held communally under the surveillance of traditional authorities. Decolonization beginning in the 1960s swept away the colonial racial order but did not abolish its legacy of boundaries, inequality, and parallel systems of land governance. The advent of geographical information systems, digital mapping, and satellite imaging has revolutionized cartography.
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Portugal’s Resistance to Decolonization and the “White Redoubt” (1950–1974)
Luís Barroso
Portugal’s resistance to decolonization lasted from the mid-1950s until the fall of the regime in April 1974, and it helps to explain why Portugal fought thirteen years of war in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea. Contrary to other colonial powers, the Portuguese rulers were not willing to accept the winds of change nor to meet the demands for the self-determination of its overseas territories that had swept Africa and Asia from the early 1950s. Several factors can explain the inflexibility of Lisbon to accept them, ranging from the ideological nature of the New State; from the strategic context of the Cold War due to the importance of the Azores islands for the United States and NATO; or from Portugal’s alliance with Great Britain. When the war broke out in Angola, and the Indian Union seized the “Portuguese India” territories in 1961, prime-minister Salazar did not receive the political support he expected from Washington and London as traditional allies.
In early 1962, Salazar decided to strengthen relations with South Africa and Rhodesia in an attempt to maintain white rule in its overseas territories amidst a drive for independence by African nationalists, so-called “white redoubt,” that was the terminology used by the Kennedy administration to refer to the set of African countries and territories dominated by white minority governments: Angola, Mozambique, Southern Rhodesia and South Africa. Strengthened ties would aid his strategy to keep the war effort in Africa by taking advantage of the importance of Angola and Mozambique to the security of South Africa. In 1964, Salazar encouraged Ian Smith to unilaterally declare independence from Great Britain to link Angola and Mozambique to the Southern Africa Security Complex led by South Africa, despite widespread criticism of the apartheid in the United Nations (UN). Concurrently, Lisbon tried to seduce Hastings Banda and Kenneth Kaunda in expelling the liberation movements from Malawi and Zambia in exchange for granting transit facilities to ease the international pressure with regards to its colonial policy.
Following several years of military collaboration, in October 1970, Portugal, South Africa, and Rhodesia established a military alliance codenamed “Exercise ALCORA,” which aimed to coordinate the global efforts against the insurgency in Southern Africa. Portugal used the ALCORA to obtain substantial aid in the form of military equipment and financial support, which Portugal needed to keep the war effort in the three African territories. In early 1974, Caetano channeled the South African loan to prevent a significant setback in Guinea, because if it were lost, Mozambique and Angola would follow, and consequently the regime.
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Race and Decolonization in North Africa
Muriam Haleh Davis
The precolonial history of slavery is fundamental for understanding the roots of antiblack racism in the region known as the Maghreb. At the same time, the question of skin color does not capture the diverse forms of discrimination that have been experienced by populations in the region over the last two hundred years. French colonial officials, for example, upheld the Berber population as a separate race that was inherently more civilized and less Muslim than the Arab population. Jews in Algeria were offered French citizenship in 1870, further complicating the racial formation of the colonial Maghreb. Despite colonial attempts to posit a racial difference between so-called white and black Africa, the porous geographical boundaries in the southern regions of the Sahara made it difficult to assert a clear distinction between Arab and African peoples. After independence, Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia sought to foster a coherent national identity and achieve political legitimacy, and their experiences of state building in turn influenced how religious and ethnic minorities were treated after independence.
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Women in Congo-Brazzaville (Republic of the Congo)
Catherine Porter
While the Republic of Congo has been frequently eclipsed by its neighbor with a similar name, women have been active participants in its history. Women’s experiences vary across Congo-Brazzaville, depending on their location and economic status; they create a diverse fabric of histories of multiple ethnicities, occupations, and encounters. The contemporary political boundaries of the Republic of Congo are European colonial constructs from the early 20th century, and today the majority of the population resides in the capital city of Brazzaville and in the other large urban areas in the southwest.
Early contact with the Portuguese in the 15th and 16th centuries at the base of the Congo River destabilized the Kingdom of the Kongo, which was further accelerated by the proselytization of Catholic missionaries. The encroachment of Europeans and missionaries combined with the consequences of the trans-Atlantic slave trade deeply affected the traditional gender dynamics that women had in rural settings on farming plots. Women lost much of their social and political power that they held in precolonial settings, and this was further exacerbated by traditional roles that were impressed by Christian missionaries.
The establishment of French Equatorial Africa in 1910 with Brazzaville as its capital shifted the importance of the area within French West Africa. The railroad industry and the completion of the Kinshasa-Matadi and the Brazzaville-Point Noire Railways changed the demographics of the southwest, most specifically Brazzaville, into not only an administrative city but also a hub for industrial activity. As men began to move the coast into railway labor camps, women followed suit, where they became predominant in tailoring, domestic labor, and, later, secretarial services. World War I and World War II brought profound changes to Congo-Brazzaville as men were conscripted into the French armed forces and women provided necessary services to the colonial French administration in the form of administrative and tailoring work. During the push for independence and decolonization, women joined political parties such as Union Révolutionnaire des Femmes du Congo, Union de la Jeunesse Congolaise, or Confédération Générale des Travailleurs Africaine, mainly as auxiliary members.
Women focused their political, social, and economic concerns and pushed the emancipation of women to the center of the government in 1967. While women had a greater role in national life for the later part of the 20th century, women faced daily harassment and exploitation, especially with the 1993–1994 and 1997–1999 civil wars. Constitutional reforms in 2002 and 2015 guaranteed women the same rights as men within the country and a proportional representation within the upper and lower houses of the National Assembly. While this has increased the prominence of women on a national level, it has not proven consistent in daily interactions. Generally women are subjected to intimate violence, including domestic and sexual violence as well as street harassment. Organizations based in Congo-Brazzaville, such as Rencontre pour la Paix et les Droits de l’Homme (RPDH), are actively working for the stabilization of gender parity through law, education, and civic participation but face regular roadblocks on day-to-day activities.
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Decolonization in Portuguese Africa
Pedro Aires Oliveira
The dissolution of Portugal’s African empire took place in the mid-1970s, a decade after the dismantling of similar imperial formations across Europe. Contrary to other European metropoles, Portuguese rulers were unwilling to meet the demands for self-determination in their dependencies, and thus mobilized considerable resources for a long, drawn-out conflict in Angola, Guinea, and Mozambique from 1961 to 1974. Several factors can explain Lisbon’s refusal to come to terms with the “winds of change” that had swept Africa since the late 1950s, from the belief of its decision-makers that Portugal lacked the means to conduct a successful “exit strategy” (akin to the “neocolonial” approach followed by the British, the French, or the Belgians), to the dictatorial nature of Salazar’s “New State,” which prevented a free and open debate on the costs of upholding an empire against the anti-colonial consensus that had prevailed in the United Nations since the early 1960s.
Taking advantage of its Cold War alliances (as well as secret pacts with Rhodesia and South Africa), Portugal was long able to accommodate the armed insurgencies that erupted in three of its colonies, thereby containing external pressures to decolonize. Through an approach that combined classic “divide and rule” tactics, schemes for population control, and developmental efforts, Portugal’s African empire was able to soldier on for longer than many observers expected. But this uncompromising stance came with a price: the armed forces’ dissatisfaction with a stalemate that had no end in sight. In April 1974, a military coup d’etat put an end to five decades of authoritarianism in the metropole and cleared the way for transfer of power arrangements in the five lusophone African territories. The outcome, though, would be an extremely disorderly transition, in which the political inexperience of the new elites in Lisbon, the die-hard attitude of groups of white settlers, the divisions among the African nationalists, and the meddling of foreign powers all played critical roles.
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Women in African Philosophy
Anaïs Angelo
Since the emergence of modern written African philosophy, African female and feminist philosophers have struggled for recognition. Writing from the margins in a field shaped by allegedly sexually neutral or universal philosophical concepts, they have argued that the lack of knowledge about women’s issues limits the development of African philosophy. Some female and feminist philosophers argue that the deprecation women philosophers experience in the field is connected to a much wider marginalization of women in African colonial and postcolonial societies. Conceptualizing a truly inclusive African feminist philosophy, these scholars call for further decolonization of African philosophy from Western philosophical canons. At the same time, they seek to reconnect philosophical questioning to various social, political, and economic issues, thereby reflecting on a wide spectrum of themes and often resorting to interdisciplinarity to give significance to their reasoning. African female and feminist philosophers explore women’s voices, ideas, and bodies not only to speak for and with women, but also to challenge the definition, purposes, and mission of African philosophy.
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The History of Christian Missions to Africa
Norman Etherington
Christianity came very early to Africa, as attested by the Gospels. The agencies by which it spread across North Africa and into the Kingdom of Aksum remain largely unknown. Even after the rise of Islam cut communications between sub-Saharan Africa and the churches of Rome and Constantinople, it survived in the eastern Sudan kingdom of Nubia until the 15th century and never died in Ethiopia. The documentary history of organized missions begins with the Roman Catholic monastic orders founded in the 13th century. Their evangelical work in Africa was closely bound up with Portuguese colonialism, which both helped and hindered their operations. Organized European Protestant missions date from the 18th-century evangelical awakening and were much less creatures of states. Africa was a particular object of attention for Evangelicals opposed to slavery and the slave trade. Paradoxically this gave an impetus to colonizing ventures aimed at undercutting the moral and economic foundations of slavery in Africa. Disease proved to be a deadly obstacle to European- and American-born missionaries in tropical Africa, thus spurring projects for enrolling local agents who had acquired childhood immunity. Southern Africa below the Zambezi River attracted missionaries from many parts of Europe and North America because of the absence of the most fearsome diseases. However the turbulent politics of the region complicated their work by restricting their access to organized African kingdoms and chieftaincies. The prevalent mission model until the late 19th century was a station under the direction of a single European family whose religious and educational endeavors were directed at a small number of African residents.
Catholic missions acquired new energy following the French Revolution, the old Portuguese system of partnership with the state was displaced by enthusiasm for independent operations under the authority of the Pope in Rome. Several new missionary orders were founded with a particular focus on Africa.
Mission publications of the 19th and 20th centuries can convey a misleading impression that the key agents in the spread of African Christianity were foreign-born white males. Not only does this neglect the work of women as wives and teachers, but it diverts attention from the Africans who were everywhere the dominant force in the spread of modern Christianity. By the turn of the 20th century, evangelism had escaped the bounds of mission stations driven by African initiative and the appearance of so-called “faith missions” based on a model of itinerant preaching. African prophets and independent evangelists developed new forms of Christianity. Once dismissed as heretical or syncretic, they gradually came to be recognized as legitimate variants of the sort that have always accompanied the acculturation of religion in new environments.
Decolonization caught most foreign mission operations unawares and required major changes, most notably in the recruitment of African clergy to the upper echelons of church hierarchies. By the late 20th century Africans emerged as an independent force in Christian missions, sending agents to other continents.
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Frantz Fanon
Christopher J. Lee
Frantz Fanon was born in 1925 on the Caribbean island of Martinique. He died in 1961 from leukemia in a hospital outside Washington, DC. Trained as a psychiatrist, Fanon achieved fame as a philosopher of anti-colonial revolution. He published two seminal books, Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961), that addressed the psychological effects of racism and the politics of the Algerian Revolution (1954–1962), respectively. He also wrote a third book, Year Five of the Algerian Revolution (1959, reprinted and translated as A Dying Colonialism in 1967), as well as numerous medical journal articles and political essays, a selection of which appear in the posthumous collections Toward the African Revolution (1964) and Alienation and Freedom (2015).
Despite the brevity of his life and written work, Fanon’s analysis of colonialism and decolonization has remained vital, influencing a range of academic fields such that the term Fanonism has become shorthand to capture his interrelated political, philosophical, and psychological arguments. Through penetrating views and a frequently bracing prose style, the small library of Fanon’s work has become essential reading in postcolonial studies, African and African American studies, critical race theory, and the history of insurgent thought, to name just a few subjects. Fanon is a political martyr who died before he could witness the birth of an independent Algeria, his stature near mythic in scale as a result. To invoke Fanon is to bring forth a radical worldview dissatisfied with the political present, reproachful of the conformities of the past, and consequently in perpetual struggle for a better future.
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History of Primary and Secondary Education in Malawi
Steve Sharra and Rachel Silver
The history of Malawian education encompasses both informal modes of teaching and learning, and institutionalized schooling. Malawi as a sociopolitical unit is a relatively recent construct, born out of colonialism and named only upon independence in 1964. A history of education in Malawi is therefore regional, predating the borders of the nation in the 21st century. Viewed this way, Malawian educational history includes precolonial cultural transmission and skills development, missionary and colonial-era schooling, the postindependence Kamuzu Banda years, multiparty democratization and free primary education (FPE), and a contemporary climate characterized by stubborn inequities. Throughout each period, curricular content, teacher roles, local community engagement, and stances on gender equity or inclusion have shifted to reflect the broader political-economic context.
Robert Laws of the Free Church of Scotland opened the first missionary school in Malawi in 1875. Over the next forty-eight years, missionaries from diverse denominations sought to evangelize locals and serve the project of colonial domination through schooling. With partial, and increasing, subsidization from the state beginning in 1907, these schools trained mostly boys and men to staff colonial bureaucracies. At the same time, they inculcated in them, and in some women, knowledge that would later inform the movement for political independence.
After independence in 1964, educational policy shifted to reflect the political priorities of Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda and his one-party state. Banda sought to restore a Chewa identity to prominence, while expanding school access to staff an Africanized civil service. Prior to independence, Malawi only had three thousand seats at secondary school. Banda built Malawi’s first university and incrementally expanded access across other levels.
The advent of multiparty democracy in 1994 came with a promise to immediately democratize school access, with FPE a policy priority of the new government of Bakili Muluzi. While in alignment with global platforms such as the Education for All Movement, the push to universalize schooling was hampered by international funder conditionalities that tightened public spending in and outside of the education sector and by HIV/AIDS. Broadened access at the primary level was met by declining quality and resourcing. In 2004, access to secondary schooling expanded through policies of decentralized educational governance.
By 2023, these and other efforts had increased access across levels, with gender parity achieved in primary schooling. Yet rates of retention, transition, and performance remain deeply uneven along lines of gender, class, and rurality. Over time, the exclusivist goals of schooling have come in tension with a push to universalize access, while curricular content and pedagogical practices remain aligned with global school culture, to the exclusion of Malawian heritage knowledge. Twenty-first-century schooling in Malawi thus demands reconsideration of education’s purposes to reflect local, indigenous, and heritage knowledge, and other decolonizing epistemologies.
Article
Early Factionalism in Zimbabwe’s Liberation Struggle
Brooks Marmon
The course of Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle was fundamentally shaped by tensions among competing nationalist factions. The impact of this dynamic is typically observed from 1963, when Zimbabwe’s long-serving ruling party, the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU)-Patriotic Front, was founded following a fissure in the liberation movement. Earlier instances of intranationalist competition in Southern Rhodesia (colonial Zimbabwe) have generally escaped scholarly attention despite their pioneering contributions to the dynamics of political pluralism in Zimbabwe and the presence of noted political figures amidst their leadership.
In 1961, the Zimbabwean nationalist movement experienced its first significant split with the formation of the Zimbabwe National Party (ZNP) which broke away from the National Democratic Party. The ZNP, in turn, experienced its own rupture a year later when the Pan-African Socialist Union (PASU) was formed. Although these were the two only two nationalist challengers of note in the early 1960s prior to ZANU, several other short-lived Black-led political parties emerged at this time in settler-dominated Southern Rhodesia.
The ZNP and PASU appealed to rising grievances with the prosecution of the anticolonial liberation struggle. They were also a consequence of the changing geopolitics wrought by Africa’s decolonization. The two parties sought to consolidate their position by appealing to the emerging cohort of African anticolonial leaders across the continent. These efforts induced extensive backlash from the main wing of the nationalist movement, then led by Joshua Nkomo. Both the ZNP and PASU were short-lived, effectively collapsing by 1963. While neither party was able to effectively overcome these intense assaults, their comparatively fleeting existence shaped the political environment by influencing tactics and providing a template for subsequent nationalist contenders seeking greater longevity.
Article
Maputo
David Morton
Maputo (Lourenço Marques until 1976) is the capital of Mozambique and one of the busiest port cities on the east coast of Africa. The Bay of Lourenço Marques had already been a source of ivory for the Indian Ocean world and Europe for centuries when, in the late 18th century, Portugal established a permanent garrison there, among the Mpfumo and other Xi-ronga-speaking clans. From 1898 until independence in 1975, the fort-turned-city was the administrative headquarters of Portugal’s territory of Mozambique, a home to many Portuguese settlers, and a stark example of racialized exploitation and urban segregation under colonial rule. It was also the principal transit hub for hundreds of thousands of southern Mozambican men recruited to labor in neighboring South Africa. Following independence, the city became a laboratory of revolutionary socialist experimentation as well as an overcrowded safe haven for refugees of Mozambique’s long and terrible civil war. Despite closer historical ties to South Africa than to most of Mozambique, Maputo is the country’s economic center and its gateway for foreign investment. According to 2017 census figures, the metropolitan population exceeded 2.5 million, making it one of the larger urban areas in southern Africa.
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The Central African Federation
Andrew Cohen
The late 1940s and early 1950s saw British government policy align, albeit briefly, with European settler desire in Southern and Northern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe and Zambia) for a closer association of their territories. Widespread African opposition was overlooked, and on September 1, 1953, the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (more commonly known as the Central African Federation) came into existence. Nyasaland was included at the insistence of the British government. The federation was a bold experiment in political power during the late stage of British colonialism and constituted one of the most intricate episodes in its retreat from empire.
Explanations for the creation of the federation center on attempts to stymie the regional influence of apartheid South Africa and the perceived economic advantages of a closer association of Britain’s Central African colonies. African opposition to the formation of the federation was widespread. Although this protest dissipated in the early years of the federation, the early promises in racial “partnership” soon proved to be insincere, and this reinvigorated African protest as the 1960 federal constitutional review drew close. The end of the Central African Federation is best explained by several intertwined pressures, including African nationalist protest, economic weakness, and hardening settler intransigence. By the end of 1962, there was large-scale African opposition to federation in both Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, and the Rhodesian Front had come to power on a platform of independence free from the federation. The final death knell for the federation rang with the British government’s decision that no territory should be kept in the federation against its will.
Article
The History of Guinea
Mohamed Saliou Camara
Like most of post-colonial African nation-states, Guinea is the product of Europe’s colonial partition of the continent at the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885. France followed up on the Berlin arrangements with military campaigns against West African rulers and treaties with other European colonial powers (Britain and Portugal) vying for territories in the region and the Republic of Liberia. However, the ancient communities whose descendants inhabit the Republic of Guinea were part and parcel of some of the greatest kingdoms and empires that marked West Africa’s history between the 6th and 19th centuries (Ghana, Mali, Songhay, Batè, Wassolon, and Futa-Jallon). Islam, which was introduced into the region through trans-Saharan trade, scholarship, and wars involving Muslim North Africa and Islamized elites of the Bilad as-Sudan, gained prominence and ultimately became the dominant religion in Guinea. The Atlantic Slave Trade spearheaded by the Portuguese, and the succeeding legitimate trade opened West Africa to colonial conquest and occupation in the late 19th to early 20th centuries. Under French occupation, Guinea underwent major political, cultural, social, and economic mutations brought about by events and processes such as its integration into the French West Africa Federation and its multifaceted participation in the World Wars, as well as in France’s colonial wars in Indochina and Algeria. In the process, a nationalist anti-colonial consciousness evolved and crystallized, leading to the country’s advent to independence in 1958. As the sole French colony to reject Charles de Gaulle’s Franco-African Community, its modern history is in many ways unique. Since independence, Guinea has gone through a pro-Soviet single-party regime, military rule, and a shaky transition to the current civilian leadership, whose record of democratic governance has been checkered at best. Economic development has also been largely elusive, despite the abundance of arable land and mineral resources. This notable uniqueness notwithstanding, the history of Guinea does epitomize in some respects that of the African continent.
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Decolonization in French West Africa
Tony Chafer
Studies of French decolonization in West Africa have traditionally treated it as a planned and reasonably smooth process. It has therefore been portrayed as a successful decolonization that stands in stark contrast to the much more conflictual decolonization processes in Indochina (1947–1954) and Algeria (1954–1962), which were marked by prolonged wars. This approach has tended to give pride of place to the role of individuals—members of France’s governing elites and African political leaders—who are portrayed as having successfully managed the transition to independence. While the importance of such individuals cannot be denied, it is important to recognize that French decolonization in West Africa was a contingent process. Shaped by the particular nature of French colonial rule in the region, the new international context after 1945, events on the ground, and—on the French side—the perceived need to maintain empire at all costs in order to restore French grandeur after the humiliation of defeat and occupation in the Second World War, it was a process that involved a multiplicity of French and African actors who were not in control of the policy agenda but who were, on the contrary, operating in a highly constrained context and constantly being forced to react to rapidly unfolding events. De Gaulle finally decided to grant independence in 1959, and within a year all the territories of former French West Africa had gained their political independence. However, political independence did not mean French withdrawal and the end of French dominance. There were many continuities between the colonial and postcolonial periods, which have been analyzed in a burgeoning literature on French neocolonialism in sub-Saharan Africa. Decolonization should therefore be seen as a process that started well before French rule formally ended in 1960 and that is—arguably—still ongoing.
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