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LANGUAGES OF FREEDOM IN DECOLONISING AFRICA*The Gladstone Prize Winner

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 November 2017

Emma Hunter
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Abstract

The ‘triumph of liberalism’ in the mid-twentieth-century west is well known and much studied. But what has it meant for the way the decolonisation of Africa has been viewed, both at the time and since? In this paper, I suggest that it has quietly but effectively shaped our understanding of African political thinking in the 1950s to 1960s. Although the nationalist framing that once led historians to neglect those aspects of the political thinking of the period which did not move in the direction of a territorial nation-state has now been challenged, we still struggle with those aspects of political thinking that were, for instance, suspicious of a focus on the individual and profoundly opposed to egalitarian visions of a post-colonial future. I argue that to understand better the history of decolonisation in the African continent, both before and after independence, while also enabling comparative work with other times and places, we need to think more carefully and sensitively about how freedom and equality were understood and argued over in local contexts.

Type
Research Article
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 27 , December 2017 , pp. 253 - 269
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 2017 

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Footnotes

*

I am grateful to Charles West and the two anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

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37 It is important to emphasise this point. Karuna Matena's recent book has argued that indirect rule, the colonial practice of government through the framework of the ‘tribe’ and chief, was a response to the perceived failure of the liberal projects of the mid-nineteenth century and that in Africa it ‘took on preemptive, and therefore more systematic, character’, aiming to prevent the dissolution of social bonds before it was too late. Yet indirect rule in Africa was never simply a project of conservation and, as Duncan Bell has argued, reading it as a rejection of liberalism rests on a narrow definition of liberalism. Mantena, Karuna, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (Princeton, 2010), 173 Google Scholar; Bell, Reordering the World, 57.

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