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.

‘[An] ambitious book, courageous and persuasive in advancing an argument derived from the very limitations encountered by its main protagonists. Far from crafting an alternative, transnational heroic narrative by lionizing these ‘secondary’ actors, often sidelined in nationalist histories, Milford uses their experiences and failures to offer us a better understanding of agency and thought in the shifting sands of imperial endgames. The book thus challenges us to grapple with the history of decolonization in microspatial ways and acknowledge the changing forms, frequent failures, and fractured globality of anticolonialism.’

Eric Burton Source: H-Soz-Kult